Michael Green: The Apologetics of Leslie Newbigin

[00:00:00] Speaker A: Well, good morning, everybody. I am both honored and embarrassed to give this lecture. Honoured because I had the privilege of knowing Leslie Newbiggen quite well and I believe has made an enormous and original contribution to apologetics amidst the cultural confusion of the mid 20th century. But I'm embarrassed because Leslie Newbegin is now the sort of figure on whom scholars write doctoral theses, and I have a feeling that some of those people are here today know a lot more about him than I do. Inevitably, my own study of his writings has not been as profound or systematic as theirs. But let's have a go. Leslie Newbiggen lived a ripe old age, actually, from 1909 to 1998. He was the son of a shipping merchant in Newcastle on Tyne. He was educated in the local schools first, then at Leighton Park School, then at. And then at my own college in Cambridge, Queens. He originally planned to join his father's firm, but his energies were soon thrown into the student Christian movement, which was strong in those days. It stressed the social, intellectual and the justice aspects of Christianity, rather than the personal conversion and growth which InterVarsity Fellowship, now UCCF, specialized in. There were two moments of strong divine guidance in his early years. The first was when he was on a camp for unemployed men in Wales in the Great Depression in 1929, and he was having a sleepless night because of his inability to change their situation. And he had a vision of Christ on the cross, reaching down to the most hopeless and sordid mass of human misery and yet promising life and victory. That was one of the convictions that shaped his later life. The other moment of illumination came a year later, and Leslie was at a Student Christian Movement conference, was having a time of private prayer, and in it he received an unambiguous call to ordination. And that was confirmed in a remarkable way the same day when he was invited to join the staff of the FCM after graduation in 1931. Join it he did, and he went up to Glasgow as one of the two Scottish secretaries, the other being Helen Henderson. And almost at once they realized they were meant for each other. But the strict rules of the Church of Scotland at that time meant that they could not marry for another five years, until 20 August 1936, as they embarked on their missionary service and were about to set out in India. There they remained in India for the next 40 years, punctuated by a period on the staff of the World Council of Churches in Geneva. And this at once sets. This missionary aspect at once sets him apart from most of those who teach apologetics from the ivory tower. He remained a practicing missionary to the end of his long life, whether he was in India, in Switzerland or in the uk. So for the majority of his life he was working in a Hindu culture. He was a very modest man and he always proclaimed that he was a pastor and a teacher, not an academic or an apologist. But of course his academic competence was phenomenal and his wide reading was voracious. Even at the very end of his life in sheltered housing in London and by now blind and confined to his bed, he had a little circle of young academics, I think Michael Ramsden among them, who came to read significant books to him and discuss issues of truth and mission. I recall being very moved by letters that he wrote me at this stage in his life on his battered old typewriter with many of the letters typed incorrectly because he could no longer see as a missionary, he became eloquent in Tamil. And once a week he would sit on the floor of some leading Hindu teacher and listen as this man taught his students. Needless to say, he won enormous respect in this way. And when the conversations between Presbyterians, Anglicans and Congregationalists led to the formation of the Church of south India in 1947, he was one of the 14 first bishops. He spent the years 1959-65 away from India heading up the International Missionary Council of the World Council of Churches. And he had a major part in international missionary conferences during this period. But actually he was very glad to be elected Bishop of Madras in 1965, not particularly because he liked being a bishop, but because it gave him a chance to return to the India that he loved. He was certainly not out of touch with what was happening in the west during these years. He wrote a spirited riposte to John Robinson over the Honest to God affair. He was a consultant at the 1968 Lambeth Conference, as I was. And this is where we first met. And I remember I shared the dismay that he had at that conference. He and Bishop Stephen Neill, another towering missionary intellectual who had given his life to India. I see you remember him. You see what happened at that conference. The Lambeth bishops did not accept the Church of South India at that time, although they did later because not all the bishops in South India had been consecrated by bishops who'd been deemed to be in the apostolic succession. I think that was a pathetic example of small mindedness. But actually the South India way of reuniting churches was merely one of the issues on which Neubingen was so eloquent for many decades. I have to say his passion fell on deaf ears in the Christian community. He pleaded for the declericalization of theology. And you guys, or many of you are the evidence of the success of that. The unity of the churches. Where do we see that the priority of mission in the west in order to match what was going on in the East? Where do we see that the liberation of theology from secularist presuppositions? My word, it would be wonderful if that happened. He advocated all these causes to little or no effect. But in his later years he began to be realized for the prophetic figure that he was. Indeed, he became the theologian regularly teaching for Holy Trinity Brompton. Now such was the man that we are considering today, a man who, somewhat like Irenaeus, straddled East and west as a missionary theologian. He wrote a wide variety of significant books, but I suppose that three of them are the most outstanding and give us an insight into three aspects of his life and of his influence. So I'm going to examine these three books. First, the Finality of Christ, directed particularly to the debate between Christianity and Hinduism. The Finality of Christ, published by the scm. Secondly, the Gospel in a Pluralist Society, which is a major apologetic against the religion of secularism, which he found to be choking the west when he theoretically retired and went to the Selly Oak Colleges in Birmingham in 1974. But in fact his retirement proved to be the most influential and crucial years of his career. And finally we will examine what was, I think, his last book. He gave me one of the first copies. It's called Proper Confidence. And as we look at these three books that was published first in the States but again by the SMCK and was the Gospel in a Pluralist Society. And as we look at these three books, we'll see themes reappearing because his writing was discursive and rather repetitive and some of those themes getting eclipsed by even more pressing issues as he went along. So let's have a look at the first one, the Finality of Christ. That was written only in 1960, but it belongs to the earlier part of his missionary career. It emerges from encounter over many years with holy men of different faiths with whom he consorted in India, nourished in a rather orthodox tradition. A sensitive