Transcript
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER 1: -- lecture series. We are up against this evening the most sacred of hours, and that's the dinnertime hour, so rather than spend a great deal of time re-introducing Dr. Newbigin, I'm going to be making some remarks at the conclusion of appreciation, and without further ado, I'd like introduce you to Dr. Newbigin. Thank you very much.
NEWBIGIN: I have been arguing in these lectures that a missionary encounter with our culture must challenge the ideology of pluralism, but cannot espouse a return to the corpus Christianum. How then, in practice, is Christian responsibility to proclaim and embody the kingship of God in the life of nations to be exercised? If I'm not mistaken, the predominant note in the contemporary answers
that I hear to that question is the note of protest. The political order, with its entrenched interests and its use of coercion to secure them, is identified very, very frequently as the enemy, the primary locus of evil. The place of the church, therefore, is not in the seats of the Establishment, but in the camps and marching columns of the protestors. The protest may be pacifist, claiming in the name of Christ
to renounce all coercion, or it may be political and revolutionary, claiming to embody an alternative order of government. In either case, the contention is that as Jesus was crucified outside the wall of the city, so the place of the Christian must always be outside the citadels of the establishment and on the side of its victims. Only from this position, it is often claimed, will things be seen as they really are.
Attempts of the kind which were often made earlier this century; for example, to bring together Christians in responsible positions in government and industry and commerce to discuss the bearing of their faith on their daily practice are dismissed as elitist, and therefore, incapable of generating true insights. A person who wields power cannot see truth. That is the privilege of the powerless. It is, of course, easy to point out
that the popularity of this kind of view owes something to the Marxist idea of the proletariat as a messianic people, the bearer in history of the promise of truth and life. But to acknowledge that does not silence the argument: Jesus was indeed crucified by the established powers. Does it not follow that to go with Jesus on the way of the cross must mean to be on the side of those who suffer from the powers of the established
order, not of those who wield those powers. Can one who goes the way of the cross sit in the seat of Pilate when it falls vacant? Well, surely to answer that question, one would have to say that Jesus and His death are misunderstood if He is seen simply as the greatest of those who have died in revolt against established power.
Jesus died as the beloved Son of the Father, by whom those powers that killed Him are authorized. It was the almighty Father who delivered the Son to death for our sake. The fact that Pilate's authority to deliver Jesus to death is given to him by God, is according to the fourth gospel, acknowledged by Jesus in the course of His trial. What is condemned is the abuse of this authority.
Kingship in the human sense, the authority to rule over a people, is according to the Scriptures, something authorized by God, and also something constantly corrupted by human sin. Jesus did not set out to destroy the rule exercised by the Roman and Jewish establishment. By manifesting and exercising the true Kingship of God, He exposed their corruption, and thereby as Paul says, "disarmed
them; robbed them of their pretensions to absolute authority." His kingship was exercised by bearing witness to the truth, to the one great reality against which all claims to reality have to be tested. All kingship from Calvary onwards, is tested and judged by the standard of the true kingship established there. Judged and tested, not eliminated, the powers are disarmed,
but they are not destroyed. According to the Pauline teaching, the principalities and powers, which can become the agents of evil, and which were unmasked and robbed of their pretensions to absolute authority when they put Jesus on the cross, are nevertheless created in Christ and for Christ, and still continued to function after Christ's decisive victory, yet only under His authority.
To unpack these Pauline ideas, let us return to the Gospel narrative. The first commentary on the death of Jesus is the suicide of Judas. If the cross is the last word in God's self-revelation, then this first commentary is the only possible one, for if all humankind, even in its best representatives, is exposed here, as it is one murderous treason against its Creator, what future
is there but death? What is the point of continuing, even with all the adornments of civilization this futile saga of sin? If the cross is the end, then there is no future; but of course it is not. The resurrection is the revelation to chosen witnesses of the fact that Jesus who died on the cross is indeed King, Conqueror of death and sin, Lord and Savior of all.
