7. Lesslie Newbigin’s Legacy for Today
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Lesslie Newbigin’s Legacy for Today
N. T. Wright says, “Lesslie Newbigin was quite simply a gift to the church in so many ways.” This has been said by many people. Certainly a big part of that gift is the theological legacy he left behind in his writings. In this chapter I elaborate eight areas where Newbigin’s theology offers valuable and needed insight to the church today. To select eight areas is difficult, because each aspect of his missionary ecclesiology that we have covered in the pages above has relevance for the contemporary church. But in this final chapter I will be more selective, highlighting the aspects of Newbigin’s theological legacy that I believe are most urgent for the church today.
Gospel of the Kingdom
There is a growing recognition today among evangelicals in North America that we need to get back to basics and ask the most foundational question we can ask: What is the gospel? This is evident, for example, in the formation of the Gospel Coalition and in its well-attended conferences. It is also clear in the number of books rolling off the presses that pose this question. Newbigin lived his life with this question in a missionary situation and constantly returned to the gospel as his starting point to address many topics. His insight is important for us today.
Where one starts in the Bible to answer this question is of fundamental importance. There is not just one place to start, of course, but Newbigin’s consistent practice was to begin with Mark 1:14–15. This is the first announcement of the gospel by Jesus, and Newbigin believed that was crucial. Starting with the kingdom sets the gospel within the context of the Old Testament narrative and establishes its eschatological nature from the outset. Far too often the background story for the gospel is personal testimonies, evangelistic presentations, and systematic theologies. The Old Testament story and the eschatological nature of the gospel are eclipsed.
Newbigin was consistent in placing the gospel within the Old Testament context. And by making the election of Israel the central theme, he made clear that the gospel had to be the climactic moment of Israel’s story. Specifically, Israel’s vocation to reveal and accomplish God’s redemptive purposes in the midst of the world is fulfilled in Jesus. This enables us to understand the very helpful, if not initially puzzling, formulation that the gospel is the revelation and accomplishment of the End of universal history. Israel was to reveal God’s creational intentions for humanity in their lives and thus to accomplish his purpose to draw nations to himself. Jesus fulfills the calling of Israel in his life, death, and resurrection by fully revealing and accomplishing God’s purpose to renew the whole life of humanity.
The starting point in the gospel of the kingdom also counters an otherworldly and individualistic understanding of the gospel and salvation. This understanding continues to ravage the church today, not just in North America but well beyond. The gospel of the kingdom preached by Jesus, if it is taken in its original context, simply cannot be twisted into this shape. It is an announcement about cosmic renewal—a salvation that is comprehensive in scope and restorative in its nature. God is restoring the whole creation and the entire life of humankind. This understanding of the gospel and the kingdom is critical for the church’s life and mission today.
Newbigin’s refusal to allow the person of Jesus to be separated from the kingdom continues to be a timely challenge. It is easy for those interested in the costly nature of mission in the areas of politics, economics, and society to turn mission into a social program and to forget that at the heart of the gospel is an invitation to personal communion with the person of Jesus. It is also easy for those who want to stress a personal relationship with Jesus to turn mission into evangelism and to forget that loving and knowing Jesus means following and joining him in his costly kingdom mission in the public square. Keeping Jesus and the kingdom together in the gospel is an important insight for us today.
The Bible as the True Story of the Whole World
If one gets anything from reading Newbigin, it will be his insistence on the Bible as the true story of the whole world. And there is so much in his reflection on this theme that is crucial for us today. His reflection on the status of story in the Christian faith is important. It has been my consistent experience that it is difficult to communicate this, especially, quite surprisingly, among those trained theologically. For Newbigin, story is not about a particular literary genre found in the Bible; the historical books narrate that story, to be sure, but it means more. Neither is it about a redemptive-historical or narrative hermeneutic, which reduces story to its importance for biblical interpretation; nor is it about biblical or narrative or redemptive-historical theology, which confines story to a way of doing theology. Certainly each of these is shaped by the story, but it is only these because story is much more.
Newbigin’s approach to the biblical narrative can be contrasted, for example, with Tim Keller’s synchronic and diachronic approaches to theology. Synchronic or systematic theology deals with Scripture topically arranged and makes propositional statements about God, sin, Christ, and faith, for example. A diachronic or redemptive-historical theology “organizes what the Bible says by stages in history or by the plotline of the story.” The first deals with the themes of Scripture and the second with its story line. In the end, Keller advocates both approaches and warns that to lose either approach invites distortions. For Keller there is no priority: story is one of two ways to do theology.
This is very different from Newbigin. Newbigin may well be happy to speak of two theological methods. But these are both second-order activities that enable us to be faithful to the biblical story. Tracing themes through Scripture by employing a more narrative approach or articulating themes propositionally by utilizing a more topical method may well produce deepened insight into Scripture, may be mutually enriching, and may in different ways protect Scripture’s teaching from distortion. Newbigin probably would not dispute Keller at this point. But Newbigin would say that story cannot be reduced to redemptive-historical theology; the very nature of Scripture is the true story of the world that provides the all-encompassing framework for or the overarching umbrella under which any kind of second-order theological reflection must be done, whether systematic or redemptive-historical theology. For Newbigin, story cannot be reduced to theology; it is much bigger and more significant than that. The Bible is an interpretation of universal or cosmic history. It is what Richard Bauckham means by “metanarrative” or what N. T. Wright means by “the basic worldview-story.”
