Mission to the west: Lesslie Newbigin, 1909-1998

Christian Century, March 18, 1998 by Lamin Sanneh

With the Death of Lesslie Newbigin on January 30, the ecumenical Christian movement lost one of its pillars. Crucial to Newbigin's perspective was his experience as a missionary in India, which culminated in his election in 1947 as the first bishop of the Church of South India, an ecumenical association of Protestant churches. Central also was his work--beginning in 1959--as general secretary of the International Missionary Council, which he led into the World Council of Churches in the 1960s as the Department of World Mission and Evangelism. He also became editor of the International Review Of Missions.)

While the CSI has survived and flourished, despite the failure to create a counterpart in North India, the DWME has largely been eviscerated by what Newbigin called "rapid social change" thinking in Western churches, which is reinforced by cultural relativism. These two attitudes have in common the idea of God as an, auxiliary of Western development machinery.

As Newbigin saw it, the churches have adopted the view that the main thrust of Christian engagement with the world is to be carried forward by interchurch aid agencies, and that the results of that work are assured by the wealth and prowess of the West. Newbigin felt that this approach would strip the gospel of its central claim about the work of Christ. It would remove from the churches their obligation to proclaim Christ in worship, preaching, prayer, service and witness to the kingdom of God. This retreat, in Newbigin's view, weakened evangelical Protestantism and with it its ecumenical strength.

Newbigin offered this critique candidly and charitably. He felt the World Council of Churches was risking its own life and integrity in jettisoning the obligation to proclaim God's finished work in Christ (though not with us), and noted, for example, that at its Uppsala Assembly in 1968 the WCC at its invitation heard Pete Seeger sing, "Pie in the sky when you die--a mockery of Christian eschatological hope. "Solidarity" with a mocking world could not be why God led Jesus to--and beyond--the cross, Newbigin insisted.

Newbigin returned to India in 1964 as bishop of Madras, but he had seen enough of the state of affairs in Europe to know the task that awaited him back home. In 1974, following his retirement from India, the Newbigin family resettled in Birmingham, England, where Newbigin taught at the Selly Oak Colleges. He participated in the 1975 WCC Nairobi Assembly and found himself responsible in part for interpreting the work of the WCC to a skeptical public in England, where recent proposals for an ecumenical Anglican-Methodist merger had been rejected by the Anglicans, with effects throughout the English-speaking world.

On the racial front also, England was in an uncompromising mood. In 1989, on the occasion of Birmingham's centenary anniversary, a committee of local churches invited Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa to lead an event convened under the rubric "Faith in the City of Birmingham." The prospect of Archbishop Tutu's visit created bitter acrimony, with the media turning on him as a communist and an unbeliever and other equally bitter aspersions. I can personally testify to hardened racial attitudes. On the way to dinner once at a friend's house in Birmingham, I happened to cut across a corner driveway only to hear racial epithets hurled at me for stepping on the patch of turf.

Newbigin cast a missionary's critical eye on the issues that dominated the thinking of Western churches. In The Gospel in a Pluralist Society (1989) he explored the challenge of religious pluralism. Many people wanted churches to abandon the policy of converting people of other faiths. The Christian faith may be true for us who are Christians already, but it is not necessarily true for others, many said. Our confession of Jesus as Lord and Savior and our worship of him in the language of the church is right and proper, but we have no right in a pluralist, diverse society to say that there is no other name given under heaven by which we are saved. It is preposterous, they said, for Christians to offer their religion as the only answer to issues of global security and environmental degradation. And many voices maintained that affirming the validity of the other great religions of the world is a necessary part of ending the spiritual and cultural humiliation of European colonialism.

Yet, for Newbigin, the incontestable reality of pluralism did not mean that we do not possess a reliable clue into universal meaning and history. It is not true that all roads lead to the peak of the same mountain. Some roads lead over the precipice. For the Christian, the ultimate clue is Jesus, the one God chose to honor and glorify the divine name and who lived out that choice at Bethlehem and Calvary.

The oft-repeated assertion that Christians do not possess the whole truth, that God is equally accessible through religions and cultural streams other than our own, falls flat on its own face, Newbigin insisted, for that assertion is itself a truth claim. On what basis do we make the claim that no one's grasp of the truth is adequate?