Gospel, Church, and Culture:
Three Urgent Issues for the 21st
Century
Michael Goheen
Geneva Professor of Worldview Studies
Trinity Western University
Who gets to narrate the world?
. . . the most pressing spiritual issue of our
time is the question “who gets to narrate the
world?” (Robert Webber)
• Liberal humanist?
• Islam?
• Bible?
A Call to an Ancient Evangelical Future
• Today, as in the ancient era, the Church is
confronted by a host of master narratives
that contradict and compete with the
gospel. The pressing question is: who
gets to narrate the world?
• In a world of competing stories, we call
Evangelicals to recover the truth of God's
word as the story of the world, and to
make it the centerpiece of Evangelical
life.
Lesslie Newbigin: Syncretistic
accommodation or missionary encounter?
• Western church is “an advanced case of
syncretism”
• Missionary encounter: “a clash between
ultimate faith-commitments or stories”
Newbigin on missionary encounter
It would seem, therefore, that there is no higher
priority . . . than to ask the question of what would be
involved in a genuinely missionary encounter
between the gospel and this modern Western
culture.
England is a pagan society and the development of
a truly missionary encounter with this very tough
form of paganism is the greatest intellectual and
practical task facing the Church.
What is needed for a missionary
encounter with Western culture?
• A recovery of the gospel
• A missional understanding of the
church
• An understanding of the religious
roots of Western culture
Accommodation of the gospel to
Western culture?
The gospel is like a caged lion; it doesn’t
need to be defended, just released.
- Martin Luther
Recovering the gospel . . .
• As truth
• Vs. relativism of liberal wing of church
• Vs. rationalism of conservative wing of
church
• Person and events which reveal and
accomplish the end of universal history
Recovering the gospel . . .
• As truth
• As a story
•Unchanging ideas of pagan Greek thought
•Or the meaning of history in Hebrew thought
I do not believe that we can speak effectively of the
Gospel as a word addressed to our culture unless we
recover a sense of the Scriptures as a canonical
whole, as the story which provides the true context
for our understanding of the meaning of our lives –
both personal and public. (Newbigin)
Recovering the gospel . . .
• As truth
• As a story
• In its comprehensive scope
• As the power of God unto salvation
I am not ashamed of the gospel because it is the power
of God for the salvation of everyone who believes . . .
(Rom. 1.16)
What is needed for a missionary
encounter with Western culture?
• A recovery of the gospel
• A missional understanding of the
church
John Power on mission and church
Mission is not a fringe activity of a strongly
established Church, a pious cause that [may]
be attended to when the home fires [are] first
brightly burning. . . . ‘so am I sending you’—
the very word ‘send’ means mission and so
the whole Church is on mission, and cannot
be otherwise. . . . Missionary activity is not so
much the work of the Church as simply the
Church at work.
Mission and church
“. . . the church exists by mission as fire exists by
burning.” (Emil Brunner)
“ . . . the church can exist only to the extent that it is
the mission.” (Werner Elert)
“Because the church and mission belong together
from the beginning, a church without mission or a
mission without the church are both contradictions.
Such things do exist, but only as pseudostructures.”
(Carl Braaten)
Jürgen Moltmann on the church
What we have to learn is not that the church
‘has’ a mission, but the very reverse: that the
mission of Christ creates its own church.
Mission does not come from the church; it is
from mission and in the light of mission that the
church has to be understood.
Yet up to now the European churches have
found it hard to discover Europe as a
missionary field or to see themselves as
missionary churches.
Mission in the biblical story
• Role we are called to play in the biblical story gives
the people of God their missional identity
• “God’s mission involves God’s people living in God’s
way in the sight of the nations.” (Chris Wright)
• Mission is not primarily about going. Nor is mission
primarily about doing anything. Mission is about
being. It is about being a distinctive kind of people, a
countercultural . . . community among the nations.
(Howard Peskett and Vinoth Ramachandra)
• Backward, forward, outward
Return to the biblical story
• Blessed to be a blessing (Gen. 12.2-3; Gal.
3.6-14)
• Chosen for the sake of the world (Ex. 19.3-6; 1
Pet. 2.9-10)
• Light for the nations (Is. 49.6; Acts 13.47)
• Sent to continue the mission of Jesus (Jn.