Consequently, story is the overarching category for understanding the very nature of the Christian faith. The Christian faith is a story that begins in creation, moves through human rebellion and the election of Israel as a solution to sin, ultimately finding its climactic moment in the person and work of Jesus and then moving throughout the world in the mission of the church until Christ returns and completes his work. Story is the very structure of the Christian faith for Newbigin. This is the same point that N. T. Wright makes when he says that “the whole point of Christianity is that it offers a story which is the story of the whole world. It is public truth.” And since this story is universal history, it is the clue or light for understanding everything in creation. This is an astonishing claim but consistent with the Bible’s own witness.
Newbigin’s emphasis on the historical nature of the narrative is also important for challenging the Greek rationalism that remains very powerful today. For many the “absolute truth” of Scripture is found in unchanging ideas that stand above history. Those theological ideas are found embedded in Scripture and may be extracted from the story to express the Christian faith in confessions or theologies. In this view, the storied nature of the Bible is incidental; the unchanging theological truths stated propositionally are the heart of the matter. Propositions are a stronger statement of truth.
Newbigin challenges this ancient pagan notion rooted in Plato and Aristotle. More than once, Drama of Scripture, a book that I coauthored with Craig Bartholomew, has been critiqued for finding truth in a story, which is seen as a weaker or postmodern form of truth. Theological propositions and systems supposedly carry more substance and weight. But this is simply capitulation to the pagan Greek tradition revived in the Enlightenment. The biblical story shows us that truth is rooted in historical events, in God’s mighty acts in history, which are leading toward the goal of cosmic renewal. This is the way the Bible reveals truth to us, and we are invited to accept the way God has revealed himself and his purpose and then to find our place in that story.
Newbigin distinguishes between Eastern and Western religions in the way they understand ultimate and comprehensive truth. Again this brings us to the heart of the matter. The great divide between religions is where comprehensive and ultimate truth can be found. Eastern religions find it in some unchanging principle that stands behind the diversity of creation (e.g., Brahman). Western religions, shaped in one way or another by the Old Testament, including the Christian faith, find it in a story that is leading to a goal for universal history. If we want to understand the Christian faith, we must attend to God’s mighty acts in history, especially in Jesus Christ, and see the Bible as a narrative of those mighty deeds that are leading the whole world to a renewed creation.
Recovering the comprehensive scope of the biblical story as a cosmic narrative is one of the most important tasks for the church today. It provides the basis for understanding the gospel in its cosmic scope as the climactic moment of the story. This provides the proper context for the climactic events in Jesus Christ. It provides the proper context for understanding the breadth of the church’s mission in the midst of the world. And, importantly for the syncretistic church of the West, it is the only bulwark that can protect the gospel from being accommodated to the cultural story: if the Bible is broken up into theological or devotional bits, it will be absorbed into a more comprehensive cultural story, and it will be that story rather than the Bible that shapes our lives.
Finally, Newbigin’s insistence on the Bible as one story enables us to rightly understand the Christian faith in terms of its true “logic”: cosmic, communal, and personal. Since the time of the Reformation, the individual has increasingly been moved to the center stage in the Christian faith. While this has had some benefits and opened up insight into Scripture, in this year when I write, on the occasion of the five hundredth anniversary of the Reformation, we have to acknowledge that there is a desperate need for a Copernican revolution. The individual is not at the center of the biblical story! This individualism feeds the narcissism and the consumerism of the West. “For me, for me—it’s all about me!” For Newbigin the Bible is a story of cosmic history with Christ at the center. It is from him, to him, by him, and ultimately for him. The story is communal: at its center is a community he has chosen to embody and enact his reconciling purpose for the world. Individuals are extended a personal invitation into that community and called to play their role in God’s story. Surely this is the very structure of thought we find in the apostle Paul, for example, in Colossians 1 and Ephesians 1. This challenges the spiritual narcissism and consumerism that is rampant in the Christian faith of the West. And—this must be clear—it does not lessen the importance of individual response, nor does it diminish the blessing each of us may enjoy as we are “included in Christ when we hear the message of truth, the gospel of our salvation. When we believed . . .” (Eph. 1:13). Rather, it sets each person where they belong—finding their place in the cosmic work of Christ (vv. 9–10), “to the praise of his glory” (vv. 12, 14), and in the community created by his work.
