Lesslie Newbigin Missionary Theologian: A Reader
by Paul Weston
SPCK 2006
A Fulcrum review by Jenny Taylor, Director of Lapido Media
Part of the secret of the power of Lesslie Newbigin's writing is in its consistency and coherence. His life and thought form a prophetic whole, not a series of ad hoc fragments. This is a superb and timely collection of extracts from the work of an illustrious missionary statesman who died in 1998. It reveals for us how the truth of a profound conversion experience unfolds in a life, rather than in the ambitious pursuit of a career.
The Revd Dr Paul Weston is tutor in mission studies and homiletics at Ridley Hall, Cambridge and Chair of the Management Council of the Gospel and Our Culture Network. He gained his PhD on the writings of Lesslie Newbigin at King's College, London. His judiciously chosen extracts, opening with a 1936 essay through to the posthumous 1998 contribution 'A Light to the Nations' in Faith and Power: Christianity and Islam in Secular Britain, traces a remarkable 60-year oeuvre.
What Newbigin saw and articulated with such brilliant clarity in his twenties is reiterated in differing circumstances for the rest of his life. It is fascinating, for example, to read an extract from The Household of God on church dis-unity, as it compromises the missionary witness of the church, just at the point when parochial issues of sexuality within the Anglican Communion is set further to disintegrate that body today. 'The disastrous error of the idea of federation is that it offers us reunion without repentance' he says, as if speaking into today's proposed solution to the ECUSA rebellion. And yet this was 1953, when Newbigin was reflecting on the World Council of Churches. The only rationale for such a body was if it were unified and missionary - and yet the International Missionary Council was a separate body. He went some way to remedying this situation as the first Assistant General Secretary of the WCC, responsible for mission. Mission without unity is a 'violent contradiction', he wrote.
Newbigin's early prophetic reminder to us that in the New Testament the whole earth, not just the churchy part of it, is God's oikumene, also stirs us today. His complete conviction that God's truth is knowable and do-able, in every single aspect of life, stem from a powerful understanding of the atonement as the pivotal event of history. He articulated this in 1936 while still at Cambridge: 'We must claim absoluteness and finality for Christ and his finished work...'tolerance' suggests leaving one another alone, and this is precisely what Christians cannot do' (p73). It was this belief that would not let him rest. Citing a slogan used by the WCC in 1936, he wrote in 1995: 'Let the Church be the Church; and therefore let it take proper responsibility for the civic community... This means addressing the question of power.' By this time he was 85, and nearly blind - yet calling Christians more urgently than ever to engage in public life and seek to influence a nation he felt would be lost by secular liberalism to Islam. This did not mean a return to Christendom, he believed, but a recovery of Christian conviction. Those who so often wrongly accuse him of nostalgia for the church's lost glory should get this book.
I have just three small cavils with an otherwise superb work of reference that provides wisdom and hope in our current inter-religious crisis. The use of the lazy expression 'increasingly secularized culture' in Weston's Preface (p viii) is a daily more redundant cliché as it in fact Islamises with increasing rapidity (there is never a religious vacuum as this loose phrase implies). And - a flaw in the editing - the failure to peg references in the introduction to the extracts that form the body of the text is disappointing. Clumsy footnoting eg 'Newbigin 1993d' and a lack of a user-friendly bibliography of the extracts cited make for incessant fumbling for the relevant text among other general works listed at the back of the book.
Dr Jenny Taylor is director of Lapido Media, a worldwide church media consultancy.
These posts are by guest authors for Fulcrum