1. The Biblical Story as Universal History
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The Biblical Story as Universal History
To rightly approach Lesslie Newbigin’s missionary ecclesiology, we must begin where he always began: with Jesus Christ revealed in the gospel. “If it is really true that God has done what the Gospel tells us that he has done . . . it must, it necessarily must become the starting point and controlling reality of all thought.” Anyone who would consider Newbigin’s understanding of any issue, including ecclesiology, must begin with Jesus Christ as he is revealed in the gospel.
Near the end of his life Newbigin lamented that in the ecumenical tradition “we have used the word ‘gospel’ without giving as much attention as we need to the question of what exactly we mean by that word.” Certainly the ecumenical tradition is not the only Christian body to be guilty of this charge; the evangelical tradition is likewise culpable. And this is no small oversight. The way we implicitly understand the gospel has enormous implications for the way we comprehend the whole Christian faith. This includes our conception of the church and its mission. Moreover, when we do not attend to what we mean by the word “gospel,” its content is filled, by default, with meaning more derived from our theological traditions than from what Jesus meant when he proclaimed the good news of the kingdom or from Paul’s restatement of the gospel of Jesus in light of the crucifixion and resurrection.
Jesus and the Biblical Story
The gospel can only be understood in terms of a reciprocal relationship between the central events of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ and the whole of the biblical story. Newbigin expresses it thus: “The reading of the Bible involves a continual twofold movement: we have to understand Jesus in the context of the whole story, and we have to understand the whole story in the light of Jesus.” This means we need constantly to move back and forth between two mutually dependent approaches to open up the content of the gospel. On the one hand, we begin with Jesus Christ and his life, death, resurrection, ascension, and gift of the Spirit as the clue to faithfully understanding and reading the biblical story. On the other hand, we articulate the biblical story as the context for rightly understanding Jesus Christ and the central redemptive-historical events surrounding his advent in history.
Newbigin’s own approach proceeds in this way. In his 1948 talk to the Amsterdam Assembly of the World Council of Churches, Newbigin poses the question, “What is the Gospel?” which he answers by quoting Jesus’s announcement in Mark 1:14: “In the New Testament the earliest and simplest statement of the Gospel is ‘the time is fulfilled and the Kingdom of God is at hand.’” To properly understand this announcement of good news, one must look both to what comes before in the Old Testament writings and to what follows in the New Testament record. He then proceeds in his talk to outline this narrative context in terms of five headings: creation, fall, election, redemption, and consummation. Similarly, in his William Belden Lectures at Harvard fourteen years later, he says:
As a starting point for this study, I take the words with which, according to our most ancient records, Jesus opened his public ministry. “After John was arrested,” so the gospel of Mark tells us, “Jesus came into Galilee, preaching the gospel of God, and saying, ‘The time is fulfilled and the Kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe the gospel’”—believe, that is to say, this piece of good news which is now announced. What is the good news? It is that the time is fulfilled and the Kingdom of God is at hand.
We must look backward and forward to ask what is being fulfilled and how it is being fulfilled. We first inquire into the background of the coming of Christ: the Old Testament. This is made up of three “presuppositions of Christ’s revelation”: creation, sin, and election. Then, second, we go to the New Testament record, which announces the present arrival and the future consummation of the kingdom of God as the end of universal history.
In both cases Newbigin begins with Jesus’s announcement of the good news of the coming of the kingdom: “the centre of his teaching was himself, the claim, that is to say, that in him the Kingdom of God had come.” This announcement of something that is happening demands a response—either faith and full allegiance or unbelief and rejection. But what was the meaning of this remarkable announcement? The kingdom of God breaking into the world in Jesus is about the goal of cosmic history. That goal is about the renewal of creation, which stands at the beginning of universal history. To embrace the good news in faith is to be invited into the Bible as a story of cosmic history. And so, moreover, the kingdom of God can only be understood in terms of the content of that story: creation, sin, election, redemption present in the work of Christ and the Holy Spirit, and consummation. This narrative content sets the context for understanding the good news.
This biblical narrative is a story of cosmic history. And that insight, expressed and stressed by Newbigin repeatedly, has significant implications for the gospel and for the mission of God’s people. In one remarkable statement, Newbigin summarizes a number of themes that lie at the heart of his understanding of the Christian faith:
If we take the Bible in its canonical wholeness, as we must, then it is best understood as history. It is universal, cosmic history. It interprets the entire story of all things from creation to consummation, and the story of the human race within creation, and within the human race the story of the people called by God to be the bearers of the meaning of the whole, and—at the very centre—the story of the One in whom God’s purpose was decisively revealed by being decisively effected. It is obviously a different story from the stories that the world tells about itself.
In this statement there are four important interrelated themes that will set the agenda for the remaining chapters of this book. First, the Bible is universal history that narrates the true story of the whole world from creation to consummation. Second, a central thread in the biblical narrative is that God has chosen a people to be the bearers of the end and meaning of this story. Third, at the center of the story, Jesus reveals and accomplishes the end and therefore the purpose of universal history. Fourth, this cosmic story is comprehensive and so is incompatible with all other cultural stories. Biblical story, election of a people to mission, the gospel of Jesus, and a missionary encounter with culture—these four themes form the heart of Newbigin’s thought. And in this framework we see just what he means by a missionary church and just how central the people of God are to his understanding of the Christian faith.
The Bible Is a Story
For Newbigin, the essential form of the Bible is a narrative: “It is essentially a story that claims to be the story, the true story both of the cosmos and of human life within the cosmos.” When he refers to the essential form of Scripture as a narrative, Newbigin is not referring to a literary genre. The Bible is in the form of a story, but it “contains, indeed, much else: prayer, poetry, legislation, ethical teaching, and so on. But essentially it is a story.” The overarching structure of the Bible is a historical narrative into which all other literary genres may be fitted. This all-encompassing story is indeed narrated in the historical books of the Bible, and the historical literary genre plays its own unique role in the canon, alongside the other literary genres, in forming God’s people into a faithful community. Yet story forms the all-embracing framework and context into which all the books of the Bible find their place. The narrative of God’s redemptive work is like the skeleton of a body, which gives the basic shape, while the various books are like the organs and body parts, which find their place and play their unique role within that fundamental structure.
