Chapter 10: Asian Perspectives on Twenty-First-Century Pluralism
Notes
Chapter 1: Introduction: The Legacy of Newbigin for Mission to the West
1 As described in his autobiography, Lesslie Newbigin, Unfinished Agenda: An Updated Biography, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1993), p. 11.
2 Tim Stafford, “God’s Missionary,” Christianity Today, December 9, 1996, pp. 24-33.
3 See, for example, The Other Side of 1984 (1983), Foolishness to the Greeks (1986) and the important essay “Can the West Be Converted?,” Princeton Seminary Bulletin 6, no. 1 (1985): 25-37. In this essay he lays out his concern: “Surely there can be no more crucial question for the world mission of the Church than the one I have posed. Can there be an effective missionary encounter with this culture—this so powerful, persuasive, and confident culture which (at least until very recently) simply regarded itself as ‘the coming world civilization.’ Can the West be converted?”
4 Lesslie Newbigin, The Gospel in a Pluralist Society (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1989).
5 I used GPS in teaching introductory missiology courses and was soon asked to teach a course only on Newbigin as a missiologist. I relented and have done so for fifteen years now.
6 A number of books have described some of this “great reversal” that occurred in the twentieth century. See, for example, Scott W. Sunquist, The Unexpected Christian Century: The Reversal and Transformation of Christianity in the Twentieth Century (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2015); Dyron Daughtery, The Changing World of Christianity (New York: Peter Lang, 2010); Wesley Granberg-Michaelson, From Times Square to Timbuktu: The Post-Christian West Meets the Non-Western Church (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2013); and, among others, Philip Jenkins, The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).
7 Walbert Bühlman, The Coming of the Third Church: An Analysis of the Present and Future of the Church (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1977).
8 From the library of Columbia University (accessed December 15, 2014): http://library.columbia.edu/content/dam/libraryweb/locations/burke/fa/mrl/ldpd_4492656.pdf.
9 Just months after this largely celebratory conference was the Boxer Rebellion in China where anti-foreign and anti-Christian sentiments spilled out across many eastern provinces. The response of missions was largely to increase their efforts to bring the best of the Christian West to China.
10 Lesslie Newbigin, A South India Diary (London: SCM Press, 1951).
11 Chapters six through nine: “Revelation in History,” “The Logic of Election,” “The Bible as Universal History,” and “Christ, the Clue to History.”
12 From a conversation with Wilbert Shenk (October 2014), who knew Newbigin.
13 Lesslie Newbigin, The Light Has Come: An Exposition of the Fourth Gospel (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1987).
14 Theology, Intercultural Studies and Psychology.
15 See a discussion of his understanding of the perils of the free market economy in Geoffrey Wainwright’s Lesslie Newbigin: A Theological Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 261-65.
Chapter 2: Newbigin in His Time
1 In 1969 the journal title changed to International Review of Mission.
2 Lesslie Newbigin, Unfinished Agenda, rev. ed. (Edinburgh: St. Andrew Press, 1993), p. 24, and conversation with Newbigin in 1991.
3 Ibid., p. 25.
4 W. A. Visser ‘t Hooft, “Evangelism in the Neo-Pagan Situation,” International Review of Mission 63 (January 1974): 81-86; W. A. Visser ‘t Hooft, “Evangelism Among Europe’s Neo-Pagans,” International Review of Mission 66 (October 1977): 349-60.
5 Ibiam renounced his knighthood in 1967 when Great Britain backed the central government of Nigeria in the civil war, 1967–1969.
6 Lesslie Newbigin, Christian Freedom in the Modern World (London: SCM Press, 1937).
7 Newbigin, Unfinished Agenda, p. 37.
8 Ibid., p. 39.
9 Ibid.
10 Charles W. Ranson, A Missionary Pilgrimage (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1988), pp. 46, 69, 75-76.
11 Lesslie Newbigin, foreword to Hubert J. B. Allen, Roland Allen: Pioneer, Priest, and Prophet (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995), p. xiii.
12 Lesslie Newbigin, in conversation with the author, 1991.
13 Newbigin, Unfinished Agenda, p. 50.
14 Ibid., p. 73.
15 Lesslie Newbigin, “The Ordained Foreign Missionary in the Indian Church,” International Review of Missions 34 (1945): 86-94. William Patton, editor until his death in 1943, had also served in India and was a critic of “colonial” missions. He was known as an advocate of Indian independence and was likely the one who commissioned Newbigin to write the article.
16 The General Administration Committee, Inter-Church Relations and Foreign Missions Committee consulted and brought a report to the General Assembly for decision (Minute 7279, 3/21/1944, NLS:Dep298/Box 191). Newbigin gives a rather oblique account of this episode in Unfinished Agenda, p. 67. My thanks to Dr. Mark T. B. Laing for the Minute citation.
17 An influential group of British Anglicans strongly disapproved and worked to overturn the inclusion of Anglicans in the CSI. Newbigin engaged in dialogue with these critics over a considerable time without success. Finally, the archbishop of Canterbury, with the backing of the Anglican bishops in India, put the matter to rest by overruling the opponents.
18 Lesslie Newbigin, The Reunion of the Church (London: SCM Press/New York: Harper & Row, 1948; 2nd rev. ed., London: SCM Press, 1960).
19 When the Church of South India celebrated its fiftieth year in 1997, Newbigin was the only surviving bishop from the original group of fifteen. His health was failing and he declined to make the trip.
20 See Newbigin, Reunion of the Church, pp. 82-83, 107-9.
21 Newbigin, Unfinished Agenda, pp. 86-87.
22 Ibid., p. 28.
23 Lesslie Newbigin, That All May Be One: A South India Diary (New York: Association Press, 1952). British edition: A South India Diary (London: SCM Press, 1951).
24 Published as The Household of God (London: SCM Press, 1953; New York: Friendship Press, 1954).
25 Ibid., p. 2.
26 Ibid., p. 10.
27 Ibid., p. 18.
28 Newbigin was reared in the English Presbyterian Church. This church and the Congregationalists formed the United Reformed Church in 1972.
29 See Geoffrey Wainwright, Lesslie Newbigin: A Theological Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 99, 177, 211, 238, 256, 296, 354, 368, 404.
30 Newbigin, Unfinished Agenda, p. 242.
31 The year was deliberately chosen because of George Orwell’s book 1984.
32 Commission on Evangelism, Towards the Conversion of England (London: Press and Publications Board of the Church Assembly, 1945), p. vi.
33 Lesslie Newbigin, The Other Side of 1984: Questions for the Churches (Geneva: World Council of Churches, 1983).
34 Hugh Montefiore, ed., The Gospel and Contemporary Culture (London: Mowbray, 1992).
35 Published in A Word in Season: Perspectives on Christian World Missions, ed. Eleanor Jackson (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994), pp. 66-79.
36 Published as Foolishness to the Greeks: The Gospel and Western Culture (Geneva: World Council of Churches, 1986).
37 For report of a spin-off from the British Programme, see Wilbert R. Shenk, “A Missiology of Western Culture: Background and Development of a Project,” in Mission in Context, ed. John Corrie and Cathy Ross (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2012), pp. 169-85. The Gospel and Our Culture Network was formed in North America and the Deepsight Trust in New Zealand.
38 Lesslie Newbigin, Truth to Tell: The Gospel as Public Truth (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1991).
39 The account in the following two paragraphs was given to me personally by Newbigin in 1990. He did not indicate why he had not included this information in the preface to The Gospel in a Pluralist Society (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1989). One may conjecture he felt it inappropriate to speak so frankly so soon after the event. He recounted the experience with warm appreciation.
Chapter 3: Newbigin’s Theology of Mission and Culture After Twenty-Five Years: Attending to the “Subject” of Mission
1 Sharon Welch, Communities of Resistance and Solidarity: A Feminist Theology of Liberation (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1985), p. 66.
2 Juan Alfaro, Fides, Spes, Caritas: Adnotationes in Tractatum de Virtutibus Theologicis, 9th ed. (Rome: Gregorian University Press [ad usum privatum auditorium]), pp. 292-93, my translation.
3 Lesslie Newbigin, Honest Religion for Secular Man (London: SCM Press, 1966).
4 Harvey Cox, The Secular City: Secularization and Urbanization in Theological Perspective (New York: Macmillan, 1965), and Rudolf Bultmann, Theology of the New Testament, 2 vols., trans. Kendrick Grobel (New York: Scribners, 1951–1955); Jesus Christ and Mythology, trans. L. P. Smith and E. H. Lantero (New York: Scribners, 1958).
5 Philip Rieff, The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith After Freud (New York: Harper, 1968).
6 Newbigin, Honest Religion, p. 44.
7 Lesslie Newbigin, The Gospel in a Pluralist Society (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1989).
8 Geoffrey Wainwright, Lesslie Newbigin: A Theological Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 29; Wainwright is quoting from Newbigin’s Sin and Salvation (London: SCM Press, 1956), pp. 62, 99.
9 Lesslie Newbigin, Foolishness to the Greeks: The Gospel and Western Culture (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1986), p. 45.
10 A view presented in Newbigin’s 1984 lectures at Princeton Seminary, later edited, expanded and printed as Foolishness to the Greeks.
11 H. Richard Niebuhr, Schleiermacher on Christ and Religion: A New Introduction (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1964), pp. 212-19.
12 Ibid., pp. 212-13.
13 B. A. Gerrish, The Old Protestantism and the New: Essays on the Reformation Heritage (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), see chap 10, “The Reformation and the Rise of Modern Science: Luther, Calvin, and Copernicus,” pp. 163-78.
14 Gerrish, Old Protestantism and the New, pp. 66-67.
15 Lesslie Newbigin, Trinitarian Faith and Today’s Mission (Richmond, VA: John Knox Press, 1964), pp. 32-33, 78.
16 Wainwright, Lesslie Newbigin, pp. 72-75.
17 See, for example, Newbigin, Foolishness to the Greeks, pp. 42-64, and Newbigin, GPS, pp. 27-38.
18 A good resource to understand ressourcement in its depth and breadth is David Schindler, ed., Love Alone Is Credible: Hans Urs von Balthasar as Interpreter of the Catholic Tradition, vol. 1 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008), a collection of essays on aspects of Balthasar’s theology as an exemplar of a retrieval of the depths of Catholic tradition that is rooted in its total aesthetic, not merely its doctrinal formulae.
