book club

the book club met this morning. and so my mind is swimming with thought. i'll try to get all i'm thinking out on this blog as coherently as possible ...

newbigin's last chapter, speaking the truth to caesar, is completely marked up in my book. there are underlines, exclamation points, stars, and notes in the margins (let me pause here to give thanks to mrs. sinkler for encouraging notations in our senior year reading materials). the third chapter is full of such powerful rhetoric, that i not once, but many times, audibly encouraged newbigin to "preach it!" for example ...

"the free market is a good servant but a bad master. it is not necessary to argue the point that, if we take the human family as a whole, what is experienced as freedom by a minority is experienced as bondage by a majority. adam smith himself recognized that free markets would only work for the common good if certain moral principles permeated society."

"i have the impression that the local congregation has too often been regarded in the best ecumenical circles as something which needs to be dragged along rather than as the primal engine of change in society."

it's exciting stuff. it makes me long for change and growth and truth. but there's a passage that weighs even more heavily on me, and as i left the room, i kicked myself for not mentioning it before we parted ...

Both objectivism and subjectivism are ways of evading personal responsibility for knowing the truth. And if this is so, then the call to the Church is to enter vigorously into the struggle for truth in the public domain. We cannot look for [security in a restored Christendom]. Nor can we continue to accept the security which is offered in an agnostic pluralism where are free to have our own opinions provided we agree that they are only personal opinions. We are called, I think, to bring our faith into the public arena, to publish it, to put it at risk in the encounter with other faiths and ideologies in open debate and argument, and in the risky business of discovering what Christian obedience means in radically new circumstances and in radically different human cultures ...

In a society where agnostic pluralism reigns, freedom is understood to be the liberty to do whAt you want provided it does not interfere with the freedom of other people. Freedom is the absence of limits ... A society in which any kind of nonsense is acceptable is not a free society. An agnostic pluralism has no defense against nonsense. So while a committed pluralism values freedom as the necessary (though not sufficient) condition for grasping the truth about the real world, the fundamental relation between truth and freedom is that enunciated by Jesus, when he said, 'The truth shall make you free.' That saying, we remember, provoked the furious anger of the hearers, who affirmed that they were free already and did not need anyone to set them free. Jesus tells them that they are not free until the truth makes them free, and they respond by threatening to stone him. When we affirm, as the Church must do, that freedom is not the natural endowment of every human being but is something to be won by acknowledgement of the truth, and that in the end the truth is something given in the sheer grace of God to be received in faith, there is bound to be anger. There is bound to be the feeling that the free society is once again threatened by dogma. I think the Church cannot evade the sharpness of this encounter.

I have re-read this passage at least a dozen times. What is it that stands out so much to me, that shouts to me like a warning, an admonishment that I hang my head about my faith, afraid to mention it in the public square for fear that I'll be viewed as a Crusader bent on power and domination? Newbigin is right - the Church cannot evade the sharpness of this encounter (his following discussion assesses the New Age movement's understandable popularity in questioning the whole foundation of our culture as well - a discussion which I'd very much like to address, but have neither the time nor the typing prowess to do).

I am overwhelmed with thought, and know I need more time and dialogue on the subject if I take seriously the implications of his thesis.

But I am hanging my hat on words from Newbigin's book, words said many different ways by many different authors, singers, scholars, etc, words that resonate with my core so deeply that I feel my very being was born to acknowledge them:

It is the very heart of the gospel that it both gives everything and requires everything.