man like Neubigen was constantly wrestling with the issue of how you could ascribe finality to Jesus Christ when so many millions of good men and women went to Christless graves. And he surveys the ways in which missiologists and world missionary conferences have grappled with that problem, and he subjects them to critical scrutiny. Hogg and Cramer and Farquhar and Spear and Panaker and MacMurray are all brought to the bar and all found wanting. Newbiggen has no difficulty in showing that the other religions are not the sort of beginnings which get completed in the Gospel, which a lot of the missiologists of the day were arguing. The fact is that they face in very different directions and they ask fundamentally different questions. They turn, as Otto put it, on different axes. And in any case, the situation has changed. No longer is it an internal debate between Christianity and other faiths. The value of the religious concepts of non Christian religions, as they used to call it, is no longer the central question. Worldwide secularization has forced the debate into other channels, and many of the changes in Asian countries which Christians had labored for for years, are now being brought about effectively by secular agencies. And there's a strong feeling amongst ancient Christians that God is at work in all this. And consequently the finality of Christ is now opposed not so much with respect to his relation to other faiths as with respect to his meaning for the whole of secular world history. How is he active in this? How can he be final? For this, Newbegin sets out to show that the teaching of Jesus about the kingdom of God is where we need to begin, and that the kingdom of God concerns the whole of life, not some religious aspect of it. It even embraces death, but points nevertheless to the guarantee of resurrection and the share in the Lord's new creation. The Christian faith is not about timeless truth, but about God's action in secular history, which looks to the consummation of all things, the climax of all human history. Now Newbiggen observes how strange this seems to the Hindus amongst whom he was operating. I quote, I have never forgotten the astonishment with which a devout and learned teacher of the Ramakrishnan mission regarded me when he discovered that I was prepared to rest my whole faith as a Christian upon the substantial historical truth of the record concerning Jesus in the New Testament. To him it seemed axiomatic that such vital matters of religious truth could not be allowed to depend on the accidents of history. Now, of course, this is the position of many German theologians, stemming back to Lessing and indeed the German disjunction between historie and geschichte. But the bishop will have nothing of this popular divide between the inner world of personal experience and the outer world of historical event. You find that both in the Hindu distinction of the real world of the self, from the world of Maya of appearance, or the Western existentialists assumption that the only meaning of external events is the meaning assigned them by the individual. This division actually was there in antiquity as well. You find it in Plato between the sensible world that we find out with the senses and the world of reflection, the intelligible world which you find only with your noose, with your mind. And it was precisely this dichotomy that Christianity was so concerned to overcome. The Christian Gospel claimed that the absolute had broken into the world of time and space and said the Gospel does not allow us to withdraw into a little private spiritual world. The Gospel is the interpretation not only of personal spiritual life, but of the whole of world history. And salvation is, is not primarily about personal survival after death, but about participating in foretaste now and in fullness at the end, in the final victory of Jesus Christ. And so Neubigen's basic position is clear. He is not prepared to start with the generalities about the religious feelings of mankind or the commonalities between Christianity and other faiths. Everything depends on your starting point. And his starting point is unambiguously Jesus Christ. He recognizes that this is a vulnerable position. But you've got to take a starting point somewhere and where is there a better one than Jesus? Of course, we will only be able to demonstrate its correctness at the end of human history, the end of the road, so to speak, of the finality of Christ is to claim that he is the clue to universal history. And that claim will either be falsified or underlined at the end. Newbiggin writes, to claim finality for Christ is to endorse the judgment of the apostles. I like that that in this life and death and resurrection, God himself was uniquely present and that therefore the meaning and origin of all things was disclosed. He has a particularly helpful picture to explain the yawning difference between the Gospel and the Hinduism in which he was so immersed for so long. It's the difference between the wheel and the road. And that demonstrates the great divide among religions. The Hindu sees history as a wheel going round and round with its unending cycle of birth, growth, decay, death, always in movement and always returning on itself. So history has no purpose. You can only find a way to escape from this endless and meaningless movement by taking one of the spokes of the wheel that is the religions. And it doesn't matter which one, which will lead you to the central hub where everything is still. The Christian, however, sees history as a road on which we all journey. It had a start point in the Creation, the midpoint of time, in the coming and dying and resurrection. And it goes to a consummation at the end. The movement we are involved in is not meaningless. It leads to the goal which we believe in but do not yet see. And the ultimate resting place will only be at the end of the road. So it becomes clear that Neubigen is not claiming finality for Christianity as a system, but he's claiming finality for Christ. Of course that claim is meaningless unless it's embodied to some extent in a community which lives by the apostolic message. And that means that in some sense there is a decisive role for the Church in world history. It's got to be engaged and fruitful and creative and constructive. People in the Church are frail. We do not know all the answers. We certainly cannot yet experience the goal. And yet we claim humbly but confidently that at the end of the story it will be seen that commitment to Christ was indeed the proper way to go. Of course that's going to mean suffering and failure and defeat at times, but it's also going to mean resurrection. Defeat will finally be turned into victory. And to claim finality for Christ is not to assert that one day the majority of men will become Christians, or to assert that all others will be damned. It is to claim that commitment to Christ is the way in which men and women can be truly aligned to that ultimate end for which all things were created. Very fresh, isn't it? Very different way of handling it. We don't have time to go into his wide ranging final chapter on the nature of conversion. But essentially he sees conversion as being turned right round to be a foretaste and a participant in God's reign. And the proper question, he remarks, is not are there many or few that will be saved? Which is the question that was raging around missionary circles in his day. But who is doing the will of God? And sometimes secular organizations can do that. To speak