19 In a memorable quip at a meeting I attended, the Maryknoll theologian William Frazier defined moralism as “the reduction of Christian life to the axiom ‘do good and avoid evil’” and charted how that attitude had eroded the theological foundations of mission.
20 See Pope Benedict XVI, General Audience, December 16, 2009, http://w2.vatican.va/content /francesco/en/speeches/2014/november/documents/papa-francesco_20141125_strasburgo-parlamento-europeo.html (accessed on May 14, 2015).
21 Newbigin, GPS, pp. 124-27.
22 This is brought home by Wainwright in his biographical study, Lesslie Newbigin, chap. 3, “The Ecumenical Advocate,” pp. 81-134.
23 John Gatu, “Missionary Go Home,” The Church Herald (November 1971): 4. See “Moratorium: Retreat, Revolt or Reconciliation,” in IDOC International Documentation Project, The Future of the Missionary Enterprise, No. 9 (New York: IDOC International, 1974), pp. 49-86. This section of IDOC contains a variety of perspectives on Gatu’s speech and is the essential resource for understanding his so-called “Moratorium” proposal.
24 Lesslie Newbigin, Unfinished Agenda: An Autobiography (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1985), pp. 231-32.
25 Wilbert Shenk, “Lesslie Newbigin’s Contribution to the Theology of Mission,” The Bible in TransMission: A Tribute to Lesslie Newbigin (1909–1998), special edition 1998, p. 4.
26 Newbigin, Honest Religion, p. 46.
27 Pope John Paul II, Redemptoris Missio §37 (1990), www.vatican.va/holy_father/john_paul_ii/encyclicals/documents/hf_jp-ii_enc_07121990_redemptoris-missio_en.html.
28 The best entrée in Pope John Paul’s overview is found in his The Acting Person, Analecta Husserliana 10 (Berlin: Springer Verlag, 1979); the original Polish edition was titled Osoba i Czyn, published in 1969.
29 Redemptoris Hominis (1979), Dominum et Vivificantem (1986) and Redemptoris Missio (1990), respectively.
30 Bernard J. F. Lonergan, Insight: A Study of Human Understanding (New York: Philosophical Library, 1957), p. 731.
31 Bernard J. F. Lonergan, Collection: Papers by Bernard Lonergan, S.J., ed. F. E. Crowe, S.J. (New York: Herder and Herder, 1967), pp. 266-67.
32 Not a Scripture scholar myself, I have found two of N. T. Wright’s shorter books immensely important for taking me beyond the dead ends of both the old and new searches for the historical Jesus. See N. T. Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1996); also, Paul in Fresh Perspective (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2005).
33 See Jukka A. Kääriäinen, Mission Shaped by Promise: Lutheran Missiology Confronts the Challenge of Religious Pluralism (Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2012), pp. 29-78, for an up-to-date summary of the Lutheran confessional doctrine of the gospel as promise and what happens when the Christian participation in the mystery of salvation is retrieved as “mission shaped by promise” (pp. 177-225).
34 See Moonjang Lee, “Theological Education as Embodiment of Jesus,” in Understanding World Christianity: The Vision and Work of Andrew F. Walls, ed. William R. Burrows, Mark R. Gornik and Janice A. McLean (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2011), pp. 79-88.
Chapter 4: Community and Witness in Transition: Newbigin’s Missional Ecclesiology Between Modernity and Postmodernit
1 This chapter was originally delivered as two lectures at the Newbigin Centenary gatherings in Birmingham and Edinburgh, UK, in 2009 and subsequently published in Mission and Postmodernities, ed. R. Olsen (Oxford: Regnum, 2011), pp. 83-108, and Theology in Missionary Perspective: Lesslie Newbigin’s Legacy, ed. M. Laing and P. Weston (Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2012), pp. 125-54. With minor revisions, it is reprinted here by permission of Regnum Books, Pickwick Publications, and the editors of both volumes.
2 Paul Weston, “Lesslie Newbigin: A Postmodern Missiologist?,” Mission Studies 21, no. 2 (2004): 229.
3 Ibid., p. 230.
4 Ibid., p. 243.
5 As a preacher rather than an academic scholar, Newbigin often used ideas and movements as heuristic “talking points” and examples rather than as showcases of detailed academic analysis. His writing style was occasional rather than systematic. To take up obvious examples: his tracing of the prehistory and development of modernity from antiquity (in terms of the two narratives of Christian faith and Hellenistic philosophy) or his treatment and contrasting of Augustine and Aquinas, which in its details hardly stands the scrutiny of rigorous academic investigation. Similarly, his preference for “good guys” in history such as Athanasius and Augustine and disdain for “bad guys” such as Aquinas and Descartes reflect much more their role in the unfolding intentionally biased reading of history than anything else. While for the purposes of academic scholarship the acknowledgment of those kinds of biases should not go unnoticed, in our opinion, they should not blur the significance of Newbigin’s critique and constructive proposal. In many ways, it can be said that his innovative and bold proposal can stand on its own feet even if it can be shown—unfortunately—that not all the historical and philosophical judgments do.
6 One of the many contributions of the essay from Weston is that it outlines the key aspects of Newbigin’s indebtedness to Michael Polanyi, the philosopher of science from whom the bishop borrowed well-known ideas such as “universal intention,” testimonies “from within the tradition,” and so forth. These are concepts that helped the mature Newbigin to construct his cultural critique and point the way toward his view of “the gospel as public truth.”
7 Elaine Graham and Walton Heather, “Walk on the Wild Side: A Critique of The Gospel and Our Culture,” Modern Churchman 33, no. 1 (1991): 5-7.
8 In my (VMK) investigation of many aspects of Newbigin’s thinking I am indebted to the published doctoral dissertation submitted to the faculty of theology at the University of Helsinki by Jukka Keskitalo. That careful study is the most comprehensive theological analysis of Newbigin’s thinking. Unfortunately, it is written in Finnish and has only a brief English summary. Therefore, I do not give references to it unless there is a direct citation or otherwise important reason in terms of academic integrity. Jukka Keskitalo, Kristillinen usko ja moderni kulttuuri: Lesslie Newbigin käsitys kirkon missiosta modernissa länsimaisessa kulttuurissa [The Christian Faith and Modern Culture: Lesslie Newbigin’s View of the Church’s Mission in Modern Western Culture], Suomalaisen Teologisen Kirjallisuusseuran Julkaisuja 218 (Helsinki: Suomalainen Teologinen Kirjallisuusseura, 1999).
9 Any attempt at a generic description of postmodernism flies in the face of an intellectual movement that intentionally opposes any generalizations.
10 Keskitalo, Kristillinen usko, p. 214, notes that Colin Gunton’s view of postmodernity is similarly.
11 Among other items, Lesslie Newbigin, Proper Confidence: Faith, Doubt and Certainty in Christian Discipleship (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995), pp. 27, 51; Lesslie Newbigin, Truth and Authority in Modernity, Christian Mission and Modern Culture Series (Valley Forge, PA: Trinity Press International, 1996), p. 82.
12 See, for example, Newbigin, Proper Confidence, p. 83.
13 See Newbigin, Truth and Authority, p. 7.
14 So also Keskitalo, Kristillinen usko, p. 214.
15 Lesslie Newbigin, “Modernity in Context,” in Modern, Postmodern and Christian, ed. John Reid, Lesslie Newbigin and David Pullinger (Carberry, Scotland: Handsel Press, 1996), p. 8.
16 Newbigin, Truth and Authority, p. 77.
17 Lesslie Newbigin, “Religious Pluralism: A Missiological Approach,” Studia Missionalia 42 (1993): 231.
18 E.g., Newbigin, Truth and Authority, p. 77.
19 Lesslie Newbigin, “Religious Pluralism and the Uniqueness of Jesus Christ,” International Bulletin of Missionary Research 13, no. 2 (1989): 50. Newbigin refers several times to the well-known ideas of the Jewish-American philosopher Alan Bloom, who in his influential work The Closing of the American Mind (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987) sees a total relativism as the dominant feature of Western culture; see, e.g., Lesslie Newbigin, A Word in Season: Perspectives on Christian World Mission, ed. Eleanor Jackson (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans/Edinburgh: Saint Andrews Press, 1994), pp. 105-6.
20 Newbigin, Proper Confidence, p. 27. Newbigin distinguishes himself in his comprehension of “metanarratives” (Fr, grand récits), an elusive term in English. Cf. Jean-François Lyotard, Geoffrey Bennington and Brian Massumi, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press), 1984.
21 E.g., Newbigin, Proper Confidence, pp. 26-27.
22 Newbigin, Truth and Authority, p. 8.
23 Ibid.
24 Newbigin, Personal Choice, p. 26.
25 Ibid., pp. 73-74.
26 Ibid., p. 27.
27 Ibid., pp. 27, 36, 105; Truth and Authority, p. 9.
28 Newbigin, “Religious Pluralism and the Uniqueness of Jesus Christ,” p. 52.
29 Newbigin, “Religious Pluralism,” pp. 227-28 (227). We would also direct the reader to the chapter in this book by Esther Meek for an intriguing proposal for the enduring influence of an ancient question that counters the notion of pluralism, i.e., the question of “the one and the many.”
30 Peter Berger, Heretical Imperative: Contemporary Possibilities of Religious Affirmation (London: Collins, 1980).
31 Lesslie Newbigin, “Can the West Be Converted?,” International Bulletin of Missionary Research 11, no. 1 (1987): 2-7; Newbigin, The Gospel in a Pluralist Society (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1989), pp. 39-40, 53.
32 Berger uses the term modern when speaking of contemporary Western culture. We have changed it to “contemporary” to avoid confusion; obviously, what Berger is describing is the culture of postmodernity, which encourages each individual have his or her own beliefs.
