Matthew Henry John Bartlett

Stanley Fish on retiring and his second and last poem

I’ve just finished Lesslie Newbigin’s Foolishness to the Greeks: The Gospel and Western Culture. Great book. A quote from the last chapter, in which he gives seven conditions upon which the recovery of the western church depends:

The sixth requirement I would suggest for a missionary encounter with our culture is simply the courage to hold and to proclaim a belief that cannot be proved to be true in terms of the axioms of our society. … The gospel is not a set of beliefs that arise, or could arise, from empirical observation of the whole human experience. It is the announcement of a name and a fact that offer the starting point for a new and life-long enterprise of understanding and coping with experience. It is a new starting point. To accept it means a new beginning, a radical conversion.