Bishop Lesslie Newbigin (1909-1998) spent 40 years as a missionary in India; on returning to his native England he spent the rest of his life as a missionary to the West.
In a recent article called “The Lasting Legacy of Lesslie Newbigin”, Michael Goheen summarizes the theology of Newbigin, drawing out his main insights across many books, articles and commentaries.
Reading Goheen’s article reminded me of how deeply impacted my own thinking has been by Newbigin’s thought, especially as found in his books The Gospel in a Pluralist Society, Foolishness to the Greeks:Gospel and Western Culture, and Proper Confidence: Faith, Doubt and Certainty in Christian Discipleship. I remember first reading The Gospel in a Pluralist Society while studying toward my Master’s degree. It stuck me as I read that Newbigin had articulated and given sense to many of my own inarticulate intuitions about the gospel and culture. If I am honest, I was a little annoyed with him: he’d written the book I always wanted to write, but much better than I could have ever done it.
Goheen summarises Newbigin’s thinking well; his article is worth quoting at length:
According to Newbigin, the public truth of the gospel has been reduced to a personal message about the otherworldly future of the individual person. He believed, however, that the gospel is a message about the goal of cosmic history. In the death of Jesus God dealt with the evil of the whole world, and in his resurrection the renewing power of a renewed creation broke into history. This restored creation will one-day fill the whole earth and all of history will culminate in the kingdom of God. If this is true, Newbigin argues, the Gospel is not a private message. It is news about the goal of universal history, the cosmic completion of God’s purpose to restore his original creational intentions for the whole creation and all of human life.
Consequently the “Bible tells a story that is the story, the story of which our human life is a part,” says Newbigin, and it is possible for us to know this true story because in Jesus God has decisively and finally revealed and accomplished where the history of the world and humankind is going. And so it is only this story that can give true meaning to the full spectrum of human life today.
If the gospel is true, if it tells us where all of history is going, then mission must follow; the true goal and meaning of universal history has been revealed and now must be made known. The way Jesus chose to do that was not to write a book, as Mohammed did, but rather to choose a community that would make it known by embodying it in its life, expressing it in its deeds, and announcing it in its words. He commissioned them with these words: “As the Father has sent me, I am sending you” (John 20:21). The church is missional by its very nature—a people charged with embodying the true end of history for the sake of the world.
Read Goheen’s full article here.