33 Berger has named these three options deductive (Karl Barth as an example), reductive (Bultmann’s demythologization program as a paradigm) and inductive (Schleiermacher, as mentioned, as the showcase).
34 See, e.g., Lesslie Newbigin, Foolishness to the Greeks: The Gospel and Western Culture (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1986), p. 13.
35 Newbigin, GPS, pp. 14-15.
36 E.g., chapter 2, “Roots of Pluralism,” in ibid.
37 Newbigin, Foolishness to the Greeks, pp. 13-14.
38 Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (London: Duckworth, 1981), p. 79. For references to this phrase, see Newbigin, Foolishness to the Greeks, pp. 76-77; Proper Confidence, p. 55.
39 Keskitalo, Kristillinen usko, p. 230.
40 Newbigin, Proper Confidence, p. 47 (in reference to Carver Yu’s phrase, cited on p. 46).
41 Lesslie Newbigin, The Other Side of 1984: Questions to the Churches (Geneva: WCC Publications, 1984), pp. 1-2, 6; GPS, p. 112; Proper Confidence, pp. 46-47.
42 Newbigin, GPS, pp. 90-91.
43 Newbigin, Other Side of 1984, p. 1.
44 Lesslie Newbigin, “The Secular Myth,” in Faith and Power: Christianity and Islam in “Secular” Britain, ed. Lesslie Newbigin, Lamin Sanneh and Jenny Taylor (London: SPCK, 1998), p. 13.
45 Newbigin, GPS, pp. 90-91; see also pp. 111-12.
46 Werner Ustorf, Christianized Africa—De-Christianized Europe? Missionary Inquiries into the Polycentric Epoch of Christian History, Perspektiven der Weltmission, Wissenschaftliche Beiträge Band 14, Herausgegeben von der Missionsakademie an der Universität Hamburg (Ammersbek bei Hamburg: Lottbeck Jensen, 1992), pp. 108-10; for Newbigin’s response, see “The Secular Myth,” pp. 6, 13.
47 Space precludes consideration of the proposals of van Huyssteen and Shults for a postfoundational theology. Such are apt, inasmuch as the reconstructions of Newbigin’s polarities—with the proposed responses—hold remarkable parallels to both van Huyssteen and Shults. Cf. J. Wentzel van Huyssteen, Essays in Postfoundationalist Theology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997), and F. LeRon Shults, The Postfoundationalist Task of Theology: Wolfhart Pannenberg and the New Theological Rationality (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999).
48 Newbigin, The Other Side of 1984, p. 55.
49 Newbigin, GPS, p. 3; Proper Confidence, p. 93.
50 Newbigin, Foolishness to the Greeks, p. 19; GPS, p. 2.
51 Newbigin, Foolishness to the Greeks, pp. 40-41, 45.
52 Newbigin, Truth and Authority, p. 81.
53 Cf. Newbigin, The Other Side of 1984, p. 55 (which of course speaks of an initiative in relation to the culture of modernity).
54 Cf. Newbigin, Foolishness to the Greeks, p. 22; GPS, p. 222 (which, again, speaks of the church in relation to modernity).
55 Cf. Newbigin, The Other Side of 1984, p. 55.
56 Cf. Newbigin, GPS, pp. 9-10.
57 Ibid., pp. 97-99; Newbigin, A Word in Season, p. 111.
58 Newbigin, The Other Side of 1984, p. 24.
59 Newbigin, GPS, p. 35.
60 Newbigin, “Religious Pluralism,” p. 233.
61 Lesslie Newbigin, “Gospel and Culture,” audio recording of an address given to a conference organized by the Danish Missions Council and the Danish Churches Ecumenical Council in Denmark on November 3, 1995. Transcript available at www.newbigin.net/searches/detail.cfm?ID=1491, p. 8.
62 Ibid.
63 Newbigin finds many faults in fundamentalist Bible interpretation: (1) “It is difficult to maintain without a kind of split personality if one is going to live an active life in the modern world.” (2) “Those who hold this position are themselves part of the modern world; consequently, when they say that the Bible is factually accurate, they are working with a whole context of meaning, within a concept of factuality that is foreign to the Bible.” (3) In the final analysis, to “prove” the Bible, fundamentalists must appeal to experience, the experience of the church concerning the Bible; if so, then fundamentalists have succumbed to the same trap as liberalism, their archenemy. Foolishness to the Greeks, p. 46; cf. GPS, pp. 42-43, 49; Proper Confidence, pp. 85-86.
64 Newbigin, GPS, p. 19.
65 Ibid., p. 82.
66 Newbigin, Proper Confidence, p. 50.
67 Newbigin, GPS, p. 28; see also pp. 4-5.
68 Newbigin, Proper Confidence, p. 24; Newbigin, Truth and Authority, p. 7.
69 Newbigin, Proper Confidence, p. 67.
70 Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), p. 300; see, e.g., Newbigin, GPS, pp. 51-52, 54-55.
71 Newbigin, Proper Confidence, p. 67.
72 Newbigin, GPS, p. 35.
73 Ibid., p. 23.
74 Ibid., p. 33.
75 Newbigin, Proper Confidence, pp. 48, 105; Newbigin, The Other Side of 1984, p. 20; Newbigin, GPS, p. 20.
76 Newbigin, GPS, p. 35.
77 Newbigin, A Word in Season, p. 187.
78 Newbigin also refers at times to the well-known philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn (The Structure of Scientific Revolutions [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970]), who spoke of dramatic turning points in the development of science when new paradigms emerge and transform not only the methods and results but also the whole way of thinking scientifically; cf. A Word in Season, pp. 91-92.
79 Newbigin, GPS, p. 87.
80 Newbigin, “Religious Pluralism and the Uniqueness of Jesus Christ,” p. 50; cf. p. 52; the reference is to Alasdair MacIntyre, Whose Justice, What Rationality? (London: Duckworth, 1988).
81 Newbigin, “Religious Pluralism and the Uniqueness of Jesus Christ,” p. 54.
82 Newbigin, Proper Confidence, p. 53.
83 Newbigin, GPS, pp. 87-88.
84 Lesslie Newbigin, “The Enduring Validity of Cross-Cultural Mission,” International Bulletin of Missionary Research 12 (1988): 50.
85 Newbigin, GPS, p. 64; Newbigin, Truth and Authority, p. 52.
86 Newbigin, GPS, p. 53.
87 E.g., Newbigin, GPS, pp. 24-25; Newbigin, A Word in Season, pp. 83-84.
88 Newbigin, A Word in Season, p. 85 (emphasis added). Shults has elucidated, among other things, the crypto-foundationalism of Lindbeck. Shults, Postfoundationalist Task of Theology, pp. 52-55.
89 Newbigin, “Religious Pluralism,” p. 236.
90 Chapter eight in GPS is titled “The Bible as Universal History.” This view of course resonates with Wolfhart Pannenberg’s view of revelation as history. For some reason, Newbigin does not engage this Lutheran theologian’s ideas, even though many of them, including the historicity of the resurrection and the importance of eschatology, are obvious common points.
91 Chapter nine in GPS is titled “Christ, the Clue to History.”
92 Newbigin, GPS, p. 5.
93 Lesslie Newbigin, The Open Secret: An Introduction to the Theology of Mission, rev. ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995 [orig. 1978]), pp. 50-52.
94 Newbigin, Truth and Authority, p. 52.
95 Newbigin, GPS, p. 63.
96 Newbigin, “Religious Pluralism and the Uniqueness of Jesus Christ,” p. 54.
97 Newbigin, A Word in Season, p. 158.
98 Ibid., p. 168.
99 Ibid., pp. 168-69.
100 Ibid., p. 170.
101 Newbigin, “Religious Pluralism,” p. 233.
102 “Logic of Mission” is the title of chapter ten in GPS.
103 Newbigin, “Religious Pluralism,” p. 233.
104 Ibid., p. 240.
105 Newbigin, A Word in Season, p. 170. Newbigin notes in another context how ironic it is that the introduction by the West of ideas, science, technology and such products of “development” were for the most part not considered as the “will to power” in the Third World. Rather, they were welcomed and embraced. Ibid., pp. 122-23.
106 Ibid., p. 168.
107 Newbigin at times calls the witnesses “seekers of the truth” and commends the apophatic tradition of Christian theology for its acknowledgment that “no human image or concept can grasp the reality of God.” GPS, p. 12.
108 Ibid., pp. 53-54.
109 Ibid., pp. 34-35.
110 Ibid., p. 12.
111 Newbigin, “Religious Pluralism,” p. 234.
112 Our own growing conviction is that, similarly to modernity, postmodernity has such built-in contradistinctions in its texture that it may not survive for a long time. Its contribution has been mainly deconstructive: it has helped the culture of the West to wake up from the modernist slumber. What becomes “post” this, we are not yet sure.
113 Keskitalo (Kristillinen usko, pp. 167-72) offers an insightful excursus on the topic; unfortunately, it is not accessible for English readers.
Chapter 5: Holistic Theological Method and Theological Epistemology: Performing Newbigin’s Plurality of Sources in the Pluralist Context
1 Some of the material in the first part of this chapter has been adapted from my book, Revitalizing Theological Epistemology: Holistic Evangelical Approaches to the Knowledge of God (Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2008).
2 This claim was reiterated by various Newbigin scholars and other presenters at a recent missiology conference focused on considering Newbigin’s The Gospel in a Pluralist Society (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1989) twenty-five years after its original publication (Missiology Lectures 2014, “Still Pluralist? Lesslie Newbigin in the 21st Century” [School of Intercultural Studies, Fuller Theological Seminary, Pasadena, California, November 13–15, 2014]).
3 Among others, Augustine, Karl Barth, Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Hendrik Kraemer appear regularly as highly regarded theological interlocutors throughout the Newbigin corpus.
4 Lesslie Newbigin, Proper Confidence: Faith, Doubt, and Certainty in Christian Discipleship (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995), pp. 66-67.
