Gospel, Church, and Culture: Three Urgent Issues for the 21 st Century

1. Gospel, Church, and Culture: Three Urgent Issues for the 21st Century Michael Goheen Geneva Professor of Worldview Studies Trinity Western University

2. Who gets to narrate the world? . . . the most pressing spiritual issue of our time is the question “who gets to narrate the world?” (Robert Webber) • Liberal humanist? • Islam? • Bible?

3. A Call to an Ancient Evangelical Future • Today, as in the ancient era, the Church is confronted by a host of master narratives that contradict and compete with the gospel. The pressing question is: who gets to narrate the world? • In a world of competing stories, we call Evangelicals to recover the truth of God's word as the story of the world, and to make it the centerpiece of Evangelical life.

4. Lesslie Newbigin: Syncretistic accommodation or missionary encounter? • Western church is “an advanced case of syncretism” • Missionary encounter: “a clash between ultimate faith-commitments or stories”

5. Newbigin on missionary encounter It would seem, therefore, that there is no higher priority . . . than to ask the question of what would be involved in a genuinely missionary encounter between the gospel and this modern Western culture. England is a pagan society and the development of a truly missionary encounter with this very tough form of paganism is the greatest intellectual and practical task facing the Church.

6. What is needed for a missionary encounter with Western culture? • A recovery of the gospel • A missional understanding of the church • An understanding of the religious roots of Western culture

7. Accommodation of the gospel to Western culture? The gospel is like a caged lion; it doesn’t need to be defended, just released. - Martin Luther

8. Recovering the gospel . . . • As truth • Vs. relativism of liberal wing of church • Vs. rationalism of conservative wing of church • Person and events which reveal and accomplish the end of universal history

9. Recovering the gospel . . . • As truth • As a story • Unchanging ideas of pagan Greek thought • Or the meaning of history in Hebrew thought I do not believe that we can speak effectively of the Gospel as a word addressed to our culture unless we recover a sense of the Scriptures as a canonical whole, as the story which provides the true context for our understanding of the meaning of our lives – both personal and public. (Newbigin)

10. Recovering the gospel . . . • As truth • As a story • In its comprehensive scope • As the power of God unto salvation I am not ashamed of the gospel because it is the power of God for the salvation of everyone who believes . . . (Rom. 1.16)

11. What is needed for a missionary encounter with Western culture? • A recovery of the gospel • A missional understanding of the church

12. John Power on mission and church Mission is not a fringe activity of a strongly established Church, a pious cause that [may] be attended to when the home fires [are] first brightly burning. . . . ‘so am I sending you’—the very word ‘send’ means mission and so the whole Church is on mission, and cannot be otherwise. . . . Missionary activity is not so much the work of the Church as simply the Church at work.

13. Mission and church “. . . the church exists by mission as fire exists by burning.” (Emil Brunner) “ . . . the church can exist only to the extent that it is the mission.” (Werner Elert) “Because the church and mission belong together from the beginning, a church without mission or a mission without the church are both contradictions. Such things do exist, but only as pseudostructures.” (Carl Braaten)

14. Jürgen Moltmann on the church What we have to learn is not that the church ‘has’ a mission, but the very reverse: that the mission of Christ creates its own church. Mission does not come from the church; it is from mission and in the light of mission that the church has to be understood. Yet up to now the European churches have found it hard to discover Europe as a missionary field or to see themselves as missionary churches.

15. Mission in the biblical story • Role we are called to play in the biblical story gives the people of God their missional identity • “God’s mission involves God’s people living in God’s way in the sight of the nations.” (Chris Wright) • Mission is not primarily about going. Nor is mission primarily about doing anything. Mission is about being. It is about being a distinctive kind of people, a countercultural . . . community among the nations. (Howard Peskett and Vinoth Ramachandra) • Backward, forward, outward

16. Return to the biblical story • Blessed to be a blessing (Gen. 12.2-3; Gal. 3.6-14) • Chosen for the sake of the world (Ex. 19.3-6; 1 Pet. 2.9-10) • Light for the nations (Is. 49.6; Acts 13.47) • Sent to continue the mission of Jesus (Jn. 20.21) • Witnessing identity (Acts 1.1-11)

17. Acts 2.42-47 • Devoted to means that nourish life of kingdom (Word of God, prayer, fellowship, and Lord’s Supper) • Attractive contrast community • Lord adds to their number

18. Living in the midst of other stories • Old Testament: A political, ethnic, geographically rooted nation in the midst of the nations • New Testament: A multi-ethnic, non-geographical community in the midst of the various cultures of the world • Pressing dilemma: How to live at the crossroads between two stories?

