I’ve got a good bunch of studying to take care of over the next week or two before I get back to Niebuhr or the Apocalyptic Literature series (remember that?). Until then, here are some Newbigin summaries from when I read it several years ago. Here’s the first post. Here's the summary...
The issue boils down, it seems, to what can be proven. If it can be proven in a lab, it is a fact. If not, it is a value and, while values may be good, they are personal and have little, if anything, to do with facts. Because knowledge is observational, it can only guess at purpose, there is no knowledge of it. That being the case, how things ought to function are only opinions, not objective facts. Newbigin then deals with the fact that we all trust something as objective and any doubts we have about something are based on things we think to be truer. Where all of this ends up in the religious sphere is the triumph of sincerity, not whether something actually “is” or not.
Reading this again, I'm not sure this even makes sense! What do you think Newbigin means, or what are your thoughts on the implications of it?
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