INTRODUCTION
INTRODUCTION
PAUL WESTON
I remember very well my first meeting with Lesslie Newbigin in the 1990s when he was already in his mid-eighties. I had returned home from an initial conversation with Professor Andrew Walker at King’s College London about the possibility of doing a PhD on Newbigin’s work, and he’d suggested that one of the first things I did was to ring the great man. This seemed a rather obvious, but daunting thing to do. But I dutifully looked up ‘Newbigin’ in the London phone book, and found ‘Newbigin, Lesslie’. Must be him, I thought. Not many people spell ‘Lesslie’ with two ‘s’s, as he did. I found myself ringing the number, and then suddenly began to wonder what I was going to say, should he answer. He did answer, and so I said: ‘I’m working on something for a PhD that might interest you.’ ‘Oh yes,’ he replied, ‘What is it?’ ‘You!’ I said, rather too emphatically on reflection. His initial response was one of surprise, but then he added in a friendly self-deprecating tone, ‘Well, I suppose I have been known to have a passing interest in myself. You’d better come and see me. What are you doing tomorrow?’ ‘Nothing,’ I said hastily, not wanting to pass up such an opportunity. And so I spent the best part of the following day with him, talking over my project, and starting to get to know a man whom I always found to be generous with his time and still razor-sharp in his thinking. So began a personal ‘conversation’ with Newbigin which has continued in one form or another ever since, and which has helped to shape my thinking about apologetics, evangelism, and the place of theology in public life.
Around this time, Lesslie Newbigin was regularly invited by Holy Trinity Brompton to share his insights and his passion for theology and mission, and this book is the combination of two sets of talks that he gave at the HTB School of Theology between 1994 and 1995. Originally these were published as two separate books (Discovering Truth in a Changing World and Living Hope in a Changing World), but I have rearranged the various chapters in order to make them into one coherent whole. In this new combined volume, you will find the full array of Newbigin’s characteristic concerns, expressed in his usual clear, direct and accessible language, but in words that repay attentiveness and serious reflection on the part of the reader.
So, to introduce Lesslie Newbigin to those perhaps unfamiliar with him, there follows a brief biography of him, an introduction to some of the central themes of his writings, and some highlights to look out for as you read through this book.
BIOGRAPHY IN BRIEF
When Lesslie Newbigin died in 1998, his obituary in The Times described him as ‘one of the foremost missionary statesmen of his generation’, and ‘one of the outstanding figures on the world Christian stage in the second half of the century’. Most people in Britain who have heard of him will know him because of the impact he made to missionary thinking in the West following his retirement from working in India in 1974. During the following twenty-four years – particularly after 1983 – he gave innumerable talks and lectures, wrote some fifteen books and over 160 articles on the contemporary missionary challenge facing the West (which is itself an inspiring thought when you think that he wrote all this when he was already in his mid-seventies!). But as the obituary points out, he had already come to prominence on the international church scene long before this time, not least as one of the founding bishops of the United Church of South India in 1947, and as a leading ecumenical statesman within the World Council of Churches.
Early life
Newbigin had gone to India as a missionary in 1936. He had been brought up in the North East of England (being born in Newcastle-upon-Tyne in 1909). Then, after attending a Quaker school in Bath, he had gone up to the University of Cambridge to study geography (and later, economics), where he had revelled in the freedom of thought that he found there. He had also by this time largely abandoned the thought of God as a ‘tenable hypothesis’, but soon found himself being invited into the friendship circle of the Student Christian Movement (SCM) and kept a semi-open mind about the viability of personal faith, even if as yet he didn’t embrace it for himself. A turning point came in his first summer vacation when he agreed to go as a helper on a Quaker camp for unemployed miners in South Wales. It was here that he realised that what the miners really needed was ‘some kind of faith’ that would strengthen them in the face of ‘apathy and despair’. One night – towards the end of the camp – Newbigin experienced a spiritual ‘awakening’ as he lay on his bed. It came in the form of a vivid picture of the cross of Jesus ‘spanning the space between heaven and earth, between ideals and present realities, and with arms that embraced the whole world’.
Returning to Cambridge as a believer, Newbigin’s new-found faith began to flourish as he immersed himself in Christian activities. Then at the end of his second year, he reached another significant turning point. Turning down the opportunity to climb with friends in the Alps, he went instead to the Annual SCM Conference at Swanwick in Derbyshire, where he relished the stimulating programme of talks and seminars, and found time to think and pray. During one of these prayer-times, he became absolutely convinced that God was calling him to be ordained, and this changed the course of his life. He spent the next three years working in Glasgow for the SCM, before returning to Cambridge for ordination training at Westminster College.