5 Polanyi began his career in the scientific arena but became a philosopher and epistemologist whose writings have influenced multiple disciplines. See his most well-known book, Personal Knowledge (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958). I am indebted to Geoffrey Wainwright for his numerous insights into Polanyi’s method and influence. Moreover, I will be making use of Wainwright’s text throughout this chapter, and it should be understood that when citing or quoting Newbigin from Wainwright, much of the material exists in unpublished works or in personal conversations between Wainwright and Newbigin. See his Lesslie Newbigin: A Theological Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
6 Newbigin’s years in India provide a rich backdrop and framework for what later would become his classic works in ecclesiology and apologetics.
7 For instance, Newbigin fully integrates the thinking of scientist-turned-philosopher Michael Polanyi, which will be discussed shortly.
8 One example of this involves Newbigin affirming the theological validity of certain charismatic movements. Even as early as 1952 in The Household of God (London: SCM Press, 1953), Newbigin shows remarkable openness to Pentecostalism, dedicating a chapter to Pentecostals. Additionally, his involvement with Holy Trinity Brompton in the 1990s helps place Newbigin in greater touch with charismatics.
9 For instance, concerning one’s normative spiritual journey and salvation, Newbigin attributes priority to the Christian community rather than to the individual (as will be seen later in this study).
10 Newbigin was even willing to grant the so-called Toronto Blessing as a work of God’s Spirit.
11 Newbigin, Proper Confidence, p. 97.
12 See Lesslie Newbigin, Truth and Authority in Modernity (Valley Forge, PA: Trinity Press International, 1996), pp. 3-4.
13 See ibid., pp. 18-19.
14 Wainwright, Lesslie Newbigin, p. 230.
15 Ibid., p. 34.
16 Newbigin, Truth and Authority, pp. 1-2.
17 Ibid., pp. 2-3.
18 From Lesslie Newbigin, The Reunion of the Church, 2nd rev. ed. (London: SCM Press, 1960), as quoted in Wainwright, Lesslie Newbigin, p. 89.
19 Ibid.
20 See Newbigin, Truth and Authority, pp. 38-39.
21 Ibid., pp. 80-81.
22 Ibid., p. 42.
23 Ibid., pp. 42-43.
24 It seems evident that most cultures of the world, regardless of the historical context, are story-oriented, and that the primarily Western Enlightenment approach to knowledge more likely represents an anomaly in time than a universal given.
25 See Polanyi, Personal Knowledge, pp. 266-67, 280-86.
26 From Newbigin, Proper Confidence, pp. 25, 49, 96, as quoted in Wainwright, Lesslie Newbigin, p. 49. Unfortunately, none of the pages Wainwright references contains the exact quotation.
27 Wainwright, Lesslie Newbigin, p. 257.
28 Ibid., p. 50.
29 For example, see Polanyi, Personal Knowledge, pp. 266-67.
30 Wainwright, Lesslie Newbigin, pp. 66-67. Unfortunately, the Newbigin source is not cited.
31 Newbigin, GPS, pp. 232-33.
32 Newbigin, Proper Confidence, p. 46. One important exception to the communitarian-apprenticeship model would be the evident faith commitment made by one of the two thieves on the cross; another would be the numerous testimonies of individuals claiming to have come to saving faith in God through Christ outside of any known Christian communities or influences. Presenting a more nuanced account of the church community/Christian tradition view would likely have alleviated concerns over seemingly unavailable means of grace outside of the normally normative apprenticeship way into theological knowledge.
33 Wainwright, Lesslie Newbigin, pp. 348-49. Internal Newbigin quotations are from Lesslie Newbigin, Honest Religion for Secular Man (London: SCM Press, 1966).
34 See Newbigin, Truth and Authority, pp. 12-13.
35 Newbigin, GPS, p. 53.
36 Newbigin, Truth and Authority, p. 49.
37 See Wainwright, Lesslie Newbigin, pp. 151, 153. The source of this claim concerning Newbigin’s view is not cited, but apparently is the Constitution of the Church of South India (CSI). See also Lesslie Newbigin, Unfinished Agenda (Edinburgh: Saint Andrews Press, 1993), pp. 85-87.
38 From Lesslie Newbigin, Truth to Tell: The Gospel as Public Truth (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1991), p. 28, as quoted in Wainwright, Lesslie Newbigin, pp. 74-75.
39 Lesslie Newbigin, The Open Secret: Sketches for a Missionary Theology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1978), p. 109; see also Jer 22:16 and 1 Jn 4:20.
40 From Newbigin, Open Secret, pp. 127-34, as quoted in Wainwright, Lesslie Newbigin, p. 188.
41 From Newbigin, Open Secret, pp. 123-34, as quoted in Wainwright, Lesslie Newbigin, pp. 187-89.
42 From Newbigin, Open Secret, pp. 102-3, as quoted in Wainwright, Lesslie Newbigin, p. 186.
43 This designation is widely attributed to Hendrik Kraemer.
44 See, for instance, two chapters, “No Other Name” and “The Gospel and Other Religions,” in Gospel in a Pluralist Society.
45 Newbigin considers this the normative approach since Jesus is the source by which all other religions, and the totality of experience, are understood (see Wainwright, Lesslie Newbigin, pp. 226-27).
46 See F. D. E. Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith (New York: T & T Clark, 1928).
47 Newbigin, GPS, p. 58.
48 Newbigin, Truth and Authority, p. 61.
49 Newbigin, GPS, p. 164.
50 Newbigin, Truth and Authority, p. 52.
51 Ibid.
52 Ibid., pp. 53-54.
53 Ibid., pp. 55-56.
54 Wainwright writes that “deconstruction” is viewed by Newbigin as an “ultimate absurdity” with its premise that “all claims to speak of truth may appear untenable” (Wainwright, Lesslie Newbigin, p. 73).
55 From Newbigin, Truth to Tell, p. 28, as quoted in Wainwright, Lesslie Newbigin, p. 73.
56 From a university lecture presented in Amsterdam, as quoted in Richard J. Mouw, Uncommon Decency: Christian Civility in an Uncivil World (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1992), p. 147.
57 As theologians Stanley Grenz and Wolfhart Pannenberg have argued in many of their published works, a rejection of ontological realism is not a necessary consequence of denying epistemological objectivity.
58 Newbigin, GPS, p. 119.
59 Ibid., p. 123.
60 See Roger E. Olson, The Mosaic of Christian Belief: Twenty Centuries of Unity and Diversity (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2002), pp. 32-39, 46-47.
61 Conferences, colloquia, and theology and culture projects offer vital opportunities for such communication environments.
62 This is the central thesis of John Courtney Murray, The Problem of God: Yesterday and Today (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1964).
63 See Newbigin, GPS, p. 227.
64 From R. T. France, “Evangelical Disagreements About the Bible,” Churchman 96 (1982): 238, as quoted in Mark A. Noll, Between Faith and Criticism: Evangelicals, Scholarship and the Bible in America (New York: HarperCollins, 1987), p. 170.
65 Stanley Grenz claims that “Christian theology is inherently eschatological, because it is the teaching about the promising God, who is bringing creation to an eternal telos”; see Grenz, Renewing the Center: Evangelical Theology in a Post-theological Era (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2000), pp. 216-17.
Chapter 6: Honoring True Otherness in a Still-Antipluralist Culture
1 Lesslie Newbigin, The Gospel in a Pluralist Society (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1989).
2 Scholars whose work is widely known, such as Alasdair MacIntyre, Charles Taylor and T. S. Kuhn, drew on Polanyi’s work—and that is not widely known. With respect to Kuhn, Polanyi himself registered a bit of conflict with regard to encouraging his work or criticizing it. Later, he was concerned that Kuhn had both plagiarized his work and misrepresented it. An entire recent issue of the Polanyi Society Journal, Tradition and Discovery 33, no. 2 (2006–2007), is devoted to this matter.
3 Newbiginian David Kettle does as well; David J. Kettle, Western Culture in Gospel Context: Towards the Conversion of the West; Theological Bearings for Mission and Spirituality (Euguene, OR: Cascade, 2011).
4 Lesslie Newbigin, Proper Confidence: Faith, Doubt and Certainty in Christian Discipleship (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995).
5 “Defective epistemic default”: Esther Lightcap Meek, Loving to Know: Introducing Covenant Epistemology (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2011), chap. 1; “knowledge-as-information mindset”: Esther Lightcap Meek, A Little Manual for Knowing (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2014).
6 Walter Brueggemann, The Prophetic Imagination, 2nd ed. (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 2001).
7 Walter Brueggemann, Truthtelling as Subversive Obedience (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2011), pp. 50-51.
8 Meek, Loving to Know.
9 Meek, Little Manual.
10 The specific sense of perichoresis that I employ here follows the rendering given it by Colin Gunton in The One, the Three, and the Many: God, Creation, and the Culture of Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
11 This fall I visited Austin, Texas. Widely offered for sale are T-shirts, mugs and so on enjoining people to “Keep Austin weird.” This exemplifies the pressure to be the same in being unique.
12 See D. C. Schindler, “Surprised by Truth: The Drama of Reason in Fundamental Theology,” in his book The Catholicity of Reason (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2013).
13 I devote chap. 12 of Loving to Know to Gunton’s thought.
14 Gunton, The One, the Three, and the Many, p. 15.
15 Ibid., p. 13.
16 Ibid., chap. 1.
17 Gunton, The One, the Three, and the Many, p. 44. Original reference: Stanley Jaki, God and the Cosmologists (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1989), p. 37.
18 “Abiding otherness” is D. C. Schindler’s phrase in Catholicity of Reason, p. 45. I regret that space does not permit me to weave Schindler’s work into this essay.
19 Alternatively, we may say that postmodernism fell short of dislodging modernism. Either way, we recognize the tension of the faulty one-many dynamic.
20 Kettle, Western Culture, continues this work, heightening its intensity.
21 Gunton, The One, the Three, and the Many, pp. 53-54.
22 David Schnarch, Passionate Marriage: Keeping Love and Intimacy Alive in Committed Relationships (New York: Henry Holt, 1997), chap. 2. Chapter 11 of Loving to Know is my engagement of Schnarch and differentiation.
