Toward an Inconclusive Conclusion
3
Newbigin’s Theology of Mission and Culture After Twenty-Five Years
Attending to the “Subject” of Mission
William R. Burrows
In 1985, during the heyday of liberation theology, Sharon Welch made an observation, the wisdom of which I have been impressed with ever since. I sometimes turn it into a question, and the chapter that follows is an extended exercise in pondering the legacy of Lesslie Newbigin in the light of that question. Welch’s observation seems unremarkably straightforward until you begin to ask it of every call to carry on the mission of the church as a bearer of the Spirit’s witness. First her observation:
The type of humanity envisioned by liberation theologians does not come about naturally; it has to be achieved. This type of human community is not a given; it must be fought for. . . . Liberation theology is part of a struggle for the establishment of a particular kind of subjectivity, not a declaration of the a priori existence of that subjectivity.1
Exchange the words “liberation theologians” and “theology” in that quotation with the words “missiologists” and “missiology,” and one immediately runs into the importance of a certain kind of community, academic and spiritual disciplines, and missionary agent if mission is to achieve the new creation imaged in Scripture and missiological reflection.
The question I have often asked is this: To what extent are we taking seriously the necessity of the personal transformation of the subjects—that is, the human agents—of mission? Or, put another way: In mission studies, are we paying adequate attention to developing the kind of human beings who can embody the kind of mission envisaged in our reflections and who live the gospel in the pluralist society Lesslie Newbigin speaks of?
To go deeper, I find my orientation toward mission in a famous text of Irenaeus, “For the glory of God is a living human being, and the life of a human being consists in beholding God” (from Against the Heretics IV, 20, 7). The first part of that text is often translated freely as “the glory of God is a human being fully alive,” but the way it is translated, “glory” is commonly not attended to or is reflexively considered a mere synonym for God being honored. Instead, “glory” (from the Hebrew kabod and the Greek doxa) means “manifestation [of the hidden God],” especially in Johannine theology. And the second part of Irenaeus’s sentence is often omitted—“and the life of a human being consists in beholding God.” In scholastic theology that “beholding” of God was spoken of as contemplation.
I am fully aware that a talk about missiology does not often get into the area of contemplation. Please bear with me. In putting the emphasis I do on this point, I should say I am returning to the beginning of my own academic life in 1966 when my BA paper at Divine Word College in Epworth, Iowa, was titled “Contemplation as the End of Human Life.” Forty-eight years later, I would probably be embarrassed to read it (although I need not worry, since it was long ago lost in one of my many moves and, in a fortunate coup de grâce, shredded in a weeding of the Epworth library).
Contemplation, as I learned while wrestling with the concept in the writings of Thomas Aquinas and Jacques Maritain, is not some sort of neo-Platonic ecstasy wherein the soul of a spiritual virtuoso escapes the body to “see” God in the heavens. Instead, contemplation is the culmination of a process begun as the individual discovers the divine depths of all things—including one’s self and one’s fellow human beings—and begins to live fully alive to the presence of God in the world. Yes, contemplation sometimes takes place in solitary, mountaintop or desert moments, but it can also occur when a person is moved to tears by a hymn in a worship service, watching the tenderness of a mother nursing her baby, or when one beholds the mystery of a loved one as thou.
What is one seeing in such moments? Simply this: things as they really are as one enters for a moment into an understanding of reality in its ontological depth, as the great chain of being proceeding from the Creator-God-YHWH, whom Jesus calls Abba. And by participating in this reality consciously, one becomes Godlike to the extent the Spirit offers entrée into this state of heightened consciousness wherein one participates in the mystery of creation and its consummation. I stress the word participation because I want to stress the difference between a lived and felt presence of the divine in the ordinary, not merely having ideas about the divine learned in books, including the Bible.
The premise of everything that follows is a view of Christian anthropology’s take on human nature, especially the anthropology revealed in what the Orthodox call the process of theosis, for becoming Godlike is another name for becoming a mature Christian, a life that begins in faith and ends in vision, living in the presence of God who is all in all. In Thomistic anthropology, as retrieved and updated for our own age by Juan Alfaro, SJ, “the internal activity of grace affects the entire human being in both his or her intellect and will; it affects the depth of the person, which is what is meant by the biblical use of the term ‘heart.’” Alfaro goes on to say that “this internal activity of grace calls the human being to union with God through faith and love, ultimately through the vision [of God].” This occurs to the extent that “‘the knowledge of God’ spoken of in the New Testament, which faith brings about, includes both communion with and personal intimacy with God.”2
Our participation in mission, accordingly, must be a sharing of the church’s and our own communion and intimacy with God as revealed by Christ and mediated in our inmost depths by the Spirit. This is also what I believe is implicit in Newbigin’s theology and will enrich us if we bring it from background to foreground.
