The Gospel in a Pluralist Society

Sayo Ajiboye
DMin Overture 1
May 2007
The Gospel in a Pluralist Society
By Lesslie Newbigin
252 pages

How do you communicate the gospel in a society where there is no approved or sanctioned pattern of belief or conduct? This is the core thought In The Gospel in a Pluralist Society. Lesslie Newbigin writes from a perspective that engages with the overwhelming fact that the structures and compositions of the Western World has been altered forever. How then does a Western Church that has operated from a platform of homogeneity engage with this reality? Newbigin’s acknowledges the tectonic shift in the Western worldview. Modernism has given way to postmodernism, science and the reign of reason has given way to questions and an unending search for truth, an absolute God of an absolute truth as conceived by the Judeo Christian traditions comes a very distant third in the thoughts of the people; Western society has become plural.

How do you engage with truth in an environment of freedom without bounds of thought? How do you define values in communities that are given a-la-carte options of a buffet restaurant of thoughts? How is value to be defined and believes chosen? Newbigins rightly notes that he first victim in the era of shifting boundaries is faith, if faith has been compromised how is one going to re-present missions? If our world is so changed, Michael Polanyi’s insight becomes a challenge because the lens with which our world is viewed becomes too many for certainty, fact becomes tenuous and truth becomes a lamb for sacrifice.

Newbigins truth is rooted in a person, the person of Christ. His story is to to guide our lives and bound our actions his story is to sharpen pour focus and define how we understand our story and his world. It is therefore essential – in Newbigins perspective to have this lens as a tool for focusing our lives and our communities. Newbigins takes his reader back to the issue that challenges the post modernist more than any thing else, the role of the tradition of faith and states that we must rediscover faith in communities bounded by the story.

Newbigins does not dismiss the reality of the society as is, his tool for engaging with it is wise, his deeply philosophical and appropriately nuanced. Faith is about a people called to walk together, individualism cannot be countenanced, the Christian practitioner must be appropriately respectful of the stories that defines the community within which he finds himself. Faith outside the culture is an oxymoron for Newbigins, the life of a true faith is embodied and immersed by a culture much in the same way that the new life of the child is encompassed by her mothers amniotic fluid.

It is however interesting to read Newbigins exposition on “Harijan-s” and what he called the epistemology privilege of the poor. His challenge to “practitioners of hermeneutic suspicion” makes interesting reading, the gospel must not be read with a lens on the poor or the lens of the poor. Newbigins seems to question the interpretation of the scriptures from a domination / oppression praxis, the poor have “no epistemological privilege.” The question this raises immediately is that this point – in my opinion makes incarnation an unnecessary nuisance. The Lord of Sabbaoth cannot agree with this perspective – in my consideration. The desire not to make empowerment normative over revealed truth seem convoluted to me, is it not the goal of truth to set us free? Is it not assumed that the logos is to bring us an abundant life? Does not the absence of freedom and the non-abundance of life suggested as preceding the contact with the gospel normative of the needy? If it is then there is an inferred epistemological privilege. Jesus himself said, “the spirit of the Lord God is upon me, for he has anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor. In that statement is an assumption of a priority, revealed truth, Jesus truth is about liberation; that is the epistemological privilege of the poor.

These thought apart, my experience shows that a faith co-opted by the powerful is a faith that soon become irrelevant. Other readings in this series (Linthicum’s especially) have shown that when power prestige and praise becomes the focus of the purveyor of faith, true grace goes out into the dustbin of opinions, men’s options take over the heart of the agent. We need to be careful not to get on the slippery slope of human preference for the rich.