By “narrative” we are speaking of the movement of history toward a goal that discloses the meaning of the whole. Specifically, it is a revelatory record of God’s actions in history whereby he leads the world to its ultimate purpose. “Revelation is not the communication of a body of timeless truths which one has only to receive in order to know the whole mind of God. Revelation is rather the disclosure of the direction in which God is leading the world and his family.”
The category of narrative has overarching significance for Newbigin. He speaks of the “great divide” among religions. The very nature of religion is that it is concerned with that which is ultimate or that which finally unifies, controls, and gives meaning to everything. It is a claim to ultimacy: it claims to make sense of reality as a whole. Ultimate truth can be found in one of two ways, and this is what leads to the great divide. One can find unchanging truth in something that lies behind and includes all reality. This truth is all-encompassing and therefore gives unity and meaning to all multiplicity. This is the way of Eastern religions—for example, Brahman in Hinduism. Or one can find it in a universal story that has an end yet to come. This is the way of Judaism, Islam, humanism, and the Christian faith. The first finds unity and meaning in some eternal and unchanging being, and the second finds it in a comprehensive historical narrative. For Newbigin, the Christian faith finds ultimate truth in a story that is centered in Jesus Christ. “To speak of the finality of Christ is to speak of the Gospel as the clue to history.” Thus the basic structure of the Bible and the Christian faith is universal history, and “the deepest meaning of history lies in the fact that in it God, who is, is wrestling with the estranged and rebellious wills of men, until his own perfect love is embodied and reflected in a redeemed and restored creation.”
To speak of a narrative, therefore, goes to the very nature of the kind of religion Christianity is. It is a narrative that unifies and gives meaning to everything. There is no more foundational or ultimate category for the Christian faith than a narrative centered in Jesus Christ.
The Bible’s narrative form is that of a historical record of the mighty acts of God. It is first a historical record: the story of the Bible is concerned with events that happened in history. “In contrast to the great religions of Asia, the classical world view, and the view that has controlled European thought since the 18th century, the Bible affirms that history is the sphere where we make contact with reality.” The Bible is concerned with events in history, things that happened and are part of the same narrative fabric that records the world’s other historical events. This fundamentally historical component is not negotiable. The whole Christian faith would fall to the ground if it were not the case that the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus were real, historical events.
Newbigin warns against the way “narrative” is sometimes used in theological discourse to speak of a story that orders and shapes the life of the Christian community but is little concerned with history. Specifically, he departs at this point from postliberals such as Hans Frei and George Lindbeck, from whom he learned much about the way the Bible functions as a master narrative to form a community. “When the word narrative is used in theological discourse, it is sometimes with the implication that the historical truth of the narrative is not important. . . . It is of the essence of the Christian faith that this story is the true story.” He asks, “How do we understand the meaning of ‘true’ in this context?” If we follow the lead of the Bible itself, then “true” means a narrative account of “things that really happened.”
The historical nature of the biblical story must be protected on two sides from the encroaching power of the Enlightenment in the Christian community. On the one side, the liberal tradition has reduced the story to a record of the religious experience of an ancient Near Eastern people. The “happenedness” of most of the narrative is suspect at best. The narrative of the Enlightenment is assumed to be true and used to judge the historical veracity of the biblical account. When judged by the central criterion of the Enlightenment story—scientific knowledge—most of the narrative is dismissed as a sort of religious experience. On the other side, the evangelical tradition has reduced the Bible to propositional truth. There is a long, powerfully entrenched tradition that arose in the middle of the twentieth century with theologians, such as Carl F. H. Henry, who rightly want to protect Scripture as truth from liberal higher criticism. In an attempt to hold on to the universal truth of the Scriptures, the Bible is molded into a book of timeless and eternal propositional truths about God and the world. The Enlightenment notion of truth is seized in order to protect the truth of Scripture. This is an extremely important point for Newbigin, and so we need to delve a little more deeply into the source of this problem.
For the Bible, the source of ultimately reliable truth is a narrative series of historical events that disclose God’s purpose for the world. Alternatively, the Greco-Roman stream within Western culture relocates that source of ultimate truth to unchanging ideas that stand above history. This has a pagan source in Plato and Aristotle. While this Greek tradition has played an important role throughout Western history, the influence of Augustine’s City of God kept this tradition from becoming dominant for a thousand years. Augustine’s narrative of the coming of the city of God did not eliminate the Greek pagan approach but kept it at bay. However, we see a shift beginning in the late Middle Ages that culminated in the Enlightenment, wherein this Greek approach moves to an ascendant position in the wake of the scientific revolution. “The Enlightenment . . . was—from one point of view—a shift in the location of reliable truth from the story told in the Bible to the eternal truths of reason, of which the mathematical physics of Newton offered the supreme model.”
When this shift takes place, the truth of what God and the world are like appears to be best expressed in timeless theological statements. Perhaps these eternal truths are illustrated by stories, but the deepest truth is found in timeless propositions. Newbigin quotes the first statement of the Westminster Confession of Faith that God is “infinite in being and perfection, a most pure spirit, invisible, without body, parts or passion, immutable, immense, eternal, incomprehensible, almighty, most wise, most holy, most free, most absolute” and then comments that “we are in a world different from the Bible.” He is not disputing the truth content of this confession; rather, it is the form of this articulation that does not follow the pedagogy of the Bible. It shows more dependency on Aristotle than on the Old Testament. The very way truth is expressed in the Bible is in a historical story. Truth comes as a narrative that reveals God through his mighty deeds and invites us to know him; it is a story in which God’s redemptive work in history reveals his purpose and calls us to find our place. “The Bible does not tell stories that illustrate something true apart from the story. The Bible tells a story that is the story, the story of which our human life is a part.” All theological formulations, including evangelical ones that claim to be expressions of eternal truth, are really “attempts we make at particular moments in the story to grasp and state how things are in terms of our experience at that point. They are all provisional and relative to time and place, as we recognize when as twentieth-century people we read the seventeenth-century language of the Westminster Confession.” These formulations may be more or less faithful to the story, but in either case they are second-order activities. Newbigin is surely on target in this critique of some species of evangelicalism. He concludes, “The reality with which we have to deal is the story—the story that begins before the creation of the world, ends beyond the end of the world, and leads through the narrow road that is marked by the names of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, Moses, Amos, Paul, and, name above every name, Jesus.”