Encounters with Newbigin
The first and most significant book by Lesslie Newbigin for me was his Honest Religion for Secular Man,3 which I read in 1970 when I was student in Rome, at the suggestion of Luis Rodriguez, a Chilean Divine Word missionary who had taught me philosophy in the United States from 1964 through June 1966. Luis was in Rome in 1970 for a renewal course. We met and talked often. Sometimes, as Luis and I took several long hikes in the Apennine Mountains near L’Aquila west of Rome, we reminisced over a 147-mile canoe trip that we and four others took down the Mississippi River one summer. Listening to my views on the modernization of the church and the Society of the Divine Word, of which I was then a member, Luis feared I was losing my way and forgetting what I had learned about communion with God as the proper end of human growth. I remember him saying that a book by Lesslie Newbigin would be a good antidote to my fascination with a popular book by Harvey Cox and two books by Rudolf Bultmann that I quoted frequently.4 Mentioning Cox and Bultmann, of course, suggests what was influencing me in the years immediately after the Second Vatican Council. Our search was to be relevant and to catch up with Protestant advances in studies of Scripture. In regard to the latter, we Catholics were attempting—in a five-year smorgasbord—to digest developments that had taken place since Friedrich Strauss (1808–1874) started historians searching for an academically respectable biography of Jesus.
Many Catholics developed indigestion in trying to gain nourishment from modern authors such as Cox and Bultmann. To give an idea of movements that exemplified the problem, let me rehearse one aspect of what was occurring during my two years studying theology at St. Mary’s Divine Word Seminary in Techny, Illinois. What became most important for most of us seminarians was engagement in an intense two-year process of group therapy utilizing a confrontation-disclosure model. Each participant was encouraged to bare his soul in weekend group sessions that aimed for a breakthrough to emotional and intellectual honesty about both our hang-ups and aspirations. For me, certainly, as well as for most of my confreres, these marathons and their follow-up sessions were dramatic. They resulted in a new way of looking at life. The way they operated revealed a sort of escapism in my upbringing and regarded traditional Catholic piety and religious life as both otherworldly and unrealistic about human nature. In the end, the marathon process made me think that my attempts to dwell prayerfully in the Spirit were escape mechanisms. To replace traditional christological orthodoxy and spirituality, our psychologist offered us a chance to embrace then-popular strands of theology that envisioned Jesus as someone calling us to genuine existence beyond conventional thinking.
In essence what we were illustrating was the case made in Philip Rieff’s The Triumph of the Therapeutic.5 Rieff’s book was an analysis of the cultural crisis in the West as stemming from the destruction of traditional cultural “control and release” mechanisms undergirded by the Jewish and Christian story, controls that served for centuries as the foundation of morality and social order in the West. In the popularized vision of Rieff’s therapeutic in our seminary’s confrontation-disclosure encounters, such abstractions were absent. I cannot speak for all my confreres, but I believe that the biblical vision of Christian discipleship was often replaced by an amalgam of ideas clustered around the notion that a person needed to become emotionally free of the hang-ups that were impeding him from becoming his authentic self. Where Christ stood in all this was unclear, but we were presented with him as an example par excellence of someone who had achieved authenticity, one who had broken through and become transparent.
A major theme in Newbigin’s Honest Religion for Secular Man brought exactly this sort of thinking into question and set me on a new course. When I went back to reread Honest Religion in preparation for the Fuller conference that occasioned the chapter you now read, the following words of Newbigin struck as forcefully in 2014 as they had in 1970. Newbigin spoke of the insufficiency of attempts to use existentialist—Bultmannian—interpretations of the Scriptures to answer the challenges posed by our secularizing culture:
The Bible speaks of God’s calling of the individual in the context of his purpose for all the nations. No one can doubt that the Bible takes seriously the individual and his responsibility for decision. No existentialist could complain that the solitary responsibility of each man to give his answer to God is not fully acknowledged. But if one thinks of the great moments of the Bible where an individual is confronted with the calling of God, the question at issue is never just his own destiny; it is God’s purpose for his people and through them for mankind. Abraham’s call is to be the founder of the nation through which all the nations will bless themselves. Moses is called to be the liberator of an enslaved people. The great prophets are all called to be God’s messengers to the people and politicians of their time. The apostles are called by Jesus to be his messengers to the nations. The calling of the individual is not simply for the acceptance of his own personal destiny; it is for the fulfilment of his role in God’s plan for the salvation of mankind. It is a calling to responsible participation in the events which are the key to world history.6
Post–Vatican II Catholicism and Newbigin
In Honest Religion, Newbigin characterizes Christian life as a response to a call to bring a message to the nations. It is not a private message to assuage the loneliness of the mildly neurotic. Nor is it a political action plan to please either conservatives or liberals. Even less is it a program to save a failing church. Instead, it is a radical vision of a universe unfolding within the arc of God’s purposes and promises, in the light of which both the individual’s and the church’s role receive their meaning. That theme reverberates in different ways in The Gospel in a Pluralist Society,7 but the differences between the two books only serve to underline the notion that Christianity is nothing if not a message about God’s promises and the election of Jesus’ followers to embody and proclaim that promise.