The Centrality of Election in the Biblical Story
It may seem initially surprising that Newbigin makes election so central to his understanding of the Christian faith. But the way he elaborates this central biblical theme is important in clarifying our understanding of the Christian faith in at least two ways. First, it reminds us of the nature of salvation. Salvation is not the rescue of one individual after another with each one set in their own personal relationship with God. This is often held as an unexamined assumption. Rather, creation has a harmony, unity, and integrity that have been ruptured in the fall. Salvation is the restoration of the coherence and shalom of human life in the context of the creation. Humans are not created as discrete individuals, nor will they be redeemed as such. God’s redemptive work travels along the channels he cuts at creation. People live related to God, to each other in many different kinds of relationships, to the nonhuman creation, and in a certain unity within themselves. All of this is shattered in Adam and Eve’s rebellion. Salvation is the healing of the lost shalom, the reconciliation of what was alienated, the knitting back together of separated fragments. If that is God’s cosmic purpose, then there must be a nucleus of people who are already restored in all these ways as the starting point for God’s work, and then they may be the place where others are incorporated into that reconciled community. Election means a reconciled and reconciling community. In this light, election is a central biblical doctrine. And it sheds light on the mission of the church.
But election also shows us the importance of Israel in the biblical story. How easy it is to forget the longest part of the biblical story or reduce it, say, to promise. Newbigin chooses the word “election” almost as a label for the Old Testament and the history of Israel. It places the mission of Israel to embody God’s universal purposes at the center of the story. This is important for a missional reading of Scripture but also sets the proper context for the work of Jesus Christ and the continuing mission of the church to the nations. The biblical story is about the election of Israel—the “three Israels”: God chooses Israel to reveal and accomplish his redemptive purpose; the story narrows to Jesus, who is chosen to himself bear the vocation of Israel and who fulfills that purpose; Jesus gathers and sends the nucleus of the true Israel, chosen to continue the mission of Jesus amid all nations.
A Missionary Encounter with Western Culture
Newbigin is right to see that one of the biggest dangers facing the Western church is its acceptance of the relegation of the gospel and the church’s mission to the private sphere. This goes against everything that the gospel is and the vocation the church has been given to embody the public truth of the gospel. It is no small issue. The notion of a missionary encounter sets before us an understanding of the very nature of the Christian faith as a clash of equally comprehensive and equally religious stories. The gospel is not about religious doctrine but headline news that God’s rule over all things has broken into history. That must clash with any cultural public doctrine that does not submit to Christ’s lordship, which can be found in every culture.
The terminology of missionary encounter keeps us from carving out a small space within culture into which the gospel is made to fit. And it does not allow us to think of Western culture as innocuous; it is religious at its core, shaped by idolatry and the spiritual powers. Newbigin warns that we have been fooled by myths—the myth of a Christian culture and the myth of a neutral culture, whether secular or pluralistic—and it is a timely warning for the church today. There is no friendly “Christian-like” culture in the West, nor is there a neutral secular culture based on objective science, nor is there a pluralistic culture that holds the ring impartially for all religions to live in peace. Newbigin claims that Western culture is the most powerful, the most pervasive, the most dangerous, and the most resistant culture to the gospel, and this is a salient warning and apt challenge to the church to not allow the gospel to be accommodated to it. A missionary encounter is the only faithful posture the church may take. This gets to the very nature of the Christian faith and a conscious habit of the heart that the church in the West must cultivate.
A Missionary Encounter with Global Economic Modernity and Consumerism
Perhaps one of the most neglected aspects of Newbigin’s thought is his focus in the last decade of his life on the danger of global capitalism and consumerism. Newbigin’s interpreters have rightly attended to what he has said about the modern scientific worldview flowing from the Enlightenment and especially his interest in epistemology. When they have turned to his comments on the cultural changes in the late twentieth century, changes that continue into the early twenty-first century, it has usually been in terms of postmodernity. But for Newbigin the biggest threat facing the church at the end of the twentieth century (and now certainly in the twenty-first century) is not postmodernity; it is economic globalization and a consumer culture. Newbigin’s references to postmodernity are few, but not so with global capitalism, economic modernity, and consumerism. He says, “The crucial question is going to be whether the Christian church can recover its confidence in the gospel in order to be able to challenge with confidence the enormous power of this ideology which now rules us. We are dealing here with an idol, the idol of the free market, and idols do not respond to moral persuasion. They are cast out only by the living God, and it is only the power of the gospel in the last analysis which can dethrone idols.”
I was alerted to Newbigin’s views while listening to him preach at Beeson Divinity School in the early 1990s. Initially I was taken aback by the passion and intensity with which he spoke about the global free market and economic idolatry as a demonic power. But the danger of global capitalism may be gauged even more by Newbigin’s hint that perhaps the economic policies of Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s were leading us to a “confessional situation.” Here he is referring to a very specific kind of confession. The whole of the Christian faith is a matter of confessing the gospel over against idolatry, of course. But sometimes there are threats to our world that bring injustice on such a wide and deep scale that they require the church to take special action and make a counterconfession in response. This has been called a status confessionis. The Barmen Declaration (1934) was just such an act in the face of the threat of Nazism. A similar response has been made to apartheid in South Africa. Some have argued that global neoliberalism presents a threat on just this same scale and puts us into a status confessionis. Newbigin notes that when Margaret Thatcher’s economic policies were taking hold in the 1980s, the public good was being “swept contemptuously aside in favour of commitment to private gain. Market forces were to have final sovereignty over our lives.” Newbigin believed we were moving into an era of blatant ideology that would require the church’s mission to change. “We were dealing not with a political programme but with an idolatry. We were coming into a confessional situation.”
