Justified True Belief

(●) A bishop who gave nearly forty years to India, came home to England, and decided that the West was now the harder mission field. + Most people who write about Western unbelief have only ever lived inside it. Lesslie Newbigin had not. He went out to south India in 1936 as a young Church of Scotland missionary, learned Tamil, spent the middle of his life as a bishop in the Church of South India, and did not come back to live in Britain until 1974, when he was sixty-four. That gave him something almost nobody arguing about Western unbelief had: he had stood outside modern Western culture long enough to see it from the far side, the way a missionary sees the culture he has been sent to. What he saw when he came home in 1974 startled him, and the rest of his life went into saying so. Britain, he decided, was not a neutral, reasonable place where Christianity was one option among several. It was a culture with its own creed, its own account of what counts as real knowledge, and its own quiet rule that religion is a private taste rather than a public fact. The church at home had accepted that rule without noticing, and so had stopped speaking as though the gospel were true for everybody. He spent his last twenty years asking what it would take to hold a proper missionary conversation with that culture, and the books he wrote in those years are still the standard starting point for the question. One fact about him is worth keeping in mind while reading the rest. He wrote his most influential book, The Gospel in a Pluralist Society, in his late seventies, while pastoring a congregation of about twenty people beside a prison wall in Birmingham.

(●) 1909 AD: Born into a Newcastle shipping family, schooled by Quakers, and sent up to Cambridge without a faith of his own. + James Edward Lesslie Newbigin was born on 8 December 1909 in Newcastle upon Tyne, the son of Edward Richmond Newbigin, a shipping merchant, and Annie Ellen Affleck. It was a Presbyterian household with money in it and a conscience attached to the money: his father was a pacifist and a Liberal, and chose for his son a Quaker boarding school, Leighton Park at Reading, partly so that the boy would not be put through the school cadet corps, the uniformed military training unit English boarding schools drilled their boys in. Leighton Park gave him two things he kept. One was the Quaker habit of silence and of taking the poor seriously. The other was a geography master he never stopped naming, "Bill" Brown, who taught him how to get to the heart of a long book quickly enough to argue about it. He went up to Queens’ College, Cambridge, in 1928, and by his own later description he arrived there an agnostic: not hostile to Christianity, simply unpersuaded that it was about anything real.

(●) 1929 AD: A summer among unemployed Welsh miners ended in a vision of the cross, and the agnostic student became a Christian. + In his first year at Cambridge he fell in with the Student Christian Movement, the society that organised Bible study and social work among students across the British universities, and through them took a summer job helping to run a recreation club for out-of-work miners in the Rhondda Valley in south Wales. The camp was run on strictly secular lines: the organisers had decided that anything religious was to be kept out of the programme. Newbigin ran games and handed out food for men who had nothing to do and nowhere to go, and found that he had nothing to give them that touched the actual trouble. They needed, he wrote later, some kind of faith that would hold them against apathy and despair, and the football and the soup did not supply it. That night he could not sleep, and what came to him he described for the rest of his life as the hinge of everything: "It was a vision of the cross, but it was the cross spanning the space between heaven and earth, between ideals and present realities, and with arms that embraced the whole world. I saw it as something which reached down to the most hopeless and sordid of human misery and yet promised life and victory. I was sure that night, in a way I had never been before, that this was the clue that I must follow if I were to make any kind of sense of the world" (Unfinished Agenda, pages 11 to 12). The rest followed from that. He spent 1931 to 1933 as a Student Christian Movement secretary in Glasgow, where he met Helen Henderson, the daughter of a missionary family, and then went back to Cambridge in 1933 to train for ordained ministry at Westminster College. There he spent his first year on a slow, deliberate study of Paul’s letter to the Romans, and it moved him: he began it, he said, as a typical liberal and finished it with a firm conviction about the finished work of Christ and the objectivity of the atonement. A liberal, in the theological sense and not the political one his father wore, is someone who takes the Christian story mainly as a set of high ideals to live by. The atonement is the old word for what Christ’s death actually accomplished, and to call it objective is to say the thing was done, once, outside us, whether anybody feels differently about it afterwards or not. Newbigin walked into that year holding the first view and walked out holding the second. That combination, a social conscience formed in a mining valley and a cross he took to be an actual event rather than a symbol, is the whole of the later man in seed.