In the period in my life when I first encountered Newbigin, the Society of the Divine Word was attempting to grapple with the issue of its missionary identity in implementing three Vatican II decrees: Lumen Gentium (on the nature of the church); Ad Gentes (on the mission of the church); and Gaudium et Spes (on the church and modernity). Its superior general from 1958 through 1969, Johannes Schütte, was one of the main promoters of Ad Gentes, and in a long conversation with me not long before his death in 1971, he told me that his principal concern was to make mission the animating concern of the entire church, not just something that was farmed out to missionary orders. In his judgment, that attempt had failed.
I took part in the debates over the Society of the Divine Word’s missionary identity, but as I look back on it today, my focal image of the life of faith was to characterize Christian life as a means to attain authenticity by becoming myself, and serving others. These were the hallmarks of genuine religious life, and in contradistinction to the early Newbigin, they had almost nothing to do with Christ. In effect, Jesus had become a model and teacher in a perspective influenced by (a) Bultmann’s contention that New Testament studies and Christology could no longer rely on the presuppositions of “supernatural” interpretations of Christianity; and (b) the typically Catholic belief that the relation between God and humanity is best expressed in the adage “Grace perfects nature.” As I look back on that outlook and, even more, as friendships with several Lutherans have unfolded, I have become convinced that the grace-nature paradigm—although a useful metaphor for understanding aspects of the Christian message—is dangerous if it becomes the focal image of Christian life. Why? Because it occludes the radical nature of the challenge addressed to us both in Word and worship as an invitation to trust the promise of the gospel in the person of Jesus. “Sin-grace” and “sin-forgiveness” encapsulate the interpersonal drama of the God-human relationship much better than “nature-grace.” If grace is merely some thing perfecting nature, however, and if one took clues on what nature is from contemporary society, then our major task was to modernize the church.
And, although Vatican II’s document on the church in the modern world, Gaudium et Spes (1965), attempted to show how Catholicism was not hostile to modernity, its reasons for witnessing gaudium (“joy”) and spes (“hope”) had more of an optimistic, formulaic quality and more this worldly optimism than gospel hope.
By contrast, Newbigin’s work is anchored in a biblical worldview that complemented Catholic doctrine, in particular the documents of Vatican II, which owed much to the ideas of Oscar Cullmann and Karl Barth on the centrality of Christ, ideas that were eclipsed after the council was over and we began arguing about church structures. As I read Newbigin, I was reminded of the early fathers of the church. Concretely I saw Newbigin offering an apologia for Christianity and the ways of God in a manner analogous to Augustine’s City of God—an alternate theology of history to replace that which was shattered by the invasion of Rome in 410 by the Visigoths under Alaric. On the other hand, was Newbigin, I wondered, taking account of the challenge of contemporary science and philosophy in the way Justin Martyr did in his Apologies and Origen in his On First Principles? Especially in Origen one finds the beginnings of spiritual exercises and traditions aimed at helping Christians understand their call to internalize the message and convert culture to Christ.