19. Living at the Crossroads

20. What is needed for a missionary encounter with Western culture? • A recovery of the gospel • A missional understanding of the church • An understanding of the religious roots of Western culture

21. Two Grand Stories in the West In our contemporary culture . . . two quite different stories are told. One is the story of evolution, of the development of species through the survival of the strong, and the story of the rise of civilization, our type of civilization, and its success in giving humankind mastery of nature. The other story is the one embodied in the Bible, the story of creation and fall, of God’s election of a people to be the bearers of his purpose for humankind, and of the coming of the one in whom that purpose is to be fulfilled. These are two different and incompatible stories. - Lesslie Newbigin

22. Urgent Task Incomparably the most urgent missionary task for the next few decades is the mission to ‘modernity’... It calls for the use of sharp intellectual tools, to probe behind the unquestioned assumptions of modernity and uncover the hidden credo which supports them... - Lesslie Newbigin

23. Religion at core of culture Religion is not one aspect or department of life beside the others, as modern secular thought likes to believe; it consists rather in the orientation of all human life to the absolute [God or an idol]. (John Hutchison) Culture is religion made visible; it is religion actualized in the innumerable relations of daily life. (J.H. Bavinck)

24. Core Place of Religion . . . the core place of religion in the structuring of culture’s meaning and usage.’ Religion is ‘not an area of life, one among many, but primarily a direction of life . . . Religion, then becomes the heart of culture’s integrity, its central dynamic as an organism, the totalistic radical response of man-in-covenant to the revelation of God. - Harvie Conn

26. Bob Goudzwaard: Ideology as Religious Idolatry • Absolutises societal end or goal which takes exaggerated importance because of context [e.g., economic growth and prosperity] • Selects certain socialmeans [e.g., free market and innovative technology] “An ideology will “recruit and invest certain social forces with significant new power, and these forces then serve as the essential tools used to achieve the prized objective” (Goudzwaard). • Takes form of story [progress] • Organise and unify society around goal

27. Organisation of society around religious beliefs • Illustration of queen bee in beehive • Queen bee’s task to produce eggs • Whole hive functionalised and directed toward that task

28. Western story or religious core • Humanism: Must we not become gods? (Neitzsche) • Rationalistic humanism: Scientia potestas est • Enlightenment story: Progress by science and technology to paradise • Economic version: Materially prosperous paradise by market and technology (Adam Smith) • Today: Globalisation, postmodernity, and consumerism

29. What time is it? • Globalisation: Spread of economic form of Enlightenment humanist story around the world • Postmodernity: Loss of faith in Enlightenment story • Consumerism: Society directed toward a consumption of experiences and goods

30. Consumerism as “Our Story” If there is an overarching metanarrative that purports to explain reality in the late 20th century, it is surely the metanarrative of the free-market economy. In the beginning of this metanarrative is the self-made, self-sufficient human being. At the end of this narrative is the big house, the big car, the expensive clothes. In the middle is the struggle for success, the greed, the getting-and-spending in a world in which there is no such thing as a free lunch. Most of us have made this so thoroughly ‘our story’ that we are hardly aware of its influence. - Susan White

31. The Religion of Our Day? Consumerism appears to have become part and parcel of the very fabric of modern life. . . . And the parallel with religion is not an accidental one. Consumerism is ubiquitous and ephemeral. It is arguably the religion of the late twentieth century. (Steven Miles) . . . we cannot fully appreciate the depths of materialism unless we understand how economic behavior supplies us with meaning, purpose, and a sense of the sacred order. (Robert Wuthnow)

32. What would a missionary encounter look like in the 21st century? • A community of justice in a world of economic and ecological injustice • A community of generosity and simplicity (of ‘enough’) in a consumer world • A community of selfless giving in a world of selfishness • A community of truth (humility and boldness) in a world of relativism • A community of hope in a world of disillusionment and consumer satiation • A community of joy and thanksgiving in a world of entitlement • A community who experiences God’s presence in a secular world