What is the real truth about the world?

"We have come again, from another angle, to the cleavage running through our culture between the private and the public worlds, a public world interpreted in terms of efficient causes and a private world in which purpose and therefore value judgments still have a place. I have affirmed that we cannot accept the situation in which Christian faith is admitted as no more than a possible option for the private sector. We cannot settle for a peaceful coexistence between science and religion on the basis of an allocation of there spheres of influence to the public and private sectors respectively. We cannot forever live our lives in two different worlds. We cannot forever postpone this question: What is the real truth about the world?" (Foolishness to the Greeks p79)

I feel precisely what Newbigin is saying here, having been raised with this "two different worlds" mentality. As an employee, when I shared the gospel with co-workers, I was told that matters of belief are personal and do not belong at work. When I was a teacher, I was told that religion had no place in school, because it was a matter of faith and conviction. And so I, like many others in my generation, have lived a schizophrenic life, postponing the question, What is the real truth about the world?

Now I am in a unique place as an entrepreneur. I don't have organizational forces telling me that I am not permitted to say certain things; yet I feel very deeply our cultural taboo against the truth of the gospel. Certainly it is a permitted opinion, but it is not admitted in any sense as truth. Science is what we consider sacred, and must not be defiled by religion, which is scientific blasphemy.

So my challenge is to do precisely what Newbigin calls for: "instead of trying to explain the gospel in terms of our modern scientific culture . . . to explain our culture in terms of the gospel." To accept the division between public and private, fact and faith, is to surrender the field - and to fail to confess Jesus as Lord of all. I am not claiming to have figured out how to do it, but I know it is what I must do. I must press the question with those we engage through tumblon: What is the real truth about the world?