The resurrection is not the reversal of a defeat, but the proclamation of a victory. The King reigns from the tree. The reign of God has indeed come upon us and its sign is a cross. But what does that mean in practice? In what sense, which has any practical consequences, can we say these things? Can powerlessness wield power? Must not the crucifixion of the King mean the end
of every kind of kingship which collaborated in His crucifixion? Surely now all traditional embodiments of kingship, of political rule stand exposed and condemned before the kingship which is exercised in the cross. Surely now is the moment for the kingship of God to appear, displacing all other forms of sovereignty. That is the natural and obvious inference that must be drawn
and that the disciples do draw, once they have become convinced that the death of Jesus is not the end and that His claim to kingship stands. "Lord, will you now restore the kingdom to Israel?" And the answer of Jesus, as we know, to that question is both a warning and a promise, which together define the role of the church in respect of the kingdom post Christum.
It is first a warning: God alone is King, and He retains in His own authority the decision when and how to manifest His kingship. "It is not for you to know the times and seasons." We are required to bide the Father's time. We do not establish His kingship. But there is also a promise. It is the promise of the Spirit, whose presence is the pledge and foretaste of the kingdom
and constitutes the church a witness to that kingdom, vis-a-vis the continuing powers of this age. The continuing existence of these powers, sustaining albeit with much distortion and corruption, an order in which some measure of justice and freedom is secured, is a work of God, who in His mercy gives a time and a space for men and women to
recognize the true kingship, to repent, and to believe. These powers are ordained by God and are to be respected. They are appointed, as Paul says, to "punish the wrongdoer and reward those who do well." Thus, the Christian is not to seek justice for himself by taking the law into his own hands, for there is one appointed by God to establish justice, a "servant of God for your good," as Paul says.
And consequently, Paul himself does not hesitate to appeal to the established powers for justice in his own case. I am, of course, well aware that this doctrine is unacceptable -- I'm sorry, I've been doing a lot of cutting because I discovered that I was being too loquacious and I have I think flipped a point here.
The church, thus, cannot absolve itself from the responsibility where it has the opportunity to remind those to whom God has given responsibility for the political order of the truth which is manifest in Jesus Christ who is the Way, the Truth, and the Life for all. The church and the state have different roles
and that would be so even if every citizen was a Christian. But governments are responsible to God, and the church has the duty at all times to remind them of this fact. I am, of course, aware that this doctrine is unacceptable in a society and at a time when the idea that the state is secular, in the sense of morally and religiously neutral, has become almost an axiom.
There was a period between the wars when men like Jacques Maritain in France, T.S. Eliot in England, and John Baillie in Scotland were sketching their visions of a Christian society. They looked at the movements in Italy and Germany which had succeeded in taking over the whole ordering of natural life in the strength of an ideology passionately believed by a vigorous minority. They saw the corrupt and hopelessly lethargic
democracies of those countries transformed into dynamic societies by the power of these ideologies and they asked themselves whether it could not be possible for Christians as a dedicated group, even if a minority, to do something comparable; to give to the rudderless democracies a sense of direction and purpose, yet without the repression and intolerance that marked the totalitarian movements. And their vision was not without effect.
