Newbigin

I just finished reading Lesslie Newbigin's 'The Gospel in a Pluralist Society.' It is a book I should have read back in college: an excellent discussion of pluralism, as well as the related epistimology.

Newbigin looks at pluralism's roots in the secular Western worldview, with its characteristic division of knowledge into fact and belief. "Facts" are explained through empirical science and philosophy, and everyone is expected to agree on them; there is no room for differing opinions. "Belief," on the other hand, is private matter of personal choice. Religions are tolerated and all equally valid, as long as they are confined to the belief category. So pluralism is limited these beliefs and values, any attempt to challenge the reigning secular worldview in the realm of facts is an attempt to "impose values." (Though tolerated, religions are understood as a sociological phenomena -- which are relevant when talking about human values and superstitions, but irrelevant otherwise.)

This approach fails to see that religions are entire worldviews, or 'plausibility structures' (patterns of belief that determine what is deemed plausible or reasonable within a society). As such, they deal with all knowledge, and they do not make the have same fact/belief divide as the dominent secular worldview. These worldviews are embodied in languages, which are only partially translateable. We have a vast array of religious books available in English, allowing us to get a superficial understanding of other religions, and a "illusion of having an overview of all these different traditions without having had the actual experience of seeing the world through any of them" (p. 57).

In the first few chapters, Newbigin deals compares the ways of knowing and thinking in secular worldview vs. Christian worldviews. Belief is often set against reason: science and philosophy is built on reason, while religion is a matter of belief. But really, each worldview is a tradition of reasoning; a person learning the tradition accepts the theory 'in faith,' until he has enough of the pieces together to be able to think through that tradition. This tradition forms the basis for reasoning and dealing with experience. Comparing the secular and Christian worldviews:

The difference between these two traditions is not that one relies on reason and the other on revelation. Both are inconceivable apart from their rationality. The difference lies at the point of contrast between the two ways of expressing the original experience: "I have discovered" and "God has spoken." (p. 60)

In the Christian tradition, reason is employed not by an autonomous or sovereign individual, but in relation to others and God, as part of His ongoing story.