23 Schindler’s proposals in Catholicity of Reason lead me to suggest this. Additionally and tellingly, this aptly describes the coherent focal pattern that merges subsidiaries in Polanyi’s epistemology.
24 Gunton, The One, the Three, and the Many, p. 230.
25 Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958; corrected ed., 1969).
26 Michael Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), p. xviii.
27 Newbigin, GPS, p. 19.
28 Ibid., p. 7.
29 Ibid., pp. 19, 33.
30 Ibid., p. 12.
31 Ibid., pp. 38, 46, 51.
32 Ibid., p. 47.
33 Ibid., p. 126.
34 Ibid., chap. 9.
35 Ibid., p. 5.
36 Ibid., p. 6.
37 Ibid., p. 12.
38 Ibid., pp. 23, 35.
39 Ibid., p. 35.
40 Ibid., p. 23.
41 Ibid., p. 192.
42 Ibid., p. 44.
43 Ibid., p. 61.
44 Ibid., p. 169.
45 Ibid., p. 172. My thesis in this essay offers no addition to Newbigin’s understanding.
46 Ibid., pp. 105-6, 132-33, 181-82.
47 Ibid., p. 180.
48 Recall that I earlier repeated Polanyi’s remark that this was his most original insight, and the one that moved him beyond the more subjective-sounding themes of his earlier Personal Knowledge. See also Marjorie Grene, “Tacit Knowing: Grounds for a Revolution in Philosophy,” Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 8 (1977): 164-71. Many readers miss this and misunderstand Polanyi.
49 I develop subsidiary-focal integration throughout Loving to Know, chap. 4, and in chap. 4 of Little Manual.
50 Meek, Loving to Know, part 3.
51 Marjorie Grene, ed., Knowing and Being: Essays by Michael Polanyi (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), p. 171. Polanyi also refers to this as a “gradient of deepening coherence”: Personal Knowledge, pp. 124-25; “The Creative Imagination,” Chemical and Engineering News 44 (1966): 88.
52 Polanyi, Personal Knowledge, p. viii.
53 Newbigin, Proper Confidence, p. 62.
54 Meek, Loving to Know, chap. 7 and chap. 2; see also Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (New York: HarperCollins, 1974), chap. 11; and Michael D. Williams, Far as the Curse Is Found: The Biblical Drama of Redemption (Phillipsburg, NJ: P & R, 2005).
55 Meek, Loving to Know, chap. 2.
56 Ibid., part 4.
57 I have borrowed this paraphrase from my colleague, Robert M. Frazier.
58 Ibid., chap. 15.
59 John Paul II, Man and Woman He Created Them: A Theology of the Body, trans. Michael Waldstein (Boston: Pauline, 2006).
60 The example that comes most readily to my mind is my relationship with my own garden. My garden presents me with itself. I respond to its need, and to my vision of it, by cultivating, watering, pruning, mowing, making new beds, mulching and so on. I make overtures every early spring. It responds throughout the summer. I have planted and replanted my deciduous azalea three times. Finally I have gotten it into a bed that receives ample sunshine. Finally it is responding with a full complement of buds. This is perichoresis, ongoing communion, to the end of shalom.
61 Parker Palmer quotes the German poet Rainier Marie Rilke: “There is no place at all that isn’t looking at you—you must change your life”; Palmer, To Know as We Are Known: Education as a Spiritual Journey (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1966), p. 16.
62 These are the motifs I employ in Little Manual to describe any knowing venture.
Chapter 7: Pluralism, Secularism and Pentecost: Newbigin-ings for Missio Trinitatis in a New Century
1 Note that the focus of George R. Hunsberger, Bearing the Witness of the Spirit: Lesslie Newbigin’s Theology of Cultural Plurality (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998), is on what is in the subtitle rather than the pneumatology suggested in the main title; to my knowledge, to date Newbigin scholarship has focused on his trinitarian theology, but not specifically on his pneumatology—hence this chapter also aspires to fill a gap in the existing literature.
2 I use Pentecostal in this chapter in a twofold sense: first as related to the Day of Pentecost account in Acts 2, always capitalized, although those occasions when this is used adjectivally in this Lukan sense will be uncapitalized; and second as related to the modern Pentecostal movement, my own ecclesial tradition, of which various cognates are always capitalized.
3 Lesslie Newbigin, Trinitarian Faith and Today’s Mission, study pamphlets, World Council of Churches Commission on World Mission and Evangelism 2 (Richmond, VA: John Knox Press, 1963), reprinted as Trinitarian Doctrine for Today’s Mission (Carlisle, UK: Paternoster, 1998); cf. also the section “Trinitarian Mission” in Lesslie Newbigin, Missionary Theologian: A Reader, ed. Paul Weston (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006), pp. 81-92.
4 Adam Dodds, “Newbigin’s Trinitarian Missiology: The Doctrine of the Trinity as Good News for Western Culture,” International Review of Mission 99, no. 1 (2010): 69-85.
5 Lesslie Newbigin, The Open Secret: An Introduction to the Theology of Mission, rev. ed. (1978; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995), p. 21.
6 Ibid., p. 29.
7 These are the fourth through sixth chapters of The Open Secret, which flesh out at least some of the details of Newbigin’s trinitarian missiology.
8 This applies even to Barth, as argued by Robert W. Jenson, “You Wonder Where the Spirit Went,” Pro Ecclesia 2, no. 3 (1993): 296-304.
9 Newbigin’s Christology is pervasive throughout his published work, so it is difficult to point specifically to what might be called his christocentric trinitarianism. Yet two windows into the centrality of Christ for Newbigin’s missiology are his article “Christ and the Cultures,” Scottish Journal of Theology 31, no. 1 (1978): 1-22, and chap. 9, “Christ, the Clue to History,” in his The Gospel in a Pluralist Society (1989; repr., Geneva: WCC Publications, 1997), pp. 103-15. See also John Reilly, “Evangelism and Ecumenism in the Writings of Lesslie Newbigin and Their Basis in His Christology” (PhD diss., Gregorian University, Rome, 1978), and Joe M. Thomas, Christ and the World of Religions: Lesslie Newbigin’s Theology (Carrollton, TX: Ekklesia Society Publications, 2011).
10 E.g., from 1960, Lesslie Newbigin, “Missions and the Work of the Holy Spirit,” which is included as chap. 3 of Newbigin’s A Word in Season: Perspectives on Christian World Missions (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994), pp. 21-32, to 1990, Newbigin, Come Holy Spirit: Renew the Whole Creation, Occasional Paper 6, Selly Oak Colleges (Birmingham, UK: Selly Oak Colleges, 1990).
11 Here I draw particularly from Newbigin, The Open Secret, chap. 6, “Bearing the Witness of the Spirit: Mission as Hope in Action.”
12 Newbigin first learned this important theological, missiological and, indeed, pneumatological truth from his years of service in India; see Newbigin, “Missions and the Work of the Holy Spirit,” esp. p. 32, and The Holy Spirit and the Church (Madras: Christian Literature Society, 1972), chap. 1.
13 Newbigin’s example here is the encounter between Peter and Cornelius (see Open Secret, p. 59); I return to this point about vulnerability later.
14 Newbigin, Open Secret, p. 179; also, The Holy Spirit and the Church, chap. 3.
15 See chap. 4 of Lesslie Newbigin, The Household of God: Lectures on the Nature of the Church (1953; repr., New York: Friendship Press, 1954), quotations from p. 94.
16 Newbigin, Open Secret, p. 58; cf. Hunsberger, Bearing the Witness of the Spirit, pp. 251-55.
17 Newbigin, GPS, p. 185.
18 Even in 1984, it was still lamented that the Spirit was the “shy” or “hidden” member of the Trinity; see Frederick Dale Bruner and William Hordern, Holy Spirit: Shy Member of the Trinity (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1984).
19 For more on the development of pneumatology over the last generation, see Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen, Pneumatology: The Holy Spirit in Ecumenical, International, and Contextual Perspective (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2002).
20 See Walter J. Hollenweger, “Toward a Pentecostal Missiology,” in Many Voices in Christian Mission: Essays in Honour of J. E. Lesslie Newbigin, ed. T. Dayanandan Francis and Israel Selvanayagam (Madras: Christian Literature Society, 1994), pp. 59-79.
21 For explication, see Hollenweger’s Pentecostalism: Origins and Developments Worldwide (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1997), pp. 132-41.
22 For an overview of the development of Pentecostal theology, see my article “Pentecostalism and the Theological Academy,” Theology Today 64, no. 2 (2007): 244-50; cf. also my essay “Pentecostal and Charismatic Theology,” in The Routledge Companion to Modern Christian Thought, ed. Chad Meister and James Beilby (New York: Routledge, 2013), pp. 636-46.
23 The first five chapters of GPS were basically epistemological; other places where epistemology features substantially in Newbigin’s writings include Foolishness to the Greeks: The Gospel and Western Culture (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1986), chap 4; Truth to Tell: The Gospel as Public Truth (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1991), chap. 1; and Truth and Authority in Modernity (Valley Forge, PA: Trinity Press International, 1996), esp. chaps. 1-2.
24 Polanyi’s notion of personal knowing ought to be distinguished from the personalism of earlier French and North American philosophers like Emmanuel Mounier and Borden Parker Bowne, but his can also be understood as a species of personalist thinking honed especially in dialogue with the epistemology of science; see, e.g., Joan Crewdson, Christian Doctrine in the Light of Michael Polanyi’s Theory of Personal Knowledge: A Personalist Theology (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1994).
25 See Harry Prosch, Michael Polanyi: A Critical Exposition (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986), chap. 5; cf. John C. Puddefoot, “Indwelling: Formal and Non-formal Elements in Faith and Life,” in Belief in Science and Christian Life: The Relevance of Michael Polanyi’s Thought for Christian Faith and Life, ed. Thomas F. Torrance (Edinburgh: Hansel Press, 1980), pp. 28-48.