(●) 1936 AD: He was ordained, married and sent to India, and a bus crash in the first year nearly ended the whole thing. + He was ordained by the Presbytery of Edinburgh in July 1936, married Helen Henderson in Edinburgh on 20 August, and by the end of September the two of them were on a ship for Madras as missionaries of the Church of Scotland. He wrote his first book on the voyage out, a short reply to the philosopher John Macmurray that SCM Press published the next year as Christian Freedom in the Modern World. He was twenty-six. Then it nearly stopped. In September 1937, while he was still in language school learning Tamil, a bus he was travelling in crashed and his leg was badly broken. Operations in India failed to set it. In November he was shipped home to Edinburgh, and for a while amputation looked likely, which would have ended a missionary career before it began. He spent two years on the mend, working as candidates secretary for the Church of Scotland’s Foreign Missions Committee, which meant handling the applications of people hoping to be sent out to the field he was not yet sure he would see again. He did not get back to India until September 1939. The work he returned to was district missionary in Kanchipuram, an ancient temple town south-west of Madras, and he did it for seven years. This is the least famous part of his life and arguably the part that made him: village congregations, catechists, bicycle journeys, funerals, quarrels over money, and long evenings in the local headquarters of the Ramakrishna Mission, a Hindu monastic order, reading the Upanishads, the ancient philosophical scriptures of Hinduism, alongside Hindu scholars who were quite sure he was wrong.

(●) 1947 AD: Four separated traditions became one Church of South India, and at thirty-seven he was consecrated one of its first bishops. + The plan had been under discussion since 1919, and it was audacious: to merge Anglicans, Methodists, Congregationalists and Presbyterians into a single church with a single ministry, bishops and all. Nothing quite like it had been done since the Reformation. In England it was fought over bitterly, because Anglicans who accepted it would be in communion with ministers who had never been episcopally ordained, never, that is, ordained by a bishop. To be in communion with them meant recognising those ministers as ministers and kneeling beside them at the same table, and to a good many Anglicans of the day that was not a detail to be waved through. Newbigin was put on the central negotiating committee in 1942 and became one of the scheme’s most energetic defenders. His argument was not administrative but missionary, and it turned on a text. If the church asks Indians to be reconciled to God through Christ while remaining unreconciled to each other, the invitation is not credible; Jesus prayed that his people would be one "so that the world may believe that you have sent me" (John 17:21). A divided church preaching reconciliation is a doctor coughing through a lecture on hygiene. The Church of South India was inaugurated in Madras Cathedral on 27 September 1947, six weeks after Indian independence, and Newbigin was consecrated in the same service as first bishop of Madurai and Ramnad. He was thirty-seven. He held the diocese for twelve years, and out of it came his defence of the scheme, The Reunion of the Church (1948), and then the Kerr Lectures at Glasgow, published in 1953 as The Household of God, which is still read: it sets the Protestant, Catholic and Pentecostal answers to the question "what makes the church the church" side by side and refuses to let any of the three be dropped.

