Marvin describes and interesting-sounding book comparing the situation of Christianity in contemporary Africa to the young Christian movement in the ancient world. One issue both face(d) is deciding which aspects or elements to preserve of the religious outlook that preceded Christianity. Christians in the ancient world divided between those, like Tertullian, who drew a bright line between Christianity and pagan wisdom, and those, like Justin Martyr, who sought to preserve and transfigure the truths of pagan religion and philosophy. Likewise, the church in Africa faces a similar debate with respect to its pre-Christian indigenous traditions.
Marvin sides with the modern-day Justin Martyrs and Origens:
If all things are held together by the Word, as the scripture says, then there are echoes of the Word in every time, place and ideology. If in fact God has revealed his will to us for the purpose of gathering all things unto Christ, then a move like Justin’s and [Kwame] Bediako’s seems not just warranted but mandatory. Obviously we must test the spirits and not be led astray by what is false, but we can also test in the confidence that something valuable will precipitate.
In short, there is no Christianity, no theology, and no line of interpretation that is pure and unsullied by the accretions of time or the infestations of alien ideologies. The Incarnation and the Lordship of Christ over all creation simply demand an admixture of Christ and culture.
He says this has implications for us in the “post-Christian” west (or north) too:
Origen didn’t fear building with Greek philosophy, and neither should we fear building with anew with the brick and mortar of liberalism.
What’s different about our situation, though, is that we’re living in a society that has been (to some extent) penetrated and shaped by the Christian message. Indeed, liberalism can’t be understood (or so I’d argue) apart from European Christianity. Some of its key elements are (often barely) secularized imports from Christianity: the freedom and dignity of the person, an emphasis on the limited and fragmentary nature of human knowledge, and a recognition of irreducible pluralism in society.
And yet, as critics have pointed out, liberalism has some significant flaws. I’d say this can be summed up as liberalism’s apparent inability to provide a check or limitation on human appetite and self-will (whether individual or collective) due to a tendency toward relativism about the good that sees human desire as the final arbiter of right and wrong.
“Reductive” liberalism denies that there is any good for humans as such, beyond what they prefer. Fundamentalisms of various sorts uphold an overly specified and dogmatic vision of the good that ignores the valuable contributions of liberal thought. What we need instead is a vision of a shared good that is objective and independent of the human will, but is also freely chosen. What the church should want is a space of civil freedom in which to preach and live the gospel, providing such a vision of human flourishing that, if true, ought to be inherently attractive to people.
A church that witnesses for the good, while being open to insights from contemporary culture, science, and other religions, is necessary in a society that seeks to provide its members with the maximum amount of freedom. Just as the nascent church learned from Hellenistic philosophy and Stoic ethics, the postmodern church can learn to permanently put aside dreams for a “pure” community–a dream based ultimately on fear–and joyously offer to share what it has received from its Lord.
A Thinking Reed 