Although we tend to associate evangelism with personal
evangelism, it was Lesslie Newbigin who first introduced the concept of
‘social evangelism.’ He saw the modern western society secularized by the
influence of modernism as the parish of the Christian mission. He declared
that the western world which was once the country exporting the gospel to
the world is now a mission field that needs to be reevangelized. When he
identified that the roots of the secularization of the western culture as
the epistemology of modernism, it was a great discovery in the circle of
missiology equal to Newton’s discovery of the law of gravity in natural
science.
One day Newton was sleeping under an apple tree and was
awaken when an apple fall on his forehead. Of course, Newton was not the
first person who had ever seen an apple falling from the tree. And there
were thousands of people who would mention, "The apple had grown big enough
so that it was time to fall down" or "It was a matter of natural law that
things above fall dawn below." But the greatness of Newton lies in that he
refused to be satisfied with that kind of explanation and continued to ask
the question why the apple fall down until he discovered the law of gravity.
No less great is the insight of Newbigin the missiologist. People usually
attributed the stagnation of the English Church in the twentieth century to
secularization, and if asked why the English society was going through
secularization, they would vaguely attributed it to the trends of modern
times. But Newbigin did not stop there, and it was he who carefully observed
that western secularization is largely due to the plausibility structure in
western modern culture since the Enlightenment.
On August 5 of the year 2000 a grand ceremony was held
in England to celebrate the 100th birthday of Queen Mother. It was the first
occasion in the British royal family that one’s age reached the one hundred.
Here was a woman who welcomed the dawn of the first New Year of the
twentieth century, who was born on August 5 of the year, a teenager girl
during the Fist World War I, who ascended high on the Buckingham palace to
celebrate the victory of the British Army from the World War II in 1945, who
ascended the palace again on August 5 of the first year in the
twentieth-first century to celebrate her one hundredth birthday.
The Queen Mother, Rev. Lesslie Newbigin, and late
Korean Rev. Han Kyung-jik were all born at the beginning of the twentieth
century, and the two reverends also lived almost a century. If the Korean
pastor Han Kyung-jik is the history of Korean Church, the Queen Mother is
the history of the British monarchy in the twentieth century, and Newbigin
the history of English Church mission movement in the same century.
Newbigin’s leadership in the Church of England was comparable to Rev. Han
Kyung-jik’s leadership in the Church of Korea.
Returning from his forty years of missionary service
oversees (with most of his service in the East) Newbigin saw that Britain
was no longer the same Britain he saw before his departure to his mission
field in India. The Great Britain in the past was the center of modern
civilization to where people from every side of the world came to learn
advanced civilization including government and medicine. But about the time
he was returning home, he saw English young men in India wandering the city
in unwashed clothes to learn the oriental wisdom. Issac Newton’s vision of
modernism was to export the light of enlightenment and civilization to the
whole world. But here were the British young people who were disappointed by
the civilization that modernism had brought. The hope for the promise of
modernism had faded away!
His pastoral experience as a retired missionary was
another illustration of the cultural context of modernity Newbigin observed.
When a small church in the district of the Asian immigrants was about to be
closed by the presbytery, Newbigin appealed for the preservation of the
congregation and was allowed to assume the pastoral position of the church
on the condition of no pay for his pastoral ministry. When he was visiting
the neighborhood to win a chance for evangelism, the English family often
met him with cold refusal on the door. It was rather the pagan Asian
families who invited him to the living room for tea. And when rarely an
English neighbor opened the door, it was no longer the Bible but the
television which occupied the center of the English family living.
In this context Newbigin experienced that far more
difficult than to evangelize a Hindu was to evangelize a British. To bear
witness to Christ to a Hindu is a hard work enough. But even though they
opposed to Christian faith, the Hinds were, at least, not uninterested in a
spiritual topic. And far more difficult was to evangelize who were not
interested in spiritual affair than who oppose to Christian faith. It was
the kind of society where faith was considered as a matter of personal
choice, and therefore evangelism was taken as intruding one’s privacy. And
that in the homeland of the Puritan movement, in the land with the heritage
of the Wesleyan spiritual revival, and the hometown of the great preachers
such as Spurgeon!
This illustrates that the same Britain can be a
spiritually productive land in one age, and barren in other age. Here
culture is an important factor. Culture affects Christian mission because it
shapes one’s worldview. What are, then, the roots of the secular worldview
of the modern western culture? Two dominant factors of western
secularization are the absence of teleology and the dichotomy of facts and
value. In this column we discuss the dichotomy of facts and value in terms
of the dichotomy of subjectivism and objectivism.
The tragic legacy of Descartes' program has been that
the other half of modern culture other than science, the half into which
theology usually falls, has lapsed into subjectivism. Newbigin put it, "The
shadow cast upon the other half of our culture by which the massive creation
of a supposedly 'objective' natural science has robbed of the liberal arts
of the confidence that they also are avenues along which truth may really be
grasped." So everything becomes subjective.
