“No state can be completely secular in the sense that those who exercise power have no beliefs about what is true and no commitment to what they believe to be right. It is the duty of the church to ask what those beliefs and commitments are and to expose them to the light of the gospel. There is no genuinely missionary encounter of the gospel with our culture unless that happens. Here we must face frankly the distortion of the gospel that is perpetrated in a great deal that passes for missionary encounter. A preaching of the gospel that calls men and women to accept Jesus as Savior but does not make it clear that discipleship means commitment to a vision of society radically different from that which now controls our public life today must be condemned as false.”
— from Lesslie Newbigin, Foolishness to the Greeks: The Gospel and Western Culture (Eerdmans, 1986)
Related reading and listening
- Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 163 — FEATURED GUESTS: Andrew Youngblood, R. J. Snell, Nicholas Denysenko, Nigel Biggar, Robert McNamara, and David Cayley
- Faith as the pathway to knowledge — Lesslie Newbigin on authority and the Author of all being
- The kingdom of God has public consequences — Lesslie Newbigin on the subversiveness of the Church’s message to the world
- Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 162 — FEATURED GUESTS: Mark Noll, R. Jared Staudt, Paul Weston, William C. Hackett, Hans Boersma, and David Paul Baird
- The Gospel as the foundation of dialogue — FROM VOL. 83 Professor Paul Weston discusses theologian Lesslie Newbigin’s time in India and how it influenced his thought and work. (17 minutes)
- Sports in America — FROM VOL. 21 Robert Higgs looks at the history of sports in American experience and at how organized religion has interacted with that history. (12 minutes)
- Divorcing the spirit of the age — Thomas C. Oden on overcoming the theological faddism of the late twentieth century
- Developing a Christian aesthetic — In the inaugural lecture for the Eliot Society, titled “Faithful Imaginations in a Meaningful Creation,” Ken Myers addresses the question of the relationship between the arts and the Church. (59 minutes)
- Consecrating the world — Paul Evdokimov on the cosmic effects of the Incarnation
- Rehabilitating authority — Authority, argues David Koyzis, is an aspect of the image of God, exercised to fulfill human vocations. (30 minutes)
- Before Church and State — Andrew Willard Jones challenges some of the conventional paradigms of thinking about political order, arguing that modern assumptions of the relationship between Church and state color how we understand history. (54 minutes
- Eternal seeds, temporal fruit — Henri de Lubac on how the Church should (and shouldn’t) make a difference in the world
- David K. Naugle, R.I.P. — Philosophy professor, author, and compassionate mentor David K. Naugle (1952-2021) explains the long history of the concepts of “worldview” and “happiness.” (26 minutes)
- First-fruits of the age to come — Lesslie Newbigin on God’s use of material means to convey redemptive transformation
- Questioning the “sacred-secular” division — With the stage set by Michael Sandel, Jean Bethke Elshtain, David L. Schindler, and John Milbank, Andrew Willard Jones examines a medieval alternative to the modern liberal paradigm. (61 minutes)
- Fr. Chad Hatfield and Peter J. Leithart on Alexander Schmemann — Alexander Schmemann’s book asks a set of questions about “Christianity and culture” that typically don’t get asked, questions that re-center our lives in gratitude and worship. (20 minutes)
- Confident agnosticism — Lesslie Newbigin on not knowing everything
- Not just a counterculture — Peter J. Leithart on the public (and prophetic) mission of the Church
- Assimilation or identity in Christ — Francisco Javier Martínez Fernández on the modern choice given the Church to conform or die
- The Church as a public reality — William Cavanaugh on how we must be disciples in public, not just citizens
- Intellectual apostasy and Christian witness — Harry Blamires on unfashionable beliefs about the ends of human beings
- Cultural participation in reconciliation — Jonathan Wilson on faithfully representing Creation in the culture of the Church
- The publicly inert Christ of modernity — Dom Anscer Vonier on secularism’s confidence in its freedom from Christ
- Which story is ours? — “Instead of allowing the Bible to shape us, we may in fact be allowing our culture to shape the Bible for us.”
- The dead-end of privatized faith — T. S. Eliot on the Church’s duty to interfere with the World
- True transcendence, true immanence — D. C. Schindler on how believers can be practical atheists
- The disabling consequences of winsomeness — Stanley Hauerwas on how many modern Christians offered atheists less and less in which to disbelieve.
- Crowd Culture — Bernard Iddings Bell: “It is because the Church has thus obscured the socially prophetic note that it seems to most people to have no relevancy.”
- Who strangled God? — James Turner examines the ways in which the pursuit of “relevant” theology helped to make atheism plausible in Western culture
- Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 92 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jake Halpern, Stephen J. Nichols, Richard M. Gamble, Peter J. Leithart, Bill Vitek, and Craig Holdrege
- Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 87 — FEATURED GUESTS: John Witte, Jr., Steven Keillor, Philip Bess, Scott Cairns, and Anthony Esolen
- Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 83 — FEATURED GUESTS: Barrett Fisher, Dick Keyes, Richard Lints, Paul McHugh, Paul Weston, and Paul Walker
- Russell Hittinger on Church, State, and Catholic Social Teaching — Dr. Russell Hittinger discusses the development in 19th-century Catholic social thought of the idea of society as a spiritual and cultural reality. (60 minutes)
- Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 69 — FEATURED GUESTS: John McWhorter, Douglas Koopman, Daniel Ritchie, Vincent Miller, and Barrett Fisher
