Proper Confidence by Lesslie Newbigin

DG had a book he wanted me to read by Newbigin. It is called the Gospel in a Pluralistic Society Well since I am very reticent to buy another book I checked the Rice Library and the Houston Public Library and could not find it available. I do not have enough influence at Rice to get the book on an interlibrary loan. I need to check to see if I can get them to buy as one of their acquisitions.

Well anyway I decided to get another book that the Rice library did have. It was the one he wrote just before the one DG recommended. It is obviously not on a related subject at all. But it is great.

He starts off with a short history of how thought developed in Europe from the time of Christ until at least the enlightenment. I have only read snippets of Locke and Hume and Bacon. I get my understanding second hand, like in this book.

One thing that was interesting was that Thomas Aquinas wrote his works that became "Thomism" in reaction to some great Muslim theologians Avicenna (980-1032) and Averroes (1126-1198). They lived in Moorish Spain, I think. At that time Moslems were advancing civilization greatly. It was after all from them that we got our numbering system, commonly called Arabic numerals. There was actually a time when people tried to add and subtract and multiply using Roman numerals. Can you imagine? There are attempts at algorithms for doing this. The introduction of Arabic numerals greatly advanced mathematics and science, first in the Moslem world and then in Christian Europe. These Muslim philosophers were introducing rationalism. It seems their ideas were later repudiated and now seem foreign to many Muslim cultures.

Thomas worked out how to combine Western Christianity with rationalism. His greatest work was Summa contra Gentiles. That's right, Aquinas set out to prove that God existed. We can know by reason alone. He also claimed that when science and revelation clashed the revelation must be the truth. The knowledge of God (theology) was higher than philosophy.

But an unintended consequence was that what we can know is separated from what we believe on faith.

Thomas felt that God could be proved and over the centuries people did attempt to do that. But finally it was concluded that God could not be proven. That led to doubts. By the 1600's skepticism was dominant in the intellectual life of western Europe (p. 19). This is what brought Rene Decartes' thesis summarized as "I think, therefore I am." Decartes tried to empty the field start from nothing and see what was certain. Decartes is referred through often in this book.

I am covering some of what is in this book. I love his quick summarizing intellectual developments in Europe especially as he shows how one movement is a reaction to the last one.

Perhaps Newbigin's main purpose in writing this book is to show how we got to this postmodern state we are in now. I still have not read the concluding two chapters but it is clear he is not happy with this postmodern state. He has already included several critiques and I think the last two chapters will put that all together with positive suggestions.

I am trying to do his ideas justice but sometimes I am not sure I totally get his meaning.