of the finality of Christ is not primarily to speak of the fate of those who do or do not accept him as Lord. It is to say that commitment to Christ in the fellowship of those who share the same commitment is the clue to a true participation in God's purposes for the whole of creation. The Church is always only pars pro toto. It's a part behalf of the whole. And God converts a man not only so that he may be saved, but that he may be the sign and the earnest and the instrument of God's total plan in salvation. So already in this early book, which encapsulates Much of his reflection as a missionary on the Indian situation, we see some of the major characteristics of his life work. He's profoundly committed to Christ and to the New Testament record. He sees the significance of Jesus on a cosmic scale. He realizes that any starting point can be assailed, including that of putting Christ at the center. But he believes that there's good reason to have confidence that that will be validated in the last day. And in the meantime it must be lived out by the Christian community in, in partnership with others who wittingly or unwittingly are acting in conformity with the will of God. The final destiny of all mankind is not a proper matter for our consideration. Mercifully, it lies not in our hands, but in the hands of God. Now. Bishop Newbiggen and his wife returned to England in 1974, and this is typical. By local transport, carrying only two suitcases and a rucksack. They went from Madras to Munich in this way. And they hitchhiked most of the way with a friendly Turkish workman. Ostensibly they came to retire, but also to serve as a part time lecturer in missiology at Birmingham's Selyoke Colleges. But Leslie found that he was facing the biggest challenge of his life. Western skepticism and materialism and indifference. He realized that as a lifelong missionary he would have to start again. He'd been seeing the Christian faith in counterpoint to Hinduism and now he has to engage with the unspoken assumption of the Western post Enlightenment culture that was spreading worldwide and was sapping Christian belief. And he started on a series of conferences and consultations and talks, including the other side of 1984. Foolishness to the Greeks, the Gospel in a pluralist society and truth to tell in Foolishness to the Greeks. You see him beginning to wrestle with the timorous captivity of the Church to the assumptions of secular society. We find him beginning the line of thought which he was going to develop in later writings. What if. What if we took a new starting point and instead of assessing the Gospel in the light of science, we began to turn it upside down and begin science assessing science in the light of the Gospel. And the same would apply to politics and all else. He's confident that such a reversal of attitudes is possible, but only if the Church is seen to act together. In contrast to the rabid denominationalism which has invaded the Church and to be confident of the message contained in the Scripture, in contrast to the liberal skepticism which has also heavily invaded the Church. Well, the presentation and development of these ideas and others is most clearly to be found in the Gospel in a Pluralist Society. How many people here have read that? A handful. It's an important book. This is a very wide ranging treatment of the interface between the Gospel and a pluralist society. It represents his most acute analysis of the weaknesses of the liberal secularist worldview, which is commonly accepted as the plausibility structure of our day. The thing that everybody assumes. There is much in this book on mission, on the Gospel and world religions, the Gospel and cultures, and his beloved and entirely proper theme of the Christian congregation as the hermeneutic of the Gospel. This is a point of utmost importance. Few other apologists even mention it, but Newbiggen insists that the best apologetic that we can offer is to recount the Gospel message that has captivated us and to do it boldly and without compromise, and then to so live it out in our personal and corporate lives that the lifestyle of the church commends and interprets the Gospel. And the book ends with a couple of pages on confidence in the Gospel, a theme to which he will return in proper confidence, which will be the last book I'll speak on in a few moments. But curiously enough, the most powerful chapter in the Gospel in a Pluralist Society, as far as apologetics goes, is the first one in the book. It's on Dogma and Doubt in a Pluralist Society. He acknowledges that dogma is a really dirty word in society. Ugh, yuck. Dogma in a society, you see, where there is no single approved pattern of belief or behavior and there's a culture of skepticism about all universals. That's the order of the day. And so dogma in that context, forget it. But with characteristic confidence, he sets out to defend dogma, not, of course, in the sense of a viewpoint forcibly imposed on others, as sometimes happened in the medieval church, nor in the sense of blind acceptance as is sometimes found in Roman Catholic or fundamentalist churches. But the word dogma comes from the Greek dot, to seem or to appear. And Neubergen points out acutely that every thought process has to start somewhere, and that the one who has split all history into two is no bad place to start. In the Gospel, something radically new has been offered to mankind. It is quite different from religious experience as found in the great religions. It cannot be derived from rational reflection. It is a new fact to be received by faith as a gift of grace or chucked overboard as such. It is either the rock which is the foundation for all knowledge, or else the stone on which you stumble to disaster. But it is certainly not something just for private opinion. Those who have experienced this grace, says Neubigen, must not water it down or try to explain it in terms of something else, but to proclaim it with confidence, realizing that it can and will be opposed. Now he's well aware that such confidence is going to arouse the fury of the rationalist camp, both within the church as well as outside it. Because this camp sharply differentiates facts which everybody has to accept, and values which are varied and personal. And you shrug your shoulders and make your mind up about what values you're going for. But he is not prepared to buy that. He is quite happy to take head on that illicit disjunction between faith and values. And he's going to demonstrate that even so called facts require a basis of faith, a fiduciary baith, an act of acceptance or rejection. But that is for later here he defends the concept of dogma by pointing out that it's not a unique peculiarity of the Church. Every kind of systematic thought has to begin from some starting point, and all has some clear views derived from that. No coherent thought system is possible without a starting point. Presuppositions. The definition of what is thought reasonable is of course conditioned by the cultural tradition in which the matter is being discussed. So within a Hindu culture, the value of democracy or the equality of all human beings will be far from self evident. And within a culture dominated as ours is by scientific method, it will appear unreasonable to explain things in terms of personal will and purpose. But that is precisely what the gospel does. Consequently, we must not try to fit the gospel into the plausibility structure in which it is proclaimed, wherever that may be in the world. It gives rise to