Seeing as it has been some time since I have written with any regularity, consider this post as my hope that this can soon be rectified. It is not, necessarily, that I don't have time to write, merely that I have used this time mostly for other things. That being said, I have undertaken a couple of reading projects for Lent and my intention is to update with things I am reading and learning.
One of these works is Lesslie Newbigin's The Gospel in a Pluralist Society. Newbigin wore many hats throughout his career, but he started his ministry in the mission fields of India. The purpose of the book is to recover gospel proclamation in an era where plurality is valued for the sake of plurality and dogma is a bad word. He posits the question thus:
Only what can stand up under the critical examination of the modern scientific method can be taught as fact, as public truth: the rest is dogma. One is free to promote it as a personal belief, but to affirm it as fact is simply arrogance. How, in this situation, does one preach the gospel as truth, truth which is not to be domesticated within the assumptions of modern thought but which challenges these assumptions and calls for their revision? (5)
One assumption of modern thought, the Enlightenment focus on "rationality," often works to constrain the church. Newbigin points out that even a large number of those defending the faith do so on the basis of rationality, adopting as they do so the "fundamental humanist assumption" (2). What looks like a defense is therefore a "tactical retreat" (3). We are playing under the terms set for us by a philosophy hostile to viewing the non-empirical as fact.
Dogma, which originally meant "to seem" and was used by the ancient church to delineate what could be accepted on "competent authority" now stands "precisely for all that is ignorant and arrogant, for the very opposite of a sincere searching after truth" (5). Dogma narrows the world and denies the abundance of avenues to truth in the world. Dogma destroys our open-mindedness, which is a virtue in the modern world, closing us off from the beliefs of others. Our culture distinguishes facts from values. Christianity, and other faith systems, belong to the world of values and it is wrong to impose those values on others. Newbigin ends the first chapter by making a few points that will be picked up as the book continues.
The first is that "dogma is not the unique particularity of the Church." Every faith system is built on dogma; assumptions, premises, are necessary in believing anything. It is difficult to question the assumptions we have built our worldview upon; difficult both for the Christian and for the pluralist.
Second, every culture "depends for its coherence upon a set of. . . 'plausibility structures' which predetermine which beliefs are acceptable within a culture and which are anathema. Within the plausibility structure of modern science, divine explanations for events will naturally seem implausible. Newbigin contends, though, that "the gospel gives rise to a new plausibility structure, a radically different vision of things from those that shape all human cultures apart from the gospel" (9).
Third, the statement that truth is bigger and more complex than any one person or one system of thought can articulate is well-intended but can also be used to close off any dissent from that position. In the famous example of the people feeling different parts of the elephant and describing a wildly different creature what we often lose sight of in the pithy lesson of different apprehensions of the truth is the fact that to know they are touching an elephant someone has to see the whole elephant. To the charge of arrogance at Christian belief in truth, Newbigin responds: (a) "The truth is that it is dogma rightly understood, namely the free gift of God's grace in Jesus Christ, which alone can establish and sustain freedom of thought and of conscience." (b) "[W]e do not defend the Christian message by domesticating it within the reigning plausibility structure." (c) Christians should be lifelong learners and seekers after truth, but it is important to insist that "this learning is, like all genuine learning, an exercise which is guided and disciplined by a tradition." (d) "The dogma, the thing given for our acceptance in faith, is not a set of timeless propositions: it is a story."
The defense, then, of our faith becomes as much about who we are and how we live as what we believe. By living outside of the plausibility structure of scientific, postmodern, late-capitalist America we invoke a different story and way of living than that which dominates our culture. We tell ourselves a different story about life and the ordering of virtues and the practice of community and the beauty of dogma and the exclusivity of truth than is allowed in our culture. And, implicit in Newbigin's picture, we do so joyfully.