The opportunity to study theology was particularly significant for Newbigin, and it ‘profoundly changed and deepened his faith’. He’d arrived in 1933 as a ‘typical liberal’, but experienced a profound ‘evangelical conversion’ through studying Paul’s letter to the Romans, completing his studies with a strong evangelical conviction about the finished work of Christ on the cross, which was to prove deeply significant for his future ministry.
India
Newbigin departed for India in 1936 newly married to Helen (whom he’d first met at the interviews for the SCM job six years before). She had spent her early years in India, where her parents had been missionaries, and it was natural that Lesslie should have caught her vision to return there. Their ministry in India was to last thirty-eight years (on and off) – until retirement in 1974. He had been ordained by the Presbytery of Edinburgh to work as a Church of Scotland missionary at the Madras Mission, and much of their initial time was spent attempting to master the complexities of the Tamil language. Then, in 1939, they were transferred some fifty miles inland to Kanchipuram (in Tamil Nadu) as district missionaries.
It was during this phase of his ministry that Lesslie became involved in the discussions about a long-running scheme for the uniting of the various denominations in southern India into an ecumenical ‘United Church’. In 1942 he was elected to the central committee, and became a fervent advocate of the plan. Five years later – following protracted discussion and debate both in India and back in the UK – the ‘Union of the Church of South India’ (CSI) was born and was formally established at a celebratory service in Madras Cathedral in September 1947.
It was at this same inaugural service that Newbigin – at the age of thirty-seven – was consecrated as founding bishop of the new diocese of Madurai and Ramnad. He was to serve in this capacity for the next twelve years, endeavouring to be a focus for unity for the varying Christian groups in the area, while making time to visit and evangelise the village congregations under his care, often preaching as many as ten times on a Sunday.
World Council of Churches
It was also from around this time that Newbigin began to be drawn into the work of the World Council of Churches (WCC). He went to its first world assembly in Amsterdam in 1948 as a ‘consultant’, and was soon co-opted onto the organising committee of the second assembly which was held in Chicago in 1954 (with the theme ‘Christ the Hope of the World’). Following this he was appointed vice-chair of the WCC Faith and Order Commission, which set the ecumenical agenda for the third assembly in New Delhi in 1961.
He also became involved with the work of the International Missionary Council (IMC) in promoting the theory and practice of mission and evangelism alongside the more ecumenical work of the wider WCC. In this capacity he was largely responsible for the agenda of its 1952 meeting at Willingen, Germany (on ‘The Missionary Obligation of the Church’). So significant was his involvement that he was ‘seconded’ for a five-year period from his work as a bishop in India to head up the process of integrating the work of the IMC with the wider organisation of the WCC. In 1961 he became the first director of the new WCC division of World Mission and Evangelism and an assistant general secretary of the WCC itself.
Leaving India and the people he had grown to love was not an easy decision. There’s a touching entry in his diary in which he writes of the great crowd of people who gathered at the station in Madurai to see him off at the close of June 1959. ‘At the end,’ he says, ‘they just stood in a great mass and gazed and gazed at me till I felt I would weep. We sang (a Tamil lyric) and at last the train moved off and the group became only a blob in the distance.’ Further down the line, groups of well-wishers had gathered to give him gifts and say their farewells.
The move ushered in an especially hectic period in Newbigin’s life as he juggled a variety of responsibilities – not just in tying up loose ends back in Madurai, but in travelling extensively in his work of the IMC. He visited fifteen countries during a tour of Africa in 1960, toured various centres in the Pacific and Latin America in the following year, and visited the Caribbean in 1962. There were also shorter trips to Thailand, Japan and North America. The Commission had offices in London, New York and Geneva (where much of Newbigin’s work was located), but by now the Newbigins had four young children, and so he and Helen decided to set up the family home in Bromley, South London, so that the older ones could attend school in England. On top of all this, he continued to lecture and publish articles and books, and as part of the director’s role took on the editorship of the International Review of Missions, which involved writing annual editorial surveys of missionary developments around the world.
