Confessing the Kingship of Christ

As I continue to reread Lesslie Newbigin's Foolishness to the Greeks, I find myself essentially blogging through it. Page after page is full of rich missionary insight into my culture, the things that I don't naturally see because they are so familiar to my view. So on that path I will continue.

In his chapter on Christian engagement in politics, economics and culture, Newbigin writes:

"From the eighteenth century onward, Europe turned away from the Christian vision of man and his world, accepted a radically different vision for its public life, and relegated the Christian vision to the status of a permitted option for the private sector. But for the modern church to accept this status is to do exactly what the early church refused to do and what the Bible forbids us to do. It is, in effect, to deny the kingship of Christ over all of life - public and private. It is to deny that Christ is, simply and finally, the truth by which all other claims to truth are to be tested. It is to abandon its calling." (Foolishness to the Greeks p102)

What he points out is that Christianity in the West has, by and large, accepted the status of a permitted option for private belief for personal salvation. Newbigin points out elsewhere that:

"Such private religion flourished as vigorously in the world of the Eastern Mediterranean as it does in North America today. It was permitted by the imperial authorities for the same reason that its counterparts are permitted today: it did not challenge the political order" (ibid. p99)

This is where the rubber meets the road for economics and entrepreneurship. The claims of the gospel prevail on every element of public and private life, calling all people everywhere to order their lives around the One for whom all things. There is not a tidy world of business in which one can bracket his 'personal' beliefs in order to be a faithful employee or employer. To be a Christian means to believe and announce the rule of Jesus over everything, and to witness to that Reality in all aspects of life. That challenges the political and economic order, and is a genuine call to repentance.