In Britain, one can certainly point to great changes which were in considerable measure made possible by the exercise of explicitly Christian convictions in the field of politics. But the 1960s saw a sharp swing in the opposite direction. Denys Munby's book, "The Idea of a Secular Society," published in 1963, was intended as a direct rebuttal of Eliot's
"Idea of a Christian Society." Secularity became the blessed word for the theologians of the 1960s. The accepted vision was of a public world, totally liberated from its tutelage by the church, and of a state which eschewed any religious or ideological commitments, holding the ring equally for all. And in this view, the position taken by Gladstone, to which I referred in the first lecture,
that the state is a moral personality and therefore responsible to do right and to acknowledge truth is regarded as a mere survivor of medievalism. But I think we have now to acknowledge that there is at least some truth in Gladstone's argument. No state can be completely secular, in the sense that those who exercise power have no beliefs about what is true, and
no commitments to what they believe to be right. It is the duty of the church to ask what those beliefs and commitments are and to expose them to the light of the Gospel. There can be no genuinely missionary encounter of the Gospel with our culture unless that happens. How in practice is it to happen? How is the church to challenge our culture in its public
as well as its private aspects in the name of Christ? What kind of churchmanship will enable us so to preach the Gospel that men and women are called to be in the fullest sense disciples whose personal and corporate life is a sign, instrument, and foretaste of God's kingly rule over all creation and all nations? How in particular are we to do this who are ourselves sent not to one of the ancient world religions but to a society nourished in its deepest roots by a Christian tradition, but governed in its explicit assumptions by a pagan ideology? And how can we who are ourselves part of this modern world be missionaries to this modern world? I want to suggest six essentials as they seem to me for the answering of this question, and
they are of different kinds. The first, on the basis of the fundamental Christian doctrine that the first shall be last, my first is about eschatology. The understanding of the last things is the first essential. The Gospel is good news of the kingdom, and the kingdom is an eschatological concept. A true understanding of the last things is the first essential. We are very familiar with
the way in which language about the kingdom of God has been used to domesticate Christianity within the post-Enlightenment worldview. The men of the Enlightenment believed that the liberation of the human spirit from the shackles of dogma would lead to the gradual elimination of ignorance and evil and so to the progress of humanity to the heavenly city, a perfect commonwealth of free and happy people. The underlying ideas
were not biblical, but classical. What is pre-supposed is an inherent power within history which leads towards perfection and the opposing power is not sin, not a radical distortion at the center of human reason and conscience, but just the inertia of nature. We are familiar with the way in which liberal, Protestant Christianity used the biblical language of the kingdom to give a pious coloring
to this dominant ideology; seeking the kingdom meant working for social progress. We are also familiar in the way which the Marxists, more biblical here than the liberal Protestants gave an apocalyptic twist to the Enlightenment scenario and proclaimed the classless society only on the other side of a final Armageddon in which the messianic proletariat will destroy the kingdom of evil. The problem with
both these views is that they marginalize the human person. The men and women who now serve and fight for the new society will not themselves see it. In relation to the ultimate goal of history, they are expendable means not ultimate ends; and so inevitably alongside the doctrine of progress there comes back the ancient pagan idea of the immortality of the soul. The individual
human person finds the true end and meaning of his living and striving not in the perfect society which only a remote future posterity will see, but in an afterlife in another world, which has no relation to this. The two histories -- my personal history and the history of the world -- go their separate ways to different ends. My personal future and the future of the world have no essential relation to
each other. Human life, therefore, is no more a unity. It falls apart into these two divisions which we have been thinking of so often in these lectures, the private and the public, the spiritual and the political, the sphere of the church and the sphere of the state. We are back again at the dichotomy with which we have been so familiar in looking at our post-Enlightenment culture. And yet, the human person is a unity. I am the same person
in my most private prayers as in my most public acts. Whence then comes this splitting apart of that which we experience as a unity? It comes of course from the fact of death. It is the fact that at a point which as unknown as it is certain, I who both pray and work must leave behind all my work, cut all those bonds which bind me from my birth onwards in the bundle of mutual
responsibility with family, society, and nation, and face alone the last horizon. It is this which creates the split tempting me to turn my back upon the outward world of shared responsibilities and to find meaning exclusively in the pilgrimage of my own soul. Yet, as a human being who still lives, I live not as a solitary individual, but as one who depends for every day's living on a human world
of shared responsibilities and I can only live as part of society and I can only act in the light of some vision of the goal of the human journey as a whole. So arises that fatal dichotomy between two worlds of meaning; one which finds ultimate meaning only in the destiny of my immortal soul, and the other, and thus makes the public history of the world a story without meaning; and the other which finds meaning only
in the march of humanity towards a shared future and thus makes the human person marginal and finally dispensable. It is death which drive this wedge and splits our vision of the future into two. And death is not for human beings merely a biological necessity. It is, as the Bible teaches us, "the wages of sin," the outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual fact; namely, that nothing in my life is fit for God's kingdom. There can therefore be no straight road from this life to the goal which alone gives it meaning. The Gospel is good news at this point because Christ has overcome the powers of sin and death, entering completely into our shared humanity with all its burden of sin and death. He has gone down for us into the darkness of death and judgment
and in His resurrection given us the sign and the foretaste of total victory. As united with Him, we are enabled to follow the same way. We do not see the future either of our own personal selves, or of the world we share with all people. The curtain of death shuts off that view, but Jesus has gone before us through the curtain. The road disappears from view into a dark valley
whose depth we cannot penetrate. But Jesus has gone down there before us and has appeared victorious on the other side. He Himself is the Path, the Way that goes through death to life. As we follow that Way, we have before us beyond the chasm of death, the vision of the holy city into which all the glory of the nations will be brought and from which everything unclean will be excluded.
