A Newbiginian Revolution

Something radically new has been given, something which cannot be derived from rational reflection on the experiences available to all people. It is a new fact, to be received in faith as a gift of grace. And what is thus given claims to be the truth, not just a possible opinion. It is the rock which must either become the foundation of all knowing and doing, or else the stone on which one stumbles and falls to disaster. Those who, through no wit or wisdom or godliness of their own have been entrusted with this message can in no way demonstrate its truth on the basis of some other alleged certainties: they can only live by it and announce it.

No one can deny the brilliance of our technology. The problem is rather what our technology is used for. We display astounding brilliance in devising means for any end we desire, but we have no rational way of choosing what ends are worth desiring.

I think that [Michael] Polanyi has given us a picture which accurately indicates where we are. The past 300 years, he says, have been the most brilliant in human history, but their brilliance was created by the combustion of one thousand years' deposit of the Christian tradition in the oxygen of Greek rationalism. Now, he says, the fuel is burned up. We shall not get fresh light by pumping in more oxygen. There has to be a renewal of the material on which critical reason goes to work.

In Gibbon's tart words, all religions were [in the Roman empire] to the people equally true, to the philosophers equally false, and to the government equally useful.

But when 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. For we are that part of God's creation which he has equipped with the power to know the truth and to speak the praise of the whole creation in response to the truthfulness of the Creator.

But is it not clear that the whole [of Descartes'] enterprise rested on an assumption - an act of faith, if you like - that the cosmos is so structured that that kind of certainty is available to human beings? In that sense Descartes was a child of Christendom.

Without that change of mind, the story [of the death and resurrection of Jesus] is too implausible to be regarded as part of real history. Indeed, the simple truth is that the resurrection cannot be accommodated in any way of understanding the world except one of which it is the starting point.

And if there is no public doctrine about human destiny, there can be no basis for rational discussion in the public forum about what are and what are not proper ends of human endeavor. And when there are no rational grounds for these decisions, the way is open for the sort of mindless fanaticism about single moral issues which is such a feature of our time.

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 the cross.

Fiction is only useful in a truth telling society. If it is understood that alleged facts are normally fictions, fiction loses its usefulness. And finally, the acceptance of this myth would wipe out our claim to know anything reliable about ancient history.

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 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 of 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.

Our faith as Christians is that just as God raised up dead, so will He raise up us from the dead. And that just as all that Jesus had done in the days of His flesh seemed on Easter Saturday to be buried in final failure and oblivion, yet was by God's power raised to new life and power again, so all the faithful labor of God's servants which time seems to bury in the dust of failure, will be raised up, will be found to be there, transfigured, in the new Kingdom. Every faithful act of service, every honest labor to make the world a better place, which seemed to have been forever lost and forgotten in the rubble of history, will be seen on that day to have contributed to the perfect fellowship of God's Kingdom. As Christ, who committed Himself to God and was faithful even when all ended in utter failure and rejection, was by God raised up so that all that He had done as found to be not lost, but alive and powerful, so all who have committed their work in faithfulness to God will be by Him raised up to share in the new age, and will find that their labor was not lost, but that it has found its place in the completed Kingdom.

To say that humans are, at root, lovers, is to emphasize that we are the sorts of animals for whom things matter in ways that we often don't (and can't) articulate.

What we do (practices) is intimately linked to what we desire (love), so what we do determines whether, how, and what we can know.

Habits are inscribed on our heart through bodily practices and rituals that train the heart, as it were, to desire certain ends.

[Habits are learned, yet] can become so intricately woven into the fiber of our being that they function as if they were natural or biological.

What if education was primarily concerned with shaping our hopes and passions - our visions of "the good life" and not merely about the dissemination of data and information as inputs of our thinking? . . . What if education wasn't first and foremost about what we know but about what we love?