5. A Missionary Encounter with Culture
5
A Missionary Encounter with Culture
The gospel makes a remarkable and bold claim: the goal of universal history—and therefore the purpose and meaning of the whole creation—has been disclosed, accomplished, and made present in the life, death, and resurrection of one Jewish man in the middle of history. This is surely not an announcement to be slotted into a private category called “religion.” Rather, it is a “secular announcement” and “public truth”: it is a message of ultimate importance for all people. But how can anyone ever believe that God’s final word is a man hanging naked, tortured, and humiliated on a cross? By any cultural vision this message is simply ridiculous and downright foolish. “It is easy for us,” Newbigin comments, “who are committed to the preaching of the Gospel, to forget how strange, and even repelling, the Gospel is to the ordinary common sense of the world.”
But the gospel is more than simply a message and a truth claim—it is a matter of power. The End of history breaking into the middle is the advent of God’s power in the Holy Spirit to renew all things. So the question of how anyone can ever believe such a strange message can only be answered in this way: first, only if there is a people that believe and faithfully witness to that good news, and second, only if the Holy Spirit works through their lives, deeds, and words to bring people to conversion.
This missionary people is set in the midst of the world. They are not hermetically sealed off from the culture in which they live but are, consistent with their vocation, interwoven into the fabric of their cultural community. This raises the enormously important and difficult question: How is the church to live out a faithful witness in the midst of its cultural context? A wrong relationship will deeply compromise its witness. This is why the relationship of gospel, church, and culture is so significant for Newbigin’s missionary ecclesiology. This chapter discusses Newbigin’s view of how the church can embody and witness to a comprehensive gospel in the midst of a culture that is itself shaped by another equally comprehensive yet incompatible story.
The Insight of a Cross-Cultural Missionary
Newbigin begins his important book Foolishness to the Greeks by asking what would be involved in a “genuinely missionary encounter” between gospel and culture. He says the “angle from which I am approaching the study is that of a foreign missionary.” We have to pause here and carefully consider what seems to be a quite unexceptional statement. He rightly notes that there is nothing new in proposing a discussion of the relationship between gospel and culture. It has been done many times, and in the twentieth century a number of cultural theologians have tackled the issue. H. Richard Niebuhr, for example, gave us a classic study of five models in his book Christ and Culture. And the work of Paul Tillich was concerned with a “theology of culture.” Newbigin observes, “This work has been mainly done, as far as I know, by theologians who had not had the experience of the cultural frontier, of seeking to transmit the gospel from one culture to a radically different one.”
The work of Newbigin, especially his insight into a missionary encounter with Western culture, has been explosive precisely because of this very point. There are at least two aspects to his claim. First, he is saying that the stance or angle from which he approaches the subject is that of mission or witness—“seeking to transmit the gospel.” Niebuhr, Tillich, and other cultural theologians step back and offer an assessment in terms of a theoretical analysis of the problem. It is not so much that Newbigin would speak against using academic tools; scientific insight can certainly be helpful. Rather, he is saying that the most fundamental stance we must take as Christians is in terms of the identity we have as God’s people—his witnesses. It is not scientific neutrality or theoretical distance. How do we analyze the relationship between gospel and culture if we start with our fundamental missional identity? If we have been entrusted with the good news that God is restoring all of human life, how do we live in a culture with a very different story to tell? It is from this angle that he approaches the subject.
There is a second dimension to Newbigin’s observation: cross-cultural missionaries have had the experience of trying to live and communicate the gospel in very different cultures from their own. This brings a depth of insight that simply cannot be obtained in any other way. When you cross over into another cultural setting and take the time to get to know the language, customs, and institutions of that culture, it begins to shake you out of the assumed familiarity you have with your own culture. That which seems to be normal and simply the way things are is now questioned. Your own embodiment of the Christian faith is reexamined; you realize that it is far more shaped by your cultural story than you had ever imagined.
Newbigin quotes a Chinese proverb: “If you want a definition of water, don’t ask a fish.” People immersed within one cultural story all their lives can easily be unaware of their context. And what sets apart people who have had a deep engagement with another culture is the way they gain critical distance on the cultural waters in which they swim. This is exactly what happened to Newbigin in his missionary experience in India. In his writings he notes many occasions when he was awakened to the many unexamined assumptions of his European worldview and its impact on his faith. He writes, “[The] missionary, if he is at all awake, finds himself, as I did, in a new situation. He becomes, as a bearer of the gospel, a critic of his own culture. He finds there the Archimedean point. He sees his own culture with the Christian eyes of a foreigner, and the foreigner can see what the native cannot see.” Two of Newbigin’s missionary experiences may serve to illustrate this “awakening.”
When he attempted to preach the gospel on the streets of India, Newbigin found he had to wrestle with the question of how one could communicate who Christ is in the language and categories shaped by Hinduism and still remain faithful to the gospel. The evangelist must use the language of his hearers. Yet that language reflects a worldview by which the hearers make sense of their world. It expresses deep commitments and beliefs that are irreconcilable with the gospel, and so to use them would be to reshape and distort the gospel message according to those beliefs. How, then, can the gospel be expressed in a way that is faithful to the gospel and yet heard as relevant to that culture?
What Tamil word could be used, for example, to communicate the identity of Jesus? Swamy might offer a possibility; it means “Lord.” Would this not be like employing kyrios in Greek? The problem is that there are many lords in Hindu thought—thirty million of them, according to one tradition—and if Jesus is just one more lord, this is not important news. What about avatar? This refers to the descent of God in creaturely form to put down the power of evil and to establish the rule of righteousness. Does this not correspond well with the incarnation and gospel of the kingdom? The problem here is that avatar is conceived of in terms of a cyclical worldview. Therefore one cannot ascribe finality to any avatar the way the gospel does to Jesus in terms of a more linear historical understanding of the world. Perhaps one could just begin by telling the story of Jesus of Nazareth. But when Newbigin did this he saw listeners melt away, for then Jesus is identified merely with maya, the transient and illusory world. All other attempts—kadavul, the supreme transcendent God; adipurushan, the primal man who is the beginning of all creation; chit, the intelligence and will that constitute the second member of the triad of ultimate reality—founder on the same problem. “What all these answers have in common is that they necessarily describe Jesus in terms of a model which embodies an interpretation of experience significantly different from the interpretation which arises when Jesus is accepted as Lord absolutely.”
Here in his evangelistic endeavors Newbigin was face-to-face with the problem of gospel and culture. Serious involvement with another culture shook him out of his own comfortable assumption that his was a Christianity untouched by cultural idolatry. It awakened him to the reality that the gospel will always be expressed in and therefore encounter a cultural story that is incompatible with it.
My confession of Jesus as Lord is conditioned by the culture of which I am a part. It is expressed in the language of the myth within which I live. Initially I am not aware of this as a myth. As long as I retain the innocence of a thoroughly indigenous Western man, unshaken by serious involvement in another culture, I am not aware of this myth. It is simply “how things are.” . . . No myth is seen as a myth by those who inhabit it: it is simply the way things are. Western man is no exception to this rule.