Following that way, we can commit ourselves without reserve to all the secular works which our shared humanity requires of us, knowing that nothing we do is itself good enough to form part of that city's building; knowing that everything from our most secret prayers to our most public political acts are part of that sin-stained human nature which must go down
into the valley of death and judgment. And yet, knowing, that as we offer it to the Father in the name of Christ, and in the power of the Spirit, it is safe with Him and that purged in fire, it will find its place in the holy city in the end. With that faith, the split between the public and the private worlds is healed. There is no room for a political fanaticism which supposes that my political achievement
will establish God's kingdom, declares a holy war against opponents and tramples on individual human beings in the pursuit of a political millennium. Equally there is no room for a piety which seeks for personal holiness by opting out of the struggle for a measure of justice and freedom in public life. This faith enables us to be politically realistic without cynicism and to be
sensitive to the supreme rule of love without sentimentality. It enables us, hungry to acknowledge that even the best social order is, in God's sight, an organization of sinful men and women, and therefore always prone to corruption. And yet, not to use this knowledge as an excuse for political pietism, but tirelessly to work for the best possible among the actually available political alternatives.
Second in my list of essentials for the quest of a Christian social order, I will put a Christian doctrine of freedom. Surely, the greatest gift which the Enlightenment has bequeathed to us is the recognition of the right of all people to freedom of thought and conscience. That is a gift which we can never surrender. And we have to remember penitently, that it was one in the teeth of determined opposition from the churches.
We have also to confess if we are honest, that those same churches which demanded freedom of conscience when they were in a minority have, when they became a majority, denied to others the freedom they had claimed for themselves. How, if we are to think of a Christian society, can we ensure that the same sins are not repeated as soon as Christians are in a position to impose their views on others. If we insist, as I have done,
that the state has an obligation to recognize the truth, how can the same state offer protection to that which it recognizes as error? If there were a Christian state, would it not necessarily be intolerant? These are real questions which must be faced. I think we must begin by distinguishing between toleration on the one hand and neutrality or indifferentism on the other. The latter was well-described
by Gibbon who said of Roman society at a certain stage, that in it all religions were to the people equally true; to the philosophers equally false; and to the government equally useful. It would be difficult to deny that that is an exact description of some societies today. That kind of neutrality is evidence either of impending collapse, or else of the fact that some other ideology
has taken the place normally occupied by religion as the overarching plausibility structure for intellectual and political life. Since total skepticism about ultimate beliefs is strictly impossible in that no belief can be doubted except on the basis of some other belief, indifferentism is always in danger of giving place to fanaticism, which can be as intolerant as any religion has ever been.
