Foreword
Foreword
Like many, I have personal reasons to be grateful to God for Lesslie Newbigin. I don’t remember which occasion it was when I first met him, but he was already a legend in his own lifetime; I was like a teenager suddenly meeting a rock star. He had, after all, been a missionary in India, working through all the issues of missionary theology and praxis, and had been secretary of the body that drew up the founding charters of the famous ecumenical experiment we know as the Church of South India. I think Lesslie quietly relished the fact that he, a lifelong Presbyterian, was called to be a bishop: God’s sense of humor, he might have said, or (perhaps better) the way in which the sovereign grace of God overrules our small human attempts at organization. He had been involved in the founding of the World Council of Churches (in the heady days after the Second World War when people were looking for signs of new hope) and had sat around the table with Karl Barth and others. And, being Lesslie, he was completely unaffected by it all. Quite short in stature, but with a strikingly handsome face and a quiet composure and poise, he was the very antithesis of the highly strung, self-promoting rock star. He gave every impression, not that he had gotten life figured out, but that he knew God had it figured out and that he was totally content just to trust him.
Mike Goheen, in this fine study that opens up the heart and breadth of Lesslie’s thought, has told the story of how I had invited Lesslie to preach in Worcester College Chapel, Oxford, and how his mere arrival that evening transformed my mood from one of nervous anticipation of the new academic term to one of readiness for the challenges and possibilities that would come. I remember telling that story to a friend who had worked in India, in the area where Lesslie had served as bishop. My friend at once told me that in that part of India one could go from town to town and admire a school, a hospital, a church building, only to be told, “Bishop Newbigin encouraged us to build this, and told us who we should employ to get it done.” Lesslie was, in other words, a walking model of the theological truth that lay behind all he did: a quiet confidence in the sovereignty and loving purposes of God, not such as might make you sit back and shrug your shoulders, but such as would make you think that it was therefore going to be a good idea to discern your own vocation within that purpose and steadily set about whatever tasks such a vocation might entail.
This same doctrine of divine sovereignty undergirded Lesslie’s sense (strongly reinforced by his reading of Michael Polanyi) that if all truth was God’s truth, then there was no area of life over which human research could claim absolute rights; in other words, there was no such thing as neutrality or “objectivity,” no such thing as a God’s-eye view of reality available to us. All the truth we see, in whatever sphere, comes with strings attached: worldview strings having to do with our own motivations and mind-sets, and not least with our wider culture. In the wrong hands, this might have meant the collapse of all truth statements into a subjective morass. But with Lesslie’s strong view of the world as God’s creation and all human vocations as located within God’s purposes, it meant that all human research would ultimately belong within the celebration of God’s good creation and the humble obedience to his redeeming purposes. I well remember the anger expressed by one chemistry professor who heard Lesslie preach on that occasion in Worcester College Chapel and felt that his own professional integrity as an “objective” scientist was being undermined. Interestingly, it was his fellow scientists, atheists all, who put him right. Yes, the experiments can be repeated on the other side of the world; but, excuse me, why were we doing these experiments in the first place? It doesn’t take long to get back to the culture-conditioned human motivations behind all our apparently “neutral” observations. That is important, as Lesslie saw very well, for our reading of the Gospels as history, as part of God’s true history: skeptical historiography put on a pose of neutral objectivity that needed to be unmasked. Lesslie helped many of us not only to glimpse a bigger vision of God and God’s creation but also to reflect on the epistemology required for that glimpse to become a grasp.
Within all that, Lesslie taught a generation of us that a primary task of the Christian in any culture was engagement. He had, after all, sat on the floor of his local ashram with Hindu teachers, getting inside their worldview, not in order to work toward some fashionable relativistic synthesis, but to discern (much like Paul in Athens) points of contact and points of radical disagreement. If all truth was God’s truth, then one might well expect many happy surprises as well as many moments of courteous challenge. This was quite different, in the 1980s, from what many Christians (British Christians at least) had supposed, poised as we were between a liberal “affirmation” and a conservative “rejection” of this or that aspect of “culture.” Indeed, Lesslie taught us what he himself had discovered on his return to live in Britain after so many years in India: to look at British culture itself with a critical discernment, to stop taking things for granted, and to inquire of this or that cultural development whether it was honoring to God the Creator. Lesslie, after all, had not come back to Britain to retire: he just translated his missionary vocation into a sequence of different modes.
What was more, Lesslie had been through a period of radical exploration and had come out the other side. He had, by his own admission, walked down the path toward a more liberal or relativistic view of gospel and culture, had seen where it led, and had firmly turned around again—not, being Lesslie, to any kind of closed-in conservatism, but to the larger world, the fresh outside air, the fully biblical vision of the creation and redemption of the world. I remember being at one or two conferences with him in the early 1990s where some young would-be radicals were trying to argue for relativistic positions and Lesslie, kindly and courteously, would argue a biblical case for the massive and all-embracing truth of the gospel: for, in the phrase he made his own, the gospel as “public truth.” (This is all the more important given the way in which some followers of Karl Barth appear to argue for a distinct sphere of Christian “truth.”) He carried conviction as few others could have done. This was reinforced, in terms of his rhetorical style, by his unnerving ability, being almost blind, to give a perfect lecture, laying out a large theme with its many interlocking parts and bringing it all in to land just under the hour without a glance at notes or a watch. He was the kind of consummate professional who made it all look easy.
I was especially fortunate to have met Lesslie and been captivated by his vision of Jesus and the kingdom just before I set about writing my own big book Jesus and the Victory of God. Many strands come together in a project like that, but Lesslie’s vision, expounded and also exemplified, helped give me the courage to shape the argument. But that wasn’t the end of it. The year after it was published I was startled to pick up the phone one day and hear Lesslie’s voice on the other end. Being far too blind to be able to read for himself, he made a virtue of necessity—perhaps I should say a seminar of necessity—by calling a team of students from King’s College in London to come and read to him. They had been reading Jesus and the Victory of God out loud, footnotes and all; and he was phoning to tell me which chapter they had just finished and how excited they had been by it. I was overwhelmed with gratitude, especially since the debt was much more in the other direction. Lesslie was, after all—as Mike’s book bears out again and again—a biblical theologian of the church’s mission. It was that deep, lifelong engagement with Scripture that undergirded all he did. The phone call was then followed up with letters; unable to see, Lesslie would use an old typewriter and bash away at where he remembered the keys ought to be, producing masterpieces of impressionistic writing whose overall impact was of the excitement still motivating this old man, increasingly frail in physique, to relish Scripture, to celebrate God’s kingdom, and to encourage relative youngsters like myself in our work.
It was only later, after Lesslie’s death, that I began to discover more of his earlier writings. We had all read Foolishness to the Greeks; indeed, it was like a second Bible to some of us. But there was so much more. Lesslie had thought his way into, and then through, most if not all of the great theological issues of the day, reflecting on them with his own mixture of prayerful humility and missionary strategy. Because his life didn’t fit into the normal academic pattern, I suspect that many of his profound and original books have mostly been ignored by professors who review books by other professors and engage with them in their footnotes. I hope that this book will go a long way toward turning that around. I have often reflected that, like some musical composers, Lesslie may in fact have his greatest impact generations after his death, and my prayer is that Mike’s work will play a role in that process. Certainly, as I reflect on the beliefs about the church’s vocation that I have come to hold over the years, and then as I look at the vast sweep of Lesslie’s work surveyed here in The Church and Its Vocation, I begin to realize that at my best I have simply been thinking Lesslie’s thoughts after him. I thank God for Lesslie Newbigin and for books like this present one that introduce him powerfully to a new generation.