For Newbigin this is a global form of economic modernity that has its roots in the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. He believed that it was through the economic theory of Adam Smith and others that the Enlightenment would have its most far-reaching impact. The new Enlightenment economics would supposedly create unlimited economic growth and bring fulfillment and happiness. While the modern scientific worldview would take two forms in the twentieth century—communism in Russia and Eastern Europe, and liberalism in Western Europe and North America—the collapse of the communist bloc would open the way for the global spread of the liberal economic form of modernity around the world in globalization. While Newbigin believed that the free market is a good way to balance supply and demand, he also recognized that when it is in the grip of the powerful idolatry of freedom, the market is an oppressive tyrant and an evil power that has final sovereignty over much of cultural life.
The free market as an idolatrous power is bringing terrible injustices, especially economically and ecologically, and the only story that seems to be able to withstand it is the Muslim story. Economic modernity and globalization are also producing a consumer society that is sweeping all of life into its current. Newbigin’s challenge to take this threat seriously is one the church of the twenty-first century must take to heart.
I have a vivid memory in this regard. In 1994 I had just finished a tour of the civil rights museum in Birmingham, Alabama, with Newbigin and my family. I was standing beside my car with Newbigin, waiting for my wife to return. He shook his head as he tried to come to terms with what he had just witnessed—the complicity of Christians in the horror and cruelty of slavery. He asked with agony etched all over his face, “How could Christians have been so blind to their sin?” He continued, “I wonder what later generations will identify as our biggest idol to which we are oblivious.” Immediately he offered an answer to his own query: “No doubt it will be our economic idolatry and our blindness to consumerism. It will be our lives immersed in mindless consumption in a world where there is so much poverty and hunger.”
The Church as Distinctive Community and the Calling of the Laity
In the face of the powerful threat of Western culture, Newbigin stressed two aspects of the church’s mission: the church as a distinctive community and the calling of the laity in the public life of culture. Both of these are important for the church today if the gospel is ever to be recognized as public truth. Newbigin’s call to the church to be a hermeneutic of the gospel is especially pointed. In the list of what that might look like, he stresses aspects of the Bible’s teaching over against the idols of the day. Following his example of making a list of what a distinctive community might look like can be a valuable way to challenge the church, especially leaders. I have done this often, making a list of what a distinctive community today might look like—for example, as we live in the midst of a consumer society; as we read, preach, and hear the books of Colossians, 1 Peter, and James; as we form academic institutions; and so on. More often than any other request I receive after I finish speaking, I am asked for these lists. Creating lists of this sort seems to trigger a few things, in my experience. It sparks the imagination to think about the church as a distinctive or contrast community. For many, that notion is simply not familiar territory. It also challenges leaders and others to think contextually. Too much preaching and teaching or Bible reading, for example, is quite abstract. We often think of doctrine and ethics in terms of timeless principles abstractly divorced from their original context and quite separate from our cultural idols. For example, we call people to be patient without considering the cultural forces that form us in the way of immediate gratification. We challenge people to live generously without considering the way a consumer society seduces us to find satisfaction in accumulating consumer goods. We exhort people to live selflessly without considering the way our culture constantly puts the self at the center. We invite people to live in wisdom without taking account of its difficulty in a world of proliferating knowledge spawned by information technology. And the list could go on. Making the kind of list Newbigin made challenges us to think contextually about the religious beliefs and structures of our culture and to set our calling in that setting. And that is why preaching or teaching any book of the Bible, for example, can become more alive and relevant if it is in dialogue in this way with our cultural story.
To elaborate: We may preach Psalm 63, for example, and invite people to live their lives coram Deo, in the presence of God, without considering the pressures of a secular culture that forms us to live our lives apart from God. It is not just a secular ethos that makes it difficult for us to walk in continual fellowship with God. Rather, the very structures and institutions of our culture are inherently atheistic. Craig Gay examines the way Western politics, technology, and economics, for example, teach us to live as if God doesn’t exist. They are molding us into the pattern of practical atheism that is built right into the very cultural structures we inhabit. It is this kind of cultural analysis that will help us as we seek to understand what it means to be a distinctive people living in the biblical story. The stress on being a distinctive people will push us to engage idolatrous cultural structures that oppose faithfulness and ask how those structures are challenged by a biblical view of the world.
Let me provide another concrete example of how this may work. In August 2018 I spoke to pastors and church planters in Brazil on the book of James at a conference to celebrate the five hundredth anniversary of the Reformation. Inspired by Newbigin, I soaked in James for months and asked how he challenges us to think about the church as a hermeneutic of the gospel. Behind what I said were Richard Bauckham’s words about the book of James:
What is needed is for the Christian community to develop as a counter-cultural alternative to the dominant culture, in its own life together both distinctive and outgoing, shaping its members’ lives, both within and without the community’s own life, in ways that witness to Jesus Christ, in critical solidarity with all that is good in dominant society and in prophetic critique of all that is corrupting and destructive. James can inform the life of such a counter-cultural community because its aim is precisely the formation and nurturing of the Christian community as a counter-cultural embodiment of God’s values and commandments. . . . The aim [in reading James today] must be to hear within our own context the distinctive voice of the text with a view to the distinctive community it aims to construct.