Tolerance, in respect of what is not important, is easy. How is it possible to combine real commitment to the truth, in matters of supreme importance, with tolerance of falsehood? Clearly, if we are to be consistent, the answer has to be given from within our commitment to the truth as it is given in Jesus, and not sought from outside that truth. We can, I think, attempt an answer
in the form of three statements. Firstly, that as we have seen earlier in these lectures, the risen Jesus whose kingship was defined as bearing witness to the truth warned the church against the temptation to expect an immediate, to expect immediately the manifestation of the truth in coercive power. It is the will of the Father to provide a space and a time wherein men and women can give their allegiance
to the kingdom in the only way that it can be given, namely, in freedom. To use the God-given authority of the state to deny that freedom is therefore to violate the space which God Himself has provided and put into the care of earthly governors. Secondly, that the church which is entrusted with the truth is a body of sinful men and women, who falsely identify their grasp of the truth
with the truth itself. The paradox of grace, that the church is a body of forgiven sinners, both forgiven, and sinful, applies to the church's understanding of the truth. At the very point of his confession of truth, Peter can become an agent of Satan as the Gospel reminds us. I have often thought standing under the dome of St. Peter's where one has
that text, "Thou are Peter, and on this rock I will found my church," and as you look round on that building and you think of all that has been drawn from that text, one could only have wished that Michelangelo had raised the roof by about one foot so that the following verse could also have been added, "Get thee behind me, Satan." Because sin remains a reality in the life of the forgiven community, the church can
and does allow the truth entrusted to her to be turned into an ideological justification of her own human interests and God has constantly to use His other servants, especially the church, the state, to bring the church to repentance. And this leads to the third statement, for which I turn to the Johannine discourses in which our Lord is represented as telling His disciples that they have yet much learn of the truth which yet cannot be told then
and that the Spirit who will be given to them will lead them into all the truth. The context of this saying is the long argument, the long account of the missionary experience which lies ahead of the church, its rejection by the world, the witness which the Spirit will give in speaking for the church in confuting the wisdom of the world, and in glorifying Jesus by taking all that belongs to the Father and showing
it to the church as the possession of the Son. This promise is being fulfilled as the church goes on its missionary journey to the ends of the earth and the end of time, entering into dialogue with new cultures and being itself changed as new things which are part of the Father's world are brought through the Spirit into Christ's treasury. In this missionary dialogue, the church both learns new
things and also provides the place where witness is born to Christ as head of the human race as He is seen more and more for what He is. Thus, a true understanding of the Gospel itself ought to enable Christians both to be firm in their allegiance to Christ as the Way, the Truth, and the Life; and also to be ready to hear, and to enter into dialogue with those
who do not give that allegiance, but from whom they know that they have to be ready to learn. The mind which is firmly anchored in Christ, knowing that Christ is much greater than the limited understanding of Him which each of us has, is at the same time able to enter freely into the kind of missionary dialogue which I have described. This is the foundation on which a true tolerance which is not indifference to truth
can be founded. True dialogue is as far as possible from neutrality or indifference. Its basis is the shared conviction that there is truth to be known, and that we must both bear witness to the truth given to us, and also listen to the witness of others. With such an understanding, it is possible to envisage whether or not such a thing is a present political possibility. It is possible to envisage a state which acknowledges the
Christian faith as true, but deliberately provides full security for those who do not make that acknowledgement. It would be different, both from the Christian states of the past which suppressed dissenting minorities and from the pluralist states of the present which profess to be guided by no vision of human nature and society, but are in fact guided by an ideology perhaps of the Enlightenment,
an ideology of which they are perhaps unaware, but which is exceedingly obvious to minorities, for example, such as the Muslims in Britain, who live in their midst. It would be a state which embodied the idea of the proper role of the political order as the Bible seems to suggest. I suppose that the crucial test of such an idea would lie in its implications for education. There is no area where the issues are
more immediate or more difficult than this. Whatever we may say about the religious neutrality of the state, the experience of passing through school and university is shaping the minds of young people in certain directions. It is not, and cannot be, religiously neutral. The omission of religion from the curriculum is itself a momentous statement about what society believes and expects its children to believe, and when we
have, as in Britain today, a Muslim community which constitutes four percent of the population, and over eighty percent in some of our inner-city schools, one discovers -- and I have been exposed recently to passionate pleading from Muslim friends in this matter -- one discovers that the very idea of treating religion as a subject which could either be included in or excluded from the curriculum of a school, like physics