26 See Paul Weston, “Michael Polanyi and the Writings of Lesslie Newbigin,” in Critical Conversations: Michael Polanyi and Christian Theology, ed. Murray Rae (Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2012), pp. 157-79.
27 Thus Newbigin’s GPS begins with analysis and applications of Polanyi’s epistemology in the first few chapters and then turns to the arena of history in chaps. 6-9. For excellent expositions of this logic of Newbigin’s epistemology, see Hunsberger, Bearing the Witness of the Spirit, esp. chap. 4, and Hunsberger, “Faith and Pluralism: A Response to Richard Gelwick,” Tradition & Discovery (The Polanyi Society Journal) 27, no. 3 (2000–2001): 19-29.
28 Newbigin, GPS, chap. 18.
29 The Spirit’s role is prominent in six of the seven summary statements on how we come to know revelation in history; see Newbigin, GPS, p. 78.
30 Beginning with James K. A. Smith, Thinking in Tongues: Pentecostal Contributions to Christian Philosophy (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010).
31 For Newbigin’s account of divine authority coming through these four elements of Scripture, tradition, reason and experience (the so-called Wesleyan quadrilateral, although he did not use this nomenclature), see Truth and Authority, chap. 2; for a Pentecostal and pneumatological version of such, see my Spirit-Word-Community: Theological Hermeneutics in Trinitarian Perspective, New Critical Thinking in Religion, Theology and Biblical Studies Series (2002; repr., Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2006).
32 For an introduction to these aspects of pentecostal and pneumatological thinking, see my The Spirit Poured Out on All Flesh: Pentecostalism and the Possibility of Global Theology (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2005), esp. chap. 4.
33 Newbigin, GPS, p. 137; this pneumatological aspect of the “foretaste of the kingdom” is repeated numerous times in the preceding pages and chapters of this volume, following the Pauline reference to the Spirit as the down payment or pledge of the coming divine reign (cf. Eph 1:13-14).
34 Jürgen Schuster, Christian Mission in Eschatological Perspective: Lesslie Newbigin’s Contribution, Edition AFEM, Mission Academics 29 (Nürnberg, Germany: VTR Publications; Bonn: VKW, 2009), pp. 159-61, discusses the Spirit as an aspect of Newbigin’s eschatological missiology rather than provides what I am suggesting here: a pneumatological and eschatological missiology.
35 Thomas F. Foust, “Lesslie Newbigin’s Epistemology: A Dual Discourse?,” in A Scandalous Prophet: The Way of Mission After Newbigin, ed. Thomas F. Foust, George R. Hunsberger, J. Andrew Kirk and Werner Ustorf (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002), pp. 153-62, esp. p. 162.
36 For an overview of the pneumatological imagination as I have developed it, see the concluding chapter to my book The Dialogical Spirit: Christian Reason and Theological Method for the Third Millennium (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2014).
37 For more on such a pneumatological and teleological imagination, see my The Spirit of Creation: Modern Science and Divine Action in the Pentecostal-Charismatic Imagination, Pentecostal Manifestos 4 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2011); the whole of my systematic theological project is thoroughly pneumatological, trinitarian and eschatological at its core—see Amos Yong, Renewing Christian Theology: Systematics for a Global Christianity, images and commentary by Jonathan A. Anderson (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2014).
38 Here I follow physicist-theologian John Polkinghorne; see “From Quantum Mechanics to the Eucharistic Meal: John Polkinghorne’s ‘Bottom-up’ Vision of Science and Theology,” in Yong, The Dialogical Spirit, chap. 7.
39 Newbigin, Open Secret, p. 171.
40 Ibid., p. 175.
41 Ibid., pp. 182-83.
42 Ibid., pp. 184-86.
43 See Newbigin’s “Trinity as Public Truth,” in The Trinity in a Pluralistic Age: Theological Essays on Culture and Religion, ed. Kevin J. Vanhoozer (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997), pp. 1-8.
44 For instance, Dale W. Little, “The Significance of Theology of the Holy Spirit for Theology of Religion and for Theology of Mission in the Writings of Lesslie Newbigin and Clark Pinnock” (PhD diss., Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, 2000), p. 261, suggests that “the Spirit’s work is linked to the Son in Newbigin’s theology of mission but is freed from the Son in his theology of religion.” My response hopefully clarifies that a solution lies in understanding the pneumatological connections between epistemology and ontology, something that Newbigin did not probe.
45 I sketch the rudiments for a pneumatological ontology in my Spirit-Word-Community, part 1.
46 See A. D. White’s classic, A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom, 2 vols. (New York: Dover Publications, 1896–1900).
47 Newbigin, Foolishness to the Greeks, chap. 4.
48 Newbigin, GPS, p. 20.
49 Ibid., pp. 33 and 214.
50 This is how Newbigin is read by Tim Stafford, “God’s Missionary to Us,” Christianity Today, December 9, 1996, pp. 24-33, quote from p. 26.
51 E.g., Richard F. Hassing, “Modern Natural Science and the Intelligibility of Human Experience,” in Final Causality in Nature and Human Affairs, ed. Richard F. Hassing (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1997), pp. 211-56.
52 Newbigin, Truth and Authority, p. 42; italics in original.
53 See here Lamin O. Sanneh’s classic, Translating the Message: The Missionary Impact on Culture, 2nd ed. (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2009); for my pentecostal and pneumatological appropriation, see Yong, Spirit of Love: A Trinitarian Theology of Grace (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2012).
54 See, e.g., Frederick Grinnell, Everyday Practice of Science: Where Intuition and Passion Meet Objectivity and Logic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), esp. part 1.
55 Whether or not Donald Le Roy Stults, Grasping Truth and Reality: Lesslie Newbigin’s Theology of Mission to the Western World (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2008), is correct to say that Newbigin’s was an overly generalized negative portrait of the Enlightenment, he is on the right track to diagnose that a more one-sided appropriation of Polanyian epistemology inhibits appreciation of science as a dialogue partner for the sake of the gospel (pp. 261-63); in that regard, this chapter suggests a pneumatological way forward for such a trinitarian and redemptive missiology vis-à-vis the modern scientific endeavor.
56 For more on such a pentecostal theology of multi-, inter- and trans-disciplinarity, see my Spirit of Creation, chap. 2; cf. also Yong, “The Spirit and Creation: Possibilities and Challenges for a Dialogue Between Pentecostal Theology and the Sciences,” in Journal of the European Pentecostal Theological Association 25 (2005): 82-110, esp. part II.
57 This strategic approach is unfolded in Newbigin’s Truth and Authority, chap. 3.
58 While there is a clear distinction between science as an empirical process of discovery and technology as the entire human world of artifacts, systems and constructions, for the purposes of this chapter, I am interested primarily in scientifically informed technological developments. Even here, the literature is too vast and the issues too complex to treat adequately. For a helpful introductory discussion to these matters, see Dennis W. Cheek, “Is There Room for the Spirit in a World Dominated by Technology? Pentecostals and the Technological World,” in Science and the Spirit: A Pentecostal Engagement with the Sciences, ed. James K. A. Smith and Amos Yong (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), pp. 192-208.
59 Thus even a generation ago, the prescient Jacques Ellul wrote: “Enclosed within his artificial creation, man finds that there is ‘no exit’; that he cannot pierce the shell of technology to find again the ancient milieu to which he was adapted for hundreds of thousands of years.” See Ellul, The Technological Society, trans. John Wilkinson (New York: Vintage Books, 1964), p. 428; cf. Ellul’s The Technological Bluff, trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1990).
60 Thus do the essayists in Michael Breen, Eamonn Conway and Barry McMillan, eds., Technology and Transcendence (Dublin: Columbia Press, 2003), strive for transcendent perspective over the ubiquitousness of technology and its grip on human life.
61 Hence my proposals are meant to complement those of Newbigin’s and his eminent missiological colleague David J. Bosch, Believing the Future: Toward a Missiology of Western Culture (Valley Forge, PA: Trinity Press International, 1995).
62 On technology’s invisibility in Christian perspective, see Albert Borgmann, Power Failure: Christianity in the Culture of Technology (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2003), chap. 1; in this text, Borgmann refracts his expertise in philosophy of technology, about which he has published extensively, through a Christian lens.
63 Borgmann, Power Failure, p. 44.
64 Philip Hefner, Technology and Human Becoming (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2003).
65 David J. Hawkin, ed., The Twenty-First Century Confronts Its Gods: Globalization, Technology, and War (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004), although the essayists in this volume tend to treat technology and war as disparate idols rather than explore their interrelated character.
66 Here along the lines of the redemption of technology proposed by Brad J. Kallenberg, God and Gadgets: Following Jesus in a Technological Age (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2011), chap. 5.
67 Brent Waters, From Human to Posthuman: Christian Theology and Technology in a Postmodern World (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006), pp. 144-50, quotation at p. 146.
68 Cogently argued by Nicholas J. Wood, Faiths and Faithfulness: Pluralism, Dialogue and Mission in the Work of Kenneth Cragg and Lesslie Newbigin (Waynesboro, GA: Paternoster, 2009).
69 Newbigin, GPS, chap. 18; see also John Flett’s chapter in this volume, and compare Darren Cronshaw and Steve Taylor, “The Congregation in a Pluralist Society: Rereading Newbigin for Missional Churches Today,” Pacifica: Australasian Theological Studies 27, no. 2 (2014): 206-28.
70 See Newbigin, Foolishness to the Greeks, p. 64; the entire third chapter of this book explicates on the interconnections between beliefs and practices.
71 Newbigin, GPS, p. 231.
72 This is also the call of Shane Hipps, Flickering Pixels: How Technology Shapes Your Faith (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2009).
73 I elaborate on the “many tongues equal many practices” argument both for engaging religious pluralism and for a pluralistic public square, respectively, in my books Hospitality and the Other: Pentecost, Christian Practices, and the Neighbor, Faith Meets Faith series (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2008), esp. chap. 2, and In the Days of Caesar: Pentecostalism and Political Theology—The Cadbury Lectures 2009, Sacra Doctrina: Christian Theology for a Postmodern Age series (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010), esp. chap. 3.