The second experience that illustrates Newbigin’s awakening to the ways our unexamined assumptions shape our worldview occurred when he was teaching the Gospel of Mark to villagers in India. He was teaching the miracle stories and trying to make sense of them in the complex way he had been taught in Cambridge, wherein miracles had to be explained somehow psychologically in terms of a naturalistic worldview. If only he could induct the villager into his own culture through a proper Western education, Newbigin thought, then he would be able to see things as they really are. But his laboring to explain Jesus’s miracles drew an impatient response from one unschooled villager: “Why are you making such heavy weather over such a perfectly simple story?” He proceeded to recount a number of healings and exorcisms that had taken place in his village congregation. Newbigin was struck by the fact that the villager was much closer to the meaning of Mark’s Gospel than he was. He says that it “was only slowly that I began to see that my own Christianity had this syncretistic character, that I too had to some degree coopted Jesus into the worldview of my culture.”
This cross-cultural missionary experience made Newbigin acutely aware of the dynamic of a missionary encounter with culture—an encounter that is always taking place but not often recognized. A missionary encounter is the clash between two comprehensive and religious visions of life that are to some degree incompatible. It is within the context of this missionary encounter that the issue of gospel and culture must be examined.
A missionary encounter is always the normal posture of the church in its cultural setting. It is unavoidable and constitutive of the nature of the gospel and the church’s existence. The church may be unaware of the dynamic, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t operative; it likely means they have capitulated to the powers of the culture. There will always be a missionary encounter—it is essential to the Christian faith. And it will always be worked out in one way or another in a certain embodiment. This is what has been called “contextualization” in missionary circles. And contextualization will always be either “true” if it is faithful or “false” if it is not. It is not a matter of whether the church is involved in a missionary encounter; it is just a matter of whether we are aware of it. And it is not a matter of whether we will contextualize the gospel; it is only a matter of whether we are faithful. It is a matter of life and death for a faithful witness to the gospel.
A Missionary Encounter and the Painful Tension
Newbigin came to understand the nature of a missionary encounter through his cross-cultural missionary experience. A missionary encounter arises, first of all, because all cultures have a religious and comprehensive credo at the center or foundation of their life together that is incompatible with the gospel. When Newbigin discusses the nature of culture, he often starts with a rather simple dictionary definition: “the sum total of ways of living built up by a group of human beings and transmitted from one generation to another.” This would include language, arts, technology, and law, as well as a culture’s social, political, and economic organization. But he immediately identifies something deeper and more ultimate that shapes and gives meaning to all these elements: “One must also include in culture, as fundamental to any culture, a set of beliefs, experiences, and practices that seek to grasp and express the ultimate nature of things, that which gives shape and meaning to life, that which claims final loyalty. I am speaking, obviously, about religion.”
Newbigin distinguishes between, on the one hand, a vast network of unified cultural elements that is visible in practices and institutions and, on the other hand, a deeper level of foundational religious beliefs that shape and integrate them all. He speaks in various ways about these foundational beliefs, calling them “committed beliefs,” “basic assumptions and commitments,” “the dogma that controls public life,” “fiduciary frameworks,” “plausibility structures,” “ideologies, myths, worldviews,” “a creed,” a “credo,” “idols,” and even “gods.” He clarifies his distinction between the various components of culture and the underlying religious beliefs in a discussion of Romans 12:1–2. Newbigin often uses the phrase “conformed to culture” from this text, specifically citing it to refer to syncretism. But in one place he discusses the text in more detail. He says that when Paul commands us not to be conformed to the world, he is referring to culture, “which does not mean just art, literature, and music, but the whole way that our world is organised. It means our language, our thought-patterns, our customs, our traditions, our public systems of political, economic, judicial, and administrative order—the whole mass of things which we simply take for granted and never question.” In all these areas, the word “world” can be used positively to refer to God’s good creation. But it can also be used negatively to speak of a culture “organised around another centre than the creator’s.” The various aspects of human culture will always be organized around some center. Human culture is created to find its center in the Creator God. But with the advent of sin, the Creator is replaced by idols, which integrate, organize, and shape the various facets of human culture in a way counter to God’s design. “Human nature abhors a vacuum. The [central] shrine [of public life] does not remain empty. If the one true image, Jesus Christ, is not there, an idol will take its place. It is not difficult to name the idolatry that controls our culture.”
The problem in Western culture is that there is a strange assumption that we can discuss religious beliefs “as though they were a separable entity from the entire life of human communities,” but this is “possible only in a society that has accepted the privatization of religion.” Religion is not one more cultural activity or institution alongside others. Religious commitments permeate and shape all our cultural endeavors even if they go unrecognized.
Neither in practice nor in thought is religion separate from the rest of life. In practice all the life of society is permeated by beliefs which western Europeans would call religious, and in thought what we call religion is a whole worldview, a way of understanding the whole of human experience. The sharp line which modern Western culture has drawn between religious affairs and secular affairs is itself one of the most significant peculiarities of our culture and would be incomprehensible to the vast majority of people who have not been brought into contact with this culture.
In these comments we see two characteristics of the central core that shapes culture. First, it is religious: the beliefs are of an ultimate nature. Second, it is comprehensive: these religious beliefs organize and shape all aspects of human life. Newbigin calls this a “hidden credo.” The Latin word credo is the first word in the Apostles’ Creed and means “I believe.” Credo refers to a set of religious beliefs that give ultimate meaning to all of life. Newbigin gives us the metaphor of a credo that is hidden beneath our culture; it functions like the foundation of a house. These beliefs lie unnoticed beneath a culture but give shape and organization to the visible aspects of human culture above. Even though hidden, this credo shapes the public life of culture, including in economics, education, medicine, and media.
Perhaps the most common way Newbigin speaks of the cultural credo is in terms of a story. The religious beliefs of a culture did not drop out of the sky but developed in the particular history of a cultural community. This is true for all cultures. But the West in particular has understood the meaning of human life in terms of a story as a result of the impact of the Bible on our culture, especially through Augustine. Western culture has a story to tell about itself and about the goal of human history. This is a story that clashes with the gospel.
All Christians are born into a particular culture, and their lives are inevitably narrated by these religious beliefs from their earliest years. Christians, also from their earliest years, breathe the cultural air common to all. Or, to change the metaphor, believers are born into and continue to swim in the waters of their culture. They come to share these comprehensive religious beliefs about the world. The problem is that they are idolatrous and incompatible with the gospel. The cultural water is polluted.
A missionary encounter is inevitable, second, because the gospel makes an equally comprehensive claim and demands absolute allegiance. In earlier chapters, we have seen that the gospel is the good news of the kingdom of God—the restoration of God’s rule over the entirety of human life. This gospel is a counterstory to the one told in culture and demands nothing less than complete and final loyalty. For “if it is really true that God has done what the Gospel tells us he has done . . . it must, it necessarily must become the starting point and the controlling reality of all thought, all action, and all hope.” Thus, we have in the gospel and the cultural story two religious and comprehensive visions of life. Both are religious: they demand ultimate commitment and submission. Both are comprehensive: they demand the entire scope of human life. And these stories are incompatible. They will shape, integrate, and unify life in very different ways.