or history or literature is itself an assault upon the foundations of belief. There are no answers to this question which are raised unless one accepts that human societies have to live through the experience of real conflict between ultimate truth claims. Any idea that one can be finally neutral is an illusion. I believe that the Christian gospel opens up the possibility of a life, public and personal,
which includes both the ability to hold vital convictions, which lead to action, and the capacity to preserve for others the freedom of dissent. As my third essential for a missionary encounter with our culture, I would list what I would call a de-clericalized theology. I can perhaps indicate what I mean by referring to a moving passage in Teilhard de Chardin's brilliant little classic of the spiritual life,
Le Milieu Divin. He is speaking of the challenge put to the Christian who is also a scientist by a non-Christian colleague. The latter is represented as saying something like this: "We who take our science seriously cannot completely trust you who are Christians. For, however brilliant your scientific work may be, we know that you are not ultimately serious about it. For your ultimate service
-- for you, the ultimately serious matters lie in a world beyond science. For you, science is not ultimately important. In the last judgment, as you conceive it, it will not matter whether your conclusions were right or wrong: the only questions asked will be about your sincerity, your devotion to truth, your humility, etc. In fact, therefore, your science is only a kind of game, a playground in which you can exercise
you spiritual muscles. You are not really serious." Teilhard acknowledges the force of that accusation. Traditional Christian teaching, as he points out, has been otherworldly in its emphasis. It has had much to say about how to accept failure, but not much about success; more about suffering than about action. And theology has been the preserve of those who minister as priests and pastors
to the inner spiritual life of their people so that when theologians whose whole work is in this pastoral ministry try to speak about matters of politics and economics their words do not carry weight. And Christian men and women who are deeply involved in secular affairs view theology as the arcane pursuit of professional clergymen. This withdrawal of theology from the world of secular affairs is made more complete by the work
of biblical scholars whose endlessly fascinating exercises have made it appear to the ordinary lay Christian that no-one untrained in these disciplines can really understand what the Bible is about, and even to make him doubt whether those who are so trained can. We are now in a situation analogous to that of which the great reformers complained: the Bible has been effectively been taken out of the hands of the laity
to become the professional property not now of the priesthood, but of the guild of scholars. Since the demise of the biblical theology, few Christians dare to appeal to the authority of Scripture for any kind of political or ethical decision. The missionary encounter with our culture for which I am pleading will requite the energetic fostering of a de-clericalized lay theology. Of course,
I am not asking for something previously unheard of. Forty years ago, Hendrik Kraemer, Visser 't Hooft, and Suzanne de Dietrich had this vision and embodied it in the Ecumenical Institute at Bossey, from where in succeeding years a stream of lay men and women from all over the world have caught a glimpse of it. But this is a small ship to carry a cargo for the whole world mission of the church. We need a multitude of places where this kind of lay theology can be nourished. We need much better provision to ensure that when church leaders make pronouncements on ethical, political, or economic questions, their words are informed by a theology which has been wrought out at the coal face, at the place where faith wrestles at personal cost with the hard issues of public life. And we need, above all, in every local congregation to create possibilities for lay men and women
to share with one another their actual experience in workaday work and to seek illumination from the Gospel for their daily secular duty. Only so shall we begin to bring together what our culture has divided; the private and the public. Only so will the church fulfill its proper missionary role, for while there are occasions when it is proper for the church through its synods and hierarchies to make pronouncements on public issues,
it is infinitely more important that all its lay members are prepared and equipped to think out the relation of their faith to their secular work day by day. Here is where the real encounter takes place. The fourth item in my suggested list of requirements is a radical, theological critique of the theory and practice of denominationalism. In an oft-quoted
sentence, Richard Niebuhr wrote that "denominationalism represents the moral failure of Christianity," but that was written more than 55 years ago. Today the defense of denominationalism has become respectable. In a famous essay on denominationalism as a basis for ecumenicity, Winthrop Hudson defined and defended denominationalism in the following affirmations, which I think it would be difficult
to fault. No denomination claims to represent the whole church of Christ. No denomination claims that other churches are false churches. None claims that all members of society should be incorporated in its membership. None claims that society and the state should submit to its ecclesiastical regulation, but all recognize their share of responsibility for society. Negatively, therefore, a denomination is not a sect.