When the IMC five-year appointment came to an end in 1965, the Newbigins returned to India on Lesslie’s election as Bishop of Madras. In a teeming city of nearly 3 million people (and growing at a rate of 100,000 every year), he was soon immersed in the challenges of the new job, starting initiatives to promote evangelism and outreach, and also developing programmes to help those who lived in the extensive slums that were mushrooming around the city area. He still travelled widely, and continued to be involved in the developing work of the WCC around the world. He was a prominent delegate at the WCC’s general assembly at Uppsala, Sweden in 1968, at the Louvain meeting of the WCC Commission on Faith and Order in 1971, and at the Commission on World Mission and Evangelism conference at Bangkok in 1973 (with its theme of ‘Salvation Today’).
‘Retirement’
Newbigin ‘retired’ in 1974 at the age of sixty-five, but seemed to go on finding the energy of someone half his age. Indeed, it could well be said that some of his most significant work was yet to come.
The first thing he and Helen decided to do was to pack some of their belongings into two suitcases and a rucksack and travel across land from Madras back to England (a distance of some 5,000 miles). The whole journey took them two months as they journeyed north from Madras up the central spine of India to Delhi, then to Lahore, across Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iran, before threading the border between Turkey and Russia via Mount Ararat. Then west to Erzurum, Kesari and on to Cappadocia. Each Sunday they tried to find local congregations with whom to worship, but Cappadocia – that strong and vibrant early centre of Christian thought and activity – turned out to be the only place on the entire trip where the Newbigins had to worship on their own because they couldn’t find other Christians with whom to share fellowship. This profoundly affected Lesslie and helped to motivate his later critiques of European culture, for it brought home just how completely a once-strong Christian heritage could all but disappear. The journey home continued through Tarsus and the ‘Turkish Riviera’ to Antalya, then north to Ephesus, Smyrna and Istanbul, before crossing into Europe through Bulgaria, Yugoslavia and Austria, Germany and France.
On arrival back in the UK, Newbigin was invited to join the staff of Selly Oak Colleges in Birmingham in order to teach ‘The Theology of Mission’ and ‘Ecumenical Studies’ to students training for missionary work. He also became a minister in the United Reformed Church (becoming its Moderator in 1978–79), and later, in 1981 – at the age of seventy-two – took on the leadership of a small inner-city congregation in Winson Green, Birmingham, which he led for the following seven years.
‘The Gospel and Our Culture’
It was during this time that Newbigin’s engagement with the questions facing the church in the West began to take a coherent shape. He had written a short pamphlet arising out of a working party convened by the British Council of Churches which was published in 1983 with the title The Other Side of 1984: Questions for the Churches. It soon became a bestseller, and was the first in a series of publications by Newbigin concentrating on the missionary challenges raised by the dominance of an increasingly secularised culture in the West. He was genuinely surprised at how rapidly the questions it raised were taken up by churches across the UK, and later – with typical modesty – described the little book as ‘a small blast not of the trumpet but of the tin whistle’. Nonetheless, what became ‘The Gospel and Our Culture’ programme soon gathered pace and led to two regional conferences in 1990 and 1991 and to an international conference of 400 delegates held in July 1992 at Swanwick in Derbyshire.
In tandem with these public discussions, Newbigin’s writings began to focus increasingly on the issues that were being raised by the missionary challenge of the West. A further fourteen books and 160 articles and smaller pieces followed The Other Side of 1984, the most well-known of these being Foolishness to the Greeks (1986), The Gospel in a Pluralist Society (1989), and Proper Confidence (1995).
Newbigin’s final years were spent in south London where he and Helen had moved in 1992. It was during this period that he became involved with the School of Theology at HTB (which has since evolved into St Paul’s Theological Centre, now part of St Mellitus College), and it was as part of this programme of lay education that the material in this book was originally given as talks and lectures.
Lesslie Newbigin died in 1998 at the age of eighty-eight.
CENTRAL THEMES
We move now to consider some of the central themes in Newbigin’s writings. Newbigin had already published some seventeen books before his retirement in 1974, and these – arising from his work in India and with the WCC – had already helped to establish him as one of the leading ecumenical missionary thinkers of the twentieth century, long before his return to the UK. Some of the emphases you will find in this book spring out of these earlier reflections and it is worth introducing these themes briefly at this point, before turning to his later thinking about the culture of the West and its missionary challenges.