Newbigin’s Central Orientation
It is clear that Newbigin himself had internalized the truth of Galatians 2:19-20: “I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.” In the first chapter of his monumental biography of Newbigin, Geoffrey Wainwright quotes Newbigin and makes an observation on Christ as the center of his life:
“Faith is the hand that grasps what Christ has done and makes it my own”; but first “Christ has laid hold of me.” That expresses the intensely personal character of the faith within which Lesslie Newbigin’s own life was lived and in which all his more technical discussions must be situated.8
The Newbigin I encountered in the early 1970s was addressing the results of a century and a half reduction of Christianity’s nature on the part of Christians who had tried to articulate a vision of Christian self-understanding
in which the boundaries of what is possible to believe were firmly fixed by the axioms of the Enlightenment, [a culture] in which it was taken for granted that the modern scientific world-view provides the only reliable account of how things really are, and that the Bible has to be understood only in terms of that account. This required a reconstruction of biblical history on the lines of modern historical science. It required the elimination of miracle. It dictated that while the crucifixion of Jesus could be accepted as a fact of real history, his resurrection was a psychological experience of the disciples. Insofar as the biblical scholar recognized religion as an authentic fact of human experience, he could find in the Bible testimony to religion, perhaps to the supreme and definitive experience of the religious spirit. But intellectual integrity required that the Bible must be understood in terms of what it is possible for a modern person to believe.9
In both Foolishness to the Greeks and The Gospel in a Pluralist Society, Newbigin entered deeply into a critique of the fundamental shifts of Western consciousness and its relegation of faith to the realms of indemonstrable, private beliefs. He succeeded in retrieving the historical nature of the central teaching of the New Testament. Christianity is much more than a grounding for morals in the way that the trajectory of liberal theology from Kant onward would make it. Instead, as Newbigin knows, Israel, Christ and the followers of Christ are about the promise of God to bring the world to its destiny as revealed and accomplished in the teaching, death and resurrection of Jesus.
Newbigin knew that the church and the Christian movement it represents are founded in the notion that the world is God’s and that Jesus reveals its meaning, shape and destiny. Faith involves a basic orientation toward history as the manifestation of God. And the Christian vocation in that context is not primarily concerned with the mere “salvation” of its individual members but with its mission in the world, a mission based on a truth that seems foolish to those wise in the way of the world.10
Newbigin, Mission and Christianity as Christomorphic
As we shift into the next section of this chapter, I want to suggest that the whole of Newbigin’s theology of mission and Christian identity is christomorphic in the sense that H. Richard Niebuhr finds christomorphism in the thought of F. D. E. Schleiermacher.11 First, let us recall what Niebuhr says about the christomorphic dimension in Schleiermacher’s thought:
His theology is Christomorphic in two senses. First of all, it asserts that Jesus of Nazareth objectively exhibits what human nature ideally is, although Schleiermacher does not on this account counsel Christians to imitate Jesus in any naïve way. . . . In this sense, then, the redeemer is the measure of human nature. And in the second place the redeemer is the historical person whose presence mediated through Scriptures, preaching and the Holy Spirit becomes the abiding occasion for the reorganization and clarifying of the Christian’s consciousness of his absolute dependence, of his identity in the world, and of his appropriate actions toward and responses to others.12
University of Chicago historical theologian and my teacher Brian Gerrish often noted in his lectures that Schleiermacher is sometimes presented by his critics as someone who compromised the truth claims of theology and collapsed theology into anthropology.13 By contrast, the heart of Schleiermacher’s work is a profound realization that subjective appropriation of dynamic religious truth is an essential aspect of whatever objectivity that truth discloses. In addition, like both Calvin and Barth, Schleiermacher’s theology cannot be said to have a single center, something that I believe can also be said about Newbigin. Third, it is appropriate to remind ourselves that Newbigin is Reformed in the contours of his missiology. In that framework, the sole reliable source of knowledge of God is Scripture, but Scripture requires careful exegesis under the inspiration of the Spirit, and theology cannot ignore what humanity learns in the book of nature. Fundamentalism, in other words, finds no true home in the Reformed tradition. Indeed, as Brian Gerrish has often remarked, Calvin was deeply influenced by the new learning of the Renaissance and was among the very earliest to approach the Bible with something like a modern sense of the hermeneutic task; yet that notwithstanding, for Calvin, “Word and Spirit are united by an ‘inviolable bond,’ and the ultimate norm is Scripture plus Spirit. The Word has become the instrument by which the illumination of the Spirit is dispensed.”14
The Word-cum-Spirit, if I may use that term, is for Calvin a sacrament making Christ present in the church and in the heart of the believer. Newbigin exhibits this same sensitivity.15 Preaching is not mere instruction but the instrument utilized by the Spirit to make us participants in Jesus’ obedience to the Father in our own social and historical context and—within that context—enabling us to trust in God, for: “we also boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us” (Rom 5:3-5).
