The Providence of God and Secularization

Newbigin attributes secularization to the providence of God. At the beginning of Honest Religion Newbigin describes the present world situation, of which

secularization is one aspect, as the “world into which God has led us.”131

Given the fact that God is the “Lord of history” the process of secularization is not to be attributed to fortune or fate, but has some purpose in God‟s hands, it “means” something.132 The meaning which it has, for Newbigin, is that it is “part of God‟s calling of mankind to maturity,” to responsible action in the world.133 This sense of the providence of God is implied in Newbigin‟s earlier language as used in an address in Bosey, Switzerland, in 1957. In this address Newbigin appears to be unaware of the term “secularization,” but referring to the changes taking place worldwide he repeatedly interprets this as humanity “being gathered up.” There is a movement at work in the world, a “process by which more and more of the human race is being gathered up into the history whose centre is the Cross.”134 This language of gathering

130 _{L. Newbigin, Honest Religion for Secular Man, 8. This is a revised version of the Firth Lectures he}

delivered at the University of Nottingham in 1964,

131

L. Newbigin, Honest Religion for Secular Man, 10.

132 _{L. Newbigin, Honest Religion for Secular Man, 42.} 133 _{L. Newbigin, Honest Religion for Secular Man, 136.}

134 _{L. Newbigin, „The Gathering Up of History Into Christ,‟ 82, 88. Newbigin appears to have derived}

this language of the “center of history” from Tillich, a source he acknowledged in a 1941 lecture delivered in Bangalore at United Theological College entitled, „The Kingdom of God and the Idea of Progress,‟ in Geoffrey Wainwright, ed., Signs Amid the Rubble, 43. In a footnote Wainwright points

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up is to be understood as God‟s providential gathering of humanity, as Newbigin makes explicit in slightly different language: “world history is in the grip of Christ, is being propelled by him towards its ultimate issues.”135 Newbigin sets the process of secularization within the context of God‟s sovereign control of history as an act of his providence.

Newbigin maintains a clear distinction between God‟s transcendent control of history and secularization. While secularization can be attributed to God‟s

providence, God is not immanent to the process, as Newbigin explains indirectly when he states that secularization is “certainly not the triumph of the kingdom of God” and does not contain “in itself the norms by which our belief and conduct” are “determined.”136

The process has a certain independence and distinction from God and “in itself” does not necessarily lead to God and his purpose. Secularization can only be properly understood and interacted with from the “starting-point” of “God‟s revelation of himself in Jesus Christ as this is testified in the Bible.”137

From this perspective secularization can be interpreted properly, and it becomes possible to discern the action and thought required of the church in the light of this development. Of importance for Newbigin‟s view of history is that secularization confronts the church and the world with a decision regarding the standpoint from which it will be understood.

Secularization generates a crisis, a situation in which a decision for or against Christ becomes compelling because of the immediate implications and consequences of that decision in the form of great blessing or of great loss:

It [the world-wide spread of the secular world-view which Christianity has brought to the birth] is part of the working out in human history of the results of the coming of Christ. It is part of the process by which the coming of the Light of the world places all men in a critical situation, a situation charged with the

possibilities both of ultimate salvation and of ultimate loss.138

Newbigin affirms secularization on three grounds as a child of biblical revelation: science and technology had its origins in a biblical view of the creation as God‟s work,

out that the source was probably Tillich‟s 1936 publication, The Interpretation of History, although he notes that where Newbigin points to Christ‟s death as the center of history, Tillich refers to Christ.

135 _{L. Newbigin, „The Gathering Up of History into Christ,‟ 83. As indicated earlier, the place of}

sovereignty would be modified in later writing, from Trinitarian Doctrine for Today’s Mission onwards, to that of God the Father.

136

L. Newbigin, Honest Religion for Secular Man, 29. . . . 42.

137 _{L. Newbigin, Honest Religion for Secular Man, 42.} 138 _{L. Newbigin, A Faith for this One World?, 22.}

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and therefore understandable, open to study and investigation;139 the concern for progress towards a new social order with improvement of the conditions of life for all people is a “form of the biblical idea of the kingdom of God”; and thirdly, secularization breaks down a belief resisted in the biblical tradition that a particular political or social structure of society can be identified with the divine.140 But against his affirmation of each of these three points, Newbigin raises a “question mark,” pointing to the darker side of secularization. Firstly, he indicates how scientific and technological advance is running hand in hand with a sense of “meaninglessness and even terror as man faces his future.” Newbigin points to nuclear energy as an example of this as a great scientific advance, but at the same time one that has generated the possibility of mass destruction.141 Secondly, he explains that the aspiration for a new social order can easily lead to ideological control, and the violation of democratic governance, as the only way to bring about this new social order in the absence of “the supernatural motives for mutual service which the biblical revelation evokes.”142

He writes this conscious of the “experience of Europe,” and the destructiveness of the ideologies of fascism and communism. These both

harnessed a constellation of ideals, values, images - enforced and policed by the state - to a vision of progress and realization of an ideal state. Newbigin directs his warning to India, conscious of the recent death of Nehru, a political leader who had exerted considerable influence in maintaining “a truly secular spirit in Indian politics.” And, finally Newbigin points to how the breaking down of the millennia old identification of a social order with the divine can, in the absence of faith in God, lead to an ironical attitude to the whole of life, “a self-destructive nihilism.” For Newbigin the process of

secularization contains within itself possibilities of great blessing, but only as long as it is set within the context of a humanity‟s relationship with, and accountability to, God.