What I Write About

I write about the infinite number of intersections between every day life and the good news of the God who has come to get us.

Wednesday, June 13, 2007

Behold I'm Making All Things Newbiggin

I'm reading one of my favorite authors for a class that I'm taking at the end of the month. Here's an excerpt from Lesslie Newbiggin's Proper Confidence:

I am writing this book as a missionary who is concerned to commend the truth of the gospel in a culture that [during modernity] has sought for absolute certainty as the ideal of true knowledge but now [in post-modernity] despairs of knowing truth at all, a culture that therefore responds to the Christian story by asking, "But how can we know that it is true?"

The assumption...[of some Christians] is that the gospel can be made acceptable by showing that it does not contravene the requirements of reason as we understand them within the contemporary plausibility structure.

The heart of my argument is that this is a mistaken policy. The story the church is commissioned to tell, if it is true, is bound to call into question any plausibility structure which is founded on other assumptions. The affirmation that the One by whom and through whom and for whom all creation exists is to be identified with a man who was crucified and rose bodily from the dead cannot possibly be accommodated within any plausibility structure except one of which it is the cornerstone. In any other place in the structure it can only be a place of stumbling.

The reasonableness of Christianity will be demonstrated (insofar as it can be) not by adjusting its claims to the requirements of a preexisting structure of thought but by showing how it can provide an alternative foundation for a different structure.

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