Trinitarian faith
Newbigin was one of the early champions of the view that Christians really needed to think in Trinitarian terms about their faith, and the first three chapters of this book map this out in some detail. We may take this kind of thinking for granted today, so it’s worth remembering that Newbigin’s Trinitarian approach to mission was ground-breaking when he first developed it in the early 1960s: so much so in fact that he had to find a publisher outside WCC circles to print his small book The Relevance of Trinitarian Doctrine for Today’s Mission in 1963. For Newbigin, this Trinitarian understanding continued to undergird his approach to missionary theology.
When you read of this volume, therefore, look for the different ways in which Newbigin draws Trinitarian themes together as a way of describing the dynamic inter-relationships between Father, Son and Spirit. Notice too how the three persons of the Godhead reveal themselves in loving outreach towards the created order, drawing creation itself back into harmony with its Creator once more; and how this eternal and Trinitarian purpose forms the cosmic backdrop to the great work of mission to which we are called as God’s people.
Church and unity
Newbigin was deeply committed to the church as the community of faith, and his 1953 book The Household of God: Lectures on the Nature of the Church is still a classic in the field of ecclesiology. It is not just a masterly introduction to the subject, but remains a landmark study because it emphasises the coming importance of the Pentecostal expression of the church alongside the more established Protestant and Catholic patterns of the 1950s. He predicted not only the significance of this newer charismatic stream of church life, but argued strongly that the distinctive emphases of the three traditions were each needed to meet the challenges of mission in the years to come.
However, as we have seen from the brief survey of Newbigin’s life, he was passionate not just about the church, but about church unity, and you will soon pick up something of this passion in the pages that follow, particularly in .
The establishment of the United Church of South India in 1947 was pivotal in Newbigin’s ministry, and the struggle for it served to strengthen his life-long conviction about the priority of unity among Christians. He wrote at the time that he was ‘so utterly sure that what we are doing is not patching things together, but being led by the Holy Spirit back to the fullness and simplicity of gospel truth’.
The visible unity of the church was not simply an ‘institutional nicety’ for Newbigin, but an essential expression of the meaning of the gospel itself. As he was later to write: ‘a gospel of reconciliation can only be communicated by a reconciled fellowship’. Newbigin fervently believed that only a community of believers visibly reconciled by the atoning work of Christ can properly demonstrate to the world what the good news of God is really all about. And if our churches live in this way, they advertise what heaven – creation restored and reconciled to God – is truly about. As a result, the acquiescence of the church in the face of disunity and separation was an understandably serious matter for Newbigin, and helps to explain why he was such a committed ecumenist to the end of his life. ‘The Church cannot abandon this struggle,’ he wrote in 1993, ‘without betraying its calling.’ For – as he had written nearly twenty years earlier – ‘to give up the quest of such unity is to settle for something less than the Gospel’.
The United Church of South India remains to this day a signpost of something profoundly significant but extremely rare in church life: a visible expression of an interdenominational unity in Christ.
How do we know?
of this book (headed ‘Faith and Doctrine’) starts with a chapter entitled ‘’ This question (a central one in the field of epistemology) was to remain crucially important for Newbigin throughout his life, and his analysis of its implications lies beneath many of the discussions in this book, especially in this particular section.
His first attempt to write about it actually dates right back to an essay entitled ‘Revelation’ which he wrote as a theological student in Cambridge in 1936. There he discussed the contemporary challenges to the doctrine of revelation, and developed the argument that in contrast to the prevailing assumption that real knowledge must be ‘factual’ (and therefore somehow ‘impersonal’), divine revelation is the living demonstration that true knowledge is essentially ‘personal’: ‘we know a person only as he chooses to reveal himself, and only as our own spirit is sensitive and trustful to respond to his revelation’. Approaching the question in this way, the knowledge of God is pictured as a gift of grace imparted to those who would receive it. It is not a piece of metaphysical ‘information’, but a personal revelation of the loving will of the Creator who longs for his creatures to be known by him, and reconciled to him.
The question about how we come to ‘know’ remained important for Newbigin because he believed that Western culture had adopted a number of unexamined assumptions about what could and could not be believed as ‘true’. Discussions of this theme emerge particularly after 1983 when he comes to address the challenges faced today in the West when Christians try to reach others with the gospel. So a few words on that theme might be helpful in setting Newbigin’s later work in context.
The crisis of Western culture
At the heart of Newbigin’s later writing (beginning with The Other Side of 1984) is a sustained critique of – and response to – the Western church’s ‘captivity’ to the culture of ‘modernity’ (a term which he discusses on pages ). Within this setting two questions tend to dominate his thought. First, how is the church to communicate the gospel in such a way that it genuinely takes root in the culture to which it is addressed; and secondly, how may confidence in the gospel be recovered when questions of religious meaning have been side-lined, and considered merely as matters of private opinion?