74 As summarized by Daniel Hardy, “A Response to the Consultation,” in A Prophet: The Way of Mission After Newbigin, ed. Thomas F. Foust, George R. Hunsberger, J. Andrew Kirk and Werner Ustorf (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002), pp. 227-33, quote at p. 230.
75 Murray Jardine, The Making and Unmaking of Technological Society: How Christianity Can Save Modernity from Itself (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2004), esp. pp. 247-51, suggests how Christian liturgical, charismatic and communal practices have the potency of reforming social space, interactivity and life and thereby redeem human technological creativity from its otherwise unanticipated destructive effects.
76 I am grateful to Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen for his reading of a penultimate draft of this chapter. Also a novice on the interface between Christian theology and modern technology, I am thankful to Dennis Cheek for his feedback on my essay. Last but not least, I appreciate the proofreading of my graduate assistant, Ryan Seow. Of course, any errors of fact or interpretation remain my responsibility.
Chapter 8: Evangelism in a Pluralistic Society: The Newbigin Vision
1 Lesslie Newbigin, The Gospel in a Pluralist Society (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1989).
2 See Darrel Guder et al., Missional Church: A Vision for the Sending of the Church in North America (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998). A basic introduction to this conversation from a Newbigin perspective is Alan Roxburgh and M. Scott Boren, Introducing the Missional Church (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2009).
3 Christopher Wright, The Mission of God’s People (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2010), pp. 192-93.
4 David Bosch, “Evangelism: Theological Currents and Cross-Currents Today,” in The Study of Evangelism: Exploring a Missional Practice of the Church, ed. Paul W. Chilcote and Laceye C. Warner (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008), p. 17. See also, within this same volume, Orlando E. Costa’s definition, which focuses on the call to invite one to make a commitment to follow Jesus Christ, pp. 33-42; Ron Sider focuses on evangelism as an announcement through both words and actions and the invitation to be part of the reconciling community of Christ followers, p. 200; George R. Hunsberger focuses on evangelism as being companions to others on the spiritual journey, pp. 67-68; and last but not least, Walter Brueggemann: “Evangelism is an invitation and summon to reinstate our talk and our walk according to the reality of this God, a reality not easily self-evident in our society. The call of the gospel includes the negative assertion that the technological-therapeutic-militaristic consumer world is false, not to be trusted or obeyed, and the positive claim that an alternative way in the world is legitimated by and appropriate to the new governance of the God who is back in town” (p. 233). Beyond this, I also draw attention to Michael Green who in his Evangelism Through the Local Church (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1993), p. 9, cites his favorite definition of evangelism from Archbishop William Temple as follows: “To evangelize is so to present Jesus Christ in the power of the Holy Spirit, that men shall come to put their trust in God through him, to accept him as their Saviour, and serve him as their King in the fellowship of his church.”
5 Scott W. Sunquist, Understanding Christian Mission: Participating in Suffering and Glory (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2013), p. 312.
6 Lesslie Newbigin, Signs Amid the Rubble: The Purposes of God in Human History (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003), p. 117.
7 Newbigin, GPS, p. 4.
8 As of 2013, the Dallas area has five of the top fifty largest churches in America. “2013 100 Largest Churches in America,” Outreach Magazine, accessed November 22, 2014, www.outreachmagazine.com/2013-outreach-100-largest-churches-america.html.
9 Michael Lipka, “What Surveys Say About Worship Attendance—and Why Some Stay Home,” Pew Research Center website, September 13, 2013, www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2013/09/13/what-surveys-say-about-worship-attendance-and-why-some-stay-home.
10 Newbigin, GPS, p. 5.
11 Ibid., p. 1.
12 About Newbigin’s home country, he writes in his book The Other Side of 1984 (Geneva, Switzerland: World Council of Churches, 1983), p. 23, “It would be hard to deny that contemporary British (and most Western) Christianity is in an advanced case of syncretism. The Church has lived so long as a permitted and even privileged minority, accepting relegation to the private sphere in a culture whose public life is controlled by a totally different vision of reality, that it has almost lost the power to address a radical challenge to that vision and therefore to ‘modern Western civilization’ as a whole.”
13 See Diana Eck’s Pluralism Project at Harvard University: www.pluralism.org.
14 “The Vision” Movement Day Greater Dallas, movementdaygreaterdallas.com/the_vision.php.
15 Newbigin, GPS, p. 1.
16 Ibid., p. 8.
17 Ibid., p. 4.
18 Ibid., p. 7.
19 Ibid., p. 12.
20 Ibid., p. 25.
21 Ibid., p. 3.
22 Ibid., p. 52.
23 Ibid., p. 3.
24 Ibid., p. 24.
25 Ibid., p. 25.
26 See Lesslie Newbigin, Truth to Tell: The Gospel as Public Truth (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1991), pp. 76-77. Also note that Alexis de Tocqueville made similar observations in the 1830s; see his Democracy in America, trans. and ed. Harvey C. Mansfield and Delba Winthrop (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000).
27 See Blaise Pascal, Pensées (London: Penguin, 1995), 10.148.
28 N. T. Wright makes an overt argument along these lines; see his Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church (New York: HarperCollins, 2008), p. 217.
29 With regard to the debate between fundamentalist versus liberal strategies, Newbigin writes, “I believe that this is an unnecessary quarrel arising from the fact that both sides have been seduced by the unquestioned assumptions of our culture. We shall prove our faithfulness to the gospel by being both fundamentalist and liberal; fundamentalist in the sense that we acknowledge no other foundation upon which to build either our thinking or our action, either our private or our public life, than the Lord as he is known to us through the Scriptures; and liberal in the sense that we are ready to live in a plural society, open to new experience, ready to listen to new ideas, always pressing forward toward fuller understanding in the confidence that Jesus is indeed the true and living way, and that when we follow him we are not lost” (Truth to Tell, pp. 87-88).
30 Newbigin, GPS, p. 12.
31 Ibid., p. 97.
32 Ibid., p. 92.
33 Ibid., p. 12.
34 Ibid., pp. 35, 38.
35 Ibid., p. 239.
36 Ibid.
37 Ibid., p. 121.
38 Ibid., p. 38.
39 Newbigin on the church as the messenger: “The Church lives in the midst of history as a sign, instrument, and foretaste of the reign of God” (The Open Secret: An Introduction to the Theology of Mission, rev. ed. [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995], p. 110).
40 Newbigin, GPS, p. 119.
41 Ibid.
42 Christopher Wright, “Calling the Church Back to Humility, Integrity, and Simplicity,” http://conversation.lausanne.org/en/resources/detail/11484#.VSK41ZTF_-U.
43 Newbigin, GPS, p. 85.
44 Ibid., p. 10.
45 Ibid., p. 120.
46 Ibid., p. 86.
47 “Reflections of the Lausanne Theology Working Group,” Lausanne Movement 2014, www.lausanne.org/content/twg-three-wholes.
48 Newbigin, GPS, p. 229.
49 Ibid.
50 Ibid., p. 123.
51 Ibid., p. 141.
52 Ibid., p. 154.
53 Ibid., p. 235.
54 Ibid.
55 Michael Green, Evangelism Through the Local Church (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1993), p. 397.
56 Newbigin, GPS, p. 137.
57 Ibid.
58 Ibid., p. 131.
59 Ibid., p. 119.
60 Ibid., p. 234.
61 Ibid., p. 230.
62 Green, Evangelism Through the Local Church, p. 8.
63 Newbigin, GPS, p. 116.
64 Pope Benedict XVI, Papal Address to Rome Diocesan Congress, June 23, 2006. See also John Paul II, Redemptoris Missio [Encyclical Letter on the Permanent Validity of the Church’s Missionary Mandate], December 7, 1990, http://w2.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_jp-ii_enc_07121990_redemptoris-missio.html.
65 Tim Keller, “What Is God’s Global Urban Mission?,” Cape Town 2010 Advance Paper, May 18, 2010, http://conversation.lausanne.org/en/resources/detail/10282.
66 See GraceNet, Inc., www.gracenet.info.
67 Rebecca Manley Pippert, Saltshaker Resources Set (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2003). Titles include How to Lead a Seeker Bible Discussion, Looking at the Life of Jesus, People Who Met Jesus, Spirituality According to Jesus, Talking About Jesus Without Sounding Religious and The Way of Jesus. To equip for evangelism we use Canon J.John’s Natural Evangelism Course; see J.John, Natural Evangelism (Chorleywood, UK: PhiloTrust, 2014).
68 Newbigin, GPS, p. 244.
69 Augustine, Confessions, trans. F. J. Sheed, ed. Michael P. Foley, 2nd ed. (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2006), book 1, chap. 1.
Chapter 9: What Does It Mean for a Congregation to Be a Hermeneutic?
1 Lesslie Newbigin, The Household of God: Lectures on the Nature of the Church (London: SCM Press, 1953), p. 14.
2 Lesslie Newbigin, The Gospel in a Pluralist Society (Geneva: World Council of Churches, 1989), p. 227.
3 Ibid., p. 222.
4 Ibid.
5 Ibid., p. 224.
6 Ibid.
7 Ibid., p. 226.
8 Ibid.
9 Ibid., p. 227.
10 Ibid.
11 Newbigin, Household of God, p. 14. Rae supplied the emphases; see Murray Rae, “The Congregation as Hermeneutic of the Gospel,” in Theology in Missionary Perspective: Lesslie Newbigin’s Legacy, ed. Mark T. B. Laing and Paul Weston (Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2012), p. 190.
12 Newbigin, Household of God, p. 14.
13 Rae, “Congregation as Hermeneutic of the Gospel,” p. 192.
14 Ibid., p. 193. Rae takes this position from Lesslie Newbigin, Truth to Tell: The Gospel as Public Truth (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1991), p. 85.