The story the Bible tells with these historical names and events is not simply one species of religious experience expressed in myths that arise out of an ancient Near Eastern people. Rather, what makes the biblical record unique is that it deals with nothing less than the mighty acts of God. This is not a mere record of an ancient tribe’s religious experiences but what the one living God is doing for the salvation of the world in and through a certain people. “It is history in the sense that it tells of things that really happened, the same things as those of which pagan historians wrote. But it was told as the narrative of the mighty acts of God.” The events are selected, recorded, organized, and interpreted because they testify to events in which God discloses the origin, meaning, and ultimate goal of history—a redeemed and restored creation. Since these are the mighty acts of God, the story the Bible tells is true for all people throughout their whole lives at all times. This is God’s story.
The Biblical Story Is Universal History
What exactly is the status of this biblical narrative in Newbigin’s understanding? This is an important question since many answers are given or, more likely, assumed in various theological circles. And the answer we give to that question will impact our view of church and mission.
We have already noted several options that Newbigin would reject. Narrative cannot be reduced simply to a literary genre. Nor can narrative be reduced to either the mythological story of a premodern ancient Near Eastern people, as in the liberal tradition, or even the true myth of the postliberal tradition. And there are other understandings of the notion of “narrative” that Newbigin would reject. Two common misunderstandings are that story has to do with either a way of interpreting Scripture (redemptive-historical or narrative hermeneutic) or an approach to theology (biblical or narrative or redemptive-historical theology). No doubt these are implications of the biblical story, but narrative cannot be reduced to hermeneutics or theology.
The very nature of Scripture is that it is the true story of the world and that it provides the all-encompassing framework for or the overarching umbrella under which any kind of second-order theological reflection must be done. For Newbigin story cannot be reduced to theology; it is much bigger and more significant than that. It is the true story of the whole world. To be fully human as God intends is to be part of the biblical story that finds its center in Jesus Christ.
We can put it another way to show just what an astonishing claim Newbigin is making here. The claim that the Bible tells the true story of the whole world is nothing less than the very nature of the Christian faith. It is not a literary genre, a hermeneutic, or a way of doing theology. It is what the Christian faith is—the whole point of Christianity. “The Christian faith is a particular way of understanding history as a whole which finds in the story about Jesus its decisive clue.” “Christian faith is itself an interpretation of history.”
One of the primary ways that Newbigin made this point was to speak of the Bible in terms of universal or cosmic history. The Bible “sets before us a vision of cosmic history from the creation of the world to its consummation, of the nations which make up the one human family, and—of course—of one nation chosen to be the bearer of the meaning of history for the sake of all, and of one man called to be the bearer of that meaning for the nation. The Bible is universal history.” The Bible is “cosmic history,” the “entire story of all things,” a story that moves “from creation to consummation,” the “story of the human race within creation.” It doesn’t get much more comprehensive than that. And it is a bold claim!
Newbigin often summarizes a conversation he had with his Hindu friend Chaturvedi Badrinath, a scholar of the world’s religions, to make his point. He believes that, sadly, Badrinath understands the nature of the Scriptures better than many Christians, even while Badrinath himself thinks the Christian claim to be absurd.
I can’t understand why you missionaries present the Bible to us in India as a book of religion. It is not a book of religion—and anyway we have plenty of books of religion in India. We don’t need any more! I find in your Bible a unique interpretation of universal history, the history of the whole creation and the history of the human race. And therefore a unique interpretation of the human person as a responsible actor in history. That is unique. There is nothing else in the whole religious literature of the world to put alongside it.
This is a story that encompasses the entire creation and all the nations of the world along with every part of their cultural lives. It is a story of the purposeful activity of God, who is Creator, Ruler, Sustainer, Redeemer, and Judge of the entire universe. But that purpose is found in a small ancient Near Eastern nation and in a first-century Jewish man because that is where God was at work revealing and accomplishing his purpose. This is the “scandal of particularity” and certainly is a “tremendously bold claim,” a “stupendous claim” that is nothing short of “astounding.” No wonder Badrinath thought the claim to be absurd!
The Biblical Story Will Clash with Other Cultural Stories
This claim that the Bible is the true story of the world immediately raises the problem of other stories that make the same claim. The church always lives in a cultural context that has a different story to tell about the world. The way we understand human life depends on what story we believe is true. In our contemporary culture, the Bible is contested by the humanist story. Both stories are comprehensive and claim to be true. Both stories invite hearers to find their place in the story and so claim the ultimate allegiance of those who hear them. The Bible never stands in a cultural vacuum but is always in a context where it is challenged by an alternative and rival story.
The problem in Western culture is that the biblical story has been tailored to fit into the more comprehensive cultural story. The fact-value dichotomy that plagues the West has forced the Bible into the inferior realm of religious values. The Western story of progress by way of science, technology, and the construction of a rational society is assumed to be the true story of the world. The problem for Newbigin is not so much that this is what contemporary Western non-Christians believe. That is normal and properly basic. This is how stories function: when one embraces a story, everything else must fit into it. And so Western folk who indwell the humanist story should make the Bible fit their story; they will reject its claim and see it as just another religious book that belongs in the private realm of religion. The problem is that Christians who have embraced Christ have allowed themselves to be drawn into the Western story as their ultimate allegiance and, like their unbelieving neighbors, have made peace with the relegation of their Christian faith to the realm of values. This is nothing short of sheer syncretism. It is a misunderstanding of the nature of Scripture and is the church’s abandonment of its vocation to live in the midst of history as a witness to the true story of the world. “To be human is to be a part of a story, and to be fully human as God intends is to be part of the true story and to understand its beginning and its ending. The true story is one of which the central clues are given in the Bible, and the hinge of the story on which all its meaning turns is the incarnation, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. That is the message we are entrusted with, and we owe it to all people to share it.”
This explains two important phrases that are associated with Newbigin’s later work in Western culture: gospel as public truth and gospel as missionary encounter. He spent much of his energy seeking to foster a missionary encounter between the gospel and Western culture. A missionary encounter is a clash between two equally ultimate and comprehensive stories. These two stories are “different and incompatible” such that if the church lives fully in the biblical story, it will inevitably clash with the cultural story, the received dogma that controls the public life of society. It is only as the church understands the gospel and the biblical story as public truth—truth for all nations, all peoples, and all of cultural life—that it will be equipped for its missionary encounter.