In his discussions of these themes (see, for example, ) the French philosopher René Descartes (1596–1650) and his English successor John Locke (1632–1704) tend to take centre stage. Together, argues Newbigin, they helped to set in place the philosophical assumptions by which the only statements or ideas which can be regarded as really true are those which can be shown to be scientifically provable. ‘Since Descartes’, he writes elsewhere, ‘our culture has been dominated by the … search for a kind of knowledge that could not be doubted, a kind of knowledge that involved no risk, no faith commitment. The unquestionable and lucid certainties of mathematics were to provide the paradigm of real knowledge. In the English-speaking world this was powerfully reinforced by the work of John Locke … who defined belief as what we fall back on when we do not have knowledge. Thus “I believe” means “I do not know”.’
The attempt to decide the question of truth on such dubious grounds lies at the heart of our cultural malaise, argues Newbigin. And it leads to a number of distinctions or dichotomies which are still very much in evidence in our contemporary society, each of which tends to divide our lives up into ‘public’ and ‘private’ spheres.
‘Facts’ and ‘values’
The malaise becomes clearest, he says, in the distinction we often make between things we commonly accept as ‘facts’ and those we consider merely as ‘values’. ‘Facts’ are those things that can be established as ‘true’ by the scientific methods of evidence and proof. Those that don’t pass this test cannot be considered ‘true’, but remain as personal ‘choices’, ‘opinions’, or ‘values’ involving – in theory – a supposed liberty of conscience. So he writes characteristically that ‘The public world is a world of facts that are the same for everyone, whatever his values may be; the private world is a world of values where all are free to choose their own values and therefore to pursue such courses of action as will correspond with them.’
The problem of course, is that the scope of the kinds of ‘truth’ founded on such methods is actually severely limited. It may be able to give answers to a wide variety of mathematical problems, or even establish the structure of the DNA molecule, but in the end it will always remain unable to deal satisfactorily with the most significant questions of human identity and purpose: questions such as, ‘Who am I?’, ‘Why am I here?’, or ‘For what purpose was I created?’ Newbigin addresses some of these questions in detail in , and – particularly in relation to the idea of ‘purpose’.
‘Knowing’ and ‘believing’
Closely connected with this distinction between ‘facts’ and ‘values’ is the parallel separation between the concepts of ‘knowing’ and ‘believing’. Indeed, there is an inevitable – and related – ‘knockon’ effect from one to the other. In the realm of science, Newbigin argues, it is commonly perceived that you can know certain things to be true. The educational curricula of our schools and universities are founded upon such premises: 2+2 = 4; the Battle of Waterloo took place in 1815; and so on. But when it comes to the realm of religious knowledge you can never actually know things to be ‘true’ in the same sense. Judgments in this sphere must stay at the level of the ‘subjective’, and as far as their ‘truth-status’ is concerned, can only be considered as ‘opinions’.
So while the theory that the cosmos began with a ‘Big Bang’ is accepted as a ‘fact’, any suggestion that the Bible may be right in positing the existence and involvement of a Creator in the act or process of creation can only ever have the status of an extracurricular ‘opinion’. As Newbigin puts it in The Gospel in a Pluralist Society: ‘We are pluralist in respect of what we call beliefs but we are not pluralist in respect of what we call facts. The former are a matter of personal decision; the latter are a matter of public knowledge.’
‘Reason’ and ‘revelation’
Summing all this up, Newbigin sets these kinds of distinctions in a wider philosophical, cultural, and spiritual framework. He argues essentially that the central flaw in the culture of the West is that it has reduced meaningful knowledge – as the gift of a personal God – to that which is ‘proof-based’ and therefore depersonalised. As he puts it, ‘The “Age of Reason” supposed that there was available to human beings a kind of indubitable knowledge, capable of being grasped by all human beings which was more reliable than any alleged revelation, and which could therefore provide the criteria by which any alleged divine revelation could be assessed.’
By so doing, the relationship between revelation and reason in the West has effectively been inverted: divine revelation is rejected, and human reason is enthroned as the sole arbiter of truth – both human and divine. And in the process, the knowledge of God the Creator of all – though properly ‘public’ – is reduced to the realm of the ‘private’.