15 Rae, “Congregation as Hermeneutic of the Gospel,” p. 191.
16 Ibid.
17 Ibid., pp. 193-94.
18 Ibid., p. 194.
19 Ibid., p. 196.
20 Ibid.
21 Ibid., p. 193.
22 Ibid., p. 200.
23 Ibid.
24 Lesslie Newbigin, “The Pastor’s Opportunities: VI. Evangelism in the City,” Expository Times 98 (1987): 357.
25 Newbigin, Household of God, p. 169.
26 Newbigin, GPS, p. 87.
27 Ibid., p. 120.
28 Ibid., p. 119.
29 Ibid., p. 235.
30 Lesslie Newbigin, “Cross-Currents in Ecumenical and Evangelical Understandings of Mission,” International Bulletin of Missionary Research 6, no. 4 (1982): 150.
31 Newbigin, GPS, p. 117.
32 Newbigin, Household of God, p. 146.
33 Rae, “Congregation as Hermeneutic of the Gospel,” p. 191.
34 Newbigin, GPS, pp. 224-25.
35 Karl Barth, The Doctrine of Reconciliation (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1956), p. 652.
36 Ibid., pp. 653-54.
37 Ibid., p. 653.
38 Ibid., p. 656.
39 Ibid., p. 658.
40 Newbigin, GPS, p. 107.
41 Ibid., p. 108.
42 Ibid., p. 107.
43 Ibid., p. 122.
44 Ibid., pp. 107-8.
45 Ibid., p. 108.
46 Newbigin’s reaction to Albert Schweitzer’s 1906 work, The Quest for the Historical Jesus, is informative on this point. Schweitzer’s argument, which Newbigin describes as “constantly repeated and hardly questioned,” holds that Jesus and the early church believed that the end of history was immanent and the New Testament is to be read from this perspective. “But in fact the end of the world did not happen. Jesus was mistaken. The Church had to adjust its thinking to this reality and so learn to settle down” (GPS, p. 104). Newbigin grants that the church became an institution, part of the “established order,” but rejects reading the New Testament as though Jesus expected history’s immediate end. The point is salient. To conceive the church as some form of eschatological detour is to set it apart from the beyondness of the resurrection and its missionary impetus.
47 Newbigin, GPS, p. 108.
48 Ibid., p. 125.
49 Ibid.
50 Ibid., p. 108.
51 Ibid., p. 116.
52 Ibid., p. 126.
53 Ibid., p. 125.
54 Ibid., pp. 116, 117.
55 Ibid., p. 116.
56 Ibid.
57 Ibid., p. 127.
58 Ibid., p. 118.
59 Ibid.
60 Ibid., p. 120.
61 Ibid., p. 118.
62 Ibid., p. 239.
63 Ibid.
64 Ibid., p. 120.
65 Ibid., p. 123.
66 Ibid., p. 124.
67 Lesslie Newbigin, The Open Secret: An Introduction to the Theology of Mission (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995), p. 182.
68 Ibid., p. 140.
69 Newbigin, GPS, p. 124.
70 Ibid., p. 80.
71 Ibid., p. 82.
72 Ibid., p. 84.
73 Ibid., p. 87.
74 Ibid., p. 228.
75 Ibid.
76 Ibid.
77 Ibid., p. 229.
78 Ibid., p. 230.
79 Ibid.
80 Ibid., p. 231.
81 Ibid.
82 Ibid., p. 232.
83 Ibid., p. 233.
Chapter 10: Asian Perspectives on Twenty-First-Century Pluralism
1 Todd Johnson, Atlas of Global Christianity (Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 2010). To qualify as a world religion, at least 5 percent of the world’s population must be adherents to it.
2 Mormonism is perhaps the closest to qualify, but it has less than 5 percent of the world’s population.
3 Philip Jenkins, The Lost History of Christianity: The Thousand-Year Golden Age of the Church in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia—and How It Died (New York: HarperCollins, 2008).
4 A term coined by Luis Bush in 1990 referring to latitude markers: the region between ten degrees and forty degrees north (namely northern Africa, the Middle East, India, Southeast Asia and China) is the least-evangelized and most gospel-resistant area of the world.
5 Paul Hattaway, Brother Yun, Peter XuYongze and Enoch Wang, Back to Jerusalem: Three Chinese House Church Leaders Share Their Vision to Complete the Great Commission (Milton Keynes, UK: Authentic Publishing, 2003).
6 However, it must be noted that Islam and Buddhism are also missionary. In fact, those two (along with Christianity) are the only three major world religions that qualify as missionary, as their founders all commissioned their followers to spread the faith. See Terry Muck, Harold Netland and Gerald McDermott, eds., Handbook of Religion: A Christian Engagement with Traditions, Teachings, and Practices (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2014), p. 46.
7 Lamin Sanneh, Translating the Message: The Missionary Impact on Culture (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1989), p. 50.
8 Some have suggested that syncretism is not as negative as it may appear at first, such as Indian theologian M. M. Thomas, who calls for a “Christ-centered syncretism.” Lesslie Newbigin did not go so far as to call it that, but admitted that Christianity must inevitably encounter culture that colors people’s personal expression of their faith. See M. M. Thomas, “The Absoluteness of Jesus Christ and Christ-Centered Syncretism,” The Ecumenical Review 37 (1985): 387-97.
9 David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature: Being an Attempt to Introduce the Experimental Method of Reasoning into Moral Subjects (1739). Another way to discuss this is using the terms positive vs. normative, or descriptive vs. prescriptive.
10 Lesslie Newbigin, The Gospel in a Pluralist Society (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1989), p. 14.
11 Ibid., pp. 166-70.
12 Max Warren, ed., To Apply the Gospel (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1971).
13 Paul G. Hiebert, Anthropological Reflections on Missiological Issues (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1994), p. 97.
14 Tokunboh Adeyemo, ed., Africa Bible Commentary: A One-Volume Commentary Written by 70 African Scholars (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2006). This was published simultaneously in Africa by Word Alive, an African publisher. A Latin American version will be released shortly, called the CBC: Comentario Bíblico Contemporaneo (San José, Costa Rica: Letra Viva).
15 Aloysius Pieris, An Asian Theology of Liberation (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1988), p. 74.
16 Tim Stafford, “Evangelism Plus,” Christianity Today, October 2006, p. 96.
17 A population of 4.43 billion out of 7.13 billion.
18 See www.worldatlas.com/citypops.htm.
19 Brazil, Russia, India, China, a term coined in 2001 by economist Jim O’Neill in a paper titled “Building Better Global Economic BRICs,” Global Economics Paper No. 66, November 30, 2001, www.goldmansachs.com/our-thinking/archive/archive-pdfs/build-better-brics.pdf.
20 David Aikman, Jesus in Beijing: How Christianity Is Transforming China and Changing the Global Balance of Power (Washington, DC: Regnery, 2003), pp. 12-13.
21 Allen Yeh, “The Chinese Diaspora,” in Global Diasporas and Mission, ed. Chandler H. Im and Amos Yong (Oxford: Regnum, 2014), pp. 89-98.
22 Vinoth Ramachandra’s reflection, untitled, in the final plenary, in Edinburgh 2010: Mission Today and Tomorrow, ed. Kirsteen Kim and Andrew Anderson (Oxford: Regnum, 2011), p. 335.
23 Paul Hiebert, “The Flaw of the Excluded Middle,” Missiology: An International Review 10, no. 1 (January 1982): 35-47
24 Duane Elmer, Cross-Cultural Connections: Stepping Out and Fitting In Around the World (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2002), pp. 171-81.
25 N. T. Wright, What Saint Paul Really Said: Was Paul of Tarsus the Real Founder of Christianity? (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997), p. 13.
26 Don Richardson, Eternity in Their Hearts (Ventura, CA: Regal, 1981).
27 Newbigin, GPS, pp. 182-83.
28 G. Wright Doyle, Builders of the Chinese Church: Pioneer Protestant Missionaries and Chinese Church Leaders (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2014), p. 78.
29 James Legge, The Notions of the Chinese Concerning God and Spirits: With an Examination of the Defense of an Essay on the Proper Rendering of the Words Elohim and Theos into the Chinese Language by William J. Boone (Hongkong: Hongkong Register Office, 1852).
30 Ricci (1552–1610) was himself embroiled in a similar controversy about contextualization, namely the Chinese Rites Controversy, as Newbigin alludes to in GPS, p. 142.
31 Pieris, Asian Theology of Liberation, p. 71.
32 Newbigin, GPS, pp. 9-10.
33 Andrew F. Walls, The Missionary Movement in Christian History: Studies of the Transmission of the Faith (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1996), p. 44.
34 Ibid., p. 46.
35 Ibid., p. 12.
36 Newbigin, GPS, p. 7.
37 Ibid., p. 12.
38 Walls, Missionary Movement in Christian History, pp. 7-9.
39 Newbigin, GPS, p. 23.
40 Ibid., p. 145.
41 Ibid., pp. 24-25.
42 Ibid., pp. 121-22. The distinction between “mission” and “missions” is also well documented by David Bosch, Transforming Mission: Paradigm Shifts in Theology of Mission (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1991), p. 391.
43 The three great superpowers of the twenty-first century as predicted by Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Touchstone, 1996).
44 Newbigin, GPS, pp. 211-21.
45 Kosuke Koyama, Water Buffalo Theology (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1999).
46 Ahn Byung-Mu, Speaking on Minjung Theology (Seoul: Han Gil Sa, 1993).
47 Newbigin, GPS, pp. 148-52.
48 John Travis (a pseudonym), “The C1 to C6 Spectrum: A Practical Tool for Defining Six Types of ‘Christ-Centered Communities’ (‘C’) Found in the Muslim Context,” Evangelical Missions Quarterly 34, no. 4 (October 1998): 407-8.
49 Martin Palmer, The Jesus Sutras: Rediscovering the Lost Scrolls of Taoist Christianity (New York: Ballantine, 2001).
50 Though it is true that the original seven ecumenical councils were all held in Asia, they were in actuality Greek/Western in their culture and framework.