Beyond Liberal and Conservative

Read Joel Garver’s piece on post-conservatism, to which I say, Here! Here! (I also like Joel Hunter’s comment!)

 He also has a piece on Lesslie Newbigin that is worth reading. You should check out Garver’s blog with regularity.  There’s a link on my blogroll over yonder —>

Newbigin On Community

“It is surely a fact of inexhaustible significance that what our Lord left behind Him was not a book, nor a creed, nor a system of thought, nor a rule of life, but a visible community. He committed the entire work of salvation to that community. It was not that a community gathered round an idea, so that the idea was primary and the community secondary. It was that a community called together by the deliberate choice of the Lord Himself, and re-created in Him, gradually sought - and is seeking - to make explicit who He is and what He has done. The actual community is primary; the understanding of what it is comes second.”                                       -Lesslie Newbigin

Five Propositions

Newbigin concludes chapter 4 with five propositions which serves as the launch point for the crescendo that is the final two chapters.

1. While the methodological elimination of final causes from the study of nature has been immensely fruitful, the attempt to explain all that exists solely in terms of efficient cause leads to conceptual absurdity and to social tyranny.
2. To recognize the place of final causes in the understanding of the world must lead to these questions: Is anyone there? Is there a word? This is because purpose is a personal reality and can be known only if the person whose purpose it is chooses to communicate it.
3. The church exists to testify that there is someone, that he has spoken, and that we can begin to know his purpose and to direct our personal and public lives by it.
4. The church, therefore, in its missionary encounter with modern Western culture, has to be quite bold and unembarrassed in using the language of testimony, since this testimony, so far from being capable of validation by methods of modern science, provides itself with the foundation on which modern science rests, namely, the assurance that the world is both rational and contingent.
5. When the ultimate explanation of things is found in the creating, sustaining, judging, and redeeming work of a personal God, then science can be the servant of humanity, not its master. It is only this testimony that can save our culture from dissolving into the irrational fanaticism that is the child of total skepticism. It will perhaps be the greatest task of the church in the twenty-first century to be the bastion of rationality in a world of unreason. But for that, Christians will have to learn that conversion is a matter not only of the heart and the will but also of the mind.

                                                    

All Created Beings Have a Sacramental Character

I’m reading Lesslie Newbigin’s Foolishness to the Greeks. Following is a very good quote from a very good book.

…I reject the division of human experience into a private world, where the “good” is a matter of personal taste, and a public world, where “facts” are regarded as operative apart from any reference to the good. I believe that all created beings have a sacramental character in that they exist by the creative goodness and for the redeeming purpose of God, that nothing is rightly understood otherwise, and that, nevertheless, God in creating the world with a measure of autonomy and contingency has provided for us a space within which we are given freedom to search, to experiment, and to find out for ourselves how things really are. I believe that the whole experience in the natural world, in the world of public affairs, of politics, economics, and culture, and the world of inward spiritual experience is to be seen as one whole in the light of this disclosure of the character and will of its Creator.

                                        (Foolishness to the Greeks, p.89)

See Romans 11:36