(●) 1959 AD: He left his diocese for Geneva and folded the world’s missionary council into the World Council of Churches. + Two bodies had grown out of the great Edinburgh missionary conference of 1910. One was the International Missionary Council, which coordinated the missionary societies, the organisations that recruited and sent people abroad. The other became the World Council of Churches, which drew the churches themselves together. Ecumenical is the word for that second kind of work, the long effort to bring divided churches back toward one another, and by the 1950s many people, Newbigin loudest among them, thought that keeping the two bodies apart had been a theological mistake. Consider what the arrangement allowed. A church could treat mission as a specialist department run by enthusiasts, safely over in another building, while a mission could operate as though it were not the church at all. So in 1959 he left his diocese and became general secretary of the International Missionary Council with the specific job of ending the separation. He spent 1960 and 1961 largely on aeroplanes, visiting church leaders in Africa, Latin America and the Pacific, because that was where the doubts were deepest and where the fear was that a merger would smother the missionary impulse inside a bureaucracy. The two bodies were formally joined at the World Council’s New Delhi assembly on 19 November 1961, and it fell to Newbigin to give the address just before the act of integration was declared, on the missionary dimension of the ecumenical movement. He came out of it holding three posts at once: first director of the new Division of World Mission and Evangelism, associate general secretary of the World Council, and editor of the International Review of Missions. Geneva did not keep him. In 1965 he went back to India as bishop of Madras, a city of some three million people growing by a hundred thousand a year, and stayed nine years. Looking back at his earlier ministry from that desk he judged that he had been too narrowly churchy in his concerns, and set out to push the strong congregations of Madras to think less about their own growth and more about the whole city.

(●) 1974 AD: He retired, came home from Madras by local bus, and at seventy took a congregation of eighteen beside Birmingham prison. + He and Helen had long wanted to travel home overland, and on retiring they did it: two months from Madras to Britain on local buses and trains, carrying two suitcases and a rucksack. Then Birmingham, where he taught the theology of mission and ecumenical studies at the Selly Oak Colleges for five years, became a minister of the United Reformed Church, and gave the moderator’s address to its General Assembly at Southport in 1978, the moderator being the person elected to preside over that assembly for the year. In 1979, chairing a district meeting of his new denomination, he found on the agenda a proposal to close a small congregation in Winson Green, a poor, largely Indian and Caribbean district beside Birmingham prison. He could not bring himself to preside over it. If the church pulls out of places like this to settle in the comfortable suburbs, he told the meeting, it gives up the right to call itself a missionary church. Early in 1980, at seventy, he took the congregation himself. It had eighteen members. He stayed eight years and left it with twenty-seven, and he never described this as a success. What he learned there is the root of everything he wrote afterwards. Winson Green, he said, was much harder than anything he had met in India, because what he faced was not opposition but a cold contempt for the gospel. Asked repeatedly what he found most difficult about moving from India to England, he always gave the same answer: the disappearance of hope. A discussion paper he wrote for the British Council of Churches, published in 1983 as The Other Side of 1984, was meant for a small committee and became a bestseller, and the rest of his books followed from it.

(●) 1998 AD: He died in London at eighty-eight, almost blind, preaching from memory to the last. + The Newbigins moved to south London in 1992. By then his sight was nearly gone, and a rota of friends read aloud to him; he took in a book the way he always had, quickly and whole, and dictated the replies. He went on preaching at his local church by composing the sermon in his head days beforehand and delivering it without notes. He was still writing in the last months of his life. A short piece asking whether it matters that the gospel events actually happened, "Does What Happened Matter?", reached an Australian church paper, The Australian Christian, which printed it on 25 March 1998, nearly two months after he was gone. He died on 30 January 1998 and was cremated at West Norwood. At his funeral on 7 February his friend Dan Beeby told the story of the aged bishop standing on his head to amuse some children in Selly Oak, and added that not one of his many doctorates, nor his CBE, the British state honour he had been given, had fallen out of his pockets, and that his episcopacy was intact. He left thirty books, several hundred articles, and a phrase that had escaped into general use: a missionary encounter with our own culture. His autobiography is called Unfinished Agenda, and the title was not modesty. He did not think he had answered the question he spent his last twenty-five years asking, only that he had got it stated properly.

