Foolishness to the Greeks

It is a rare thing for me to reread a book. I often return to a good book and reread passages from it, but I cannot remember when I last finished a book and picked it up to start reading it again from the beginning.

However, when I finished reading Foolishness to the Greeks, I returned to the beginning and started rereading. On my first encounter with Newbigin, I had to reread just to understand what he was saying because his paradigm was so different from mine. (I daresay my outlook was so syncretistic that I couldn't understand another Christian who didn't share my syncretisms.) Now that I've undergone a sort of Newbiginian revolution, I am reading voraciously to understand. In Foolishness to the Greeks, he explores this question in depth:

"What would it mean if, instead of trying to explain the gospel in terms of our modern scientific culture, we tried to explain our culture in terms of the gospel?" (p41)

In doing precisely that, he has completely upended my world view. My understanding of education, commerce, and the church have undergone a seismic shift.

"The former statement (i.e., that the tomb was empty) can be accepted as a fact only if the whole plausibility structure of contemporary Western culture is called into question." (p62)

In other words, "it is idle to suppose that any kind of peaceful coexistence is possible between these two ways of understanding history" (61). The truth of the good news of Jesus says that the modern Western vision (its plausibility structure) is not only inadequate; it is false because it claims to see truth. It is not merely an invitation to adopt a belief system. It is a call to conversion "in which the most real of all realities is the living God whose character is 'rendered' for us in the pages of Scripture" (64).

If you haven't recommend Newbigin, I highly recommend starting with Foolishness to the Greeks.