We will return in chapter 6 to the Western story and a missionary encounter. But it is important at this stage to note the way Newbigin always pleaded for an understanding of Scripture as story, not as mere theology done within the academic setting but as a matter of life and death for the Christian church. If the church did not embrace the Bible as one story and as their story, it would inevitably succumb to another—and that is unfaithful compromise and syncretism. As he puts it, “If this biblical story is not the one that really controls our thinking then inevitably we shall be swept into the story that the world tells about itself. We shall become increasingly indistinguishable from the pagan world of which we are a part.”
So the implications of this confession of scriptural authority for the church and its mission are significant. This is not simply a matter of getting our doctrine of Scripture correct for the sake of orthodoxy. It is a matter of faithfulness to our missional calling—our very being! “I do not believe that we can speak effectively of the Gospel as a word addressed to our culture unless we recover a sense of the Scriptures as a canonical whole, as the story which provides the true context for our understanding of the meaning of our lives—both personal and public.” Here are the three important dimensions of biblical authority that need to be recovered if the church is to be faithful to its missionary vocation: the Bible is a story; it is a true story; and it is a comprehensive story with authority over every nation and over the whole of human life. The Bible is the true story of the whole world. We are set in the midst of the world to witness to God’s comprehensive purpose. Until the consummation, he has “entrusted to us the task of making His victory known and effective in every nation and in every sphere of life.”
The Biblical Story Reveals God’s Purpose
The Bible tells us the true story of the world because it reveals God’s purpose for the entire creation. For Newbigin the oft-used word “purpose” carries significant weight. He often elaborates this in terms of knowing the meaning of the world because you know the origin and goal of history. The Bible is cosmic history because it begins with the origin of the whole world in creation; there, God reveals his purpose for the creation and for humankind. The Bible finds its goal in the renewal of whole creation; there, the purpose for the world is disclosed. The story of God’s dealings with Israel and the church, and ultimately in Jesus Christ, discloses the meaning of the creation and of human life. Israel is chosen to bear and embody the meaning of the whole, Jesus fully reveals and accomplishes it, and the church is sent to make it known among the nations. It is a universal story revealed in a particular nation, a particular man, and a particular community. God’s work in Israel, in Jesus, and in the church moves toward the renewal of all creation as the goal of history.
God’s Purpose Is the Cosmic Renewal of Creation
The biblical narrative reveals the purpose of God for the world. Newbigin describes that purpose as “cosmic renewal or restoration . . . a divine act by which all created things are to be renewed.” This cosmic renewal is characterized both by its cosmic breadth and by its restorative essence. Salvation is as wide as creation, and it is the restoration of the sin-corrupted creation back to its original purpose. That is the goal of universal history.
The cosmic scope of salvation is the restoration of the entirety of human life in the midst of the nonhuman creation. The renewal of human life involves four dimensions of restoration: of the broken harmony between God and humanity, among human beings in their various relationships, between humanity and the nonhuman creation, and within each human being. The recovery of the original shalom in these relationships is the “very essence” of salvation; God’s purpose for his creation at the beginning becomes the goal of redemptive history. “The salvation of which the Gospel speaks and which is determinative of the nature and function of the Church is as the very word itself should teach us—a making whole, a healing. It is the summing-up of all things in Christ. It embraces within its scope the restoration of harmony between man and God, between man and man, and between man and nature for which all things were at the first created. It is the restoration of the whole creation.”
Even though he has not developed a robust doctrine of creation—something desperately needed today in North America—it remains true that throughout his writings Newbigin continually makes the connection between creation and salvation: salvation is the restoration of the creation from sin and its curse. Simply, salvation is “the restoration of creation to its original purpose by the purging away of sin.”
The first chapters of Genesis describe the creation of humans and their fall into sin in terms of the four relationships just mentioned: with God, with one another, with the nonhuman creation, and within themselves. Sin has brought about a radical contradiction and disharmony in each of those relationships. “Salvation means that man is released from bondage, and that the contradictions of which we have spoken are overcome. . . . It means ‘wholeness.’ It means the healing of that which is wounded, the mending of that which is broken, the setting free of that which is bound.” The plotline of the biblical story with its ultimate goal of cosmic restoration is made clear in the movement of creation, sin, and salvation. Genesis shows us God’s original purpose for humanity and the creation and its corruption by sin; the biblical story narrates God’s restoration of that purpose lost by sin and its curse. “What is given to us in these chapters of Genesis . . . is the truth about man expressed in pictures—the truth of his creation, of his nature, and of his sin. . . . What God has given to us in the Bible is the revelation of the nature which God has given to man, of the manner in which sin has corrupted that nature, and of the salvation which God has provided for us.”
Newbigin contrasts this goal with two erroneous positions within the liberal and evangelical traditions of the church: the Western history of progress that afflicts the liberal tradition and the individual, otherworldly salvation that corrupts the evangelical tradition. The “Christianized form of the idea of progress” found in liberalism has a vision for the purpose of history as a whole: the restoration of society. However, this restoration looks more like the paradise of the Enlightenment dream. It eliminates restoration as an act of God at the end of history and sees history as a gradual and incremental movement toward cosmic and corporate harmony. And this position has no place for the individual when the end arrives. The liberal tradition has departed from the biblical story by simply domesticating it to the Western story of progress.
The second position is the knee-jerk response of the evangelical tradition to these distortions: salvation is God’s work of snatching individuals from this corrupted world into another world. In this vision there is a place for the individual, but history is relegated to the margins. This view of the end is indebted to the pagan Greek worldview. Unfortunately, this individualistic and otherworldly salvation continues to ravage the evangelical community, and it continues to have a devastating effect on the mission of the church. We must reject this, Newbigin rightly believes, as an utter misunderstanding of the biblical nature of salvation.
The emphasis of the New Testament teaching about last things is not upon our escaping out of this world into another one, but upon Christ’s returning to this world in glory . . . to reign . . . over a renewed and transformed creation.
The end of the story is not escape into another world. It is the triumph of God in this world—a triumph that lies on the other side of death. . . . It is life beyond death—not the immortality of the souls liberated from this world but the resurrection of the body and the re-creation of all things.
God’s Purpose and the Logic of Election
The Bible is a story of universal history that is moving toward the goal of cosmic renewal. How does God reveal and accomplish this universal purpose? The answer is, perhaps somewhat surprisingly, through the logic of election—the calling of a particular people through whom God will disclose and bring about his universal purpose for the world.
