This year was the twenty-fifth anniversary of Lesslie Newbigin’s death. At the time, I completely forgot about it because I was focused on various health concerns. I had the privilege of
working with Lesslie during the last few years of his life and wrote this piece about him shortly after his death.
Mission
to Western Culture: the Contribution of Lesslie Newbigin
Introduction
In
the Great Commission, Jesus commanded the apostles and, by implication, the
entire Christian Church to ‘go and make disciples of all nations’ (Matthew
28.19). Contrary to modern individualistic readings, this is a clear call to
disciple the nations rather than isolated individuals within them. Thus the
Church has traditionally been concerned not only with calling individuals to
salvation but also entire cultures to walk in the ways of God. Of course,
Christians have interpreted this in many different ways. For some it has meant
a rejection of a secular culture in favour of a Christian alternative: ‘What
hath Athens to do with Jerusalem?’ Others have used it unthinkingly to baptize
entire cultures: ‘Of course this is a Christian culture! Just look at how many
of its members are Christians!’ Between these extremes, Christian missionaries
and theologians have conceived a range of ways in which the gracious judgement
of the gospel can bring transformation to human cultures.
Our
own century has seen great changes in the relationship between the Christian
faith and human cultures worldwide. In 1900 many Europeans still identified
Christianity with European civilization and regarded Christian mission as
another device for furthering imperialistic foreign policies. If we go by sheer
numbers of believers, Christianity today is predominantly a phenomenon of the
southern hemisphere (particularly Sub-Saharan Africa and South America).
Although Western Christians still exert a disproportionate influence upon
global Christianity because of their material wealth, the emphasis in world
mission is beginning to shift. For example, Christian missionaries from the
two-thirds world are now injecting new spiritual vigour into British
congregations. Instead of assuming that Western culture (the public culture of Europe
and North America) is loosely Christian, there is increasing recognition that
we live in a post-Christian era. The question of how we should be relating the
gospel to this culture, of mission to Western culture, is now firmly on the
agenda of Western churches.
One
man who lived through many of these changes in mission strategy and who did
much to put the question of mission to Western culture back on the churches’
agenda was Bishop Lesslie Newbigin. He was born in the North of England in
1909, the son of a devout Christian businessman. Having abandoned the Christian
assumptions of his parents as a teenager, he went to Cambridge University in
1928 to read geography and economics. During his first year as an undergraduate
he drifted back towards Christianity under the influence of friends in the
Student Christian Movement. That drift culminated in a dramatic conversion
experience while working with a Quaker service programme in South Wales. He
found himself unable to cope with despair of the unemployed men among whom he
was working. In his own words,
As
I lay awake a vision came to my mind . . . It was a vision of the cross, but it
was the cross spanning the space between heaven and earth, between ideals and
present realities, and with arms that embraced the whole world. I saw it as
something which reached down to the most hopeless and sordid of human misery
and yet promised life and victory. I was sure that night, in a way I had never
been before, that this was the clue that I must follow if I were to make any
kind of sense of the world. From that moment I would always know how to take
bearings when I was lost. I would know where to begin again when I had come to
the end of all my own resources of understanding or courage. (UnfinishedAgenda, p. 11f.)
This
did not have any immediate repercussions on his sense of vocation. He still
believed that he would follow in his father’s footsteps, applying Christian
principles in the world of commerce. However, God had other plans – a clear
call to ordination and the mission field. Lesslie left England in 1936 with his
wife Helen bound for India as a Presbyterian missionary.
India:
Christian Unity in a Culture of Diversity
His
missionary service in India reflects one of his major concerns. Since his
student days the scandal of Christian disunity had disturbed him. This had
nothing to do with a desire for a centralized church bureaucracy to make global
Christianity more efficient or present a united front to a secular world.
Rather it was a sense of outrage that men and women who share in the saving
death and resurrection of our Lord should be unable to pray together, share the
sacraments or even cooperate in mission.
That
sense of outrage enabled him to become a moving force behind the creation of
the Church of South India (a union of Congregationalist, Episcopalian,
Methodist and Presbyterian churches) in 1947. One unexpected (and, for a Presbyterian,
ironical) outcome of that union was his subsequent consecration as Bishop of
Madurai.