Positively, to quote Sidney Mead, a denomination is "a voluntary association of like-hearted and like-minded individuals who are united on the basis of common beliefs for the purpose of accomplishing tangible and defined objectives. One of the primary objectives is the propagation of its point of view." End of the quote. It is a matter of historic fact that denominationalism as it flourishes today, developed
out of the voluntary associations which were formed for missionary purposes. In the essays from which I have been quoting, denominationalism is celebrated of the great gift of North American Christianity to the universal church. In the words of Karl Hertz, "Denominationalism is the new American way in Christianity." And so, in a large part of the world today, denominationalism is accepted as the normal form
of the visible church. Now surely no one can deny that denominations have been and are powerful, purposeful, and effective agencies of self-propagation. The question that has to be asked is this: How serious is it that the denominational principle requires as all its defenders agree the surrender of any claim to be the church in the sense in which that word is used
in the New Testament? It is clear that in the Pauline letters the name Ekklesia tou Theou is applied to actual visible bodies of sinful men and women defined by the names of the places where they lived; God's congregation in Corinth, etc. Also applied to the whole body of such people in all places since it is the same God who is assembling them in each place. These assemblies are the church.
The exponents of the denominational principle acknowledge that a denomination does not and cannot claim to be a church, or the church, in any biblical sense. The church in its true being, according to this doctrine, is invisible and the denomination is but a partial manifestation of the invisible church, but makes no claim to be the church. It is a voluntary association
based on the free personal choice of a number of individuals to co-operate for certain purposes; purposes which in the nineteenth century, when the great development of denominations took place, was described as the advancement of the kingdom. It is the common observation of sociologists of religion that denominationalism is the religious aspect of secularization. It is the form which religion takes in a culture controlled
by the ideology of the Enlightenment. It is the social form in which the privatization of religion is expressed. As Thomas Luckman has written, "Once religion is defined as a private affair the individual may choose from the assortment of ultimate meanings as he sees fit." The denomination provides a shelter for those who have made the same choice. It is therefore, in principle, unable to confront
the state and society as a whole with a claim, with which Jesus confronted Pilate -- the claim to the truth. It follows that neither a denomination separately, nor all the denominations linked together in some kind of federal unity or "reconciled diversity," to use the blessed phrase, can be the agents of a missionary confrontation with our culture, for the simple reason that
they are themselves the outward and visible form of an inward and spiritual surrender to the ideology of our culture. They cannot confront our culture with the witness of the truth since even for themselves they do not claim to be more than associations of individuals who share the same private opinions. A genuine ecumenical movement, that is to say a movement seeking to witness to the lordship of Christ
over the whole oikoumene cannot take the form of a federation of denominations. It must patiently seek again what the Reformers sought in their day to restore -- to use their beautiful phrase, "the ancient face of the Catholic Church." Fifthly; as the fifth condition for a missionary encounter with our culture, I would list the necessity for help in seeing our culture
through Christian minds shaped by other cultures. Paul says that we need all the saints to comprehend the greatness of Christ, and we need the witness of the whole ecumenical family if we are to be authentic witnesses of Christ to our culture. I alluded in an earlier lecture to the impression we receive when we look at the portraits of Jesus painted in different cultures. They make vividly clear how much our vision of Jesus, and therefore our understanding
pf the Gospel is shaped by our culture, and it cannot be otherwise. The fact that Jesus is much more than, much greater than, our culture-bound vision of Him can only come home to us through the witness of those who see Him with other eyes. Asian and African Christians who received the Gospel from European and American missionaries, and therefore were invited to see Jesus as our culture sees Him, now struggle through their own
study of the Scriptures and their own obedience in their own time and place to articulate a form of Christian believing and behaving in terms of their own cultures. We need their witness to correct ours; as indeed they need ours to correct theirs. At this moment, our need is greater for they have been far more aware of the dangers of syncretism of an illegitimate alliance with false elements in their cultures than we have.