No doubt to give election such a prominent place in the biblical story would occasion surprise and objections. Newbigin states two such objections as metaphysical and ethical. The metaphysical difficulty is that it is self-evident that God is present always and everywhere, and therefore to speak of him as acting in a particular series of events in one nation at one point in history is ridiculous and even scandalous. This is the “scandal of particularity.” The ethical difficulty is that such a choice of a particular people for special favor would be discriminatory and arbitrary. It is the random action of a despot but not a benevolent God who has created and loves all people. This is the “scandal of divine election.”
These two objections arise because those who make them misunderstand two things: salvation and election. And so Newbigin attempts to rehabilitate a doctrine of election in keeping with Scripture and to demonstrate the integral logic of election to the salvation that is the goal of the biblical story. He believes that “the principle of election is the only principle congruous with the nature of God’s redemptive purpose” and that “God’s way of universal salvation . . . must be accomplished by the way of election.” As we see how Newbigin articulates salvation and election, the objections above lose their force.
The problem is when we view salvation as individualistic and spiritualistic. It is misunderstood as a spiritualized one-to-one relationship of the human soul with God. However, in Scripture, salvation is social and cosmic: it is about knitting together the human race again in reconciliation with God, with each other, and with the nonhuman creation. It is a restoration of the harmony and shalom of the creation, of the way God made humanity and the world at the beginning. Newbigin describes salvation this way:
God, according to the Bible, is concerned with the redemption of the whole human race and of the whole created world. The goal of His purpose is not a collection of individual spirits abstracted one by one from their involvement in the world of matter and in the human community and set in a new and purely spiritual relation to Himself. Such a thought is irreconcilable with the biblical view of God, of man, and of the world. The redemption with which He is concerned is both social and cosmic, and therefore the way of its working involves at every point the re-creation of true human relationships and of true relationship between man and the rest of the created order.
It is “in the context of this biblical conception of the nature and scope of salvation that we are to understand . . . the doctrine of election.” If salvation is conceived of “as ultimately a matter of the relationship between each individual soul and God, then the whole idea of divine election appears as a piece of arbitrary favoritism, typical of an irresponsible potentate but unworthy of the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.” This is a misunderstanding of salvation that corrupts election. “But once it is understood that salvation is corporate and cosmic, and that therefore the means which God employs for our salvation must be congruous with that end, it becomes clear that God must deal with us according to the principle of election.”
The only way of proceeding in revealing and accomplishing the cosmic and corporate salvation of the end is by choosing a community to be the nucleus of his renewing work. God begins with some community, knits them back together, and restores the creational relationships fractured in the fall. He begins with a reconciled community and then incorporates others from outside into this community. In short, God’s people have been chosen to be reconciled to God, to each other, and to the nonhuman creation and to draw others into that reconciliation. God’s people are to be “his reconciled and reconciling people.” And the election of this kind of people is the “only principle congruous with the nature of God’s redemptive activity.” In election we see that God moves along the channels he cut at creation to accomplish his universal purpose.
So it is a misunderstanding of salvation that leads to objections to election. However, a misunderstanding of the nature of election itself also contributes to the problem. Too often election is understood strictly in terms of its benefits and the blessing of God’s salvation. Election, in this misunderstanding, is only for privilege and not for responsibility; election is so that the people of God might enjoy salvation, not be a means of salvation for the world. Election is about being a reconciled community but not a reconciling community. In short, “the missionary character of the doctrine of election is forgotten.”
A missionary doctrine of election understands that God’s choice of a people is not simply for their own sake but also for the sake of the world. “The chosen people are chosen for the sake of the world. The mission of the Church is the clue to the meaning and the end of world history. But the Church does not exist for itself, it exists for the sake of fulfilling God’s purpose for the world.” Thus, to be elect in Christ means to be incorporated into his mission to the world and to bear God’s reconciling purpose for his whole world.
We can capture both the missionary nature of the doctrine of election and the “inner necessity” of election for God’s universal purpose in two phrases: the elect community makes known God’s universal purpose as a reconciled people, and the elect community brings about God’s universal purpose as a reconciling people. On the one hand, God’s people become the starting point of God’s redemptive purposes by being the reconciled community God is creating. It makes known in the midst of the world where God is taking universal history: it is a clue to cosmic history. On the other hand, it offers the invitation to others to join in the reconciled community that will one day fill the earth. It is a reconciled community that is making known God’s universal purpose and a reconciling community that is bringing it about.
From this we can see that it is precisely in election that God discloses and will one day bring about his universal purposes: he travels a particular road to arrive at a universal destination. “From the beginning of the Bible to its end we are presented with the story of a universal purpose carried out through a continuous series of particular choices. . . . This is the pattern throughout the Bible. The key to the relation between the universal and particular is God’s way of election. The one (or the few) is chosen for the sake of the many; the particular is chosen for the sake of the universal.”
Newbigin speaks of election as a series of choices or the “process of narrowing.” The missional thrust of Scripture can be seen in terms of election and the “three Israels”—Old Testament Israel, Jesus, and the church. In the Old Testament story, God chooses Abraham and a nation that will come from him to bear the blessing for all nations. Israel is called to be a sign and instrument of God’s redemptive purpose for all humanity, but they fail in their calling. And so God judges Israel, and “from the beginning there is a process of elimination. . . . There is a covenant between God and Israel, and those who flout the terms of the covenant are no part of the chosen people.” There is a narrowing until, at the cross, “He alone on that day is Israel.” Jesus fulfills the purpose of election, faithfully doing what Israel did not do—disclosing and effecting God’s renewal for the whole world. “But this is not the end of the story of Israel. It is the beginning of the story of the true Israel.” For Newbigin, “Jesus does not found a new people of God, a new society,” but restores Israel to their calling. His mission is to Israel, and he appoints twelve as a representative number to make known the beginnings of the true Israel. Following the cross and resurrection and the mighty event of Pentecost, the way is clear for all nations: “Now at last the ancient promise that Israel shall be a light to the Gentiles and salvation to the ends of the earth is to be fulfilled.” The “Church is the Israel of God, not a newly founded society.” Gentiles are incorporated into the true Israel that is gathered, renewed, and sent by Christ. They are like branches engrafted into an olive tree. “There is only one Israel of God, one olive tree of God’s planting.”