Always a pastor, Newbigin develops his missiology as he is asked to address concrete questions. And the context in which he reflects after his return to Europe from 1959 to 1965 and again from 1974 till his death in 1998 was the decline of the church and the growing implausibility of being an active Christian throughout Europe.16 In attempting to understand this recession from Christian life and faith, Newbigin takes from his toolbox of wide reading, knowledge of Scripture and personal experience to offer reflections that both throw light on the question and often reframe it. Concretely, the axis around which The Gospel in a Pluralist Society and Foolishness to the Greeks revolve is the deteriorating situation of Christianity in the West and the question of its reconversion. Moreover, what another of my teachers, Langdon Gilkey, was fond of saying—admiringly—of Barth is also true of Newbigin. Both are masters at outflanking modern reductionists, whether their reductionism came in the form of scriptural literalism and fundamentalism, on the one hand, or higher criticism of Scripture or scientism’s scorn of faith as a way of truly knowing anything important, on the other hand. Newbigin refuses to be confined by contemporary Western culture’s pigeonholing of Christianity on the subjective value side of an opinion/values versus fact divide. It is a theme he returns to often.17 His refusal to let modernity set the terms of faith becomes, in my view, an important but perhaps too seldom attended to dimension of what Catholics in these same years were pursuing under the rubric of aggiornamento.
Newbigin and Aggiornamento
In recent years an influential group of Catholic theologians has pursued the question of what aggiornamento is about under the rubric of the French word ressourcement (literally “re-sourcement”).18 Ressourcement points to the necessity of retrieving the dynamic dimensions of the biblical, patristic and high medieval heritage as resources for interpreting Scripture and for creating theology that is critical in the modern sense but also, and more importantly, is not reduced to categories of modern science and academic vogues. In short, ressourcement is a search for a path around the barren deserts of post-Kantian moralism and reductionism, on the one hand,19 and what Pope Benedict XVI calls the postmodern “dictatorship of relativism” on the other hand.20
Honest Religion for Secular Man can be distilled to a short formula—namely, that the gospel is not properly interpreted by modernity so much as all history must be interpreted by the gospel. The problem is how one can make sense of this for modern, Western men and women. Simply asserting it seems preposterous and arbitrary, and not just to cultured despisers of religion. For we are faced with a multitude—including perhaps a majority in our pews—for whom Jesus has been demoted to the status of a personal Savior (at one end of the theological spectrum) or to that of a great teacher (at the other end of the spectrum). For both, the most important thing is interpreting the gospel for political ends, such as the need to uphold traditional morality or create a just society by means of politics.
For Newbigin, the key to the gospel is Jesus, who embodies and discloses the good news and the goal of human history. Mission, for Newbigin, revolves around sharing the story of Jesus, in which is revealed the true story about ourselves.21
As is well known, Newbigin served in India from 1936 to 1959, when he became general secretary of the International Missionary Council (IMC) and oversaw the amalgamation of the IMC (some might call it a “takeover”) into the World Council of Churches (WCC). The WCC itself had been founded eleven years earlier in the aftermath of World War II, bringing together two major currents of Protestantism (“Life and Work” and “Faith and Order”), which had been active after World War I. The IMC itself was the direct descendant of the International Missionary Conference at Edinburgh in 1910. The birth of the WCC was complex, occurring as it did during the reconstruction of Europe and the beginnings of the United Nations after World War II. The Life and Work stream that flowed into the new WCC represented the energies of churches organizing to bring relief to millions of refugees. The Faith and Order stream was concerned with achieving church unity by means of patient dialogue aimed at clarifying theological and practical obstacles standing in the way of both cooperation and communion among Christians. The IMC stream that joined the WCC represented missionary organizations in Europe and North America whose concern was mission understood primarily as explicit evangelization of non-Christians.
The leaders of the IMC, whom Newbigin was representing in 1959, were primarily learders of missionaries and missionary societies, but they were dealing with the maturation of indigenous churches throughout Africa, Asia and Oceania. If IMC voiced the concerns of Western missionaries, indigenous church leaders were in the ambiguous position of depending on these societies for financial support and personnel while feeling the need to assume leadership roles—in the decolonization terminology of the day—“nationalizing” and “indigenizing” their churches. Indigenous church leaders found in the WCC an organization that shared their opinion that the colonial-era structures of the missionary societies needed to be tamed. The IMC’s relationship to the European colonial powers is complex, but one area in which both the foreign missionary and colonial leaders shared a problem was difficulty in giving up power.