But whether it is we or they, we imperatively need one another if we are to be faithful witnesses to Christ in our many different cultures. For this reason, the church in the western world must recognize that we cannot do without the World Council of Churches. When that council held its second assembly at Evanston in 1954, it was a great media event. There was immense enthusiasm throughout the nation, and even the
secular press and radio were full of it. Today the World Council is widely regarded with the deepest suspicion, and the reason is obvious. Thirty years ago, the ecumenical movement was proclaimed as the worldwide triumph of our kind of Christianity. The colored and colorful representatives of the Asian and African churches were hailed and photographed as trophies of our missionary enterprise. Today, the ecumenical movement is quite rightly
perceived as a threat, and the theologies coming out of the younger churches call our own certainties into question. That is as it should be. We do well to feel uncomfortable. Of course a theology is not true because it comes from Buenos Aires or Jakarta. But we cannot be faithful in the discharge of our missionary responsibility to our own people unless we are willing to listen for what the living God says
to us through His servants in other cultures. We need all the saints and the foreign missionary is not therefore a temporary but an abiding necessity for the life of the church. The Word of God is to be spoken in every tongue, but it can never be domesticated in any. The contemporary campaign of abuse directed against the World Council of Churches is certainly predictable and perhaps even to be welcomed as a sign that the sharp
sword of the Word of God is piercing our complacencies and challenging the comfortable syncretism in which our Western Christianity has been living for so long. And finally, the sixth requirement which I would suggest for a missionary encounter with our culture is the most fundamental. It is simply the courage to hold and to proclaim a belief which cannot be proved to be true in terms of the axioms of our society.
This may sound simplistic, but it is not. Our modern scientific culture has pursued the ideal of a completely impersonal knowledge of a world of so-called facts which are simply there, which cannot be doubted by rational minds, and which constitute the real world as contrasted with the opinions, desires, hopes, and fears of human beings; a world in which the words purpose and value
have no meaning. In fact, this whole way of trying to understand the totality of human experience rests upon beliefs which are simply not questioned. For every attempt to understand and cope with experience must rest upon some such ultimate belief. Every such belief is of course open to critical question, and we are more aware of this than any previous generation has been, but no criticism is possible
except by relying on other beliefs which in the act of criticizing, we exempt from criticism. All understanding of reality rests on a venture of faith. That is as true of science as it is of the Christian gospel. No belief system can be faulted by the fact that it rests upon assumptions which cannot be proved within our culture. What can and must be faulted is the blindness
of its proponents to the fact that it is so. The Gospel is not a set of beliefs which arise or could arise from empirical observation of the whole human scene. It is the announcement of a fact which offers the starting point for the whole life-long enterprise of understanding and coping with experience. It is a new starting point. To accept it means a new beginning, a radical conversion. The church needs to be very humble in acknowledging that it is itself only a learner needing to pay heed to all the varieties of human experience in order to learn and practice what it means that Jesus is King and Head of the whole human race. But the church also needs to be very bold in bearing witness to Him who alone is the King
and Lord. For the demonstration and proof, we have to wait until the end. Until then, we have to be bold and steadfast in our witness and patient in our hope. We are partakers of Christ if we hold our first confidence firm to the end.