On Not Leaving Theology to the Professionals

Peter Edman

Lesslie Newbigin: Missionary Theologian: A Reader, compiled and introduced by Paul Weston (Eerdmans/SPCK, 2006, ISBN 0802829821); 264 pages plus notes, bibliography, and index.

Since Implications is directed at business and professional leaders you may wonder why our first formal book review is about theology. The reason is that all of us, consciously or not, are theologians, and as Andrzej Turkanik said at a recent emerging leaders forum, the question is, what kind of theologians are we?

Most of us tend to leave the deep thinking to the “professionals,” and as Lesslie Newbigin says, “Theology has been largely the preserve of clergy and academics.” He said this as a challenge to the average follower of Jesus, reminding us that we have a deeper responsibility than we sometimes wish to acknowledge. We must not be satisfied with a superficial understanding and there are significant dangers when you leave everything to the professionals. We thus start with this collection of writings of the great missionary bishop and theologian who died in 1998, for it offers a framework for the type of approach we will often take.

Biography informs theology

This collection is prefaced appropriately with a brief biography of Newbigin, whose life is intertwined with the history of the church and the theological conversations of the twentieth century. Theology, in Newbigin’s understanding, is not primarily about a quest for universal axioms, like some schools of philosophy. It is about the ways human beings, in human bodies, talk and think and work together, empowered by Jesus and his resurrection life and guided by the Spirit he sends, to realize in history God’s plans for the world.

I find it comforting to think about it this way: A too-tidy theology may be a warning sign. Beyond the great ordering narrative of the Christian story, a Christian understanding of life leads us to expect a certain necessary messiness—and no little humor. I had not realized before coming to Weston’s Reader that Newbigin was actually Reformed by training, and ended his life as a minister in the United Kingdom’s United Reformed Church (which is largely presbyterian in governance). The fact that his great unifying work in the formation of the Church of South India led directly to his becoming a bishop leads, one might say, to worthwhile theological speculation about God’s sense of humor.

This is not to say that Newbigin was uninterested in philosophical questions. Some of his most important contributions to theology flow from his appreciation, explanation, and application of the work of scientist-philosopher Michael Polanyi in the area of knowledge (notably the question of public truth). He uses this background to help us wrestle with questions of modernity, postmodernity, and pluralism—increasingly urgent in light of the demands of Islam and the collapse of “enlightened” Western self-confidence (it is no coincidence that one of his final books is titled Proper Confidence). His discussions on these topics give us a practical and theoretical framework by which we can do so.

Although the primary audience for this book is committed Christian believers, thoughtful seekers will find it decidedly appealing because of the honest and demanding take on Christian faith, thankfully low on jargon and technical terms. Editor Paul Weston assembles many of Newbigin’s previously uncollected occasional pieces along with key excerpts from his most important books. He sets each piece in context, here and there summarizing important themes. This, combined with the shorter nature of most of the pieces, makes an excellent introduction to Newbigin and a surprisingly approachable way into the deeper waters of theology for those who are not professionals in the field.

This is not to say that it is an easy read, but there are built-in opportunities to breathe, as it were, and the book’s difficulty is more due to the depth, seriousness, and radical nature of its questions than any issues with its prose.

Public truth for public life

Weston notes that Newbigin often returned to themes, so in coming to terms with his thought we have the assistance of an occasional repetition of ideas from different angles. The brief quote above is from a 1994 essay, “The Cultural Captivity of Western Christianity as a Challenge to a Missionary Church.” Citing another passage from that piece calls out some of these themes, most of which badly need our attention:

If what I have been saying is true, there is need for what I would call a declericalizing of theology. . . . What is needed is the cooperative work of Christian laymen and women in specific sectors of public life: industry, politics, medicine, education, local government, welfare, administration, the media, literature, drama, and the arts. In each of these and other sectors of public life there is a need to examine the accepted axioms and assumptions that underlie the contemporary practice, to examine them in the light of the gospel. That will not happen as long as theology is the preserve of the clergy or, what is equally dangerous, simply an enclave within a secular academic community. There is an immense intellectual and pastoral task in which the experience of the foreign missionary movement could, I believe, be of great help to the Churches in making this move towards a more truly missionary relationship with our culture.

