<Theofragen>

Steve Bush has been offering some insightful remarks regarding the fundamentalist response to post-evangelical (post-foundational) theology. In engaging Steve's assessment of the project, Reclaiming the Center: Confronting Evangelical Accommodation in Postmodern Times, I have also been wrestling with the missional theology of Leslie Newbigin. I understand why so many evangelical scholars, pastors and lay-people are afraid of the theological and philosophical arguments of post-colonial thinkers, like Grenz and Bush. It seems that evangelicals in general and fundamentalists in particular are scared that their 'pure' understanding of the gospel will become tainted by 'postmodernism'. In attempting to mollify this fear they bifurcate unadulterated Truth (which they believe they have grasped en toto) and subjective relativism (which they accuse 'postmoderns' of holding). Such a dichotomy is simply not helpful!

For example, D.A. Carson writes, "Grenz has bought into one of the fundamental antitheses embraced by postmodernism: either we can know something absolutely and omnisciently, or our 'knowledge' of that thing is nothing more than a social construction that has the most doubtful connection with reality, i.e., with the thing-in-itself" (quoted from Bush). I find it interesting that Newbigin writes, "We must start with the basic fact that there is no such thing as a pure gospel if by that is meant something which is not embodied in a culture...The missionary does not come with the pure gospel and then adapt it to the culture where she serves: she comes with a gospel which is already embodied in the culture by which the missionary was formed" (144).

I don't think that we need to view this in such either/or terms. I appreciate fundamentalism's critique of an 'anything goes relativism'. Yet, perhaps they have gone too far in the opposite direction. I think it is fair to say that most of my conservative and fundamentalist friends will be able to agree with Newbigin's next quote. He continues, "Once again we have to insist that since the response to the gospel has to be made in freedom, and since all human beings are fallible, there will not be unanimity in the ways in which the Church in any time and place seeks to 'contextualize' the gospel, seeks, that is to say, so to proclaim to embody the life of Jesus that his power both to sustain and to judge every human culture is manifest" (148).

I want to press my fundamentalist friends to consider the fact that perhaps their understanding of an inerrant Bible and absolute Truth readily discernible by reason is nothing more than their post-enlightenment contextualization of the gospel. I conclude with Newbigin:

"Where there is a believing community whose life is centered in the biblical story through its worshipping, teaching, and sacramental and apostolic life, there will certainly be differences of opinion on specific issues, certainly mistakes, certainly false starts. But this is part of my faith in the authenticity of the story itself that this community will not be finally betrayed. The gates of hell shall not prevail against it. But where something else is put at the center, a moral code, a set of principles, or the alleged need to meet some criterion imposed from outside the story, one is adrift in the ever changing tides of history, and the community which commits itself to these things becomes one more piece of driftwood on the current" (148). Peace.

The Myth of a 'Pure Gospel'

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