His
involvement in that very successful union of churches opened the way for him to
work towards Christian unity on a larger scale. From 1959 to 1961 he was
General Secretary of the International Missionary Council during which time he
oversaw its integration into the World Council of Churches. He then served with
the WCC for three years before returning to India to become Bishop of Madras.
‘Retirement’
and Mission to Western Culture
In
a sense, the story of Lesslie’s contribution to the question of mission to
Western culture really began with his retirement in 1974. His return to England
brought him face to face with a culture in despair. He often contrasted the
pervasive optimism of people in the slums of Madras with the nihilism he
experienced on his return.
To
make matters worse, he found a Church still geared largely to the pastoral care
of a predominantly Christian society. It seemed quite unable to cope with the
missionary demands of the new situation. Many Christians seemed unable even to
put into words what the gospel might be for our own culture. He often spoke of
being horrified by the timidity of the Church in the West – its doubts about
the meaning and truth of the gospel, the way it had lost sight of the
centrality of mission (or even rejected it as theological racism) and, above
all, its passive acceptance of many assumptions of secular society.
Having
been a missionary for four decades, he brought a missionary’s eye to the
situation. Clearly, he had returned to a pagan culture. The pressing question
was how could he be a missionary for Christ in this culture? More important,
how could the Church become again a missionary force in this culture? The Selly
Oak Colleges in Birmingham gave him the chance to begin working out his
response by appointing him to teach the theology of mission.
An
opportunity to share some of his ideas with a wider audience came when he was
elected Moderator of the United Reformed Church for 1978–79. A recurring theme
of his year as Moderator was ‘I am not ashamed of the Gospel’ (Romans 1.16).
Then in 1982 a committee of the British Council of Churches invited him to join
them in planning a conference on the relationship between the gospel and modern
culture.
Had
the conference organizers known in advance what effect he would have on their
plans they might not have invited him to take part! He was so unhappy about the
proposed agenda that he suggested the postponement of the conference to allow
for a more careful consideration of the underlying issues. The committee
countered by inviting him to write a short book to initiate the study process.
This was subsequently published as The Other Side of 1984: Questions for the Churches,
and the conference was postponed for eight years. That deceptively simple
little book evoked an international response. It challenged Christians in many
countries to take a critical look at modernity from the perspective of the
Christian gospel. Today there are thriving networks in Europe, North America
and Australasia tackling the issues he raised.
A
Culture Divided
Lesslie’s
analysis of Western culture was broadly historical. He traced many of its
distinguishing features back to the European Enlightenment of the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries. This was, largely, a reaction against the religious wars
that ravaged Europe in the wake of the Reformation. For the generations
immediately following, those wars were a clear sign of the failure of public
religion. If religion could not provide an adequate foundation for public life,
what could? The intellectual leaders of the Enlightenment thought they had
found a more satisfactory basis in human reason and the scientific method.
This, they believed, could sweep away the old superstitions that kept humankind
imprisoned within authoritarian religious and political structures. The
unfettered application of reason would lead inevitably to an ideal human
society – a purely secular version of the kingdom of heaven.
Perhaps
the most striking effect of this elevation of reason (and one that Lesslie
stressed in his analyses) is the split it creates between a public sphere and a
private one. We simply take for granted the division between a public world
(the world of work, of politics and economics, of science, of truth and reason)
and a private world (the world of leisure, of family life and personal
relationships, of morality and religion, of opinion and superstition). Yet it
is a distinction with few parallels in other cultures.
This
basic division has had all kinds of implications. The association of science
and reason with the public sphere is an important basis for the tremendous
material progress that has taken place in Western culture over the past two
centuries. However, this progress has had its price – the privatization of all
that humanizes us and a corresponding atrophying of the human spirit. Small
wonder that the majority view among late twentieth-century intellectuals is
some form of nihilism.
The
Gospel and the Church
Lesslie’s
challenge to Christians to look at their culture from the perspective of the
gospel often met with the retort, ‘But what is the gospel?’