My ears perked up on reading this; The Trinity Forum is in part an attempt to help Christians do this. Note in particular the bit about public life—a central component to Newbigin’s thinking, and critically important for followers of Jesus. For as Newbigin reminds us, the gospel of Jesus Christ is a public gospel, addressed to the public world. And the “missionary calling [is] to claim the whole of public life for Christ and his kingdom.” It is critical to highlight the fact that this perspective comes from a man who spent the bulk of his career as a missionary and churchman in India, a leading candidate for the planet’s most relativistic and syncretistic society. Speaking as someone who became an outsider to his own culture, he reminds us that privatized religion is not a faithful option—it is only a preemptive surrender to the dying Enlightenment world.

Also notable is his call to question the “axioms and assumptions” of contemporary disciplines. This is the role of applied ethics, which in a Christian context must be fitted into an overall narrative of God’s work in the world and his overall purposes. But how many of us in various public sectors are able to articulate those purposes? If you are not one of them, you will find this essay and similar passages invaluable. A more focused study or primer, and worth more than this mention in passing, is N. T. Wright’s new Simply Christian (2006), which does set out that larger narrative for us in a way that Newbigin would, I think, also affirm.

Newbigin is not comforting reading if you are looking for easy reassurance. He admits that the implications of his thinking frighten even himself. But there is a deeper confidence underlying his questions—demanding them—grounded in the ultimate purposes of God for creation and new creation. In this sense, we can count ourselves fortunate—if that’s the right word in this context—to be living at a time of a wider return to a more holistic and biblical appreciation of God’s purposes in history, and what will come after history, in the work of thinkers like Newbigin and Wright and Dallas Willard.

We must contrast this perspective with that of a wide swathe of popular theology which in effect teaches that our responsibility is to make one right decision and then wait quietly for the end, when everything will be destroyed and we all go to heaven. This devalues God’s created world, making for a functionally gnostic way of life—disconnected personal morality, aimless work, shoddy architecture. It is no response to secular nihilism and despair. But Newbigin takes the Christian scriptures more seriously, grounding our work, ethics, and relationships in eternal significance by pointing us to a “meaningful future,” for our destiny is not heaven but a renewed earth.

Another part of Newbigin’s response worth noting here—again, discomfiting in a bracing way—is his insistence that we reconsider the question of the church. His discussion of church raises questions that we all need to deal with, not least many of us involved with the Trinity Forum. Some of my friends are loathe even to use the term “Christian,” given its historical and sociological taints. But it seems that if we are to be “followers of Christ,” we need to take seriously Jesus’ claim to be the head of a body of believers, the church. The historicity of Jesus and his resurrection is rightly a nonnegotiable for Newbigin, and he was careful to say that Jesus’ church has two millennia of history that cannot be overlooked or undone.

The Christian church is what Jesus gave us to work with. And as Newbigin reminds us, it is how he chooses to change the world, to manifest his kingdom. Trying to go back to some primitive pre-church era is a dangerous nostalgia. Talk around it all we want, the church is not going away and it needs to be taken more seriously than Western Christians have in the past century.

Proper confidence

The collection is also timely in light of the recent illuminating controversy over the Regensburg lecture of Pope Benedict XVI. Like the Pope, Newbigin was fully aware of the weakness of “the liberal, secular democratic state” in the face of attacks from “powerful new religious fanaticisms.” These attacks, he says in an excerpt from The Gospel in a Pluralist Society,

are possible only because its own internal weaknesses have become so clear: the disintegration of family life, the growth of mindless violence, the vandalism which finds satisfaction in destroying whatever is comely and useful, the growing destruction of the environment by limitless consumption fueled by ceaseless propaganda, the threat of nuclear war, and—as the deepest root of it all—the loss of any sense of a meaningful future. Weakened from within, secular democratic societies are at a loss to respond to religious fanaticism without denying their own principles.

And then he poses the deep question that needs to be asked afresh:

What could it mean for the Church to make once again the claim which it made in its earliest centuries, the claim to provide the public truth by which society can be given coherence and direction?

I imagine some hackles are rising. It is not a comfortable question. All the more reason to read on. 

Peter Edman is director of research at the Trinity Forum. He lives in Virginia.

Reviews, Faiths and Worldviews, Public Square, Spiritual Growth, Thu 12 Oct 2006