Geoffrey Wainwright, Lesslie Newbigin: A Theological Life - Book Review

Ecumenical Review, The, July, 2003 by Martin Cressey

New York, Oxford UP, 2000, 459pp., US$ 65.00.

This review is being completed on the fifty-fifth anniversary of the inauguration of the Church of South India on 27 September 1947. During the liturgy in Madras cathedral Lesslie Newbigin was consecrated as one of the bishops newly elected to serve the united church. There is no doubt about the formative place that his missionary service in India had in his whole life and in his theological development. Equally clearly his roles in the ecumenical movement and in the service of the World Council of Churches were focused upon the world mission of the church. At the age of eighty-one it was "A Missionary's Dream" that he wrote as his contribution to "A Dialogue of Dreams and Visions", the January 1991 number of The Ecumenical Review.

It is as a younger colleague and collaborator in Faith and Order work that Geoffrey Wainwright has provided a careful survey, with abundant culling of his subject's own words, of the theological life lived in this encounter of mission and ecumenism, of reflection and diaconal service, of the religious and the secular. "There is no question here of conducting a critique of Newbigin from a quite different standpoint" (p.viii); the book "aims to instantiate a way of doing theology that takes sanctified life and thought seriously as an intrinsic witness to the content and truth of the gospel" (p.vi).The aim is fulfilled--at length but without being boring! The limitation is also clear--though without hero-worship this is throughout a positive record and summary of Newbigin's output, not a detached critique of it. Each of ten chapters takes up an aspect of his life and draws out its theological expressions in diaries, sermons, occasional writings and books.

This one-volume condensation of a lifetime's thought is a valuable resource. The main theological issues discussed are of permanent relevance. On the broad canvas there are applications to many situations of a centred Reformed theology, focused upon the atoning work of God in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus and (increasingly as Newbigin's thought and ecumenical experience developed) on trinitarian presentation of mission and ecclesiology. In a more detailed way, the argument for the South India approach to the reconcilation of ministries is still important for currently continuing negotiations by and with episcopally ordered churches. The debate is not about the niceties of covenants but about the basic contention that "one can both insist that episcopacy is God's will for the church and at the same time acknowledge without any hedging or double talk that non-episcopal bodies are true churches" (p.92 quoting Newbigin in The Reunion of the Church).

Wainwright believes that a new generation of theologians may be more ready to listen to Newbigin's life message than those who have been caught up in the debates of the 1990s. One of that new generation, Telford Work of Westmont College, Santa Barbara, acknowledges the way in which his ecumenical understanding was reshaped by Newbigin's ecclesiological vision for South India. "Because a reunion of churches is a reunion of divided parts of the church, not the return of dissident brethren to the one church, my task is to resolve debates rather than to win them, to reconcile all sides rather than to beat the opposition" (p.399).

The consistency of Lesslie Newbigin's thought is made plain by showing it in debate with many different dialogue partners, from the interfaith meeting that began in his early friendship with scholars of the Ramakrishna mission, studying alternately the Svetasvara Upanishad and St John's gospel (in Sanskrit or Greek), through to his involvement, in the last twenty years and more of his life, with the gospel and culture debates and the call for the reconversion of the West, seeing modernity, controversially, not as the one way forward for humankind but as one of the cultures to be addressed by the gospel of Jesus Christ.

A tantalizing phrase in Wainwright's appraisal is "The Secular Flirtation" (p.341), his description of a period which included the lectures "Honest Religion for Secular Man" (which many read in counterpoint with John Robinson's "Honest to God") and a close encounter with Arendt van Leeuwen's "Christianity and World History". From such positive response to secularity Newbigin moved away through his experience of the WCC Uppsala assembly in 1968, at a point where others (including the present reviewer) were challenged to take the secular more seriously. The bishop from India, retired from the Madras diocese, came back to Britain to lecture on mission in the Selly Oak Colleges of Birmingham and then to be the minister of Winson Green United Reformed Church, a small congregation near the gates of a prison. He won the admiration of the church of his youth (the Presbyterian Church of England had by then become part of the United Reformed Church) and was elected moderator of its general assembly. Yet in the efforts of his British church to respond to the changing community around it, he did not always perceive a hearing of the gospel and his last few appearances at the general assembly involved him in the sometimes acrimonious debates about human sexuality and in particular about the Christian response to homosexuality. He was also a supporter of pro-life organizations in their opposition to abortion.