Something to chew on from Lesslie Newbigin:
I believe that the Christian view of God’s purposes for the human family is different from both [capitalism and socialism]… and arises from a distinct belief about what human nature is. From its first page to its last, the Bible is informed by a vision of human nature for which neither freedom nor equality is fundamental; what is fundamental is relatedness. Man – male and female – is made for God in such a way that being in the image of God involves being bound together in this most profound of all mutual relationships. God binds himself in a covenant relationship with men and women to which he remains faithful at whatever cost and however unfaithful his covenant partner is. And people and nations are called to live in binding covenant relationships of brotherhood. Human beings reach their true end in such relatedness, in bonds of mutual love and obedience that reflect the mutual relatedness in love that is the being of the Triune God himself. Neither freedom nor equality are words that can take us to the heart of the matter.”
[Foolishness to the Greeks, 118-119]
In the second chapter of Foolishness to the Greeks, Newbigin paints a marvelous profile of modern culture. His analysis is compelling, and makes me curious to read further to see how he thinks the gospel needs to confront the modern world (and to see whether what he says will remain relevant in a post-modern world). Here’s a brief taste of his profile of our culture – a snippet that appealed to me because of its insight into bureaucracy:
Many observers have noted that bureaucratization plays a central role in modern societies. The division of labor and the consequent pluralization and complexification of society require the development of techniques for large-scale control. Bureaucracy applies the mechanical model to this task. It provides machinery in which there is a high degree of division of labor, of specialization, of predictability, and of anonymity. It is of the essence of bureaucracy that it sets out to achieve a kind of justice by treating each individual as an anonymous and replaceable unit. The introduction into bureaucratic procedures of the personal relationships that govern the private life of the home is – in bureaucratic terms – corruption and nepotism. Bureaucracy applies the principles of reason as understood at the Enlightenment to human life in the public sphere: the analysis of every situation into the smallest possible components and the recombination of these elements in terms of logical relationships which, ideally, can be expressed in mathematical terms and handled by a computer. In its ultimate development, bureaucracy is the rule of nobody and is therefore experienced as tyranny.
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This morning I started reading Lesslie Newbigin’s Foolishness to the Greeks: The Gospel and Western Culture, and he quickly got my attention. I was thinking of blogging through it, but it’s heady stuff and I’m not sure I’m up to saying anything intelligible about it. I would just end up quoting the whole thing to you. Perhaps this quotation will suffice for now, and I’ll see if I can conjure up some of my own reflections later. This one hit me right in my sitz im leben (trying to learn Slovak):
He must first of all struggle to master the language. To begin with, he will think of the words he hears simply as the equivalent of the words he uses in his own tongue and are listed in his dictionary as equivalents. But if he really immerses himself in the talk, the songs and folk tales, and the literature of the people, he will discover that there are no exact equivalents. All the words in any language derive their meaning, their resonance in the minds of those who use them, from a whole world of experience and a whole way of grasping that experience. So there are no exact translations.