Here is a small sample of my list of how James aims to construct a distinctive community in the twenty-first century to be a hermeneutic of the gospel. The point is to set James’s teaching in today’s context, especially the structural idolatry of our culture that stands opposed to his exhortation.
If we are to communicate the gospel as public truth, we will also need to take the calling of the laity in public life seriously, along with its implications for congregations. This is also an important emphasis for our day. Ian Barns has rightly pointed out the importance of this area of Newbigin’s thought:
For Newbigin it was lay Christians, in the context of their daily occupations and professions, that played a crucial role in communicating the public truth of the gospel in our culture. Because of this he was particularly concerned for the effective and ongoing equipping and support of lay Christians in their daily lives. Notwithstanding the various impressive “Christians at work” initiatives around the world, I don’t think that this challenge has really been taken on board by pastors, theologians, Christian educators and Christian leaders in the professions. . . . Many Christians in professional occupations are godly, honest, and caring people in their personal dealings with others, but they default to being technocratic humanists at a cognitive level. Given the enormous societal upheavals that are about to befall the planet, the human community will desperately need Christian community organisers, food producers, doctors, engineers, peacemakers, counsellors, inventors (to name just a few) inspired by the love of Christ and the public vision of God’s peaceable universal kingdom.
I can say with joy that in Phoenix I see the Surge network of churches that have begun to take this challenge seriously. About forty churches work together to provide a curriculum and discipleship program to train over three hundred people a year to work out what it means to live in light of the gospel and the biblical story in their particular callings. This concern for vocation combined with another of Newbigin’s concerns—the unity of the church—has enabled this initiative to be quite effective and to have an influence on the public life of the city. But even in Phoenix there is a long way to go. And so, given that most places are much further behind, this surely remains a significant challenge for our day.
Theology and Theological Education
Few would disagree that there is a crisis in theological education today and that this is not a new problem. The urgency of the issue is that missionary churches need well-trained missionary leaders. Recently, a growing chorus of voices has argued that mission may play an important role in the renewal of education today. Yet what is surprising is how few of those who advocate this are returning to the missionary leaders and thinkers of the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s. During that period there was rich reflection on the nature and practice of theological education in view of the rapidly growing church in the Southern Hemisphere. There was little interest in transporting the university model of theological education to those churches, and so there was some deep thinking about what kind of theological education would meet their needs.
The theological reflection of this time was primarily concerned with the so-called younger churches of the global South and East. Yet Newbigin rightly posed the question of whether the issue was “that the theological schools of the Third World needed to be brought up to the ‘best’ western standards. It was the question whether these standards really are the best; whether the models of ministerial formation accepted in Europe and North America are really the right ones for the Third World—or even for the areas where they have been developed.”
Discussion of theological education focused on four main areas: structures, pedagogy, evaluation, and curriculum. While Newbigin did not become deeply immersed in the discussions, he did wade in a few times. And his comments arose out of a long history of reflection on theological education. Where his legacy may be most important is in the area of curriculum, specifically his constant challenge to rethink the various theological disciplines. On this his challenge was twofold. On the one hand, there was not enough awareness of how much the cultural assumptions of the West were shaping theological studies. The problem was not that the Western church had a Western theology; that is the way it should be. Rather, the problem is a lack of awareness of the contextual nature of theology and an assumption that one’s theology, formed in a particular culture, is universal—a theologia perennis. When this happens, there is little critique, and the church is vulnerable to embracing the idols of the culture. On the other hand, Newbigin also challenged the church to see that the centrality of mission in the biblical story had little formative power on the theological disciplines. The main patterns of theological education were formed when mission had ceased to exist as a living reality in the minds of many Christians. In what follows, we’ll briefly consider Newbigin’s take on the primary disciplines within theological education.
Newbigin believes that much Western scholarship within the realm of biblical studies has substituted one religious creed for another. “From the late 18th century onwards, the Bible came more and more into the hands of the scholars whose scholarship was shaped by the new perspectives of the Enlightenment. The Bible was read and interpreted from within another belief-system, another worldview. It was (to the scholarly world) no longer Holy Scripture, but a corpus of ancient writings to be understood and assessed in the light of a different creed. It no longer stood in judgement on culture but was itself judged by new cultural standards.” Newbigin did not reject historical-critical method or that there was much fruit arising out of this scholarship. Rather, he rejected its dominance and captivity to another creed that crippled church leadership. The renewed interest today in theological hermeneutics is something that Newbigin would have strongly encouraged. The church and mission must be the primary dialogue partner for biblical scholarship.
But Newbigin would also want to encourage what he calls a “missionary hermeneutic” for the sake of the church. He believed Scripture “is from Genesis to Revelation the essential missionary text.” And so he speaks of a “proposed marriage” between the “canon of scripture” and the “whole mission committed to the Church.” It seems to be a marriage “made in heaven,” he says, “but at present partners are rarely linked together and appear to be still awaiting introduction.” Yet “canon and mission are interdependent and should be inseparable,” and “if the marriage takes place and is consummated there will be progeny essential to the future life of the Church.” Today we might say that the introduction of mission to biblical studies has been made; a missional hermeneutic has begun to develop in earnest. But we are still a long way from an enduring marriage. And so the formulation of a missionary hermeneutic in biblical scholarship remains an important task for the present.