His
answer to this question was deceptively simple. The Christian gospel, the good
news, is quite simply the story of Jesus Christ – an itinerant Jewish teacher
and miracle worker whose death and resurrection reveal him to be the Son of God
and set us free from our bondage to sin. Accordingly, for Lesslie, the basis of
Christian mission was ‘Friendship – sharing the Good News with neighbours.’
However,
the good news cannot be merely personal truth; it cannot be merely true for me.
Lesslie insisted that it is public truth, i.e. either the events in this story
happened or they did not happen. If they did not happen – if Jesus did not rise
from the dead – then Christianity is a delusion. If they did happen, then God
is real and has manifested himself at a particular time and in a particular
culture. Thus, the story of Jesus is the key to human history as well as
personal existence. God’s judgement and grace as revealed in the cross and
resurrection are not to be limited to our private lives but apply to the whole
of human existence.
Yet
‘how can they believe in the one of whom they have not heard? And how can they
hear without someone preaching to them? And how can they preach unless they are
sent?’ (Romans 10.14f.). To be effective as judgement and grace, we must
faithfully retell the gospel in meaningful ways.
The
church is an immediate implication of this need for communication. It is what
we have made of the gospel in the process of retelling it. This is not to
suggest that it is merely an optional human response to the gospel. On the
contrary, the church is rooted in the fact that Jesus called into being a body
of disciples to bear witness to the gospel – to proclaim the good news in terms
that their hearers could understand, and to interpret that proclamation through
their own lives. The biblical model for evangelism and mission is a human
community, not a loose network of isolated evangelistic entrepreneurs.
Lesslie’s
insistence on the importance of the local church for the communication of the
gospel was not merely a theoretical stance. Rather than allow his denomination
to close an ailing church in a run-down part of Birmingham, he volunteered to
become its pastor at an age when most of us would be looking forward to a
well-earned retirement. This experience of inner-city ministry is what grounded
much of his thinking about mission to Western culture. His comments about the
experience are striking:
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. (Unfinished Agenda, p. 235)
Lesslie’s stress on the Church as an implication of the
gospel was one reason for his lifelong insistence on the importance of
Christian unity. If we reject the popular view that religion is essentially a
matter of private opinion, the divisions between Christians become a very
serious matter. Because we have divided the body of Christ, we have confused
the gospel of Christ. We deny Christ when we refuse to have fellowship with men
and women whose lives have been altered by the gospel.
Of
course, this does not mean that we should be uncritical of each other. On the
contrary, the lordship of Christ is the basis for a vigorous criticism of
teaching or behaviour that departs from the standards of the gospel. However,
we criticize them as brothers and sisters. Similarly, we must listen seriously
to their criticisms of us. Lesslie sometimes pointed to the example of Paul’s
relationship with the Corinthian church as a model of this approach. There is
room for the sharpest possible theological and ethical criticism within the
wider context of unity in Christ. Whatever one’s views of the World Council of
Churches – and Lesslie frequently voiced his disappointment at its abandonment
of its original missionary emphasis – one is not absolved from the obligation
to pray and work for the unity of the people of Christ.
Crossing
the Divide
Recognizing
that the gospel is public truth implies a recognition that Christian mission is
more than personal evangelism. Sharing our faith with our family, friends and
colleagues is an essential part of mission. However, beyond this we are called
to interpret the gospel by living responsibly as Christians within the wider
culture. At one level, this means allowing our Christian beliefs to govern our
political actions and business decisions.
At
another level, it requires us to debate the basic practices and assumptions of
our culture from the perspective of the gospel. Every human culture contains
elements that are contrary to the good news of Jesus Christ and which we must
therefore challenge. For the early Church, the pervasive idolatry of the Roman
Empire was such an element and their response varied from a refusal to eat meat
to a refusal to serve in the army. Lesslie used to cite the caste system and
the practice of widow burning as examples from India. Contemporary Western
examples might be our materialism and conspicuous consumption.
However,
if the gospel requires us to challenge aspects of the culture in which we live,
we also have a duty to affirm those aspects of the culture that are consistent
with the gospel. Lesslie highlighted various aspects of our own public culture
that we can and should affirm in this way.
A
fundamental feature of the Enlightenment that left a lasting mark on Western
culture was its belief in the rationality of the universe. Similarly, the
Christian doctrine of creation affirms that the universe is rational and
orderly. Thus the gospel offers a basis for a continued commitment to science
and technology that is lacking in the wider culture – as witness the emergence
of a new irrationalism with the New Age.