a radically new plausibility structure which calls into question the assumptions of every culture. And he goes further, and he asks pertinently of those who want to critique the gospel on the grounds of some supposed superior insight. How they know that their superior insight is valid? On what grounds do do they claim it? What privileged access to reality do they have which enables them to relativize all other claims but their own? It's not often you find an apologist coming out shooting as strongly as that. He says it's sheer arrogance and we should not be embarrassed by such accusations. We must not, like the liberals, domesticate the Christian message within the plausibility structure acceptable to secular society. We must not make the mistake of supposing that revelation and reason are two parallel paths to truth. It's very important this or that revelation must be tested at the bar of Reason. Reason is simply the power of the human mind to grasp meaningful patterns, and it's involved in knowledge of any kind. Reason isn't an independent source of information about life. It is one aspect of the human activity by which we seek to understand the world and ourselves. Believers and unbelievers alike exercise reason. They simply interpret the data differently. Data which are potentially available to all. So don't let anybody pit revelation against reason there. You need reason to grasp the revelation or reason to reject the revelation. And he very interestingly takes the empty tomb as an example. Liberals explain it away as the result of pre existent faith amongst the disciples, and you'll find them in this university in teaching posts. So let's take this quite seriously. Liberals explain away the resurrection as a result of the prior faith in the disciples. And that's of course a precise reversal of the biblical record. And here, he says, is a classic example of the domestication of the Gospel into the reigning plausibility structure. Because of course, we can't believe that Jesus actually rose from the dead. But it's obvious, he says, that the story of the resurrection cannot be fitted into any existing worldview except the one of which it is the starting point. He says it's analogous to what happened on the day when the cosmos came into being once. Accept that claim that there was a day when the cosmos came into being, and most top physicists accept that now. Then you will find it gives a totally new way of understanding our human experience and destiny. And this acceptance of the resurrection is a way, he says, that makes much more sense than the existential despair embodied in the contemporary sceptical worldview. You don't defend a new worldview by trying to demonstrate its compatibility with the old. You challenge the old with the dogma. How it seems to the believer. Stand in my shoes and see how it seems to you. Try it for size. Very skillful. He makes two further important points about dogma. To be witnesses to God's new reality in Christ does not mean that we Christians possess all the truth. We don't. There's a proper place for agnosticism among Christians. We have much to learn. And that learning is guided by a tradition which stems from what God has done in Christ. No learning takes place except within a tradition whose authority is accepted as a guidance for exploration. That's exactly parallel to scientific work. It doesn't start from scratch each time. It works within the accepted tradition, it explores from there. And finally, in this highly condensed chapter, which encapsulates so many key aspects of his thought Neubigen insists that the dogma, the thing offered for our acceptance in faith, is not a timeless set of propositions, but a story. It's a story as yet unfinished, a story with a start and a midpoint but the end has not yet been disclosed. A story in which we are involved personally. We don't yet see the end of the story, so we rely on a faith commitment based on the resurrection. But he says this is not unreasonable. No human life is possible without some idea, explicit or implicit, about what the story of human existence means. The Christian faith is historical in two senses. It's based on what actually happened in history and it's also an interpretation of universal history where all human life is headed. So its defence, he concludes, will be as much concerned with how we act as what we say. And he's always on about the church commending the truth of the Gospel. And so often our theories may be right but our lifestyle may be lousy and people have got every good reason for rejecting it. So much for his defence of dogma properly understood. In the next two chapters of this very important book he mounts his sustained attack on the pseudo scientific worldview which which would exclude faith. And here he relies a good deal on the writings of Michael Polyarni, who is himself a philosopher of science and who shows that all knowledge involves not just what you reckoning to know, but the person who reckons to know it. In other words, the current disjunction between subjective and the objective out there is false. Both are always involved in anything we know. Our society is falling apart because of this disconnection of the subjective and objective poles in knowing. It's disastrous. And it goes back to Descartes. His claim to certainty on I think therefore I am makes no contact with any reality outside his own mind. His thinking only statements which can be doubted make any contact with reality. As Einstein put it, as far as the propositions of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain. As far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality in the real world. You see, there is no insurance against making mistakes. There is no absolute certainty. And even what we are encouraged to think of as value free facts are nothing of the kind. The development of quantum physics has shown that a picture of the cosmos which excludes the observing subject, as classical Newtonian physics did, is not a true picture. The research scientist with his clear sense of purpose and his flashes of intuition is part of the picture. Indeed, if all knowledge were to fit Descartes specification, I think, therefore I am, all scientific discovery would Never have happened. So Neubigen laments that most ordinary people and many sociologists and economists still operate with the myth of value free facts and a mechanical universe where everything is to be explained in terms of its causes. He doesn't object to explaining things in terms of causes, but just to saying that's all there is to it. If you tried to explain a horse in terms of its causes, you wouldn't get very far. You need to look at the purpose, what it's for. A computer is inexplicable without some understanding of the purpose for which its hard drive and software come together and powerfully. Newbegin plugs this in all his writings. He contends for the inclusion of purpose in our understanding of the world. And that's what a lot of scientific writing has excluded. He writes with biting scorn. To see the cosmos as a machine which creates itself and exists for no purpose is something which in most periods of human history would have been thought to exceed the imagination of even the most credulous. Yet it is still widely diffused and given credence by respected scientists. It is this concept of a cosmos without purpose which provides validation for the division of our world into two a world of facts without value and a world of values which have no basis in facts. And finally, he shows that the