Systematic Theology
Newbigin also inquired as to whether we had developed a “missiologically adequate systematic theology.” Such a theology would certainly be contextual. Theology is a fresh task in each generation because the cultural context is constantly changing. Theology has the negative role of exposing and expelling the idolatry that perverts the faith. It also has the positive task of expressing the faith in relationship to the relevant issues of the day so the church may fully and vividly take hold of the faith. Contextual theology is not a fad for Newbigin but the prerequisite of a living and faithful faith; it must be both rooted in Scripture and relevant to the cultural currents of the day.
If the Church is going to meet and master the forces which are shaping the secular world of our time, she needs to put a far greater proportion of her strength behind the work of the theologians; she needs a theology which is not the mere product of changing moods and fashions but deeply based on Scripture, stated in terms in which the world lives, relevant to the forces which are actually shaping the lives of men. It is not sufficient for the Church to attend to tactics: she must attend first to truth.
Newbigin is concerned that theology has been primarily focused on “a mutual struggle of rival interpretations of the Gospel” and not enough concerned about the cultural context. Dialogue has been between theological traditions rather than between the gospel and religio-cultural context. This leads to either a “jellyfish” theology that is blown about on the cultural tides or a “fossil” theology that clings to old and irrelevant forms of theological expression. A good example of challenging a “rival interpretations” approach is when Newbigin was asked to speak to the Anglican-Reformed International Commission on the sacraments. In effect, his talk relativized the differences between the traditions when he argued that both share the same problematic approaches to the sacraments, rooted in Christendom. The real battle is not between Anglican and Reformed views of the sacraments but has to do with whether baptism and the Lord’s Supper are nourishing a missionary congregation.
Newbigin also offers some helpful structures for a missiologically adequate systematic theology. In chapter 2, we discussed how the eschatological, missional, communal, and individual contexts informed Newbigin’s formulation of his pneumatology and doctrine of the sacraments. Pneumatology has often been shaped by an understanding of the application of Christ’s work to individuals; the sacraments are understood in terms of the means of grace for individual salvation. Newbigin’s formulation does not diminish the importance of these insights but places them in a broader framework. We might also think of the way he views the “logic” of the Christian faith in cosmic, communal, and personal terms. Many theological themes would be much better understood within this framework. For example, the atonement and the resurrection, understood in their cosmic and communal significance, would challenge typical individualistic approaches. The beneficia Christi that often make up the whole of soteriology would be rightly placed in a more comprehensive soteriology. These frameworks offer much potential for revitalizing systematic theology in a way that nourishes the missionary church.
Church History
Newbigin’s brief suggestions about church history are likewise filled with promise. He believed that church history had been taught in terms of doctrinal and polity conflicts within the life of the church. Instead, he calls us to approach church history in terms of a series of successive missionary encounters of the gospel with the various cultures of the world. In fact, it was in a talk that Newbigin once gave that my own understanding was changed, and I saw the value of this approach. He said something like this: “I wish someone had taught me in seminary that the christological and trinitarian controversies of the second and third centuries were not first and foremost matters of orthodoxy and heresy but examples of a contextual struggle in theology.” He wasn’t denying the faithfulness of Athanasius in contrast to Arius, saying both were equally contextual theologies. But both were struggling to contextualize the gospel in a Greek context. Athanasius offered a more faithful contextualization in keeping with Scripture, challenging the idolatrous Neoplatonic framework assumed by Arius and others. Church history is about exposing the contextual struggle of the gospel with the cultural currents of the day. This approach to church history has much to teach students, not just in terms of content—that is, the actual theological results—but also in terms of models. We may observe the way churches in other historical periods confessed and taught the gospel faithfully within their own cultural context. And so we learn both by good and by bad example how to walk in a way that is faithful.
Pastoral Theology
Newbigin has also offered insight for the development of a more missional pastoral theology. On the one hand, he rejects the theory-praxis dichotomy that underlies theological education and divides the subjects into theoretical disciplines (biblical studies, systematic theology, church history) and practical disciplines (pastoral and practical theology). This dichotomy is the product of the Enlightenment. On the other hand, he believes that pastoral theology operates on a view of ministry that is not shaped by a missionary understanding of the church. Pastoral care is conceived in Christendom terms, assuming that each individual believer is a passive recipient of the means of grace. It is the duty of the minister to administer it. He acknowledges the partial truth in this; pastoral care must indeed employ the means of grace to build up believers. But there is more: pastoral care must also be for the discharge of the missionary task.
Missiology
Finally, Newbigin also has much to offer the discipline of missiology. He describes his own experience as he takes up teaching missiology at Selly Oaks and determining where to begin and how to approach the discipline. He says he wants to root his missiology in an understanding of the church as missionary. The text that he authored for the course on theology of mission was The Open Secret. There we see the way he sets the church’s mission in the context of the narrative of God’s mission. Mission is a central theme in the biblical story as a whole, and the people of God are missionary by their very nature. Mission is not formulated as one of the tasks of the church.