And so, third, a missionary encounter is a clash between two incompatible stories that creates a painful tension. The Christian affirmation that in Christ we know the true story of the world comes into direct conflict with a “different dogma” that shapes the public life of culture. The church that is faithful to the gospel “must necessarily clash with contemporary culture. It must challenge the whole ‘fiduciary framework’ within which our culture operates.” This is the perennial experience of the church in the world when it is faithful. What is at stake for the church in every place and time, if it is true to its witnessing identity, is nothing less than a “clash of ultimate commitments.”
With the notion of a missionary encounter, Newbigin seeks to counter a deep syncretism in the Western church that has simply tried to carve out a small “religious” space for the gospel within the cultural story. The sad reality is that when this happens, the church has made peace with the idols of the cultural story by tailoring its own message to fit into it. The Western church has “in general failed to realize how radical is the contradiction between the Christian vision and the assumptions that we breathe in from every part of our shared existence.” Newbigin wants to somehow awaken the church, as he was himself, to see afresh this radical contradiction between the gospel and the cultural vision of life.
This clash is not simply a matter of differing worldviews or philosophies of life. There is a religious or spiritual dimension; this is idolatry. Newbigin alerts us to this by his use of the Pauline language of “powers.” Idolatry gives a foothold to spiritual powers, and these powers do not take the victory of Christ lying down. The powers will always strive for the established cultural idolatry to become and remain the exclusive controlling vision of life. Thus, if the church is faithful to the gospel, the clash will bring a “painful tension.” This “belongs to the essence of the Church’s life in the world.”
Newbigin illustrates this painful tension with a story from India. He describes a situation where all the members of the church in a village came from the same caste. It is difficult in this situation, he says, for the church to understand its role as God’s new humankind and therefore to challenge the assumptions of the old community. It is easy to continue to live life within the caste system. “Yet eventually the Church, as a totally new kind of community, must challenge the older forms of community, and a painful tension is set up. It is part of the mission of the Church to set up such a tension. It must not evade it either by seeking to deny and repudiate all the ties of kinship, or by capitulating to them and allowing them to have control. It must demonstrate its character as something of a wholly different order.” The church, as a “totally new kind of community,” must challenge in its life the idolatrous social structure of the caste. Quite naturally, a painful tension emerges, one that cannot be evaded by syncretism or withdrawal. And Newbigin is clear that this is an essential dimension to the church’s mission. Evading it is to fail to live out our missional vocation.
We need to beware as we hear this story, especially if we are from the West, lest we simply confine this problem to non-Western cultures. It is always easier to see idolatry in others. Readers who are not from India can easily nod in agreement and miss that what Newbigin is describing here ought to be the universal experience of the church. Believers everywhere will experience a painful tension if they are faithful. We may see the idolatry of caste systems, but do we have eyes to see our own idolatry? Churches everywhere must constantly ask the question: What are the idolatrous social, economic, and political structures of our culture?
In another example, Newbigin describes this painful tension in terms of the “secular-apostolic dilemma.” In a paper on education, he grapples with the question of how Christians can be involved in the public school system when there are two different understandings of education based on two different visions of the purpose of human life. The secular state mandates that education fall in line with their purpose of national interest based on their public doctrine. Yet their “secular” involvement in the school system will bring a tension with their “apostolic” calling to be faithful to the gospel. How can Christians fall in line with the idolatrous purpose of public education?
Faithfulness in the midst of this painful tension may bring suffering. Suffering comes because we follow Jesus, whose message of the kingdom challenged all powers that stood in opposition to it. “His ministry entailed the calling of individual men and women to personal and costly discipleship, but at the same time it challenged the principalities and powers, the rulers of this world, and the cross was the price paid for that challenge. Christian discipleship today cannot mean less than that.” Suffering is unavoidable if the church follows Jesus in a missionary encounter with idolatrous culture.
No human societies cohere except on the basis of some kind of common beliefs and customs. No society can permit these beliefs and practices to be threatened beyond a certain point without reacting in self-defence. The idea that we ought to be able to expect some kind of neutral secular political order, which presupposes no religious or ideological beliefs, and which holds the ring impartially for a plurality of religions to compete with one another, has no adequate foundation. The New Testament makes it plain that Christ’s followers must expect suffering as the normal badge of their discipleship, and also as one of the characteristic forms of their witness.
Newbigin tells a story that significantly shaped his views on the painful tension and suffering during his bishopric in Madurai. After independence, the government of India required all elementary schools to switch to the Ghandian model of education in which Hindu syncretism was built into the program. A village boy who took up a teaching position in Madurai lost his teaching certificate because he refused to conform and compromise his faith. Newbigin reports, “The costly witness of a village boy who was willing to lose his teaching certificate rather than compromise his faith so shook the whole institution that I was soon baptizing students within the college campus.” This event convinced Newbigin of three things: the incompatibility of the gospel with the dominant doctrine shaping culture and public institutions, the cost of suffering one must often pay for a faithful witness, and the power suffering may have to draw others to Christ.
There is a fourth point to be made about the nature of the missionary encounter: the painful tension is embodied in the very life of the church as it inhabits both stories. We have seen that the deepest beliefs of our culture, as well as the gospel, are religious and comprehensive. But they are also communally held. They are not the fruit of individual insight, nor are worldviews peculiar to particular individuals. Rather, a religious vision is the product of human life together in a community over time. Worldviews are shared, and they are expressed and transmitted from generation to generation in a common language. They are embodied in shared ways of life in customs, institutions, practices, symbols, and more.
Newbigin speaks of “plausibility structures.” This points to a process whereby humans form and construct a culture that expresses and embodies their deepest beliefs about the world. Then as people inhabit those institutions and customs, they are socialized into a way of life and the beliefs embedded in the various cultural products. The church is not exempt from this socialization process. They too inhabit the cultural story and way of life. As they inhabit the cultural institutions, customs, and practices, the beliefs embedded in them become plausible. The church internalizes the fundamental beliefs woven into the cultural way of life and finds it difficult to question them.
The church is a community that inhabits this cultural story. But it is also a community that is called to live in another incompatible story told in Scripture. As they take hold of the gospel, they do not extract themselves from culture but embody and articulate it in the cultural forms they know. This establishes the painful tension at the very heart of the church’s life.
This leads Newbigin to an important insight into the nature of the relationship between gospel and culture. Newbigin asks whether, in the way we pose the question of the relation of the gospel to culture, we have already implied “an unacknowledged and disastrous dualism.” We treat the gospel-and-culture question “as though it were a matter of the meeting of two quite separate things: a disembodied message and a historically conditioned pattern of social life.” The gospel is not “an ethereal something disinfected of all human cultural ingredients.” It is always incarnated and expressed in the lifestyle and patterns of a particular culture. The church does not somehow transcend culture when they embrace the gospel; they share the same life and beliefs as members of the cultural community. In other words, the gospel always flows together with cultural beliefs and meets in the life of the church. Neither the gospel nor the culture exists in the abstract—“out there.” The church is a community that inhabits both stories: narrated and socialized into the cultural story from birth, then renarrated and resocialized with the biblical story through the hard work of discipleship and formation. And so it is precisely within the very life of the church and in the heart of every believer that gospel and culture meet. A painful tension is the essence of the church’s life in the midst of culture; it is the inevitable outcome of living in two communities that embody two incompatible stories.