What He Taught

(T1) Being chosen is an appointment to carry God’s blessing to others, never a private guarantee. + Election is the doctrine that God chooses particular people, and for a lot of Christians it is the doctrine they would most like to leave in the cupboard. It sounds like favouritism with eternity attached: some are picked, the rest are not, and the picked ones spend their lives quietly relieved. Newbigin thought that reading had the logic exactly backwards, and he thought you could see the backwardness on the first page where election appears. God chooses Abraham. The sentence that does the choosing does not stop at Abraham: "in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed" (Genesis 12:3). The choosing is not a fence, it is a route. Israel is picked to be the carrier of something meant for everyone, and the pattern runs all the way through: a servant is chosen and then told that raising up Israel is too small a job, so he will be a light for the nations instead (Isaiah 49:6). Newbigin’s word for this was the logic of election, and his point was that God saves people the way news travels, through somebody who tells somebody. Nobody gets the gospel by post from heaven. It always comes through a neighbour, and the neighbour was chosen so that it could. Two consequences follow, and both cut. The first is that there is no such thing as private salvation; being brought in and being sent are the same act (John 20:21). The second is that the question "am I one of the chosen?" is the wrong question, because the mark of the chosen in Scripture is not a feeling of security but a job and usually a cost. Newbigin never denied that God genuinely chooses, and he was not a universalist, a universalist being someone who holds that everyone is saved in the end. He simply insisted that election is God’s way of reaching everybody, not his way of sorting out a few.

(Q) "They are chosen not for themselves, not to be the exclusive beneficiaries of God’s saving work, but to be the bearers of the secret of his saving work for the sake of all." + Source: The Gospel in a Pluralist Society, chapter 7, "The Logic of Election," page 86 (Eerdmans, 1989). "They" are the first disciples. Newbigin adds, on the same page, the sentence that sets his whole account of election: to be chosen does not mean that the elect are the saved and the rest are the lost (T1).

(T2) Modern Western culture is a mission field, and a tougher one than the fields the missionaries were sent to. + A missionary arriving in a village in Tamil Nadu in 1939 knew he was a foreigner. He knew he would have to learn the language, work out what the local words for god and sacrifice and sin actually carried, and expect the gospel to sound strange. Newbigin’s central claim about the West is that a minister in Birmingham is in exactly the same position and does not know it. He is a missionary in a culture with its own gods, and because it is his own culture he cannot see its shape, any more than a fish is impressed by water. He was careful about what he meant by calling that culture pagan. He did not mean it was primitive or that its people were wicked; he meant that its public life is governed by beliefs, and that some of those beliefs are false. And he added the observation that makes the claim sting: this is not a paganism that has never heard of Christ. It grew out of a rejection of him, and the person who has already decided he knows what Christianity is and has moved on is a harder person to reach than one meeting the story for the first time. Every Christian who has tried to explain the faith to a relative at Christmas knows the difference between curiosity and boredom. The practical conclusion was not a programme but a reversal of attention. The church in the West had been asking how to make the gospel acceptable to modern people. Newbigin wanted it asking the older missionary question instead: what in this culture can the gospel affirm, what must it challenge, and what will it cost to say so.

(Q) "And because it is not a pre-Christian paganism, but a paganism born out of the rejection of Christianity, it is far tougher and more resistant to the Gospel than the pre-Christian paganisms with which foreign missionaries have been in contact during the past two hundred years. Here, without possibility of question, is the most challenging missionary frontier of our time." + Source: "Can the West be Converted?", Princeton Seminary Bulletin 6, number 1 (1985), page 36. The lecture was first given on 20 May 1984. He has just been quoting Gladstone, who had written nearly a hundred and fifty years before that a Britain which put all beliefs on a footing of equal indifference would be travelling back toward the place the gospel found it. Newbigin’s comment is that this is what happened, and that twenty-five years earlier he and everyone else had expected something else: a secular society, meaning a neutral space with no public beliefs at all (T2).