Beyond this important starting point Newbigin has offered two significant distinctions—between missionary dimension and missionary intention, and between mission and missions—that remain extremely helpful in approaching missiology. Both distinctions are attempting to protect an intentional witness of the church in evangelism and cross-cultural missions while recognizing the comprehensive scope of the church’s mission to bear witness to Christ’s lordship over all of life.
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More could certainly be said about Newbigin’s legacy in theology and theological education, but these brief comments show that he has much to offer in our present crisis in the way of missional theology and missional theological education.
An Unanxious Witness
N. T. Wright tells the story of a time in the 1980s when he entered the second term of the academic year fearful and exhausted, not wanting to face the tasks ahead. Newbigin was scheduled to preach in chapel that first day, and when he walked through the gateway of Worcester College, Oxford, Wright felt all those fears and exhaustions drop away. He knew he could tackle the new term with joy. He notes that others have expressed a similar experience when he has related that story.
I experienced this too but in a different way. I was entering Duke University Chapel with Newbigin just prior to his second Hickman lecture on the topic of scriptural authority. We had been discussing at a meal just prior some opposition he was receiving from liberal quarters on his view of Scripture and how he was being characterized as a fundamentalist. I confess I was mildly anxious as we walked in, knowing the lecture that was coming. Just before reaching the door, he momentarily reached for my hand and said, “There will be many who will oppose what I say.” And then, as if in an act of resolve, he pushed my hand away and said, “But I must be faithful whatever the consequences and leave it in God’s hand.” I remember my own sense of anxiety and fear dropping away.
What accounts for this? In my case at least it was the joyful and bold, yet humble, confidence that characterized Newbigin’s approach to the faith. This is rooted in a shift that he describes in his own theology and experienced in the 1960s. He believed that his own theology was not as fully trinitarian as it should be. Some have discounted Newbigin’s self-description here because his earlier writing appears to be fully trinitarian from the start. However, what changed was not simply a fuller theological formulation of the Trinity, although this may be true. It was his deepened confidence in the sovereign rule of the Father over all of history, ineluctably working out his purpose, and the conviction that the Spirit is the first and only effectual witness to Christ. This theme becomes far more prominent in his writing and, we can assume, in his own experience. Mission is not only following Christ and continuing his mission of life, word, and deed. It is following in Christ’s way, with the same trust in the work of the Father throughout history and the same faith in the power of the Spirit working in his words and deeds.
This very real faith that it is God’s mission stands against the powerful humanist tides that are sweeping the Western church into its currents today. There is a managerial ecclesiology that relies—in practice but not in theology—on planning, strategy, and the social sciences for the church’s life. Just recently a pastor said to me that he believes this to be one of the biggest threats, even while being hidden, for American pastors today. Confessing in our theology that God is sovereignly working out his redemptive purposes in history and that the Spirit is the primary witness is much easier than taking this truth into our being so deeply that our ecclesial practice is reshaped.
This confidence in God’s work, coupled with the conviction that central to our very being as the church is the call to bear faithful witness to Christ, led Newbigin to an unanxious witness that was full of joy, boldness, and trust. It also liberates us from fear and concern about results and frees us to be directed to the glory of God. Those who knew Newbigin can testify to this. And this also may offer an explanation of why he has had this calming effect on others. One just knew with Newbigin that mission is in God’s hands, and our responsibility is quite simply to be faithful.
. Private email correspondence, July 28, 2017.
. Surprisingly, John Frame seems to misunderstand N. T. Wright precisely at this point. See Frame, “N. T. Wright and the Authority of Scripture,” in Did God Really Say? Affirming the Truthfulness and Trustworthiness of Scripture, ed. David B. Garner (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R, 2012), 111–12.
. Timothy Keller, Center Church: Doing Balanced, Gospel-Centered Ministry in Your City (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2012), 40.
. Richard Bauckham, Bible and Mission: Christian Witness in a Postmodern World (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2003), 4–5; N. T. Wright, The New Testament and the People of God (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1992), 135.
. Wright, New Testament and the People of God, 41–42.
. Craig G. Bartholomew and Michael W. Goheen, The Drama of Scripture: Finding Our Place in the Biblical Story, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2014).
. The original verse is in the second person: “And you also were included in Christ when you heard the message of truth, the gospel of your salvation. When you believed . . .”
. Newbigin has this intriguing reference to “the three Israels” in an outline on canon and mission. It is one item of a list of important interpretive clues for reading the biblical story. See Lesslie Newbigin, “Canon and Mission,” unpublished notes, Newbigin Archives, University of Birmingham (n.d.), 2. See also comments above in chap. 1 in the section “God’s Purpose and the Logic of Election.”
. Richard Bauckham holds a similar conviction: “The reality of our world is not the end of grand narratives, but the increasing dominance of the narrative of economic globalization” (Bauckham, Bible and Mission, 94). Interestingly, he interacts with Newbigin throughout this chapter.