A final point about the missionary encounter: the term “missionary” qualifies this encounter. Up to this point we have simply been describing an encounter, but it is always qualified by the term “missionary.” What does Newbigin mean by that qualifying adjective? Islam also understands the notion of an encounter between two equally religious, comprehensive, and communally embodied visions and ways of life. Sadly, many Muslims probably understand this better than most Christians. But an encounter in the Christian faith differs from that of Islam, and the word “missionary” helps to pinpoint that difference.
The term “missionary” points, first, to the fact that the gospel can be translated into every culture of the world. The gospel is not a comprehensive vision and way of life that must completely displace every element of another vision. While there is a “radical discontinuity,” even “radical contradiction” between the gospel and culture, there is not “total discontinuity.” This, of course, departs from Islam. One cannot translate the Qur’an from Arabic into any other language. All translations are called interpretations. Moreover, the social, political, and economic vision and way of life expressed in a comprehensive sharia law must displace all other rivals.
Moreover, the witness to the comprehensive vision of the gospel is noncoercive. Our witness must be in the power of the Spirit and not in any coercive methods that would compel people to convert under pressure. The gospel must be embraced freely, and space must be given for a response. Rejection of the witness and suffering is what may be expected and embraced when it comes. The witness must be the appealing life, deeds, and words of a seemingly weak community rather than the pressure tactics of the strong. Suffering love must characterize the witness of the church. Ultimately the witness to the gospel must be the work of the Spirit. In Islam, since the goal of history is an intrahistorical victory, the Muslim mission may and even must use coercive means to usher in the end. The only question is how far that coercion can go—does it include violence?
“Missionary” points to one more thing: even though the church may not use coercion, this does not imply a weakened commitment to the truth of the message. Quite the opposite, in fact. Adherents to a witness that is missionary in nature believe that its message is universally valid and therefore must be made known to all people. And so, while the church may not use any pressure tactics, it remains steadfast and firm in its commitment to the truth and to the ultimate victory of the gospel when Christ returns. There may be an unanxious and joyful witness that leaves the results in God’s hand. Witness will be one of humble yet confident boldness in the truth of the gospel. It will be accompanied by a trust in God’s work that follows Jesus’s path of suffering love.
The Church for and against the World
If there is a missionary encounter, how can the gospel be translated into a way of life without compromising its all-embracing demands? Or, to approach the issue from the standpoint of the church’s mission, how can the church faithfully witness through its life, deeds, and words to the lordship of Christ over all of cultural life in a particular place where other lords rule? Newbigin approaches these questions from the angle of the church’s missionary vocation. The church struggles with the issue of a missionary encounter precisely so it can faithfully carry out its vocation to mediate the call of Christ to a people living in a certain place. He insists that the “whole existence of the congregation must be such as to mediate to the people of that place the call of Christ which speaks to them as they are but calls them from what they are in order that—in Christ—they may become God’s new creation.” The call of Christ affirms their cultural identity—speaks to them as they are. But it also rejects their cultural identity—calls them from what they are to become God’s new creation. This raises the question: How is the church to translate the gospel into a particular culture in such a way as to faithfully mediate the call of Christ in that context?
The Cross and Resurrection as the Determining Criteria
The starting point for a faithful witness in culture is the cross and resurrection of Jesus Christ; these events form the pattern for the life of the missionary church. The church must be for the world in the same way that Christ is for the world, but the church also must be against the world in the same way that Christ was against the world. Christ’s relationship to the world must be the determining criterion. And this is seen most clearly in the cross and resurrection: “The Cross is in one sense an act of total identification with the world. But in another sense it is an act of radical separation. It is both of these at the same time.” Both solidarity and separation belong “to the essence of the Church’s life in the world.” And so, following its Lord, the church must be against the world and for the world.
Earlier we noted Newbigin’s observation that the Bible uses the word “world” in two different senses: the world is God’s good creation as developed in human culture, and the world is human culture as it is distorted by idolatry. The cross says no to the idolatrous form, and the resurrection says yes to the good creation. “A society which accepts the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus as its ultimate standards of reference will have to be a society whose whole style of life, and not only its words, conveys something of that radical dissent from the world which is manifested in the Cross, and at the same time something of that affirmation of the world which is made possible by the resurrection.”
So to mediate the call of Christ faithfully, the church must assume a twofold posture toward its culture. On the one hand, the church will identify with its culture, living in solidarity with and affirming it, while mediating the call in terms and forms that are familiar. On the other hand, the church will be separate from its culture, living in opposition to and rejecting its idolatry, mediating a challenging call to repentance and conversion. A loss of either side of this double stance will compromise the church’s witness. We need to probe further this twofold orientation.
A Twofold Posture for Faithful Witness
Newbigin begins with affirmation: the church is for the world. It is precisely because the church loves and identifies with its culture that it opposes the idolatry that distorts the fullness of life in God’s good creation. The church is against the world precisely because it is for it. The starting point is God’s love and faithfulness to his creation, and that must be the starting point for his followers. Because God loves his creation and human culture, he hates the sin that corrupts it and ruins the lives of its inhabitants.
The reason that the missionary church must take this stance of affirmation and solidarity is the confession that creation is very good. This includes human cultural development as a part of that good creation. Newbigin distinguishes between the good creation and the distortion of evil. “The world is itself not evil, but is under an evil power.” Sin is pervasive in its scope, and it pollutes all parts of human culture. But the creation and cultural development remain good. Thus, the church must be at home in its cultural setting and participate in its development for the flourishing of all. That is what it means to be human. It must affirm all of the created goodness its history has uncovered.
The affirmation of the creational good of culture will lead to a full identification and solidarity of the church with its culture. It will adopt its language, customs, symbols, institutions, and systems. The good news then may be embodied and communicated in understandable and familiar patterns.
The other side of the stance the church must take is that it is against the world. Not only is the church at home in its culture; it is also at odds with it. Not only does it participate in cultural development; it also calls for repentance and conversion. There is to be not only identification with the world but also radical dissent from it. The reason for this is that sin and idolatry have twisted every aspect of it. The gospel comes as both a yes and a no—a word of salvation and a word of judgment. And both come at the same time on every part of culture.
Newbigin speaks strongly and often about this side of the church’s posture. He speaks of the church in terms of a “dissenting otherworldliness” and as “discriminating non-conformists.” We are to be “radical dissenters,” “radical critics and misfits” with a relationship of conflict, contradiction, and radical discontinuity with the world. “There is a stark contrast between the faith by which the Church lives and the mind of the world.”