quest for certainty through universal doubt, which is so characteristic of our culture, is actually a blind alley because all doubt is based on some prior held belief or conviction. I don't believe this in brackets because of what I believe otherwise. And he says no, it's a big mistake. You don't start with skepticism, you start with faith. Faith is logically prior to doubt. You've got to grasp something before you can assess it and maybe throw it away. Of course, both faith and skepticism are needed if we're going to gain a proper assessment of any situation. But faith is prior. Now, what Newbiggen has done in this powerful book is to expose the false epistemological foundations of liberal skepticism. Liberal secularism. Well, skepticism as well for that matter. He has shown that even scientific inquiry holds ultimate commitments that are based on faith. Just as the Christian story does. They work in parallel. And as he does this stuff, it just comes out of the page at you. How his reading and understanding are massive. Descartes and Kant and Russell and Darwin and Kung and Rahna and many others are all subjected to searching critical scrutiny. But you see, his main purpose in this book has been to show that the Enlightenment attempts to found truths on a basis from which faith is eliminated is not only nonsense, but it's highly dangerous. Without faith and values, science and technology bid fair to destroy all life on this planet. Any scientific explanation which excludes purpose is inadequate. And the critical principle of universal skepticism is sheer folly. He wants to lead us to a post critical period in which we know we have to find a new basis for confidence for the whole human enterprise. And he maintains that it is not only tenable, but it is the best of all explanations to adopt the story of which Christ is the centre for it proposes a meaning and a goal for the whole of human history. It is therefore not a matter of private opinion, but a public truth. We must proclaim it fearlessly, we must live it attractively. And so I quote, when the Church is faithful to the Lord, then the powers of the kingdom are present and people begin to ask the questions to which the gospel is the answer. I've spent quite a bit of time on that major book of apologetics, but I want to come now to the third book, which comes from the last spirit of his life, Proper Confidence. He wrote it in the 80s. It's a wise and gracious book. It's about faith, doubt and certainty in Christian discipleship. And it develops and applies many of his previous insights. As Geoffrey Wainwright of Duke University observed. Seeing both liberal and fundamentalist Christians imprisoned in the epistemological presuppositions of the Enlightenment, Leslie Newbiggen offers them liberation by pointing to the fiduciary character of all human knowledge. There's got to be faith to accept anything at all. Now, that is a very acute judgment, saying that both liberals and fundamentalists are imprisonment in Enlightenment worldviews. Both liberals and conservatives have tended to operate within the Enlightenment disjunction of facts on the one hand, and values on the other hand. And you can see what's happened. The conservatives have said Scripture is indubitable fact. And the liberals have said, well, perhaps it's got some value, but I've got a higher value, the value of my own opinion about things. There is the classic dividend between facts and values. And Newbiggen was keen to transcend this most unfortunate quarrel and turn it into constructive dialogue. I don't think he's quite succeeded. I'm quite sure that he was not entirely trusted in either the liberal or the conservative camp. He begins in this last book, Proper Confidence, which is short and I do commend it to you. It's a marvellous book. He begins by showing that what makes Europe distinct from the rest of the Asian Landmass and I'd never seen this. It's the confluence of two streams. The humanist classical culture is one stream, and the Hebrew Christian faith is the other stream. And that's what makes Europe different from Asia. For Greek rationality, the biblical story could not be the place where ultimate truth was found. But the first Christians took an entirely new starting point. A factum. A fact, something that had been done. God had acted in Christ, the Word had become flesh. And if the ultimate had indeed come into the world of the relative, then the dualism of Greek humanist thought separating the material from the spiritual was overcome. Ultimate reality was no longer unknowable as late Greek thought came to sadly believe final truth is available to us in the person of Jesus. And that biblical story has shaped Europe for more than 1500 years. But if Christ is the author of this story, so to speak, who has silenced our endless questions and witterings by entering the room in which we're doing the discussing, why then Personal knowledge of him is indispensable. You can't begin the exercise without an act of trust in him. And trust always involves risk. So the certainty we have is not without risk, but it rests on the faithfulness of the one whose story it is. We walk by faith, since the story is still unfinished, but it's a faith in which we can have proper confidence because it's based in the one who cannot lie. Neubigen returns to Descartes. He does in all of his books. We've come to expect that. And it's in this book that he gives his most interesting account of what Descartes set out to do. He was commissioned by a Catholic cardinal to defeat skepticism and to defeat atheism. These are actually two incompatible aims which, if you think about it, you will see. And Descartes built his new structure of indubitable knowledge on the foundation of skepticism. Until he arrived, he was skeptical of everything, until he arrived at the thing that he couldn't doubt. The content of his own mind demonstrated to him that he existed the cogito which he could not doubt. And so the critical principle of relentless skepticism was the only secure way to knowledge. But of course, this approach strongly reinforced the dualism of mind and matter which had been so debilitating in the classical world. It polarized subjectivity and objectivity, and it enhanced the dichotomy between theory and practice. And we've suffered from all of those three things. Though Descartes was himself a believer in God, it didn't take his followers long to remove God from certain knowledge by means of this critical principle, this skepticism which scythes down everything in its way. And it was left to Nietzsche in the late 19th century ruthlessly to expose the conclusion of Descartes Method. The critical principle must necessarily destroy itself. For if the critical principle is to have the supreme place in knowing, then the possibility of knowing anything at all is destroyed. All values, all distinctions between right and wrong, between truth and error, are now words without meaning. They're simply the expressions of the will of the person who is saying them. The will where right is might and might is right. Violence, therefore, is the fundamental element in human life and history. And we've seen that yesterday in the heart of London, the quest for absolute certainty had proved a stepping stone to Nietzsche's nihilism. And that is what Nietzsche foresaw, mad though he became. And that is the way our society seems to be heading. That might is right and that all you're left with is the will and the power to carry it through. Is there an alternative? Well, New beginnings? Sure