20.21)
• Witnessing identity (Acts 1.1-11)
Acts 2.42-47
• Devoted to means that nourish life of
kingdom (Word of God, prayer, fellowship,
and Lord’s Supper)
• Attractive contrast community
• Lord adds to their number
Living in the midst of other
stories
• Old Testament: A political, ethnic, geographically
rooted nation in the midst of the nations
• New Testament: A multi-ethnic, nongeographical community in the midst of the
various cultures of the world
• Pressing dilemma: How to live at the crossroads
between two stories?
Living at the Crossroads
What is needed for a missionary
encounter with Western culture?
• A recovery of the gospel
• A missional understanding of the
church
• An understanding of the religious
roots of Western culture
Two Grand Stories in the West
In our contemporary culture . . . two quite
different stories are told. One is the story of
evolution, of the development of species through
the survival of the strong, and the story of the rise
of civilization, our type of civilization, and its
success in giving humankind mastery of nature.
The other story is the one embodied in the Bible,
the story of creation and fall, of God’s election of
a people to be the bearers of his purpose for
humankind, and of the coming of the one in
whom that purpose is to be fulfilled. These are
two different and incompatible stories.
- Lesslie Newbigin
Urgent Task
Incomparably the most urgent missionary task
for the next few decades is the mission to
‘modernity’... It calls for the use of sharp
intellectual tools, to probe behind the
unquestioned assumptions of modernity and
uncover the hidden credo which supports
them...
- Lesslie Newbigin
Religion at core of culture
Religion is not one aspect or department of life
beside the others, as modern secular thought
likes to believe; it consists rather in the
orientation of all human life to the absolute [God
or an idol]. (John Hutchison)
Culture is religion made visible; it is religion
actualized in the innumerable relations of daily
life. (J.H. Bavinck)
Core Place of Religion
. . . the core place of religion in the structuring of
culture’s meaning and usage.’ Religion is ‘not an
area of life, one among many, but primarily a
direction of life . . . Religion, then becomes the
heart of culture’s integrity, its central dynamic as
an organism, the totalistic radical response of
man-in-covenant to the revelation of God.
- Harvie Conn
religious
core
STORY
Bob Goudzwaard: Ideology as
Religious Idolatry
• Absolutises societal end or goal which takes exaggerated
importance because of context [e.g., economic growth and
prosperity]
• Selects certain social means [e.g., free market and
innovative technology]
“An ideology will “recruit and invest certain social forces with
significant new power, and these forces then serve as the
essential tools used to achieve the prized objective”
(Goudzwaard).
• Takes form of story [progress]
• Organise and unify society around goal
Organisation of society around
religious beliefs
• Illustration of queen bee in beehive
• Queen bee’s task to produce eggs
• Whole hive functionalised and directed
toward that task
Western story or religious core
• Humanism: Must we not become gods?
(Neitzsche)
• Rationalistic humanism: Scientia potestas est
• Enlightenment story: Progress by science and
technology to paradise
• Economic version: Materially prosperous
paradise by market and technology (Adam
Smith)
• Today: Globalisation, postmodernity, and
consumerism
What time is it?
• Globalisation: Spread of economic form of
Enlightenment humanist story around the
world
• Postmodernity: Loss of faith in Enlightenment
story
• Consumerism: Society directed toward a
consumption of experiences and goods
Consumerism as “Our Story”
If there is an overarching metanarrative that
purports to explain reality in the late 20th century,
it is surely the metanarrative of the free-market
economy. In the beginning of this metanarrative
is the self-made, self-sufficient human being. At
the end of this narrative is the big house, the big
car, the expensive clothes. In the middle is the
struggle for success, the greed, the getting-andspending in a world in which there is no such
thing as a free lunch. Most of us have made this
so thoroughly ‘our story’ that we are hardly aware
of its influence.
- Susan White
The Religion of Our Day?
Consumerism appears to have become part
and parcel of the very fabric of modern life. . . .
And the parallel with religion is not an
accidental one. Consumerism is ubiquitous
and ephemeral. It is arguably the religion of
the late twentieth century. (Steven Miles)
. . . we cannot fully appreciate the depths of
materialism unless we understand how
economic behavior supplies us with meaning,
purpose, and a sense of the sacred order.
(Robert Wuthnow)
What would a missionary encounter
look like in the 21st century?
• A community of justice in a world of economic and
ecological injustice
• A community of generosity and simplicity (of ‘enough’) in a
consumer world
• A community of selfless giving in a world of selfishness
• A community of truth (humility and boldness) in a world of
relativism
• A community of hope in a world of disillusionment and
consumer satiation
• A community of joy and thanksgiving in a world of
entitlement
• A community who experiences God’s presence in a secular
world