Particular Witness for Confident Witness in Postmodernity

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Particular Witness for Confident Witness in Postmodernity

Author: Dae Ryeong Kim

Published on: August 27, 2005

    A postmodernist is suspicious of the universal truth because they hold that every situation is particular. According to George R. Hunsberger(1998), Postmodern people have a way of using qualifying phrases that show a sensitivity to the opinions of others. Affirmations are prefaced by phrases like ‘It seems to me,’ or ‘I believe that…,’ or “I have found this to be true for me’. The language is generous and tolerant. But somewhere in it lurks the potential that all notions are held as true only ‘for me,’ with little or nothing presumed to be true also for others. Naturally, this postmodern ethos challenges the Christian mission because Christian truth is generally known as the universal truth.

     Newbigin's evangelical epistemology can provide a bridge for the gap between the Christian and postmodern worldview. As Hunsberger notes, Newbigin helps us to see that even within the generous tolerance of humility about the provisional character of our knowing there is nonetheless the possibility—for all postmodern people on all sorts of issues—to hold something with universal intent, that is, as being true for everyone, however partial may be our grasp of it. As Christian believers read the gospel they find that it is surely in this sense that the New Testaments expects to be believed. It announces with firm conviction that this good news is for and about the whole world, not just for a particular few. Jesus’ prophetic utterance, ‘You shall be my witness’ both energizes them with a sense of their calling and haunts them with the dilemmas it causes in the midst of the postmodern mood.

The Particularity of the Christian Gospel

     Postmodernism affects preaching ministry by challenging the authority of the Church to preach the gospel in a postmodern world. It is not hard to see how deliberate, direct Christian witness rubs against the sensibilities of a world living on the rump of several centuries of Western colonialism. Hunsberger put it, "What right do Christians have to pretend to be the bearers of the message everyone should believe? In other worlds, how can the Church show to the world that what it preaches is the Truth?

     It is to this matter of ‘the duty and authority of the Church to preach the gospel’ that Newbigin has constantly addressed himself in an attempt to build confident Christian witness. His missiology of preaching for witness in the contemporary world is grounded in particularity. Those who support universal witness argue that only some point of reference in a universally validated gospel could be found. Some seek this universal ground under the rubric of objective truth, others in universally found religious principles. In either case, the particularity of the Church is suspect and believed to be an obstacle to witness. In short, both fundamentalists and liberals have not supported the particularity of the Church.

     But not so for Newbigin. His missiology of preaching does not lie in some universal principle distilled out from the particularity of Christian communities; it is rooted precisely in their particularity! He finds it an unworkable myth that we can only witness forthrightly if we somehow rise above and beyond particularized belief to a shared, universal knowledge. That at any rate is impossible. But what is more important still for Newbigin is that he finds in the biblical rationale for witness the notion that a true particular faith is exactly where the universal scope of witness finds its grounding. In short, there is a paradox that a true particular faith is exactly where the universal scope of witness finds its grounding. With Newbigin one finds that the particularity of the gospel is not in contradiction with the universality of the gospel.

     Cross-cultural insight helps us to understand what Newbigin mean by "the particularity of the Church." One cannot assume that the audience from Christendom is the same with those from a gentile culture. A preacher or an evangelist will need a difference approach to Christian witness for those whose worldviews and assumptions are totally different. This can be explained also from the perspective of Christian communication theory. The size of audience determines the communication environment (although it is more about communication mode). Thus, the particularity of a small group cannot be the same with that of a larger congregation.

     Newbigin shows this in what he calls the “logic of election.” In his understanding of the ‘missionary significance of the biblical doctrine of election’ Hunsberger finds a thread that runs through his major work on mission theology, The Opem Secret, and in fact through out the range of his writings. By the term election Newbigin refers to God’s choice of Israel to be God’s particular people, to be blessed by God and to be a blessing to the nations, and to God’s choice of the incipient Church—the earliest circle of disciples—to be witnesses to the life, teaching, death and resurrection of Jesus. In both cases, the choice of the nation and the Church is the choice of a particular community to be the means by which people of other particularities will hear and see the witness.

Preaching as Missionary Dialogue

     According to Newbigin, the most important aspect of preaching is that it is a missionary dialogue. Insights from Newbigin's cross-cultural experience helps us to see that preaching is not only a proclamation but also a missionary dialogue.

     In the very act of witness from one particularity to another, and in the birth of faith in persons and communities to whom the witness is born, the healing reconciliation about which the gospel speaks occurs. In the end, so declares Paul in Romans 9-11, both the Jew and the Greek depend on the witness of the ‘other’ from whom the gospel is received. God’s method of choosing particular witnesses is congruent with the social nature of the gospel which envisions the healing of the nations.

     The consequence of such rationale for the Church’s mission of witness is an attitude of humility. Any missionary who recognizes this as the source of authority for commending the gospel with the universal intent will do so knowing that the particularity of the missionary Church’s faith must be worn with confidence but not assumed to be absolute or final. The conviction with which the gospel is told leads us to a humble form of missionary dialogue with the ways that a new person or community or culture grasps and exhibits the gospel in response to the Spirit. Incidentally, what Newbigin expresses as confident witness is congruous with non-foundationalism that theologians depict as a postmodern quality.

     Hunsberger comments that preaching that approaches its task in this way will model the sense that in any preaching—in sermon, conversation, demonstration or deed—the calling of the Church is to give the gospel away and to expect wonderful new flowerings of its expression‎ in the message’s recipients. Confident witness by the whole community is best nourished when that is the case. And it is from this observation that Hunsberger believes that particular witness in Newbigin’s missiology of preaching has implications for gospel witness to people in a postmodern world.

http://www.suite101.com/article.cfm/9463/117312

http://cafe.daum.net/issue21

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