Thus the Christian church lives as a minority in its culture, “questioning the things that no one ever questions.” The church offers another story—the true story—which has a more rational and comprehensive way of understanding and living in the world. We live in a “different fiduciary framework” that is “an alternative to the one that is dominant in our culture.” Our life and words call our neighbors to conversion—a radical shift in perspective. To question what no one questions and invite others into this alternative story requires “the boldness of a foreign missionary who dares to challenge the accepted framework, even though the words he uses must inevitably sound absurd to those who dwell in that framework.” So our lives and message will be familiar but will also appear absurd.
We noted that Newbigin begins with solidarity and affirmation. But it is also true that he speaks more often of separation and rejection—the church against the world. This has led some to characterize Newbigin’s thought as counter- or even anticultural. But Newbigin was a deeply contextual thinker; the problems he encountered needed the emphasis of a radical dissent of the church from culture. We especially see this in two places: as he engaged the World Council of Churches and as he developed his Mission and Western Culture project. He believed that the World Council of Churches often identified with culture to the point of departing from the gospel. He also believed that the Western church was an advanced case of syncretism. Both had “failed to realize how radical is the contradiction between the Christian vision and the assumptions we breathe in from every part of our shared existence.” Both led him to stress the negative and antithetical side of cultural engagement. If there is a very large person sitting on one side of the teeter-totter, it is necessary to jump very hard on the other side. And this is what Newbigin is doing: jumping hard on the side of opposition to the idolatry of culture.
The rejection of cultural idolatry will lead the church to a radical separation from and opposition to its culture. Precisely because the church loves and identifies with its culture, it will oppose the idolatry that destroys the flourishing of human life. Even as it adopts its culture’s language, customs, symbols, institutions, and systems, the church will do so critically aware of its idolatrous shaping. The good news, although necessarily embodied and communicated in understandable and familiar patterns, will always issue a call to repentance and conversion. There will be an invitation to join the new humankind that will one day fill the new creation. This is a call not to reject culture but to embody a sign of what that place is meant to be.
The question that arises is whether Newbigin is simply speaking out of two sides of his mouth. Do we not really have an outright contradiction between identification and opposition, affirmation and rejection, yes and no, at home and at odds? Newbigin resolves the painful tension with the notions of “subversive fulfillment” and “challenging relevance.” But before we discuss those terms, we note briefly two ways of avoiding the painful tension that Newbigin rejected.
Avoiding the Painful Tension
Newbigin often contrasts two ways of avoiding the painful tension: irrelevance and syncretism. The experience of being a cross-cultural missionary had taught him that there are always two opposite dangers, the Scylla and Charybdis, between which one must steer. On the one side, there is the fear of the idolatrous culture. This leads to an attempt to withdraw from the culture into a ghetto. One may withdraw to another form of perceived faithfulness that comes either from another place or from another time. Thus the gospel is made irrelevant, and the witness of the church is subverted. When the church attempts to freeze the gospel in another time or transport it from another place to protect it from the idolatrous forces of culture, it becomes a petrified fossil, the dead remnant of life from another time. On the other side, there is an attempt to so identify with the culture that the church ends up uncritically taking on the idols of the culture. The church is absorbed into and domesticated by the cultural story. This is syncretism, and this too leads to the subversion of a faithful witness. This is the life of a chameleon that takes on the color of its surroundings or a jellyfish that is moved to and fro with the tide.
Newbigin believed that the evangelical tradition, rightly concerned to protect the truth of the gospel, resembles the first danger. It ends up in a sterile and repellent sectarianism that shuns culture and often lives in polemical confrontation with it. Evangelicals attempt to be faithful by holding on to theology and forms from another time. Theirs is a separation without solidarity. The ecumenical tradition is threatened by the second danger. Christians in the ecumenical tradition are motivated by a genuine concern to sympathize and identify with the struggles of humankind, attempting to be relevant to the needs of the world and meet the world on its own terms; theirs is a solidarity without separation that ended “near or at the point of apostasy.”
In reality, though, it is impossible to withdraw. One cannot escape culture. And so the attempt to withdraw will only take place in certain confined areas of life. The rest will be vulnerable to syncretism. This is clear enough in Newbigin’s analysis of evangelicalism. While he critiques them for their repellent sectarianism and irrelevance, he also interprets their approach to the Christian faith as syncretistic in a variety of ways. It is quite common, for example, for Newbigin to place those from the evangelical and ecumenical traditions on different sides of the fact-value dichotomy. In that case, both have capitulated to the religious vision of the Enlightenment.
So Newbigin’s biggest concern throughout his life is that the painful tension would be resolved in terms of syncretism—a capitulation in life and word to the idolatry of culture. For him the “crucial question” is, What is the story that we think we are really a part of? He answers, “If the 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.”
This syncretism is almost always unacknowledged. There usually is real sincerity in confessing Christ. Yet there may be a difference between one’s professed religion and one’s real religion. A person’s real religion may be something quite other than what he or she professes. Someone’s real religion is what is “ultimately authoritative” in all of their thinking and acting. If, for example, Christians limit the gospel to a restricted area of life and allow the modern scientific worldview to shape the rest of their public lives, then their real religion is not the gospel they profess but the cultural worldview that actually shapes their lives. “In this case the commitment to Christ will be conditioned by the person’s commitment to the overriding ‘myth,’ and the latter will be his or her real religion.” This is one of the urgent reasons that Christians need to be awakened from a syncretistic slumber to the missionary encounter that should be integral to their faith.
Subversive Fulfillment and Challenging Relevance
In light of the above discussion, how do we live faithfully in the painful tension that arises from living in two incompatible stories? How can the church be both for and against the world? This is especially pressing if every cultural product and institution is both creationally good and idolatrously twisted and the two are inextricably intertwined.
Faithful contextualization, for Newbigin, can be summarized in the terms “subversive fulfillment” and “challenging relevance.” He borrows the term “challenging relevance” from veteran Indian missionary Alfred Hogg and the term “subversive fulfillment” from his two primary mentors, Hendrik Kraemer and Willem Visser ’t Hooft. The coupling of “challenging” and “relevance” shows that Newbigin is looking for a way to both employ and indwell familiar and relevant cultural forms while at the same time challenging the idolatry embedded in them. Subversive fulfillment is an attempt to express the same thing. The gospel fulfills the creational longings or design or structure but subverts the idolatry that has twisted it. Both expressions recognize that all cultural products—language, institutions, customs, and so forth—have both a creational structure and an idolatrous distortion. Both want to hold on to what is creational and reject the idolatrous.