This brief summary shows how God’s universal purpose is carried out through a continuous series of particular choices. The election of Israel, Jesus, and the church is a central theme in the biblical story. In this particular nation, this particular man, and this particular community God is revealing and accomplishing his universal purpose for the world. Their election means blessing for all nations. This makes mission a central theme in the biblical story. Thus, the Bible “is not a repository of the occasional ‘missionary text’ but is from Genesis to Revelation the essential missionary text.” To read the story aright is to read it along its missionary grain.
God’s Purpose Is Personal and Invitational
The story of the Bible reveals God’s purpose as the renewal of the entire creation and whole life of humankind returning to its original created design. “Purpose is a personal word. It implies a mind which has a purpose real in the mind though not yet realized in the world of objects; it can only be known by listening to the person whose purpose it is.” Creation has a purpose because a personal God has created and designed it so. And he is working to realize his purpose in history. That means there is only one way to know what his purpose is—listen to him if and how he chooses to reveal it.
One of the things Newbigin targets here is the way the enthronement of scientific reason has taken over Western epistemology, either effectively denying the possibility of revelation or distorting the nature of revelation. True knowledge comes in modernity only by way of analysis. Scientific knowledge is impersonal; it employs methodological analysis to examine an object. Newbigin does not dismiss scientific knowledge in its place. There is a proper competence for scientific analysis at lower levels of explanation that can give us knowledge—physical, chemical, biological, mechanical, sociological, and more. There is a proper, God-given autonomy of various areas of creation, which allows for scientific examination. Analysis is good in its place. However, this way of knowing is not appropriate for knowing other persons and certainly not for knowing God or his purpose. If one wants to know the purpose of any person, listening is in order, not analysis.
Martin Buber’s book I and Thou captures the problem for Newbigin. Buber distinguishes between two kinds of knowledge. I-It knowledge is appropriate to the scientific examination of things. In this kind of knowledge, the knower is a masterful actor, free to interrogate and examine the object in order to gain knowledge. The other, I-Thou knowledge, is appropriate to the knowing of other persons. Here it is not appropriate to interrogate and examine the person as an object. Rather, the posture of humble and submissive listening is appropriate. Any epistemology that precludes this kind of listening effectively shuts itself off at the start from knowing God’s purpose for the world.
Newbigin is concerned that often the church reads the Bible through a lens fashioned by the dominance of science in our culture. He is concerned that much biblical scholarship succumbs to I-It knowledge and remakes the Bible exclusively into an object to be examined rather than a word to be heard. Not only in the academy but also in the pew, we hear the Bible as information that informs the mind rather than a personal revelation that invites our loving response. I-It knowledge is inappropriate to the Scriptures, wherein God reveals himself and his purpose; it invites our submissive listening in order that we might know him and participate in his purpose for the world. If the nature of the world is personal, then the only way to know it is by an attentive posture of listening to the One whose nature and purpose are disclosed in the Scriptures.
The fact that the revelation of God is personal means more: God is revealing not simply his purpose but also himself. The biblical story would be misunderstood if it were taken to mean that God simply communicates information about his plan for the creation that might otherwise not be known. Rather, in the narrative disclosure of God’s purpose, there is revelation of God himself. Revelation is “the self-communication of the one whose purpose the story embodies.”
This makes clear why the Bible must come to us as a narrative of God’s mighty acts in history. “I would want to speak of the Bible as that body of literature which—primarily but not only in narrative form—renders accessible to us the character and actions and purpose of God.” Note the three words Newbigin uses: “purpose,” “character,” and “actions.” The biblical narrative is one of God’s actions in the world, his mighty deeds of creating, ruling, sustaining, judging, and redeeming. As one attends to those mighty works, one comes to know his purpose and his character. God himself and his purpose can only be known by attending to his creating and redeeming actions as narrated in the biblical story.
Story is the only way to know another person. “When you read a good novel you come to know the hero of the story as if you had actually met him. No description of him, for example in an obituary notice, can be a substitute for this. It is as you watch him dealing with actual situations and people that you come to know him. So it is, I think, in reading the Bible. As you read and re-read and go on reading, you come to know God. He is the one whose nature the Bible discloses. You come to know him personally.” Since the Bible narrates the mighty acts of God in creation and restoration, it reveals his character as well as his purpose for the whole of creation.
This personal revelation is also invitational. The Scriptures are not a “series of propositions” to be examined; rather, they are the “appeal of a personal love which seeks not to coerce submission but to evoke love.” We dare not reduce the word “revelation” to “information.” Revelation does not simply mean that God has informed us about the meaning and end of universal history or simply told us something about himself or even explained to us what he has done in the world. “Revelation is indeed this, but it is this only because it is something much more. The revelation of which we speak in the Christian tradition is more than the communication of information; it is the giving of an invitation. It is more than an unfolding of the purpose, which was otherwise hidden in the mind of God but is now made known to us through God’s revealing acts; it is also a summons, a call, an invitation.”
So the revelation of God’s purpose is not just personal; it is also invitational. The invitation is threefold: to enter into a personal relationship with God, to participate in his purpose for the world, and to join the community in which this personal communion and comprehensive mission is a reality. “It is clear that we are here moving away from a view of revelation as the impartation of information, to one which sees it as the revealing of a purpose and the establishing of a personal relation.” This is especially seen in what Newbigin referred to as two of the most important words in the Gospels: “follow me” (Mark 1:17).
All that we have observed about the personal and invitational nature of the biblical story is beautifully illustrated in John 15:15: “I no longer call you servants, for a servant does not know his master’s business. Instead, I have called you friends, for everything that I learned from my Father I have made known to you.” Newbigin calls this verse the “clearest indication of the nature of Scriptural authority.” Here we have Jesus, who embodies the fullest revelation of the character and purpose of God. He reveals the Father and his purpose to his little community of disciples and calls them into intimate fellowship with himself. He calls them his friends. They are not servants who are asked to carry out some assorted tasks. Rather, they are friends because Jesus tells them what the Father is doing. They are let in on the big story and personally invited as a community of friends to participate in what he is doing. This invitation calls them to faith, love, and obedience. It is a summons to be with him and know him, to love him as a friend, and to join him in his mission.
The call of Scripture is an invitation into a personal relationship as well as to costly participation in his comprehensive purposes for the world. In other words, it is to know Jesus and seek his kingdom. A problem arises when we detach Jesus from the kingdom. Newbigin believed that Jesus and kingdom had become disconnected in the twentieth-century church. Evangelicals emphasized the person of Jesus in their gospel but neglected the kingdom that he proclaimed. So the invitation was reduced to a personal relationship. The ecumenical tradition emphasized the breadth of the kingdom mission and therefore involvement in the social, economic, political, and cultural issues. But it neglected the person of Jesus. Mission became simply another social program or political movement. For Newbigin, the gospel is an invitation to believe, follow, love, and obey Jesus, and that means entry into his kingdom-community and costly participation in his comprehensive mission.