there is. It doesn't lie in indubitable propositions, but it lies in a story, a story recorded in the Bible and supremely in the word made flesh. You cannot be sure of the truth of that story by rational reflection alone. As Martin Buber recognized in his epoch making book I and Thou, another very short book that is absolutely seminal. The I it knowledge that I have of this rostrum is quite different from the I thou knowledge that I have from Ms. Chap sitting in the front row. Those are two quite different things. And therefore Augustine and Athanasius were right. Credo ut intelligam. I put my trust. In order that I may understand. I have to exercise some prior trust that something is there or someone is there before I can understand it. I can have no assured knowledge of Christ. Without commitment to Christ. There's got to be that I thou relationship with him. And once that happens, the biblical story becomes my story too. I am part of its action, caught up in its direction towards the consummation of all history. The corollary, of course, is that my faith must lead to obedience. My commitment to Christ must lead to commitment to his people and to service to the world. You see, the Church is the hermeneutic of the Gospel. He keeps coming back to this. It is that people judge the truth of our Jesus by the lifestyle of his people. And that's very painful, but it's absolutely necessary. The Church is the hermeneutic of the Gospel. And if that is so, I may have proper confidence. I may have deep assurance, because it is commitment to the Christ who cannot lie. But it's not that death dealing certainty to which Descartes skeptical methods led, for which some Christians lust. It is that assurance which relies completely on the trustworthiness of the person. We have begun to know Jesus Christ himself. Such is the proper confidence that Christians may possess. And so he concludes the book by asserting that the proper form of apologetics is to grasp this new achi, this new starting point of the Christ who came and died and rose, this fundamental principle which the Gospel provides. That's what we must grasp, not attempt to answer questions that arise out of a totally different way of looking at the world. The Gospel itself is. Is the alternative structure that we need to commend, not to try and fit it in to the prevailing thought forms of the day. I quote the proper form of apologetics is the preaching of the Gospel itself. And the demonstration which is not merely or primarily a matter of words, the demonstration that it does provide the best foundation for a way of grasping and dealing with the mystery of our existence in this universe. And he goes on to draw a powerful corollary from that. If we attempt a form of apologetics which tries to show that the Gospel is reasonable, then we contradict and betray the Gospel. For it means that we're looking for a Logos, a rationale of all things elsewhere than in Jesus. We are witnesses to the one who has shown himself utterly reliable. What further assurance do we need? Now you can bring a variety of criticisms against Leslie Newbiggin, and he knows that very well, and he endured it very patiently. But I find that his whole approach is very fresh and very helpful. Newbiggen rejects the traditional role assigned to apologetics since the Enlightenment of trying to show that the Christian faith can be squeezed somehow or other into the Enlightenment presuppositions, trying to show that the Christian faith is reasonable in a manner which secular people will regard as reasonable. Even CS Lewis was strongly attracted to this approach. Instead, he argues for apologetics to take the role of interpreting the culture from a new perspective, the Gospel. And he shows quite brilliantly how this can be done. That is what Paul did at Athens when he grasped a new starting point for inquiry by insisting on the Resurrection. This is what Augustine did when the pagan hordes were pouring into Rome. He sat down and wrote the City of God, an entirely new start point for that adopted by the classical culture in which he, Augustine, had been nurtured. And that book became one of the most influential books in the world for the next thousand years. And now Leslie Newbegin has done it again. In a day when the barbarian hordes are no longer at the gates but have long been inhabiting our parliaments and our media and our university departments and have been advocating a disastrous secularist worldview splitting facts from values which has been swallowed whole by society at large. Neubigen is a prophet. He has taken an entirely new arche, a new starting point. And it's the coming and the dying and the rising of the Son of God. And in the light of this new starting point has devastatingly criticized the prevailing worldview of secular liberalism and has pointed the way to humble but confident Christian assurance. But only if we're committed to Jesus personally. You can't have that assurance as some intellectual abstract out there that I've got it and you haven't. The assurance comes from relationship with the Reliable One personally and unitedly as his people. Also going to mean courageously as well. If we want proofs for the existence of God or answers to the problem of pain and all that stuff, we got to look elsewhere. They are not what Newbiggen is concerned with. He sets out to paint the big picture of human existence which if we have the courage to adopt it, might yet rescue our society from destruction. He was a very great man whom we should honour and from whom we have much to learn. Thank you very much. I think some guru is going to come and show how all this a summary of this on the screen and I will stand aside. Meanwhile, there may be things on your mind or maybe your mind has gone to sleep. I hope it hasn't. Yes, in the background. [00:57:02] Speaker B: I was just wondering what you had to say. How living and if he was talking to my neighbor as a skeptic would begin or approach my neighbor differently than maybe some other apologetic forces. [00:57:18] Speaker A: Well, he was an intellectual and he would do it very capably. But basically he would do what he encourages us to do. He would tell the story. He would say, see it this way. What if there is a living personal God? What if he cared enough for you and me to come and find us? What if he was even willing to be done to death by the cussedness of humankind? What if he's alive in his business? Doesn't that change everything? So I think that's how he would do it. And the humble lifestyle of this man who journeys from being a bishop for donkey's years with a couple of suitcases and a rucksack hitching in a Turkish wagon, I think that would Commend the story which he says, you know, I'm a humble part of it. Why not come and join him? Why don't you come and see it from this perspective? Have you got a better perspective? He makes a very interesting point several times in his writings. I don't know any of you play squash here. Squash or racquetball or anything like that. Quite a few of you do. There's a gallery, isn't there, up above, from which you can watch the game going on underneath. And he says none of us can occupy the spectators gallery in this world. We are all playing some sort of game and it might be just as well to get the right one. Somebody had another point. Yes. [00:58:56] Speaker B: A lot of what you said sounds a lot like what we heard, Joe. [00:58:59] Speaker A: I'm sorry, could you say it again? [00:59:01] Speaker B: A lot of what you've said today sounds similar to what Joe Boot