Lesslie Newbigin: An Enduring Voice
The word missionary, like others, summons a mental snapshot when it’s heard. It is a smiling family on a glossy prayer card. It is a Christian college graduate with ideals about changing the world. It’s someone at a church convention who looks like us, but wears foreign attire. These images (and perhaps more) reflect our personal experience more than anything.
Our recent emphasis month on the Forum addressed such themes. But something we don’t often associate with missionaries is scholarship, or the life of the mind. This is the stuff of academics, professors, and publishing. Missions is the stuff of sweat, travel, and coping with slow progress in an indigenous culture. However, Lesslie Newbigin complicates these stereotypes.
James Edward Lesslie Newbigin (1909-1998) was perhaps the most distinguished British missionary of the twentieth century. Although he was originally ordained to minister within the Church of Scotland, Newbigin became a leader and pioneer of ecumenical ministry in India. Despite the fruitful avenues biographers have explored, I would like to offer some biographical reflections, including an appreciative appraisal of his accomplishments as a theologian, philosopher, and cultural commentator.
Mission to the East: Ecumenical Pastor and Evangelist
I first became acquainted with Newbigin’s life and work during my time as a theological student at Duke Divinity School. Although I’m confident I encountered his contributions earlier in my education, it was there that Newbigin’s legacy was a source of ongoing consideration and engagement.
Born in Northhumberland, Newbigin spent most of his early years away in boarding school. Though his Christianity was nascent, he notes in his biography: “In the matter of religious belief, I had, by the end of schooldays, abandoned the Christian assumptions of my home and childhood” [1].
However, it was during his university education at Cambridge that he became involved with the Student Christian Movement (SCM). In those days he had two different spiritual experiences of awakening that led him to a decisive Christian commitment. His time of theological study at Cambridge’s Westminster College was also a pivotal experience that shaped his understanding of the faith. At Westminster, he had begun as a “typical liberal.” Yet he ended it with “a strong conviction about ‘the finished work of Christ’, about the centrality and objectivity of the atonement accomplished on Calvary” [2].
Newbigin and his wife Helen left for India in 1936, just one year after Free Will Baptist missionary Laura Belle Barnard set sail for the same region. For decades they and their children ministered in India, “bringing together the Congregational, Presbyterian, Reformed, Episcopal, Methodist, Baptist, and Pentecostal churches from India, Pakistan, and Burma into one ecumenical denomination: the Church of South India” [3].
For Newbigin, ecumenism was not simply a useful arrangement, nor did it result from a conviction-free doctrine of the church. Rather, Newbigin understood cooperative, ecumenical ministry as a logical outcome of the Gospel. The Good News summoned all who professed Jesus Christ as Lord to display a visible unity. As Newbigin explains, “[F]rom the beginning of my discipleship the SCM taught me to see unity and mission as two sides of a single commitment” [4].
For twenty-seven years Newbigin served as a Bishop in the Church of South India. These years were not free from hardship, as his autobiography describes. However, Newbigin’s later years back in Britain yielded intellectual fruit that has provoked extensive dialogue among Christians today.
Mission to the West: Author, Theologian, Philosopher
Upon returning to England, Newbigin was gradually unsettled as he discovered that the Western society that had sent him to India was as spiritually dark as the East. He describes his discovery this way:
As time went on, I began to receive invitations to take part in conferences of ministers and lay people. I began to feel very uncomfortable with much that I heard. There seemed to be so much timidity in commending the Gospel to the unconverted people of Britain. There were two aspects of this. One was the feeling that ‘the modern scientific world-view’ had made it impossible to believe much of traditional Christian teaching . . . the other and newer aspect of the problem was the result of the presence of substantial numbers of Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims in the big cities. The fact that the world contains large numbers of people who follow these religions had not, apparently, made any impact on the minds of good church people who had been supporting foreign missions since childhood . . . The Gospel was all right for white Europeans, but it was an improper intrusion into the lives of Asians [5].