Two biblical examples make this clear. The first, and the one that functions quite often as a model for Newbigin, is the way the Gospel of John communicates the gospel. John freely uses the language and thought forms of classical religion and culture that formed the world of his hearers. The classical dualisms of word-flesh, spirit-body, heaven-earth, light-darkness, and more are all the fruit of pagan idolatry. Nevertheless, John uses this language and these thought forms in such a way as to confront them with a fundamental question and indeed a contradiction. For example, John begins with the announcement, “In the beginning was the logos.” As he continues it becomes apparent that logos is not the impersonal law of rationality that permeated the universe, giving it meaning and order, as his pagan hearers would have assumed, but is rather the man Jesus Christ. John identifies the classical longing for order but subverts, challenges, and contradicts the idolatrous distortion of the classical world. Newbigin writes, “I suppose that the boldest and most brilliant essay in the communication of the gospel to a particular culture in all Christian history is the gospel according to John. Here the language and thought-forms of that Hellenistic world are so employed that Gnostics in all ages have thought that the book was written especially for them. And yet nowhere in Scripture is the absolute contradiction between the word of God and human culture stated with more terrible clarity.”
On the one hand, John embraces the creational longing to know the origin of order and meaning in the world. This question is intrinsic to the very creational makeup of humanity. This longing is good and can be affirmed. However, the answer that is given is shaped by classical idolatry. The logos is an idolatrous fiction of the pagan mind. So, on the other hand, John subverts the Hellenistic religious vision and contradicts its accepted rationality. He challenges the pagan answer and offers Jesus as the true source. The language is baptized, cleansed of the idolatry while affirming the true creational intent. The language of logos or eternal life, for example, is burst open, emptied of its idolatry given by the framework of the classical-pagan worldview, and filled with new meaning.
It is important to see that Newbigin is not just talking here about a strategy for verbal communication. Rather, this model of communication is a way of understanding the whole way we relate to culture. Language is only one of the cultural forms that have been shaped by deeper religious beliefs. We deal with all institutions and structures within a culture—economic, political, artistic, educational, technological, family, judicial, and so forth—in this way. We discern the creational design and the idolatrous distortion. We do not destroy the cultural practice in an anarchist way because there is creational good. Nor do we maintain the custom in a conservative way because it is sinfully twisted. Rather, the goal is “to subvert them from within and thereby to bring them back under the allegiance of their true Lord.” This is how Paul deals with the various cultural forms and structures of Rome. “The structure is not simply to be smashed. . . . It is to be subverted from within.”
An example of the way Newbigin approaches various issues of mission in the public square with this kind of distinction is his discussions of power and especially political power. The first time he discusses this issue is in the 1970s when, after the Bangkok Conference, there were many attacks on so-called First-World churches that held overwhelming economic, political, cultural, and ecclesiastical power. This rejection, he believed, was a naïve sort of philosophical anarchism and gnostic rejection of power as evil. To treat all power as evil is to fall into the Manichaean heresy, which does not distinguish between the good creation and sinful corruption. Yet, for Newbigin, power is a good part of the creation, and the problem is the misuse and abuse of power. Power is creationally good and is God’s gift for some to serve others. The abuse of power comes from idolatrous corruption. The need of the hour is “help for those entrusted with power to learn how to use it.” Political tyranny embodies both the creational goodness of political power and the sinful distortion of oppressive abuse.
The church’s task is to faithfully translate the gospel into each culture so that the witness to the good news is both challenging and relevant, fulfilling the creational intent and longing while subverting the idolatry. The trouble is that every cultural institution, custom, and practice is both creationally good and idolatrously twisted. How can one distinguish between the two? And how can one faithfully embrace and embody all the good creational gifts? This is incredibly difficult and demands discernment.
The Process of True Contextualization
The process of discernment that leads to true contextualization involves three things: an ultimate commitment to the biblical story, a dialogue with culture, and an ecumenical dialogue with Christians from other cultures.
Allegiance to the Biblical Story
Faithful contextualization requires, in the first place, an ultimate allegiance to the biblical story. Newbigin says that true contextualization “must begin and continue by attending to what God has done in the story of Israel and supremely in the story of Jesus Christ. It must continue by indwelling that story so that it is our story, the way we understand the real story.” For Newbigin, to begin with Scripture and offer our ultimate allegiance to the gospel means at least three things: understanding Scripture as a narrative of universal history, the church’s indwelling of this story, and discerning the gospel’s yes and no to the cultural story.
Newbigin states categorically, “I do not believe that we can speak effectively of the Gospel 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.” If Scripture is fragmented into bits, whether those bits are historical-critical, theological, moral, devotional, or narrative, then the Bible will be absorbed into the bigger cultural story. There will be no encounter. “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.”
The church must indwell this biblical story and interpret the culture from within it. The “gospel gives rise to a new plausibility structure, a radically different vision of things from those that shape all human cultures apart from the gospel. The Church, therefore, as the bearer of the gospel, inhabits a plausibility structure which is at variance with, and which calls into question, those that govern all human cultures without exception.” The continual danger is that we interpret the Bible from within the culture rather than the other way around. “Do you try to understand the gospel through the spectacles provided by your culture, or do you try to understand your culture through the spectacles provided by the gospel?” The gospel must hold ultimate priority, and the cultural story must be subjected to the scrutiny of the Bible. The gospel is to become like a pair of spectacles through which we view, interpret, and live in the world. The biblical story “provides us with such a set of lenses, not something for us to look at, but for us to look through. . . . This calls for a more radical kind of conversion than has often been thought, a conversion not only of the will but of the mind, a transformation by the renewing of the mind so as not to be conformed to this world, not to see things as our culture sees them, but—with new lenses—to see things in a radically different way.”
To be able to do this, we will need to remember and rehearse the story through individual and communal reading and reflection on the biblical story so that we indwell the story and it becomes ours. We need “to soak ourselves in this story so that we more and more understand that it is the real story and that the story we are listening to on the radio and in our newspapers is to a very large extent phoney.”
As we indwell the biblical story, we attempt to discern the word of grace and judgment that Scripture pronounces on our culture. “True contextualization accords the gospel its rightful primacy, its power to penetrate every culture and to speak within each culture, in its own speech and symbol, the word which is both No and Yes, both judgment and grace.”
Dialogue with Culture
By what process do we discern the yes and the no, the grace and the judgment of the gospel on our culture? Faithful contextualization demands, second, a dialogue with culture in which the cultural story is always brought under the scrutiny of the biblical story. Newbigin writes, “We must always, it seems to me, in every situation, be wrestling with both sides of this reality: that the Church is for the world against the world. The Church is against the world for the world.” Newbigin describes this as an internal dialogue with culture that takes place in the heart of each Christian and a communal dialogue with culture within the church. The people of God are to more and more indwell the biblical story “as the true story of which our story is a part.” But we are fully socialized into our cultural story as well. “By all our cultural formation from infancy onward, we are made part of the story of our nation and our civilization.” The competing understandings of the world are internalized, and “there is necessarily an internal dialogue within us.” The clash of two incompatible stories makes this internal dialogue inevitable. Indeed, if it does not occur, it is likely that the biblical story has been accommodated to the cultural story.