(T3) The gospel is news about things that happened, not a set of values that people may find helpful. + There is a line running down the middle of modern Western thinking, and Newbigin spent twenty years pointing at it. On one side are facts: what is taught in the science block, what is printed in the timetable, what everybody is expected to accept whether they like it or not. On the other side are values: religion, morals, taste, what a person happens to find meaningful. Philosophers call this the fact and value split. It sounds tolerant, and it quietly settles the argument before it starts, because it files the resurrection under preferences. Newbigin’s answer was that the gospel will not fit in that drawer, because it is not a value at all. It is a report. Something happened in Palestine under a named Roman governor, and either it happened or it did not. He liked to point out that the creeds name Pontius Pilate, an official of no theological interest whatever, for precisely this reason: the faith is anchored in datable public history, and that anchoring is not decoration but substance. His phrase for the claim was the gospel as public truth, and he was careful about what it did not mean. It did not mean Christians should be given power, or that the state should enforce belief. It meant only that the gospel enters public debate as a truth claim about the world, open to challenge like any other, rather than as a private hobby that polite people agree not to examine. He had tested this on himself years earlier. As a young missionary he used to spend evenings with the monks of the Ramakrishna Mission at Kanchipuram, reading the Upanishads and the Gospels together, and he once told their leader that if it were not for the fact of Jesus he would become a Vedantin, a follower of Vedanta, the Hindu philosophy those monks lived by, since it is the most complete intellectual system ever conceived and leaves no loose ends. The leader answered, good humouredly, that a man who wanted to tie his eternal salvation to a set of disputable historical events must be mad. Retelling that years later, Newbigin said it was the whole point.

(Q) "The Gospel is the story of things which have happened. What has happened has happened and cannot be changed." + Source: "The Gospel as Public Truth," The Gospel and Our Culture (United Kingdom), number 9 (Spring 1991), page 1. He is answering theologians who had asked him which brand of Christianity he proposed to set against modern culture, given how many brands there are. His reply is that Christianity changes constantly but the gospel does not, because you cannot revise an event; what changes is how each generation understands it (T3).

(T4) There is no knowing anything without first trusting something, so doubt is not the more honest position. + Think about how anyone actually learns to be a doctor. You do not begin by doubting everything and rebuilding medicine from first principles. You apprentice yourself to people who already know, you trust the textbook long before you could defend it, you learn to read a scan by watching someone who can, and only when you are inside the practice are you in a position to question any of it. Trust first, criticism afterwards. That is not laziness; it is the only way anybody has ever come to know anything. Newbigin took this from the chemist and philosopher Michael Polanyi, whose book Personal Knowledge he first read in the 1960s and never got over. Polanyi’s target was the idea that real knowledge is the kind with the knower removed from it, a view of the world from nowhere, belonging to no tradition and needing no trust. Polanyi, who had done fundamental research himself, said no working scientist has ever known anything that way. Every scientist serves a long apprenticeship, relies on judgement he cannot fully justify, and stakes himself on beliefs he might turn out to be wrong about. Polanyi’s name for the resulting thing is personal knowledge: not subjective, because it reaches out to a reality that will answer back, but never impersonal either. The framework of trust you have to stand in before you can know anything at all he called a fiduciary framework, from the Latin for trust. For apologetics this rearranges the furniture. The usual modern demand is that the Christian produce proof first and believe afterwards, while the doubter waits on neutral ground. Newbigin’s reply is that the neutral ground does not exist. The doubter is standing inside a tradition too, trusting a set of beliefs about what counts as evidence, and those beliefs have never been proved by the standard he is applying to the gospel. This is not an excuse to stop giving reasons, and Newbigin gave them all his life (1 Peter 3:15). It is a refusal to let one party alone be asked for its credentials. What the Christian offers, in his phrase, is proper confidence. That is not the certainty Descartes went looking for, doubting everything he possibly could until he struck something nobody could doubt. Nobody in any field has ever actually had that, and Newbigin thought it was time Christians stopped apologising for not having it either. It is the confidence of a person who has committed himself and is willing to be shown wrong (2 Timothy 1:12).

(Q) "There is no way of arriving at the truth except by being willing to take the risk of being mistaken. We must recover the confidence to affirm what can be doubted as a step on the way to contact with reality." + Source: Foreword to Drusilla Scott, Everyman Revived: The Common Sense of Michael Polanyi, revised edition, pages iv to v (Eerdmans, 1995). Newbigin is commending a book that explains Polanyi to readers who are not scientists. He notes that Polanyi was not writing Christian apologetics at all; he was trying to save science from a false ideal of objectivity, and the rescue turned out to be useful to anyone asking how the gospel can be commended as true to a generation that has stopped believing in truth (T4).

