What has made Europe a distinct cultural and spiritual
entity is the fact that, for a thousand years, the barbarian tribes who had
found their home there were schooled in both the biblical story and the
learning of classical antiquity, the legacy of Greece and Rome. These tribes,
or at least their intellectual leaders, were taught to think in Greek and
Latin, but the story that shaped their thinking was the Bible. Therefore, from
the beginning of what we now call “Europe,” there was a tension between historical
and philosophical streams, one flowing from Greece and Rome and the other from
Israel.
The Jews, whose synagogues were in every major city, were
a people apart. One could admire their high moral standards and perhaps their
noble monotheism, but their religion was outside the main currents of
philosophical investigation.
Christianity presented itself to the classical world as a
development of this Jewish faith, but—unlike Judaism—it reached out in vigorous
propaganda among all sectors of the people. Its scriptures were also offered in
Greek, but more significantly, commentary and interpretation were available in
Greek, not the Aramaic of the emerging rabbinic tradition……
At the heart of the
Christian message was a new fact: God had acted—and let us remember that the
original meaning of “fact” is the Latin factum, “something done.” God had acted
in a way that, if believed, must henceforth determine all our ways of thinking.
It could not merely fit into existing ways of understanding the world without
fundamentally changing them.
--- Lesslie Newbigin, Proper Confidence: Faith, Doubt,
and Certainty in Christian Discipleship. 1995
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