In that context, Newbigin’s credentials were impressive and gave promise for integrating a vigorous understanding of evangelism into the WCC’s concerns for social justice and ecumenical dialogue. In his missionary life he had been, after all, one of the major figures in the effort to erase the denominational boundaries between churches founded by European Methodists, Anglicans, Presbyterians and Congregationalists and their unification into what became known as the Church of South India. He was also not interested in missionary societies retaining power, but my sense is that he found himself caught in a three-way argument between the WCC, the IMC and local church leaders. Without attempting to assign blame to anyone, the integration of the IMC into the WCC was not smooth and did not satisfy any of the parties, especially the missionary societies. What is important is to understand that Newbigin was a committed ecumenist, on the one hand.22 On the other hand, the Faith and Order and Life and Work movements defined the culture of the WCC, and they found allies among indigenous church leaders who felt the need to throw off, as I have said above, what many perceived to be the heavy hand of colonial-minded missionaries and missionary societies.
Nothing epitomizes this spirit of the day better than the Kenyan Presbyterian leader John Gatu’s speech in Milwaukee in 1971, in which he argued for “a withdrawal of foreign missionaries from many parts of the Third World, that the churches of the Third World must be allowed to find their own identity, and that the continuation of the present missionary movement is a hindrance to this selfhood of the church.”23 Gatu spoke in 1971, but he referred to events that were going on precisely when Newbigin was in Geneva and unhappily watching the marginalization of the idea that evangelism was at the heart of mission. Although the passage I cite next from Newbigin’s Unfinished Agenda was written in 1968 at the Uppsala, Sweden, Fourth Assembly of the WCC (thus before Gatu’s speech), we find in it Newbigin’s growing disenchantment with the regnant theology of WCC-affiliated churches:
The mood [at Uppsala] was one of anger. The well-drilled phalanx of students in the gallery [this is the year of the European student revolt against the “establishment”] ensured that the emotional temperature was kept high. . . . We were corporately shaken over the pit of hell. The word of the Gospel was hardly heard, except, in a muted way, when a little band of Salvationists sang to us. More characteristic was the evening when Pete Seeger sang the well-known mockery of the Christian Gospel which affirms that “there will be pie in the sky when you die,” and the assembly sat in rapt silence and then applauded as though it were a new relation of truth. How, I couldn’t help wondering, could such a group be so easily brainwashed?24
Newbigin returned to India in 1965, deeply disappointed by the WCC’s adoption of a point of view espoused by William Earnest Hocking (1873–1966) on Christian identity vis-à-vis the world and world religions. For Hocking, according to Wilbert Shenk, faith is “an individual experience of timeless reality,” while for Newbigin, “in the Bible the living God takes the initiative in creating a new social reality.”25 It can be said of the WCC that, like Hocking, its evolving theology was diffident about Christ, who for Newbigin was the ultimate revelation of God’s initiative to enlighten humankind. Newbigin’s gospel is vastly more than an expression of eternal truth that can be found in other religions; instead,
It is the declaration of God’s cosmic purpose by which the whole public history of mankind is sustained and overruled, and by which all men without exception will be judged. It is the invitation to be fellow workers with God in the fulfilment of that purpose through the atoning work of Christ and through the witness of the Holy Spirit. It calls men to commitment to a worldwide mission more daring and more far-reaching than that of Marxism. And it has—what Marxism lacks—a faith regarding the final consummation of God’s purpose in the power of which it is possible to find meaning for world history which does not make personal history meaningless, and meaning for personal history which does not make world history meaningless.26
A Catholic Appreciation of Newbigin’s Theology of Mission
I do not know if Pope John Paul II was acquainted with Newbigin’s writings, but it is clear that both he and Newbigin were concentrating on healing the same spiritual illness that beset European society and Christianity. Indeed, I believe that any fair-minded Protestant who reads John Paul II’s encyclical letter on the permanent validity of the church’s mission will find a kindred spirit, especially in the following citation in which, mutatis mutandis, the pope is stating what is at the core of Newbigin’s thought:
Proclamation is the permanent priority of mission. The Church cannot elude Christ’s explicit mandate, nor deprive men and women of the “Good News” about their being loved and saved by God. “Evangelization will always contain—as the foundation, center and at the same time the summit of its dynamism—a clear proclamation that, in Jesus Christ . . . salvation is offered to all people, as a gift of God’s grace and mercy” [John Paul quotes Pope Paul VI, Evangelii Nuntiandi, § 27]. All forms of missionary activity are directed to this proclamation, which reveals and gives access to the mystery hidden for ages and made known in Christ (cf. Eph 3:3-9; Col 1:25-29), the mystery which lies at the heart of the Church’s mission and life, as the hinge on which all evangelization turns.27
The principal difference between the two men, I believe, stems from John Paul’s identity as an academically trained philosopher, whose preoccupations lay with developing a Christian anthropology that would speak to the spiritual depths of humanity—depths that define the whole person and which John Paul believed were occluded in secular ideologies. John Paul’s anthropology, however, is not empirical but philosophical, rooted in Thomism and permeated by Husserl’s phenomenology.28 If one spends time with John Paul, the theme that unites everything is Christ the concrete universal, the revealer of God’s riches bestowed on those who will embrace him in faith, the perfect exemplar of humanity in its fullness. Newbigin uses biblical language to express this reality; John Paul the language of the perennial philosophy transfused by Husserl’s philosophy.