The false dichotomy is setup between "I know" and "I
believe." Everything in theology becomes subjective. What we call
Christianity is one of the many varieties of religious experience, and its
truth-claims are set aside on the ground that they arise out of particular
cultural contexts. Now, this bears witness to the shadow of modernism
initiated by Descartes. This is the shadow cast by the idea that there is
available, or should be available, a kind of knowledge which is not the
knowledge of a fallible human subject living in a specific cultural context,
but the "objective" knowledge. Newbigin stresses that this idea is simply
illusion. Yet this idea has become so powerful in modern world that it can
rob the Christian of the freedom to say simply: "I know whom I have
believed” (II Tim. 1:12).
But, if one extends this "subjectivity-objectivity"
debate to God, the great objectivity is God but he is also the supreme
subject. who wills to make himself known to us not by a power that would
cancel out our subjectivity, but by a grace that calls forth and empowers
our subjective faculties, our power to grow in knowledge through believing.
Quoting from St. Augustine, Newbigin declares, "We believe in order to
understand, and our struggle to understand is a response to grace." It is
grace that makes real understanding possible. As Newbigin put it, "Real
understanding becomes possible not by seeking a certitude apart from grace,
but by accepting the calling to seek understanding."
Citing the famous slogan of Augustine, "credo ut
intelligam" ( I believe in order that I know), Newbigin comments: “Here
faith is understood not as an alternative to knowledge but as the pathway to
knowledge. We do not come to know anything except by believing something”
(1996:3). Newbigin discusses the nature of this knowing process. “We have to
begin by believing the evidence of our senses, the veracity of our teachers,
and the validity of the tradition into which we are seeking
apprenticeship…We do not begin to acquire any kind of knowledge by laying
down in advance the condition upon which we will accept any evidence. We
have to begin with an openness to a reality greater than ourselves in
relation to which we are not judges but pupils” (1996: 4-5).
The famous story of Dr. Heo-Jun in the Korean MBC drama
is a good illustration of this. The healing career of this renown medical
doctor from the Yi-dynasty began by his apprenticeship under Yoo, Yi-tae,
the master of oriental medicine and his mentor. The disciple did not begin
to acquire his medical knowledge by laying down in advance the condition to
his teacher. The starting point of his learning was his trust in the
teaching of his teacher. He began with an openness to his teacher, a great
minds of medicine, to whom he was not a judge but a pupil. What is true with
learning the oriental medicine is also true with learning the western
science. Even in the fields of science there are schools of science, and
each school of science has its own tradition. On has to belong to one of the
school in order to learn science. Without this process of subjective
experience one cannot learn a tradition of science, and therefore cannot
inherit a theory system of science. It is impossible to detach subjectivity
from objectivity, and this is the fundamental flaw in Descartes ’ program.
As a result, Descartes’ dichotomy only formed the
plausibility structure of the society where faith is reduced to a subjective
experience while certitude of knowledge, namely, the objective knowledge is
glorified. The majority of the Western people before the Cartesian era was
Christian although not all of them might have the assurance of salvation. In
the western traditional society the Christina gospel had unquestioned
authority. But the dichotomous way of thinking in modernism took religious
truth as a subjective claim, and therefore a truth-claim that lacks
scientific certitude, and this has become one of the main roots contributing
to western secularization.
The impact of modernism seems to be much greater on
Korean Christianity than it has been on Western Christianity. Korea recently
celebrated the fiftieth anniversary (August 15, 2000) of the Liberation Day
since the Korean War. Things happened during this half-century. Tent
churches of fifty years ago have grown to be among the largest churches in
the world. But recently there are many signs that indicates that the turn of
the new century is also a turning point of the Korean church experience. The
influence of modernism that the western Christianity has experienced during
the last three centuries the Church of Korea is experiencing in much shorter
period. What comes with the influence of western modern education and
culture is Cartesian worldview, that is, the dichotomy of subjectivism and
objectivism. While the new young Korean generation are free from any
religious persecution, this generation is often characterized for its
nominality, spiritual unproductivity, and unresponsiveness to Christian
evangelism.
In a society where this worldview that dichotomizes the
subjectivity and objectivity is a reigning plausibility structure, faith is
driven to a marginal place. As the intellectual circle of modernism has
grown up to be the majority, this change in Korean ministry context has
become conspicuous. In a time when the church buildings occupy the center of
the town community, the Christian faith is pushed to the marginal place of
the society. The modernism culture exults human’s objectivity, scientific
knowledge, while taking faith as subjective experience. The Christian
mission is challenged when this become a reigning plausibility structure.
When industrialization, westernalization, and modernization has been
progressing fast during the last three decades, it was not just an economic
environment that has been changed; the Korean society has become susceptible
to the influence of the secularization of modernism. Inside this cultural
context faith and intelligence appears to be contradictory each other, and
to be faithful is often taken as the sign of being less intelligent. But as
we have already seen, this false worldview has to be rejected. We must
follow the example of the Psalmist who, when seeking the truth, prays, “Open
thou mine eyes, that I may behold Wondrous things out of thy law” (Ps.
119.18). As St. Augustine sets forth it, we believe in order to know. Faith
is not an alternative to knowledge. The Christian truth is the true truth,
the truth of truths, and the eternal truth because it is the kind of truth
one can enter by faith. “For in the gospel a righteousness from God is
revealed, a righteousness that is by faith from first to last”(Rom. 1:17).
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