“It is not so often acknowledged that evangelism means calling people to believe something which is radically different from what is normally accepted as public truth, and that it calls for a conversion not only of the heart and will but of the mind. A serious commitment to evangelism, to the telling of the story which the Church is sent to tell, means a radical questioning of the reigning assumptions about public life. It is to affirm the gospel not only as an invitation to a private and personal decision but as public truth which ought to be acknowledged as true for the whole of the life of society. . . .
“[T]he opening words of the ministry of Jesus include the word metanoete. At the very beginning we are warned that to understand what follows will require nothing less than a radical conversion of the mind. . . .
“The problem of making sense of the gospel is that it calls for a change of mind which is as radical as is the action of God in becoming man and dying on a cross. . . .
“[W]hen the Church affirms the gospel as public truth it is challenging the whole of society to wake out of the nightmare of subjectivism and relativism, to escape from the captivity of the self turned in upon itself, and to accept the calling which is addressed to every human being to seek, acknowledge, and proclaim the truth. . . .
“Our problem is that most of us who are Christians have been brought up bilingual. For most of our early lives, through the accepted systems of public education, we have been trained to use a language which claims to make sense of the world without the hypothesis of God. For an hour or two a week we use the other language, the language of the Bible. We are like the Christian congregations under the milet systems of the Persian and Muslim empires: we use the mother tongue of the Church on Sundays, but for the rest of our lives we use the language imposed by the occupying power. But if we are true to the language of the Church and the Bible, we know that this is not good enough. The incarnate Word is Lord of all, not just of the Church. There are not two worlds, one sacred and the other secular. There are differing ways of understanding the one world and a choice has to be made about which is the right way, the way that corresponds to reality, to the reality beyond all the show which the ruler of this world can put on. . . .
“How can we affirm the gospel as true in a pluralist society where all such claims are bracketed out of public life and relegated to the area of private opinion? The very fact that its truth can be doubted and is in fact doubted by the majority of human beings, is regarded as sufficient to exclude it from public doctrine. Public doctrine, as currently understood, has to deal with ‘facts’ which are objectively true and not maters of personal opinion. . . . Objectivity is taken to mean freedom from risk. But, in truth, all knowing involves the possibility of being mistaken. . . .
“[W]e in our society know much and are learning more about the problems of pluralism. Total pluralism, in which there are no criteria by which different life-styles could be evaluated, in which any kind of discrimination between cultural norms as better or worse is forbidden, in which there is no truth but only ‘what seems meaningful for me,’ leads inevitably to anomie, to lostness, to a meaningless life in a meaningless world. . . .
Newbigin distinguishes between “Agnostic Pluralism” and “Committed Pluralism.” In the first, it is assumed that truth is unknowable. In the second, “because it is believed that there is reality to be known, differences of opinion are not left to coexist side by side as evidence of the glories of pluralism. They are the subject of debate, argument, testing, and fresh research until either one view prevails over the other as more true, or else some fresh way of seeing things enables the two views to be reconciled as two ways of seeing one reality. . . .
“A society in which any kind of nonsense is acceptable is not a free society. . . .
“We have a gospel to proclaim. We have to proclaim it not merely to individuals in their personal and domestic lives. We do certainly have to do that. But we have to proclaim it as part of the continuing conversation that shapes public doctrine. It must be heard in the conversation of economists, psychiatrists, educators, scientists and politicians. We have to proclaim it not as a package of estimable values, but as the truth about what is the case, about what every human being and every human society will have to reckon with. When we are faithful in this commission we are bound to appear subversive to those who believe that the cosmos is a closed system. We may appear to threaten the achievements of these centuries in which this has been the reigning belief. In truth we shall be offering the only hope of conserving and carrying forward the good fruits of these centuries into a future which might otherwise belong to the barbarians. . . .
“[W]hen the Church is seen simply as a voluntary society made up of those individuals who have decided to accept the Christian faith and to join themselves together for its nourishment and exercise, then the danger is that the ethical implications of the gospel come to be regarded as merely house rules for the Church, guidance for Christian behavior rather than the law of the creator with jurisdiction over the entire human family. . . .
“For the Church simply to be free to do its own thing is not freedom. The proper function of the Church is inseparable from its obligation to declare the sovereignty of Christ over every sphere of life without exception. The individualistic model of freedom which pervades our society and controls the way we approach every question has to be challenged by the gospel affirmation that we are not naturally free but that we may receive the gift of freedom when we are in Christ, and that in every area of life there is only one Lord to be obeyed, namely the Lord Jesus Christ. . . .
“[T]he most important contribution which the Church can make to a new social order is to be itself a new social order. More fundamental than any of the things which the Church can say or do is the reality of a new society which allows itself to be shaped by the Christian faith. The basic unit of that new society is the local congregation.”
—from Lesslie Newbigin, Truth to Tell: The Gospel as Public Truth (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1991)