John Paul’s and Lesslie Newbigin’s adversaries are also very similar. John Paul believed that the West had lost its moorings in Christian faith and that the progressive wing of Western Catholic theology had imbibed too deeply historical studies that did not deal adequately with the transcendent mystery of humanity and the way in which Christ and the Spirit revealed humanity’s potential. It is no accident that the pope’s most significant encyclicals dealt with (1) Christ as the redeemer of humankind, (2) the Spirit as the bearer of true life, and (3) theological reductionism’s weakening of a full grasp of the church’s mission.29 John Paul saw himself primarily as a teacher, but at least in passing, I must also observe that in my many visits to Rome as an editor working for Orbis Books, a constant refrain was the judgment of Roman insiders that John Paul was so taken up with his own writing and international trips that he was neglecting administration. Problems were allowed to fester, my conversation partners said, and the crisis represented by clergy’s sexual abuse of minors was not faced.
When I read Newbigin, I find myself reading a man whose career as a missionary bishop in India led him to concentrate on the essentials, because he was forced to translate the message into Indian languages. This gave him a pastoral perspective that John Paul lacked, since his challenge was outfoxing a Communist government and preserving space for his church to operate. He carried on that ministry among a people for whom practicing Catholic faith was a way to demonstrate disaffection with that regime. When Communism fell, in no small measure because of John Paul’s efforts, Catholicism enjoyed immense prestige in Poland. It did not take long, however, for the bishops and clergy to overplay their hand, and Catholicism began to suffer the same—albeit less pervasive—recession it had in the rest of Europe as Poles strove to modernize their economic, educational and legal systems. John Paul was used to commanding and being obeyed in a situation of oppression. He confronted a different situation as pope, and his critics doubted he understood that culture.
Newbigin’s career brought him face to face with the same kind of reductionism that John Paul encountered in Western Catholicism in 1978, but neither John Paul nor Lesslie Newbigin was able to overcome what Bernard Lonergan diagnoses as the challenge of our age, confronting “a problem of evil that demands the transformation of self-reliant intelligence into an intellectus quaerens fidem [“understanding seeking faith”].”30 Lonergan is quite conservative in matters of doctrine. There would be little disagreement between him, Newbigin and John Paul on the core of faith, but I find him quite radical in his grasp of what ails the church in its attempts to retrieve and propagate the gospel. In the following passage, he speaks explicitly of Catholicism, but the same problems confront Protestants in the Western world, that is to say,
a crisis not of faith but of culture. There has been no new revelation from on high to replace the revelation given through Christ Jesus. There has been written no new Bible and there has been founded no new church to link us with him. But Catholic [or Protestant] philosophy, and Catholic [or Protestant] theology are matters, not merely of revelation and faith, but also of culture. Both have been fully and deeply involved in classical culture. The breakdown of classical culture and, at least in our day, the manifest comprehensiveness and exclusiveness of modern culture confront . . . philosophy and . . . theology with the gravest problems, impose upon them mountainous tasks, invite them to Herculean labors.
In that context, he goes on to say:
There is bound to be formed a solid right that is determined to live in a world that no longer exists. There is bound to be formed a scattered left, captivated by now this and now that new development, exploring now this and now that new possibility. But what will count is a perhaps not numerous center, big enough to be at home in both the old and the new, painstaking enough to work out one by one the transitions to be made, strong enough to refuse half-measures and insist on complete solutions even though it has to wait.31
Lonergan is not a missiologist in the way both Newbigin and John Paul were, but he has three issues in hand that complement Newbigin’s and John Paul’s analysis and lead us forward: his identification of the “human problem” within humanity, the need to recognize evil, and the need for conversion or transformation if evil is to be overcome and God’s victory over it in principle in Christ is to be realized de facto in history.