taught us about Cornelius Van Till. Can you compare and contrast briefly? [00:59:10] Speaker A: I'm not an expert on this. I thought Valentino was much more in the rationalist mold and came very much from an extremely reformed Calvinist position. And that is certainly not what I mean. To be sure, there's some roots in the common. There's a reformed background. But it's this taking of the new standpoint and not arguing as Van Till, if I understand him rightly, did argue very logically from A to B to C to D. It's much more looking at the big picture of what this world could be like if we start with this new standpoint. I don't think that is in Van Till, is it? [00:59:55] Speaker C: I think it was done, Michael. It was on the presuppositional nature which focused Joe very focused on Van Til. And he was similar actually to New Biggin in that sense in terms of the starting point. And that's what came across very strongly, that Van Till emphasized very heavily the need that the starting point was the issue. [01:00:14] Speaker A: Thank you. [01:00:15] Speaker C: But then of course he wanted to reform, demand beyond that. But at the epistemological level, that's where he said it had. That's the key. [01:00:21] Speaker A: Thanks very much. Thank you. That's helpfully clarified it. Another minor fraga. Well, I see that very few of you have actually read any books of Leslie Newbegin. And I do think that he's one of the. Of the great Christian apologists of the 20th century who moves very naturally and easily into the 21st. Yes. Two further points at the back. [01:00:53] Speaker B: I'm finding that our presuppositions are quite stubborn in terms of they're firmly ingrained in who we are, especially for the unbeliever. Now, in terms of the role of the Holy Spirit, what role would that be in New England's apologetic? [01:01:09] Speaker A: I think the Holy Spirit is absolutely fundamental in evangelism because only the Spirit can convict of our lostness. Only the Spirit can say Jesus is beautiful. Only the Spirit can say you need him and I'm willing to come into your life. So in all evangelism the Holy Spirit is central. And I hope many of you here are evangelists. Never think that. That we have a technique that can bring people into the kingdom. We haven't. It's the work of the Holy Spirit. However, when the Holy Spirit is active in the lives of a dynamic church or of an individual that is illuminating the hermeneutic of the gospel. And I can think of a church where the love between members, you could feel it 10 yards outside the church because it was just so flowing in the church. It just bubbled out of the doors with the faces and the relationships of the people. And there is the Holy Spirit being a commendation of the gospel. Thank you. There was another question. [01:02:33] Speaker B: You said a lot about the Descartes and some about Villanya. I wonder if there was any anybody prior to Descartes whose model of rationality to reason New Begin would affirm. It seemed like the enlightenment with Descartes is we get off on a wrong path. Would you look to a type of reason that predates Descartes as being a modern for us to apply? [01:03:03] Speaker A: Well, I can't think of any in the Christian context. You've got obviously in Plato and Socrates and indeed in the pre Socratics, a very, very rational, argumentative form of approach, often by encounter and debate. But I can see that in the constant return to Descartes. I believe that Neubigen actually missed a trick and that he left out the whole line of British empiricists like Berkeley and Hume and Locke. And he doesn't mention him very, very often, if at all. And so I think the empiricists have actually got something very helpful to say to us. And what they're saying is suck it and see, there's got to be an empire. There has got to be an experience of any fact if it is going to be meaningful to you. And of course of the Gospel, there has got to be an experience if we're going to gain any light from it. Yes. [01:04:26] Speaker D: So just mentioning the empiricists, I was going to ask. Newbiggin seems to deny the distinction between fact and Value, does he not? [01:04:34] Speaker A: He wants to transcend them. He wants to say that there are no value free facts that even the most, you know, like 1066 or something like that there is the presupposition of the intelligent mind which can grasp that. And sure, that's a pretty recherche understanding of faith, of value. But I think he's right on this, isn't he? There aren't these naked facts lying around the world. [01:05:09] Speaker D: Okay, I was thinking it's a more neutrality issue. Yeah, I got you. [01:05:12] Speaker B: Okay. [01:05:12] Speaker D: Okay. I was thinking also I was wondering if there's also in terms of like when you were. There's a distinction between fact and value, but that's more of that. [01:05:19] Speaker A: Well, Hume couldn't live with his own stuff. If you read. It's perfectly true. If you read some of Hume's letters. Well, I mean those of you who are into British empiricists, he takes the whole thing as far as it can go and he denies the fundamental link between cause and effect. And he also denies the fundamental link between me as a boy and me as an old man. And so he says, you know, I'm not sure that I'm the same man as I was 10 years ago. And what is that? That provides some principle of continuity and coherence. And then in his letters he says, you know, when I've been writing like this all day, I can't bear it any longer and I go out and I have a dinner with my friends and then when I come back and I find that the fire in my grate is still going, I have to believe that there is some causal effect between the coal that I left on it before I went and the blaze that there is now. Now you've got to be able to live with your intellectual worldview. And I believe that that is what the Gospel enables us to do and that New Begin's understanding of it is terribly helpful. Yes, sir. [01:06:46] Speaker B: Maybe a pedestrian question, but the context in which we live in North America is. This seems to be a dichotomy now and I think Newbegin may be onto something. Can you comment about what his church would look like? We have in North America, the Seeker Service and then the Brethren, Exclusive, inclusive. What would Newington's church have looked like if he could have, Sunday by Sunday, week by week, formed a church? [01:07:12] Speaker A: You mean what is the church that is the real hermeneutic of the Gospel? I think he would want, if I know him well enough, I think he would not want an idealized picture of this. You know, let's get all the denominations together, let's get all the viewpoints the same and then you're going to have the gospel that will really interpret the church. I think he was much too much a realist for this, much too much a missionary for this. And that he would say it is this church here and now that you are in and that I am in, that has got to commend the gospel, which is altogether more painful. [01:08:00] Speaker E: Maybe it is connected with that question. Friedrich Nietzsche divided the position of Jesus Christ and the position of St. Paul as like a spirit between value and facts. He loves Jesus, but not St. Paul because Jesus taught the kingdom of God and Paul brings a church and churches, facts, history of churches and the kingdom of God is a value. And so he totally recognized and divided the value and facts and the person tragedy. [01:08:42] Speaker A: So are you saying that the Spirit was there in Jesus but not in Paul and that Jesus