At the time of the first edition of his autobiography (1985), he was a part-time pastor. He further explains his dismay:
On 2 January 1980 I was duly installed and since then I have been struggling to fulfil [sic] the obligations of this ministry. It is much harder than anything I met in India. There is a cold contempt for the Gospel which is harder to face than opposition . . . I have been forced to recognize that the most difficult missionary frontier in the contemporary world is the one of which the Churches have been—on the whole—so little conscious, the frontier that divides the world of biblical faith from the world whose values and beliefs are ceaselessly fed into every home on the television screen . . . If God is driven out, the gods come trooping in. England is a pagan society and the development of a truly missionary encounter with this very tough form of paganism is the greatest intellectual and practical task facing the church [6].
During this time Newbigin was also invited to lecture in a number of settings. Most of his books grew out of his lectures and observations about the religious climate of the West. Foolishness to the Greeks (1986) and The Gospel in a Pluralist Society (1989) are among the titles still widely-read today. For conservative evangelicals, Newbigin is similar to Francis Schaeffer in that his education and ministry outside of contexts dominated by the Judeo-Christian heritage gave his lectures and books a prophetic pathos. He was well-equipped to perceive the shifting ground beneath the church, as well as the tremors ahead.
Part of Newbigin’s genius was his ability to make sense of ideas, their consequences, and antecedents. In several of his books he narrates the story of Western thought and situates Christian mission within that philosophical and cultural context. It’s his proficiency at this that shows he was more than a bright missionary acquainted with jargon. He was one who shaped a generation of ministers to have discerning eyes. This is why one author refers to Newbigin as a “missionary theologian.” Another biography is subtitled “a theological life.” Newbigin’s entire ministry as a pastor, evangelist, teacher, and author was shaped by a particular understanding of the Gospel and its theological ramifications, which is why he has an enduring influence.
Final Reflections
Some confessional Christians may dismiss Newbigin due to his ecumenism—though Baptists will perhaps be more unnerved by him being Bishop Lesslie Newbigin (of course, Athanasius, Augustine, and Aquinas were bishops, too!).
On the first count, Newbigin was perhaps too optimistic about how commitment to the Gospel required a specific expression of organizational unity in the visible church—expressions which inevitably varied when the Bible was studied carefully and led people to different convictions beyond the fundamentals. Yet he never altered his plea for unity:
There can be for me no escape from the conviction that the essential contribution of the Church to peace and justice in the world is a fellowship which actually realizes (even if only in foretaste) that peace and justice which Christ has won for all peoples in his atoning death and resurrection [7].
Nevertheless, if one isn’t convinced by his ecumenism, at least his administrative decisions do provide examples for church leaders today. After all, he said “no” to many opportunities for influential leadership roles, often opting for ministries oriented more around teaching, preaching, and evangelism.
Above all, Newbigin understood that Christian mission is not exclusively an overseas endeavor, but a native calling. After having served in a country dominated by Hinduism and all manner of spiritual darkness, he returned to Britain and confronted the same spiritual darkness. He did not see historic institutions and familiar traditions as symbols of spiritual strength and vitality, but signposts of a quickly-fading Christian memory to be understood and challenged.
As Christians in the West are increasingly confronted with the data that shows the emergence of faith in the global south, Newbigin’s missiology and cultural commentary is one of several tools available to help the Western church understand such trends and respond accordingly. The church must proclaim the “public truth of the Gospel” without shame [8]. This begins with it envisioning itself as a missionary people—a missionary people with a mind for God.
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[1] Lesslie Newbigin, Unfinished Agenda: An Autobiography (London: SPCK, 1985), 5. Though his biography would be later updated in 1993, these and other quotations come from the earlier edition.
[2] Ibid., 30.
[3] Krish, Kandiah, “The Missionary Who Wouldn’t Retire,” accessible at http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2010/january/1.44.html.
[4] Newbigin, 251.
[5] Ibid., 243-244.
[6] Ibid., 249.
[7] Ibid., 253.
[8] By clicking on the hyperlink in the prior sentence, one can access a fascinating lecture given by an elderly Newbigin available in audio/mp3 format through the Beeson Divinity School podcast. The lecture is entitled, “The Gospel as Public Truth.”
Recommended Works:
The Household of God (1953)
The Open Secret (1978)
Foolishness to the Greeks (1986)
The Gospel in Pluralist Society (1989)
Truth to Tell (1991)
Proper Confidence (1995)
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