[@] You prolly have no idea ...

... what these two diagrams mean:

That's from Lesslie Newbigins's contribution to The Church between Gospel and Culture, 1996, Eerdman's -- as it appeared in Mark Driscoll's the Radical Reformission.

This one you will have seen here for the first time.

This week we are dropping all other commitments to monologue on these two diagrams and what they mean. I hope it gives you something to look forward to.
OTHER POSTS IN THIS SERIES 1 2 3 4 5 6 [intro]

2 comments:

Mark said...

Are we looking at a proposed synergism in the first picture?

Mark

FX Turk said...

Man! I can't even straighten out my monday morning at work without some smart guy asking questions.

I'll be honest: I didn't read Newbigin's original work. I only read Driscoll's summary of it in Radional Reformission. But here's why Driscoll included it. He wanted to establish the following equations:

Gospel + Culture - Church = Parachurch

Culture + Church - Gospel = Liberalism

Church + Gospel - Culture = Fundamentalism


And rather than rant about each of these (and they are all rantable as far as I'm concerned), I'd rather just say, as a continuing part of the teaser, that as a paradigm the diagram is completely inadequate, and the applications or corollaries that Driscoll/Newbigins provide are, um, not very useful except to make a point that they were going to try to kake anyway. They are stacking the deck with the paradigm, and then they don't really address the problems with their view.

But what are they trying to say and why? Did they simply start from a lousy place but, becuase they are experienced people who do know something about God's word and taking the Gospel to the lost, they incidentally got some things right?

Stay tuned and we'll see.