. See, e.g., Lesslie Newbigin, “New Birth into a Living Hope” (keynote address, European Area Council of the World Alliance of Reformed Churches meeting, Edinburgh, Scotland, August 28, 1995), 2–3, 9; Lesslie Newbigin, “Whose Justice?” Ecumenical Review 44 (July 1992): 309; Lesslie Newbigin, “Gospel and Culture” (unpublished speech, Denmark, November 1995), 11–12; Lesslie Newbigin, “A Missionary’s Dream,” Ecumenical Review 43, no. 1 (January 1991): 5–6; Lesslie Newbigin, “The Gospel as Public Truth: Swanwick Opening Statement” (unpublished address, 1992), 5–6; Lesslie Newbigin, “Modernity in Context,” in Modern, Postmodern and Christian, ed. John Reid, Lesslie Newbigin, and David Pullinger, Lausanne Occasional Paper 27 (Carberry, Scotland: Handsel, 1996), 8; Lesslie Newbigin, “The End of History,” Gospel and Our Culture (U. K.) 13 (Summer 1992): 1–2; Lesslie Newbigin, “. . . and Culture,” in Signs amid the Rubble: The Purposes of God in Human History, ed. Geoffrey Wainwright (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003), 119–20. For essays that seek to expose the religious and idolatrous roots of globalization, see Michael W. Goheen and Erin G. Glanville, eds., The Gospel and Globalization: Exploring the Religious Roots of Globalization (Vancouver: Regent College Press and Geneva Society, 2009).
. Newbigin, “. . . and Culture,” 119.
. Ulrich Duchrow, Global Economy: A Confessional Issue for the Churches? (Geneva: World Council of Churches, 1987); Timothy Gorringe, “The Principalities and Powers: A Framework for Thinking about Globalization,” in Globalization and the Good, ed. Peter Heslam (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004), 85; Guillermo Hansen, “Neoliberal Globalization: A Casus Confessionis?,” Lutheran World Fellowship Documentation 50 (December 2004): 163–78.
. Lesslie Newbigin, Unfinished Agenda: An Updated Autobiography (Edinburgh: Saint Andrew Press, 1993), 250.
. Craig M. Gay, The Way of the (Modern) World: Or, Why It’s Tempting to Live as if God Doesn’t Exist (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998).
. Richard Bauckham, James: Wisdom of James, Disciple of Jesus the Sage, New Testament Readings (London and New York: Routledge, 1999), 174–75.
. Ian Barns, “Some Reflections on Lesslie Newbigin’s Challenge to Bear Witness to the Gospel as ‘Public Truth,’” Fellowship of Saint Thomas, “Lesslie Newbigin Centenary,” www.fost.org.uk/bigincont.htm.
. Lesslie Newbigin, “Theological Education in a World Perspective,” Churchman 93, no. 2 (1979): 105–15 (my emphasis).
. Lesslie Newbigin, “The Bible: Good News for Secularised People” (keynote address, Europe and Middle East Regional Conference, Eisenach, Germany, April 1991), Newbigin Archives, University of Birmingham, 1.
. Newbigin, “Canon and Mission,” 1.
. Newbigin, “Canon and Mission,” 1.
. Newbigin, “Canon and Mission,” 2.
. Michael W. Goheen, “Theology in Context: Lesslie Newbigin’s Contribution,” Christian Courier, 2668 (July 9, 2001): 16–17.
. Lesslie Newbigin, “Bishop Newbigin’s Final Word,” in We Were Brought Together, ed. David M. Taylor (Sydney: Australian Council for the World Council of Churches, 1960), 129.
. Lesslie Newbigin, Honest Religion for Secular Man (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1966), 102.
. Lesslie Newbigin, “How Should We Understand Sacraments and Ministry?” (paper for the Anglican-Reformed International Commission meeting, London, 1983), Newbigin Archives, University of Birmingham.
. I have taken this approach in Michael W. Goheen, A Light to the Nations: The Missional Church and the Biblical Story (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), 101–19 (chap. 5, “The Death and Resurrection of Jesus and the Church’s Missional Identity”).
. Lesslie Newbigin, Proper Confidence: Faith, Doubt, and Certainty in Christian Discipleship (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995), 38–39.
. Lesslie Newbigin, Household of God: Lectures on the Nature of the Church (New York: Friendship Press, 1954), 166–67.
. Newbigin, Unfinished Agenda, 229.
. In my own missiological text—Michael W. Goheen, Introduction to Mission Studies Today: Scripture, History, and Issues (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2014)—I start with mission in the biblical story (chap. 1) and three theological distinctions: between mission of God and mission of the church, missionary dimension and missionary intention, and mission and missions (chap. 2) as a foundation for missiology.
. A postscript to the story: I sat in front of a pastor and conversed with him before the lecture. It was rather clear he did not like Newbigin’s orthodox views that he had heard in the first lecture. At the end of the lecture, Newbigin received a lengthy standing ovation, something I am told is uncommon for that lecture series. I turned and saw this liberal pastor applauding, and so when it concluded I asked him why. His answer surprised me: “He just gave me the gospel back again to preach!”