And here we return to the challenge with which we began, the question of how to form the agents who will bring the gospel to the nations. Yes, I realize that Newbigin and John Paul both employ great rhetorical art that exhorts men and women to put the gospel into practice, but do they put us in touch with the spiritual disciplines that the Christian tradition teaches us are necessary if the Spirit’s work of making us new selves in Christ (Eph 4:22-24) is to occur?
It is one of the truisms of modern biblical hermeneutics that Christ promised to usher in the kingdom but left us with a church. It was the genius of the apostle Paul, as N. T. Wright’s marvelous body of work has shown, to translate kingdom language into the reality of the Spirit ushering the believer into an entirely new dimension of life.32 From Wright’s perspective, the experience of the Spirit is our entrée into beginning to feel and live in the mystery of the kingdom. When one grasps that the Gospels were written in the light of the primitive Jesus movement’s growing understanding of what it means for Jesus to be Messiah/Christos, the stories of the life, teaching, ministry, death and resurrection of Jesus as told in the Synoptics and John take on new meaning. The details of the narratives recorded fifty and more years after his death and resurrection are shaded by the Evangelists to illustrate the dimension of Jesus’ that any given Gospel is bringing attention to. Taken together they offer a kaleidoscopic image of the gospel as the promise that God will deal with humanity and the cosmos as Jesus is transformed in the power of the Spirit after his crucifixion.
The Lutheran shorthand for what the gospel is is helpful in this regard: the gospel is the promise to whose veracity and trustworthiness the Spirit testifies in our inmost being.33 A promise of what? That sins will be forgiven, that mortal flesh will be transformed, that the universe is moving toward the day when all discord will be reconciled and God will be “all in all” (1 Cor 15:28) through the reconciling activity of the cosmic Christ, an activity that we now experience as the “first fruits” of what is to come (Rom 8:20-26).
What I have been driving at is fairly simple. The splendid insights that Newbigin brings forth concerning the need to become a missional church and face up to the end of Christendom will come to nothing if our congregations and formation programs are not first and foremost entrées into the promise of the gospel mediated to individuals through community life, study, prayer, worship, contemplation and a grasp of the depths of life by the Spirit.
Toward an Inconclusive Conclusion
I was once an invited participant in a series of seminar events convened at Princeton Theological Seminary by Andrew F. Walls to discuss various aspects of the reality often called—without, I fear, clear definition—“world Christianity.” There were many wonderful papers presented and discussed, but the one that struck me most strongly was presented by Professor Moonjang Lee. Several years later he would publish his main ideas in an Orbis book.34 In his presentation and the spirited dialogue that followed, Lee advanced the notion that a Korean candidate for ministry is invariably disappointed, sometimes severely so, during his first year in seminary. He or she comes with the Korean cultural expectation that the candidate is being led into a transformative experience of the Tao of Jesus—the moment in which “knowledge” moves from the theoretical, academic level to living harmony in the heart of the Christian. That expectation, of course, comes from Korea’s history of involvement with the great religions and life systems of East Asia—in particular, Buddhism, Taoism and Confucianism as they are added to a fundament of Korean sensitivity to the presence of ancestor and nature spirits. Skillful teachers lead novices to breakthrough moments when the shape and nature of the “Whole” are experienced as Tao. To meet Korean expectations, theological education must immerse the candidate for ministry to the Tao of Jesus.
What happens when students come to Christian seminaries and other schools or departments of theology—and not just in Korea—however, is an encounter with a theological curriculum that is more a non-aggression pact between academic disciplines and fields than a vehicle for dwelling and being transformed by divine Sophia/Wisdom. Each field competes for the maximum number of lecture hours to introduce students to what professors believe is essential to master in his or her field, be it history, systematic or doctrinal theology, Scripture, ethics, counseling and pastoral theology, preaching and worship, or management skills. Integration is left to the student, and many fail at the task.
In this age of recognizing the need to acknowledge the reality of cultural and religious pluralism, are we capable of seeing the challenge that this Korean theologian presents us? Seeking to meet this challenge is, of course, not something completely alien to Western tradition, for in Catholic reform movements of the thirteenth century (in orders founded by St. Francis and St. Dominic) and in the sixteenth (in the order founded by St. Ignatius), immersion in the Tao of Jesus was exactly what was involved.
Moonjang Lee points to the need to transform the formation of men and women for mission in a secularizing world with the courage to embody the wisdom that heart speaks to heart, and that the only way to measure up to Newbigin’s challenge to be communities that embody the gospel in pluralistic, secularizing societies is immersion in the transforming Spirit.