Behind these words is a long history of Newbigin’s reflection on the notion of conversion. He focused his attention on the nature of conversion during the 1960s, when this topic was a pressing issue in missiological circles. The pietistic and evangelical tradition emphasized the personal dimension of individuals coming to know God through faith. The ecumenical tradition was concerned with the social dimensions of conversion, the costly engagement in the public square with the economic, social, and political powers. The Eastern Orthodox tradition was dissatisfied with both because the church was neglected: conversion meant incorporation into the church. Newbigin saw strong biblical warrant for all three concerns. For him the invitation is personal: we are called to believe, to love, to follow Jesus, to enter into a relationship with him, and to offer our allegiance to him. The invitation is also costly: we are summoned to join Jesus in his mission to the world, to exhibit a comprehensive and costly obedience that challenges the powers that stand in opposition to his kingdom. Finally, the invitation is communal: it is an invitation to be baptized and to join the community that is following Jesus and knows him, that is participating in his mission and exhibiting a costly obedience across the spectrum of human life. This is the invitation that is issued to all people in the gospel.
The Cosmic-Communal-Personal Logic of the Biblical Story
We see in the unfolding of this chapter the narrative and theological logic that Newbigin believes the gospel and biblical story itself demands: cosmic, communal, personal. The Bible tells the story of the cosmic renewal of all of human life in the context of the nonhuman creation. At the center of this cosmic story is a chosen community called to embody the end of the story. All people are personally invited into and within that community to participate in the cosmic salvation of the biblical story and to play their role as part of the community to make it known. And faithfulness to the biblical story means that one moves precisely in that order: cosmic, communal, personal.
What is at stake is that the very nature of the Christian faith may be misunderstood by reducing salvation to the individual and making that the starting point for understanding the Bible, salvation, and mission.
In distinction from a great deal of Christian writing which takes the individual person as its starting point for the understanding of salvation and then extrapolates from that to the wider issues of social, political, and economic life, I am suggesting that, with the Bible as our guide, we should proceed in the opposite direction, that we begin with the Bible as the unique interpretation of human and cosmic history and move from that starting point to an understanding of what the Bible shows us of the meaning of personal life.
It is clear that, for Newbigin, this move from the cosmic to the individual moves through the communal. It is instructive to note where Newbigin makes this statement and the logic of his argument preceding it. His words come at the opening of a chapter on mission in which he will stress that the new being of God’s people is the primary way the gospel is made known. The chapters that precede this statement and give it context hammer home two points: the Bible tells the story of universal history, and the election of a community is at the center of the story and the clue to understanding it. The logic of Newbigin’s thought is clear: the Bible is a cosmic story of God’s mighty deeds in history whose meaning has been disclosed and accomplished in Christ; at the center of the narrative is a chosen community that bears the goal of the story; every person is invited to find their place in the story as part of God’s people. To rightly understand mission we need to follow this biblical logic.
Conclusion
In approaching Newbigin’s missional ecclesiology, it is essential to understand the Bible as the true story of the world. The very nature and mission of the church is inextricably tied to this: “The business of the church is to tell and to embody a story, the story of God’s mighty acts in creation and redemption and of God’s promises concerning what will be in the end. The church affirms the truth of this story by celebrating it, interpreting it, and enacting it in the life of the contemporary world.” The missionary church is to do this in a world where there are idolatrous and competing stories that are diminishing and destroying the lives of people. The biblical story is true, and to understand the world through a different story is quite simply to misunderstand it. “The church’s affirmation is that the story it tells, embodies, and enacts is the true story and that others are to be evaluated in reference to it. . . . [It] is the true interpretation of all human and cosmic history and to understand history otherwise is to misunderstand it, therefore misunderstanding the human situation here and now.” The missionary nature of the church is found in the fact that “God has entrusted to it this story and that there is no other body that will tell it.” As the church incarnates and announces this story centered in Jesus, it invites all people to return to what it truly means to be human by joining the new humanity that will one day fill the earth. The mission of the church is a summons to all people “to respond to a word of calling by believing and acting, specifically, by becoming part of the community which is already committed to the service of the Builder.”
. See Michael W. Goheen, “As the Father Has Sent Me, I Am Sending You”: J. E. Lesslie Newbigin’s Missionary Ecclesiology (Zoetermeer: Boekencentrum, 2000), https://dspace.library.uu.nl/handle/1874/597; Michael W. Goheen, “‘As the Father Has Sent Me, I Am Sending You’: Lesslie Newbigin’s Missionary Ecclesiology,” International Review of Mission 91, no. 362 (July 2002): 354–69. A word of warning regarding the online version of my dissertation: when the dissertation was transferred electronically with formatting done for the page size common in North America to the European size, the pagination was altered. I will reference the original book pages, but unfortunately these will not correspond to the electronic online version. Therefore, I will also refer to chapters and section numbers for easier reference.
. Lesslie Newbigin, “The Gospel and Modern Western Culture,” unpublished speech, Newbigin Archives, University of Birmingham (n.d.), 13. See Lesslie Newbigin, The Gospel in a Pluralist Society (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1989), 86.
. Lesslie Newbigin, Signs amid the Rubble: The Purposes of God in Human History, ed. Geoffrey Wainwright (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003), 113.
. For an articulation of Newbigin’s understanding of the gospel as revelation, see Krish Kandiah, “Toward a Theology of Evangelism for Late-Modern Cultures: A Critical Dialogue with Lesslie Newbigin’s Doctrine of Revelation” (PhD diss., University of London, 2005), chap. 2.
. Lesslie Newbigin, Proper Confidence: Faith, Doubt, and Certainty in Christian Discipleship (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995), 88; see Lesslie Newbigin, “Biblical Authority,” unpublished article, Newbigin Archives, University of Birmingham (1997), 2.
. Lesslie Newbigin, “The Duty and Authority of the Church to Preach the Gospel,” in The Church’s Witness to God’s Design, ed. Lesslie Newbigin and Hendrik Kraemer, Amsterdam Assembly Series 2 (New York: Harper Brothers, 1948), 23.