(T5) The only convincing explanation of the gospel is a congregation of people who live by it. + A hermeneutic is simply a way of interpreting something: the thing you consult when a text is hard and you want to know what it means. Newbigin’s most quoted sentence says that the interpretation of the gospel is not a book or an argument but a group of people. If a stranger wants to know what it could possibly mean that the last word in human affairs belongs to a man executed on a cross, the answer that will actually reach him is a congregation that is visibly living as though it were so. He arrived at this in Winson Green rather than in a study, and he was specific about what such a congregation does, having tried to build one with eighteen people. It worships, so that the life it lives comes from somewhere outside itself. It is noticeably different from the neighbourhood around it, and at the same time thoroughly mixed up in that neighbourhood’s ordinary troubles, its schools and its unemployment. It serves without calculating the return. It hopes for something beyond this world, which is what keeps it from despair when the numbers do not move. It tells people about Jesus, by name. And it seeks visible unity with the other Christians on the same streets, which is why Newbigin spent his Winson Green years praying and planning with the clergy of three neighbouring churches. He was not dismissing the other work. He wrote books himself, and said so in the same breath. His claim was about order: campaigns, literature, conferences and arguments do their work only when they are rooted in and lead back to a community that is already living the thing. A demonstration model has to be running for the sales brochure to mean anything.

(Q) "I am suggesting that the only answer, the only hermeneutic of the gospel, is a congregation of men and women who believe it and live by it." + Source: The Gospel in a Pluralist Society, chapter 18, "The Congregation as Hermeneutic of the Gospel," page 227 (Eerdmans, 1989). The question he has just asked is how it could ever be credible to people that the power which has the last word in human affairs is represented by a man hanging on a cross. He goes straight on to say that he is not dismissing evangelistic campaigns, Bibles, conferences or even books like the one the reader is holding, only that they are secondary and work only as they lead back to a believing community (T5).

(Q) "It is therefore strange and sad that the adjectives ‘evangelical’ and ‘ecumenical’ should have come in our time to stand for two mutually opposed positions." + Source: "Cross-Currents in Ecumenical and Evangelical Understandings of Mission," International Bulletin of Missionary Research 6, number 4 (October 1982), page 146. The two words started as near synonyms. The evangel is the good news; the oikoumene is the whole inhabited earth. Newbigin points out that both camps say the gospel is for the whole world, and that the quarrel had been advertised in the summer of 1980 when the two wings held rival world mission conferences within weeks of each other, at Melbourne and at Pattaya. He wrote as a man who thought every Christian is obliged to be both, and that is largely how the church has read him since.

What the Church Made of Him

(†) He wrote a paper for a committee in 1983 that became a movement on two continents, and the movement left the church the word "missional". + In Britain the response to The Other Side of 1984 was immediate enough to surprise its author, and the discussion it started organised itself as the Gospel and Our Culture programme. Regional conferences followed in 1990 and 1991, and in July 1992 four hundred delegates met at Swanwick in Derbyshire under the title Newbigin had given them, "The Gospel as Public Truth." In North America the same call produced the Gospel and Our Culture Network in the late 1980s. George Hunsberger, who became its coordinator, had written his doctoral thesis on Newbigin; Darrell Guder had been working the same seam. In 1998, the year Newbigin died, six of the network’s leaders published Missional Church: A Vision for the Sending of the Church in North America, and acknowledged their debt to him in its opening chapter. That book is where the adjective "missional" entered ordinary church speech. It was meant to carry one particular thought: that mission is not a department of the church’s programme but the reason the church exists, since the church is sent as the Son was sent (John 20:21). The word has travelled a long way from the book, and much that now calls itself missional would not have interested Newbigin. But the underlying move, from asking how the church can attract people in the West to asking what a missionary encounter with the West would require, is his, and it has reshaped how a great many congregations describe themselves.