proclaimed the kingdom but Paul gave us the church? Is that broadly what you're saying? [01:09:03] Speaker C: She's saying that was Friedrich Nietzsche's position in the Birth of Tragedy and yet she's asking you to comment on it. [01:09:09] Speaker A: Right. [01:09:09] Speaker C: Between the Pauline and Paul was the values in Jesus? [01:09:15] Speaker A: Yes. I think you might find useful a book by a colleague of mine, Dr. David Wenham, who has written on Paul and Jesus. It is quite a mistake to say Jesus is one thing and Paul is another. There's a very strong continuity between the two. And you're absolutely right in saying that the main emphasis of Jesus is the kingdom and that that is not a major emphasis in St. Paul. And I think the reason is this, that Jesus is proclaiming God's kingly rule over all mankind. This is his claim. God claims the rights of sovereign ruler over humankind. And when you come to him in repentance and faith, you enter into a practical embodiment of that kingly rule. And so you get him talking about the little flock, you get him appointing 12 apostles representing a people of Israel. And it is that practical people that Paul is largely dealing with. He hasn't lost the vision of the overall control of God over his world. He's got a very strong eschatology of future salvation. But I think we'd be quite wrong to make too tight a distinction between Jesus and St. Paul. It's often been done and equally often repudiated. I'm not convinced that I'm quite speaking to what you. [01:11:03] Speaker E: You told me that there is a spirit, spirit, this junction between value and facts. [01:11:11] Speaker A: Yes. [01:11:12] Speaker E: And kingdom, kingdom of God is near at hand. That's the message of Jesus and it's a value and fact. We had about 2,000. That's a fact. [01:11:31] Speaker A: So the kingdom is a value and the church is a fact. Okay, I think I see much more clearly than I did what you were getting at. I don't think the kingdom is just a value. The kingdom is indeed embodying the value that God as the ruler has the right of us as his subjects to be subordinate to him. That is his purpose. And of course all this purpose stuff fits in very well with Neubergen. But that value, if you like, is embodied in the lifestyle of people who do surrender themselves to Jesus which on the way you're putting in is the fact which becomes the church. They are not discrete from one another. Any more questions or are we just drawing to an end? Oh yes, right. [01:12:31] Speaker D: Since we're on Nietzsche, I don't know if I saw as clearly as I would have liked to what the motivated association was between Descartes conclusions and the Nils in Nietzsche. I was wondering if you could rephrase it for me because I wanted to see it. [01:12:44] Speaker A: Okay, let me try and undo it. Descartes erected skepticism about everything except the contents of your own mind to be the formative principle of his epistemology. And what Nietzsche saw, I mean he was a crazy character and eventually got carted off by the Gestapo and stuff like that came to a sticky end. But what he understood was that this is too explosive a weapon, it blows everything up. And that there is therefore no, you can't have any distinction between right and wrong. You can't have any distinction between true and false because skepticism just corrodes a lot. And therefore he says okay, well if all values and stuff are smashed by this principle of skepticism, what is left? Answer nothing but the will to power. And probably his most interesting and fascinating book is Thus Spake Zarathustra. And there you've got this business of the madman running into the streets with a torch. This terrible discovery that everything is savaged by ultimate skepticism. There are no values other than the value that I impose if I am in power. And of course that led. He saw it as leading to violence and it led to the century of the greatest violence that's ever been humankind which is cheerfully being carried on today. Does that help at all? Thank you. There was another gentleman. A very perceptive question about the missionary in New Beginning. Does he call people out of Hinduism? Does he see Christ as the only way or the best way? I think if I never knew him during that period And I never discussed it at length with him so this is speculation but I think what he is doing in his writings particularly in the Finality of Christ which is an old book but it's a superb book and it's short you really would find it very, very helpful particularly on the relationship of Christianity and Hinduism I think he would want to say is that he is not there to condemn any culture or any worldview he is there to commend putting Christ into the centre and seeing what sense this makes of the whole mystery of existence particularly of the purpose of human individual life and of the corporate life of. Of humankind and he would proclaim this humbly and confidently unlike the Hindu with a wheel that would say well all history is meaningless and you need to try and go through some spoke to the hub he'd want to say no it's a road and I am going to rest the whole of my faith that's what amazed Radhakrishna on people like that the whole of my faith on that which could have been otherwise the coming and the dying and the rising of Jesus Christ but look at the illumination on life that that brings if you take that step would you not see that as something immensely attractive? And of course many Hindus did see it as immensely attractive but he wanted to move the whole thing out of the debate of how many people are going to be saved and how many people are going to be lost lost he wanted to say look this is the purpose for the whole of humankind that God has made Won't you align yourself with your purpose, with that purpose? You may be partly in your Hindu background you may be partly as a quite secular person doing good things that are the will of God but that doesn't make sense of the whole picture why not go for the whole picture that has got the main, the main story is in the middle the coming and the dying and the rising of Jesus that is the immensely significant trailer for the whole film of humankind Yes, I think that. Did you catch that question? I think the way to look at is this is that Neubergen was a biblical Christian he really tried to take the scriptures as normative so he would want to advocate a viewpoint that was at variance with scripture he knows and he's very strong in his writings particularly in proper confidence that all have sinned and come short of the glory of God Nobody could earn their way into the presence of God the whole thing is a factum it's a gift of grace and you have to receive it by faith I mean this is real gospel stuff, real reformation stuff. It's deeply in his bones. But he is not wanting to rubbish good deeds that do not come from Christian faith. He's not wanting to call all virtues of heathens splendid vices, as some people have done before him. He's wanting to say, hey, look, when a secular government as much for a good deal of the time Indian government was. When a secular government does things which are in accordance with the gospel, the Lord rejoices, even though the individuals have not personally encountered him. And he wants them to encounter Him Him. And that's why he goes proclaiming the gospel to his dying day. And he wants to show the church as a community, which makes this stuff credible. We probably ought to draw ourselves to a conclusion, I think, if we may. Thank you for your enormous patience.