. Lesslie Newbigin, A Faith for This One World? (London: SCM, 1961), 60.
. Newbigin, Faith for This One World?, 56–83.
. Newbigin, Faith for This One World?, 84–105.
. Newbigin, Faith for This One World?, 58.
. 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, 6.
. Lesslie Newbigin, Truth and Authority in Modernity (Valley Forge, PA: Trinity Press International, 1996), 38.
. Lesslie Newbigin, The Open Secret: An Introduction to the Theology of Mission, rev. ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995), 81.
. Lesslie Newbigin, The Good Shepherd: Meditations on Christian Ministry in Today’s World (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1977), 117.
. Lesslie Newbigin, The Finality of Christ (London: SCM, 1969), 65–69.
. Newbigin, Finality of Christ, 65.
. Newbigin, Finality of Christ, 69.
. Newbigin, “Biblical Authority,” 2.
. See Newbigin, Gospel in a Pluralist Society, 66.
. Newbigin, Truth and Authority, 40–41.
. Newbigin, Proper Confidence, 73.
. Westminster Confession of Faith 2.1, quoted in Newbigin, Open Secret, 82.
. Newbigin, Open Secret, 82.
. Newbigin, Open Secret, 83.
. Newbigin, Truth and Authority, 67 (my emphasis).
. See Lesslie Newbigin, A Word in Season: Perspectives on Christian World Missions (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994), 118.
. Lesslie Newbigin, “The Centrality of Jesus for History,” in Incarnation and Myth: The Debate Continued, ed. Michael Goulder (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1979), 200 (my emphasis). Newbigin says elsewhere that “the Christian faith is a faith regarding the meaning and end of the human story as a whole” (Open Secret, 89).
. Newbigin, Finality of Christ, 55 (my emphasis).
. Newbigin, Gospel in a Pluralist Society, 89.
. Newbigin, “The Bible: Good News for Secularised People,” 6.
. Lesslie Newbigin, A Walk through the Bible (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1999), 4.
. Newbigin, Open Secret, 66–67.
. Lesslie Newbigin, “Why Study the Old Testament?,” National Christian Council Review 74 (1954): 75.
. Newbigin, Proper Confidence, 77.
. Newbigin, Gospel in a Pluralist Society, 15–16.
. Newbigin, Word in Season, 118.
. Newbigin, “Biblical Authority,” 2.
. Lesslie Newbigin, “Response to ‘Word of God?,’ John Coventry, SJ,” Gospel and Our Culture Newsletter 10 (1991): 2.
. Lesslie Newbigin, “The Present Christ and the Coming Christ,” Ecumenical Review 6, no. 1 (1954): 123.
. Newbigin, Signs amid the Rubble, 28.
. Lesslie Newbigin, Household of God: Lectures on the Nature of the Church (New York: Friendship Press, 1954), 161.
. Newbigin, Household of God, 159.
. The best place to find such a robust doctrine of creation is in Albert M. Wolters, Creation Regained: Biblical Basics for a Reformational Worldview (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005), chap. 2.
. Lesslie Newbigin, Sin and Salvation (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1956), 124.
. Newbigin, Sin and Salvation, 11–15, 21–22.
. Newbigin, Sin and Salvation, 14.
. Newbigin, Sin and Salvation, 22.
. Lesslie Newbigin, Behold, I Make All Things New (Madras: Christian Literature Society, 1968), 22.
. Lesslie Newbigin, “The Bible Study Lectures,” in Digest of the Proceedings of the Ninth Meeting of the Consultation on Church Union (COCU), ed. Paul A. Crow (Princeton: COCU, 1970), 220. See Newbigin, Sin and Salvation, 122–23.
. See Newbigin, Gospel in a Pluralist Society, 80.
. See George Hunsberger, Bearing the Witness of the Spirit: Lesslie Newbigin’s Theology of Cultural Plurality (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998), for an articulation of the importance of election in the thought of Lesslie Newbigin.
. Newbigin, Open Secret, 66–67.
. Newbigin, Faith for This One World?, 78.
. Newbigin, Faith for This One World?, 82.
. Newbigin, Household of God, 111.
. Newbigin, Open Secret, 71 (my emphasis).
. Newbigin, Household of God, 109.
. Newbigin, Household of God, 110.
. Newbigin, Household of God, 111.
. Newbigin, Household of God, 111.
. Newbigin, Faith for This One World?, 81.
. Newbigin, Gospel in a Pluralist Society, 27.
. Newbigin, “Duty and Authority,” 29.
. Newbigin, Open Secret, 68.
. Newbigin, Open Secret, 31.
. Lesslie Newbigin, “Canon and Mission,” unpublished notes, Newbigin Archives, University of Birmingham (n.d.), 2.
. Lesslie Newbigin, The Reunion of the Church: A Defence of the South India Scheme (London: SCM, 1948), 30.
. Newbigin, Reunion of the Church, 31.
. Newbigin, Reunion of the Church, 32.
. Newbigin, “Canon and Mission,” 1.
. Lesslie Newbigin, “Can the West Be Converted?,” International Bulletin of Missionary Research 11 (1985): 6.
. Newbigin, “Centrality of Jesus,” 205.
. Lesslie Newbigin, Foolishness to the Greeks: The Gospel and Western Culture (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1986), 59.
. Newbigin, “The Bible: Good News for Secularised People,” 7. See also Newbigin, Gospel in a Pluralist Society, 99.
. Lesslie Newbigin, “The Bible and Our Contemporary Mission,” Clergy Review 69, no. 1 (1984): 16.
. Newbigin, Proper Confidence, 65.
. Lesslie Newbigin, “Revelation” (unpublished paper, 1936), 24.
. Newbigin speaks of the words “follow me” as “the central keyword” and “the most fundamental in the sayings of Jesus” (Gospel in a Pluralist Society, 240). See also Newbigin, “How Should We Understand Sacraments and Ministry?” (paper for the Anglican-Reformed International Commission meeting, London, 1983), 8.
. Newbigin, Proper Confidence, 90.
. Lesslie Newbigin, Mission in Christ’s Way: Bible Studies (Geneva: WCC Publications, 1987), 7–10.
. Newbigin, Gospel in a Pluralist Society, 128.
. Newbigin, Proper Confidence, 76–77.
. Newbigin, Proper Confidence, 78.
. Newbigin, Proper Confidence, 66.