I found this article by Bishop Newbigin, which is the opening chapter to "Lausanne Occasional Paper 27" (1996) here. It gives an interesting overview or summary of the context of modernity (the age of reason) and post-modenity. It also touches on Christian and Islamic engagement with 'reason.'
Chapter 1
MODERNITY IN CONTEXT
by Lesslie Newbigin
In the following chapter, [On web-page] Bishop John Reid has drawn together some of the main insights of the conference on ‘Faith and Modernity’ convened by the Lausanne Committee for World Evangelisation in Uppsala, Sweden in the Summer of 1994. The full report of the papers given at that meeting deserves wide circulation and study, and I hope that the present work will lead readers to study the full report. As one of the participants said, ‘Modernity is perhaps the most serious challenge which Christianity has so far faced in its two thousand year history and it is urgently necessary that we understand it and how to respond to it’.
Perhaps the best way to say what we mean by the word ‘modernity’ and to identify its characteristic features is to look at it from the point of view of those societies for whom ‘modernisation’ is the contemporary programme. All over Africa, Asia and the Islands of the Pacific there are societies seeking to achieve ‘modernisation’, which is the replacement of traditional ways of thinking and of organising economic and political life by the ways developed in Western Europe and North America during the past two or three centuries.
And it is also easy to see that Christian missionaries, by introducing western styles of education, medical care, agriculture and industry, have been among the main agents of world-wide modernisation. Modernity, in other words, is not an enemy that has attacked Christendom from without; it is a development within Christendom which we have exported to the rest of the world. If, as we must, we now recognise it as an enemy, we must search our own history to find out where we took a wrong turn. It also means that Christians of the western world have a special responsibility in this regard.
It is common among students of the history of ideas to date the rise of modernity from that century which called itself the ‘Age of Reason’. (1) Here ‘reason’ was invoked as a contrast to ‘tradition’ and ‘revelation’. To understand the power of this appeal to ‘reason’, one must remember two things. One is the memory of the religious wars of the 17th century. For most of that century Europe had been soaked in the blood of Christians fighting each other in the name of divine revelation understood through different traditions. There was a deep revulsion from the fanaticism and intolerance of those who claimed to be representing God. The other new fact was the birth and development of the new science and of what seemed to be a more reliable avenue to truth than those offered by the warring factions of Christianity.
