Christian, what is your goal in all of life? For
years, I was told, "heaven." Once we get to heaven, we "finish
the race," right? We strive with God, and we seek to perfect the soul, but
once we die, the Christian has "made it," right? Newbigin challenges
some of these sacred pieces of evangelical thought by suggesting that this way
of thinking about the Christian life is really borrowed from Greek as well as
Enlightenment ideals, but perhaps is not very Biblical. Really?
And so, inevitably, alongside the doctrine of
progress (an Enlightenment ideal) there comes back the ancient pre-Christian
idea of the immortality of the soul (a Greek ideal). The individual person
finds the true end of his living and striving not in the perfect society, which
only the remote posterity will see, but in an afterlife in another world, which
has no relation to this. The two histories- my personal history and the history
of the world- go their separate ways to different ends. My personal future and
the future of the world have no essential relationship to each other. Human
life is no longer a unity; it falls apart into two divisions: the private and
the public, the spiritual and the political. We are back again at the dichotomy
with which we have become so familiar in looking at our post-Enlightenment
culture.
Yet the human person is a unity.
I am the same person in my most private prayers and my most public acts. Whence
comes the splitting apart of what we experience as a unity? It comes, of
course, from the fact of death, the fact that at a point that is as unknown as
it is certain I who pray and work must leave behind all my work, cut all those
bonds that have from my birth bound me in one bundle of mutual responsibility
with family, society, and world, and face alone the last horizon. This creates
the split, tempting me to turn my back on the outward world of shared
responsibilities and to find meaning exclusively in the pilgrimage of my own
soul.
Foolishness to the Greeks, p. 136
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