The
Enlightenment also put great emphasis on respect for human life. This was
usually expressed in terms of the inalienable human rights of every individual.
Erosion of that respect has in recent decades led to the increasing acceptance
of abortion and euthanasia. Again the gospel, with its emphasis on the value of
human life, gives us a basis for affirming this aspect of Enlightenment
culture.
A
third area highlighted by Lesslie is the Enlightenment’s rejection of the
territorial principle. This principle, which Christendom had inherited from
Imperial Rome, asserted the divine right of monarchs, i.e. it gave religious
legitimization to political absolutism. The Enlightenment proposed a new basis
for political authority – the will of the people rather than the will of God.
The US Constitution was the first fruit of this new basis and with the birth of
the United States came the emergence of modern liberal democracy. By ending the
fusion of Christianity and the state, it enabled us to recognize that being a
Christian is a matter of personal commitment to Jesus Christ rather than
citizenship of a Christian country. However, he also warned that it is
ultimately only within a Christian context that a stable relationship between
human rights and the will of the people can be maintained. Unless those rights
are based upon our being made in the divine image and unless the lordship of
Christ ultimately takes priority over the will of the people, democracy lapses
into the tyranny of the majority. Without Christ, the American political
experiment is more likely to end in anarchy or dictatorship than democracy.
Christians
are called not merely to affirm the status quo nor to take the easy option of
rejecting wider society in favour of a Christian ghetto. Rather we are called,
as individuals and church communities, to be salt and light at every level in a
complex pluralistic society. Salt enhances flavours as well as acting as a
preservative. Light shows off the good as well as showing up the bad.
Some
critics have accused Lesslie of calling for a return to medieval Christendom or
advocating a social gospel. However, this dual stance of challenge and
affirmation is not about creating the kingdom of God by our own unaided
efforts. On the contrary, it is about bearing witness to God’s sovereignty.
Recalling a former clarion call of the ecumenical movement – ‘let the Church be
the Church!’ – Lesslie summarized his own position by adding ‘Yes, and
therefore let it be the faithful and confident witness to God’s rightful rule
over the world!’
Lesslie
Newbigin: A Personal Sketch
The
thing that struck me most forcefully about Lesslie when I first began to work
with him was his tremendous energy. In the years following his ‘retirement’, he
was successively a lecturer in missiology, pastor of an inner-city church,
moderator of his denomination, and the inspiration for an international
movement whose aim is nothing less than a radical revitalization of mission to
Western culture. On top of all that, he maintained a busy schedule of national
and international speaking engagements and wrote prolifically on missiology.
Many
people (including many Christians) who achieve positions of prominence or
influence are only too conscious of their own importance – not so, Lesslie. For
me he epitomized intellectual humility. He was always very open about the
dependence of his ideas on others, always willing to listen seriously to
criticism, always ready to encourage younger men and women who were struggling
with aspects of the relationship between the gospel and our culture.
A
less obvious personal characteristic – but one that became clear as one got to
know him – was his gentle sense of humour. At times this could be slightly
self-deprecating, e.g. when he commented that old ecumenists are only really at
home in airport departure lounges. Or he could be gently ironical. However, his
favourite form of humour was the limerick; he admitted that he used to relieve
the boredom of ecclesiastical committee meetings by writing limericks about his
colleagues.
The
energy, humility, and sense of humour together serve to obscure another
important characteristic, namely, his courage. His autobiography gives scant
mention to an accident during his first term in India. That accident led to ten
operations on his leg, the very real prospect of amputation, and more than a
year spent on crutches. When I knew him, half a century later, he was still
suffering the after-effects. However, he could say ‘God did indeed turn that
accident into a source of manifold blessing for which I cannot cease to give
thanks’ (Unfinished Agenda, p. 44). Towards the end of his life, he also had to
cope with failing eyesight. I think many of those who read his final works
would be surprised to discover that by the time he wrote them he was no longer
able to read. His humour and his courage come together in a typical remark: ‘You
don’t have to be able to see to use a typewriter!’