(†) He spent his working life in the ecumenical institutions and is read today mostly by evangelicals. + Newbigin spent his working life in ecumenical institutions, at a time when a great many evangelicals regarded the World Council of Churches as the place where mission went to die. By the ordinary sorting of the period he belonged to the other side. Yet it is largely evangelicals who read him now, and the reason is that the ordinary sorting never fitted him. Look at what he actually held. The atonement was an objective accomplished fact, done outside us whether anyone feels it or not. Evangelism means naming the name of Jesus, and where the name is not named there is no evangelism. The church exists for the people outside it rather than for its members. Any evangelical would sign those. He also held, in the same breath, that the gospel bears on economics and politics and cannot be shrunk to the saving of individual souls, which in those years was the sentence the other camp was known for. Neither side could claim him whole, and he thought the division between them absurd and said so in print. His account of knowledge did something else: it arrived at the same moment as several other attempts to break the same logjam, and it strengthened them. Alvin Plantinga and the Reformed epistemologists, philosophers asking what makes a belief a reasonable one to hold in the first place, were arguing that belief in God can be rational without being derived from neutral premises. Alasdair MacIntyre was arguing that moral reasoning always happens inside a tradition. Newbigin, coming at it as a missionary rather than a philosopher, said the same thing in the plainest available terms and drew the practical conclusion for preaching. Pastors who will never open Polanyi have taken from him the confidence to tell the Christian story as a true account of the world rather than defending it inside somebody else’s. The debt is easy to trace in the generation that followed. Timothy Keller worked out a ministry in secular Manhattan on explicitly Newbigin-shaped lines and credited him for the framework in Center Church. The habit, now common in English-speaking churches, of speaking about "the story we live in" rather than arguing point by point from neutral ground is in large measure his doing.

(†) He pressed through a merger that never brought the renewal he hoped for, and he would not say what becomes of those who never hear. + He kept his own accounts honestly, and two entries belong on the other side of them. Both come from what he did and wrote himself. - The integration of 1961. Newbigin, more than anyone, pushed the International Missionary Council into the World Council of Churches. He did it against warnings from missionary leaders who feared that the missionary impulse would be absorbed into a larger agenda and disappear. Twenty years later he sat down and wrote an assessment of his own work, and the assessment is candid: the renewal he had hoped for in the World Council and its member churches had not happened. He still defended the decision, on the ground that it had created the conditions in which a rebirth of missionary concern could happen. Whether that is a sufficient answer to the people who warned him is a fair question, and it has been asked by critics inside the ecumenical movement as well as outside it. What can be said for him is that he did not let the matter rest. He spent the 1990s fighting, in public and sometimes sharply, against a direction in the World Council which he said left the church’s missionary calling out of view altogether, and he admitted that if that direction prevailed the merger would have to be judged a mistake. - The question he would not answer. Asked what becomes of those who die without having heard of Christ, Newbigin consistently refused to give a verdict. Scripture does not put that knowledge in our hands, he held, and pressing for it is a species of improper curiosity. When he did say where he stood, he did it by taking the three labels the debate runs on and accepting half of each: • Exclusivist, in affirming the unique truth of the revelation in Christ. Not exclusivist, if that means denying that a non-Christian may be saved. • Inclusivist, in refusing to limit God’s saving grace to church members. Not inclusivist, if that means treating other religions as vehicles of salvation. • Pluralist, in acknowledging God’s gracious work in every human life. Not pluralist, if that means denying the decisiveness of what God did in Jesus. Pluralists have called that evasive, and evangelicals have asked whether a refusal to say who is lost can support the urgency the New Testament attaches to preaching. Both objections deserve a hearing. Both come up against the same fact: Newbigin gave his own life to going where Christ was not named, which is not the behaviour of a man who thought the answer did not matter. Neither entry touches what he was chiefly right about, and he would have been the first to say that a man’s mistakes are part of the record. His own summary of a life’s work was that the agenda was unfinished.