If this dialogue is to lead to growing discernment, three things we have discussed earlier in the chapter will be important. The first is that we must immerse ourselves more and more in the biblical story. This will be both an individual and a communal task. The cultural story will naturally form us, but it takes hard work to indwell the biblical story. Second, there is a need for a missionary analysis of the cultural story. This will require the church to understand the religious beliefs of the culture, the story that has formed those beliefs, and how those beliefs are embodied in the culture. To the degree the church does not understand its own cultural story, it is vulnerable to its idolatry. This is why Newbigin spends so much time rehearsing and analyzing the Western story from so many different angles. And finally, we need an understanding of subversive fulfillment. Discernment involves distinguishing between the creational structural good in every cultural institution and product and the idolatrous distortion that misdirects it. If the church is to subvert the cultural structures and practices within which it lives and bring them back under the allegiance of their true Lord, then it must distinguish between the design of the creation and its idolatrous spirit.
This is an ongoing process that will take place in the life and heart of every believer. But this internal dialogue must not only be an individual affair. Contextualization takes place in the life of the congregation that rehearses and remembers the story the Bible tells in Word and sacrament and that together brings the biblical story to bear on its culture.
Ecumenical Dialogue across Cultures
There is a danger that even a vigorous dialogue with culture may result in a local contextualization being absorbed into the idolatry of that place. And so faithful contextualization requires, finally, an ecumenical dialogue with the church outside of one’s own culture. There is the need for new eyes that come from believers from other cultures. Thus, writes Newbigin, the dialogue must move beyond cultural boundaries and be “open to the witness of the church in all other places.” Only thus will the church be “saved from absorption into the culture of that place and enabled to represent to that place the universality, the catholicity of God’s purpose of grace and judgment for all humanity.”
This dialogue will involve both mutual enrichment and mutual correction. All contextualizations of the gospel are incomplete: there is a need in every church for enrichment. All contextualizations of the gospel are also to some degree shaped by the idolatry of their place: there is a need for mutual correction. Our understanding of the gospel will be shaped by the cultures that have formed us. The only way we can be shaken out of these culturally conditioned interpretations of the gospel is through the correcting witness of other believers who have read the Bible within the context of other cultures.
There are real hurdles to be faced if this kind of dialogue is to become a reality. On the one hand, this dialogue at present only takes place within the language and thought forms of Western culture. Because of the dominance of this cultural pattern, Christians living in the West do not receive from Christians in other cultures the correction they need. On the other hand, the forum in which this dialogue has most often taken place has been the World Council of Churches. But this body has become increasingly infected by a pluralism and loss of confidence in the truth of the gospel. Moreover, many Pentecostal and evangelical churches with insight to offer remain outside this fellowship. These are not easy problems to solve.
Newbigin points to the possibility of this dialogue arising from the return of cross-cultural missionaries to their own culture. The cross-cultural missionary has the gift of new eyes to see their own culture critically. At the same time, they know their own culture and are able to translate that insight for the church. Newbigin, of course, is a sterling example of this dynamic.
Conclusion
Throughout the biblical story and church history, cultural idolatry has constantly threatened to derail the church’s witness to the End of universal history. In his understanding of a missionary encounter with culture, Newbigin has offered a gift and a challenge. As a cross-cultural missionary, he offers a gift: he is acutely aware of the essential reality of a missionary encounter and has wrestled with ways to faithfully live in the painful tension it fostered. His challenge to embrace the painful tension of a missionary encounter and pursue a path of faithful contextualization is a call we must embrace if we are to be faithful to our missionary vocation.
. Lesslie Newbigin, The Finality of Christ (London: SCM, 1969), 22, 46.
. Lesslie Newbigin, Truth to Tell: The Gospel as Public Truth (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1991).
. Lesslie Newbigin, “Context and Conversion,” International Review of Mission 68, no. 271 (1979): 301.
. See further Michael W. Goheen, “Gospel and Cultures: Lesslie Newbigin’s Missionary Contribution,” Philosophia Reformata 66, no. 2 (2001): 178–88; Michael W. Goheen, “As the Father Has Sent Me, I Am Sending You”: J. E. Lesslie Newbigin’s Missionary Ecclesiology (Zoetermeer: Boekencentrum, 2000), 331–70 (chap. 8).
. Lesslie Newbigin, Foolishness to the Greeks: The Gospel and Western Culture (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1986), 1.
. H. Richard Niebuhr, Christ and Culture (New York: Harper, 1951).
. Paul Tillich, A Theology of Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959).
. Newbigin, Foolishness to the Greeks, 1.
. Newbigin, Foolishness to the Greeks, 21.
. Lesslie Newbigin, A Word in Season: Perspectives on Christian World Missions (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994), 68.
. Lesslie Newbigin, “Christ and Cultures,” Scottish Journal of Theology 31 (1978): 2–3.
. Newbigin, “Christ and Cultures,” 3.
. Newbigin, Word in Season, 99.
. Newbigin also speaks of a “missionary confrontation” in “Die Kulturelle Gefangenschaft Abendlandischen Christentums als Herausforderung an eine missionarische Kirche,” unpublished speech, Newbigin Archives, University of Birmingham (1984), 5.
. Newbigin, “Christ and Cultures,” 9; Newbigin, Foolishness to the Greeks, 3.
. Newbigin, Foolishness to the Greeks, 3; see Lesslie Newbigin, The Open Secret: An Introduction to the Theology of Mission, rev. ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995), 160–61.
. Newbigin, Open Secret, 146.
. Lesslie Newbigin, “Mission in the 1980s,” Occasional Bulletin of Missionary Research 4 (October 1980): 155.
. Newbigin, Word in Season, 150.
. Lesslie Newbigin, The Other Side of 1984: Questions for the Churches (Geneva: World Council of Churches, 1983), 53.
. Lesslie Newbigin, The Gospel in a Pluralist Society (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1989), 228.
. Newbigin, Gospel in a Pluralist Society, 221.
. Lesslie Newbigin, Proper Confidence: Faith, Doubt, and Certainty in Christian Discipleship (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995), 50.
. Lesslie Newbigin, “Gospel and Culture—but Which Culture?,” Missionalia 17, no. 3 (November 1989): 214.
. Newbigin, Word in Season, 150.
. Newbigin, Gospel in a Pluralist Society, 220; Newbigin, Word in Season, 150.
. Lesslie Newbigin, “Renewal in Mind,” GEAR (Group for Evangelism and Renewal in the URC) 29 (1983): 4.
. Newbigin, Foolishness to the Greeks, 115.
. Lesslie Newbigin, “Mission in the 1990s: Two Views,” International Bulletin of Missionary Research 13, no. 3 (1989): 101.
. Newbigin, Gospel in a Pluralist Society, 172.
. Newbigin, “Gospel and Culture—but Which Culture?,” 214.
. Lesslie Newbigin, “The Gospel and Modern Western Culture,” unpublished article, Newbigin Archives, University of Birmingham (n.d.), 13.
. Newbigin, Other Side of 1984, 53.
. Newbigin, Open Secret, 154.
. Lesslie Newbigin, “Evangelism in the City,” Reformed Review 41 (Autumn 1987): 4.