THE MISSIONARY CHALLENGE
Not surprisingly, Newbigin presents the missionary challenge facing the contemporary church in stark terms. ‘The Church’, he writes, ‘is not generally perceived as concerned with facts, with the realities which finally govern the world and which we shall in the end have to acknowledge whether we like them or not.’ Consequently, as long as the church is content to ‘offer its beliefs modestly as simply one of the many brands available in the ideological supermarket, no offence is taken’. But to claim more than this is something which will remain culturally unacceptable.
So what is Newbigin’s response? In a sense I want to leave you to read what follows in order to answer that question. But by way of introduction perhaps two brief points may be helpful.
First, the name Michael Polanyi crops up in Chapter 4, and then again at the start of . This Hungarian chemist-turned-philosopher is a key figure in helping Newbigin to explain his response to the challenge. Polanyi wrote an important book in the 1950s called Personal Knowledge which deeply influenced Newbigin, and in which he set out as a scientist to show that ‘complete objectivity as usually attributed to the exact sciences is a delusion and is in fact a false ideal’. All knowing, he argued, begins with some kind of unproven (and un-provable) faith-commitment: a sort of personal intuition about the nature of reality which forms the starting point out of which fresh discoveries can be made. The important point for Polanyi is that at this formative stage in the process of discovery, a kind of personal trust is exercised: trust in a view of reality which forms the basis for further thought and action, even though it cannot yet be proved to be true.
In effect, Polanyi’s approach to the question of ‘knowing’ cuts right across the accepted ‘enlightenment’ model with its emphasis on the objectivity and superiority of ‘reason’. Newbigin happily finds in this insight a way of re-establishing a broader conception of knowing, and uses Polanyi’s idea of ‘personal knowledge’ to defend the idea that our knowledge of God – though inescapably personal – is nonetheless real knowledge, and therefore opens up the possibility of talking once more about the truthfulness of religious knowing.
Second, Newbigin’s response to the missionary challenge of the West is that this proper and genuine knowledge of God through Jesus in the power of the Spirit is made visible in corporate form through the church. Indeed it is in and through the ongoing life of believing congregations that a renewed grasp of genuine reality is made evident and intelligible to others. It was in this vein that Newbigin wrote the following words back in 1989, which provide a fitting way to conclude this introductory chapter:
I have come to feel that the primary reality of which we have to take account in seeking for a Christian impact on public life is the Christian congregation. How is it possible that the gospel should be credible, that people should come to believe that the power which has the last word in human affairs is represented by a man hanging on a cross? I am suggesting that the only answer, the only hermeneutic of the gospel, is a congregation of men and women who believe it and live by it.
So read on. I am confident that you too will find yourself challenged, inspired and invigorated by one of the most significant missionary thinkers of our time.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Newbigin, Lesslie, ‘All in One Place or All of One Sort? On Unity and Diversity in the Church’, in Richard W. A. McKinney (ed.), Creation and Culture: Studies in Honour of T. F. Torrance, Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1976, pp. 288–306.
—— Foolishness to the Greeks: The Gospel and Western Culture, London: SPCK, 1986.
—— The Gospel in a Pluralist Society, London: SPCK, 1989.
—— The Household of God: Lectures on the Nature of the Church, London: SCM Press, 1953.
—— ‘Our Missionary Responsibility in the Crisis of Western Culture’ (1988), reprinted in Eleanor Jackson (ed.), A Word in Season: Perspectives on Christian World Missions, Grand Rapids, MI/Edinburgh: Eerdmans/Saint Andrew Press, 1994, pp. 98–112.
—— ‘Pluralism in the Church’, ReNews [Presbyterians For Renewal] 4, No. 2, May 1993, pp. 1, 6–7.
—— The Relevance of Trinitarian Doctrine for Today’s Mission, C.W.M.E. Study Pamphlets, No. 2, London: Edinburgh House, 1963.
—— ‘Religious Pluralism: A Missiological Approach’, in Theology of Religions: Christianity and Other Religions, Rome: Pontifical Gregorian University, 1993, pp. 227–44.
—— Unfinished Agenda: An Updated Autobiography, 2nd edn, Edinburgh: Saint Andrew Press, 1993.
Polanyi, Michael, Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958.
Weston, Paul, ed., Lesslie Newbigin, Missionary Theologian: A Reader, London/Grand Rapids, MI: SPCK/ Eerdmans, 2006.