Foolishness to the Greeks
Few books have had more influence on missions and ecclesiology than Newbigin’s little book, Foolishness to the Greeks. Newbigin (1909-1998) was not the first to see that western culture was passing into a post-Christian existence but he was one of the first, and certainly one of the most influential to call for a missionary approach to western culture.
A missionary’s recommenation for ministering to “the most challenging missionary frontier of our time”—the modern Western World.
Newbigin’s life and ministry gave him a unique vantage point from which to view the West. He served as a missionary to India for nearly forty years. During that time he gave numerous lectures, wrote volumes of articles, and served as a church leader, academic, and important evangelical voice in the ecumenical (worldwide missionary) movement. He returned to England in the mid-1970s to find Europe dramatically changed.
Foolishness to the Greeks grew out of Newbigin’s Warfield Lectures at Princeton Theological Seminary in 1984. He developed these lectures from a pamphlet he had authored in Britain entitled “The Other Side of 1984”, a small work calling the churches of Britain “to a more forthright missionary encounter with contemporary British culture.” (Preface) This book became the clarion call for an increasing number of church leaders to engage all Western nations with such an approach.
Outline
The book contains only six chapters.
Chapter one introduces the West as “the most challenging missionary frontier of our time” (20).
Chapters 2-5 address some of the more prominent challenges associated with a missionary encounter, particularly the encounter with science and politics.
Chapter six explores the ecclesiological implications of this missionary encounter for the church in the west.
Takeaways
Readers will find the thick writing best digested slowly. The book effectively engages with complex concepts without bogging down in endless detail. As he addresses these concepts, Newbigin not only identifies some of the more significant cultural issues but also demonstrates how to apply the gospel to these concepts, affirming the good and calling out the bad.
At the same time, church leaders will find a treasure trove of quotable quotes. Far from trivial, these compact sentences communicate with a stickiness that, with one hand carries a depth of scholarship and experience, and with the other opens the door to a breadth of application.
This is a book you’ll want to read multiple times because it attempts to answer one of the most urgent questions for the church in the west: “What would it mean instead of trying to explain the gospel in terms of our modern scientific culture, we tried to explain our culture in terms of the gospel?” (41)
This little volume recaptures the missionary thrust of the New Testament for our day, outlining the ways in which the church’s encounter with Western culture must be to some extent foolishness to the Greeks before “to [those] who are being saved it is the power of God.” (1 Cor. 1:18, NASB)
As the Senior Consultant for Sending Pathways, Cris Alley helps support the local church in thinking and acting like missionaries.
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