. Newbigin’s views on the powers are confusing and need clarification, which he himself recognized. See Al Wolters, “Creation and the ‘Powers’: A Dialogue with Lesslie Newbigin,” Trinity Journal for Theology and Ministry 4, no. 2 (Fall 2010): 85–98 (special issue, “The Gospel in the Public Square: Essays by and in Honor of Lesslie Newbigin”). About Wolters’s perspective Newbigin says: “Here I must say that his criticisms have a great deal of weight in them. I think he is right in pointing out the weaknesses of my treatment, both as regards the exegesis of scripture and as regards the internal coherence of my arguments. I have to confess that I ought to do some real rethinking.” He goes on to say, though, that he believes “there is more to my argument than Wolters grants.” See Lesslie Newbigin, “Response to the Colloquium by Bishop Lesslie Newbigin” (unpublished response, Leeds Colloquium, June 1996), 6–7.
. Lesslie Newbigin, A South India Diary (London: SCM, 1951), 49.
. 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), 202.
. Newbigin, South India Diary, 49.
. Lesslie Newbigin, “The Secular-Apostolic Dilemma,” in Not without a Compass: Jesuit Education Association Seminar on Christian Education in India Today, ed. T. Mathias (New Delhi: Jesuit Educational Association of India, 1972), 72–78.
. Newbigin, Gospel in a Pluralist Society, 220.
. Lesslie Newbigin, Trinitarian Doctrine for Today’s Mission (1963; repr., Carlisle, UK: Paternoster, 1998), 46.
. Newbigin, South India Diary, 90–93, 115.
. Lesslie Newbigin, Unfinished Agenda: An Updated Autobiography (Edinburgh: Saint Andrew Press, 1993), 120.
. Newbigin, Gospel in a Pluralist Society, 188.
. Newbigin, The Finality of Christ, 59; Newbigin “Evangelism in the City,” 4.
. Lesslie Newbigin, “What Is ‘a Local Church Truly United’?,” Ecumenical Review 29 (1977): 120.
. Lesslie Newbigin, “Bible Study Lectures,” 195.
. Lesslie Newbigin, The Good Shepherd: Meditations on Christian Ministry in Today’s World (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1977), 98.
. Newbigin, “Bible Study Lectures,” 202.
. Lesslie Newbigin, “Stewardship, Mission, and Development” (address, Annual Stewardship Conference of the British Council of Churches, Stanwick, 1970), 6.
. Newbigin, Word in Season, 53–54.
. Lesslie Newbigin, “Bible Studies on John 17: Just Who Is the Enemy?,” Lutheran Standard (USA), May 2, 1967, 12; Lesslie Newbigin, “What Is a ‘Local Church Truly United’?,” in In Each Place: Towards a Fellowship of Local Churches Truly United, ed. J. E. L. Newbigin (Geneva: World Council of Churches, 1977), 119.
. Newbigin, Gospel in a Pluralist Society, 141.
. Lesslie Newbigin, Behold, I Make All Things New (Madras: Christian Literature Society, 1968), 26.
. Newbigin, “Stewardship, Mission, and Development,” 6.
. Newbigin, Behold, I Make All Things New, 26.
. Lesslie Newbigin, “Bible Studies Given at the National Christian Council Triennial Assembly, Shillong,” National Christian Council Review 88 (1968): 13.
. Newbigin, Open Secret, 112.
. See Stephen B. Bevans, Models of Contextual Theology, rev. ed. (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2002), 117–37; Sander Griffioen, “Newbigin’s Philosophy of Culture,” trans. Al Wolters, Trinity Journal for Theology and Ministry 4, no. 2 (Fall 2010): 99–111 (special issue, “The Gospel in the Public Square: Essays by and in Honor of Lesslie Newbigin”). I have responded to this charge in Michael W. Goheen, “Is Lesslie Newbigin’s Model of Contextualization Anticultural?,” Mission Studies 19, no. 1 (2002): 136–56.
. Newbigin, “Evangelism in the City,” 4.
. Newbigin, Word in Season, 67; Newbigin, Foolishness to the Greeks, 7.
. Lesslie Newbigin, The Reunion of the Church: A Defence of the South India Scheme (London: SCM, 1948), 142. Newbigin speaks of a “jelly fish” and “petrified fossils.” The imagery of a chameleon comes from Jürgen Moltmann, The Experiment Hope, trans. M. Douglas Meeks (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1975), 3.
. Newbigin, “Bible Studies on John 17: Just Who Is the Enemy?,” 12.
. Lesslie Newbigin, “Biblical Authority,” unpublished article, Newbigin Archives, University of Birmingham (1997), 2.
. Newbigin, Open Secret, 161.
. Alfred G. Hogg, The Christian Message to the Hindu: Being the Duff Missionary Lectures for Nineteen Forty Five on the Challenge of the Gospel in India (London: SCM, 1947), 9–26.
. Kraemer uses the term “subversive fulfilment” in Hendrik Kraemer, “Continuity and Discontinuity,” in The Authority of Faith, Madras Series 1 (New York: International Missionary Council, 1939), 4. Following Kraemer, Visser ’t Hooft uses the term “subversive accommodation” in Willem A. Visser ’t Hooft, “Accommodation: True and False,” South East Asia Journal of Theology 8, no. 3 (January 1967): 13; see also Lesslie Newbigin, “The Legacy of W. A. Visser ’t Hooft,” International Bulletin of Missionary Research 16, no. 2 (1992): 80.
. Newbigin, Foolishness to the Greeks, 53.
. Newbigin, Truth to Tell, 82.
. Newbigin, Foolishness to the Greeks, 102.
. Lesslie Newbigin, “The Taste of Salvation at Bangkok,” Indian Journal of Theology 22 (1973): 51; Newbigin, Foolishness to the Greeks, 126.
. Newbigin, Foolishness to the Greeks, 126.
. Newbigin, Word in Season, 143–44.
. Newbigin, Gospel in a Pluralist Society, 195–96.
. Newbigin, Gospel in a Pluralist Society, 151.
. Lesslie Newbigin, “Response to ‘Word of God?,’ John Coventry, SJ,” Gospel and Our Culture Newsletter 10 (1991): 3.
. Newbigin, “Biblical Authority,” 2.
. Newbigin, Gospel in a Pluralist Society, 9.
. Newbigin, Word in Season, 99.
. Newbigin, Gospel in a Pluralist Society, 38.
. Newbigin, Gospel in a Pluralist Society, 147.
. Newbigin, “Biblical Authority,” 6.
. Newbigin, Gospel in a Pluralist Society, 152.
. Newbigin, Word in Season, 54.
. Lesslie Newbigin, “Truth and Authority in Modernity,” in Faith and Modernity, ed. Philip Sampson, Vinay Samuel, and Chris Sugden (Oxford: Regnum Books, 1994), 76. See also Newbigin, Gospel in a Pluralist Society, 65.
. Newbigin, Gospel in a Pluralist Society, 65, 147.
. Newbigin, Gospel in a Pluralist Society, 147–48.
. Newbigin, Gospel in a Pluralist Society, 152.
. Newbigin, “Christ and Cultures,” 13; Newbigin, Gospel in a Pluralist Society, 196; Newbigin, Open Secret, 149–50.
. Newbigin, Open Secret, 152.
. Newbigin, Word in Season, 125.