Lesslie Newbigin may not have thrown much weight around Christian bookstores in America, but he sure packed a wallop around the world.
When you look at his resume, you can see why. He was bishop of the Church of South India, general secretary of the International Missionary Council, editor of the "International Review of Missions,״ and an early leader in the World Council of Churches.
One authority said that he "has few if any peers in this half of the twentieth century for laying the biblical and theological foundations for missions.״ Christianity Today called him a "world-class theologian״ who wrote "books without footnotes.״ He had a wide range of interests including missions, evangelism, ecclesiology, and apologetics. When you read one of his books, it's almost like reading C. S. Lewis because it is understandable, stimulating, and mind-stretching.
In 1936 Newbigin left his native England to become a missionary in India. When the Church of South India was formed in 1947, uniting Anglican, Methodist, Presbyterian, and Congregational churches, he became one of its first bishops. As he contemplated that union of churches, he realized that very lit-tie had been written on the doctrine of the church, except polemical books, which tried to prove that one church's polity was better than the rest. So he wrote Rethinking the Church, seeking to find biblical directions for the new ecumenical church of South India. About four years later, he was asked to update the book for a wider audience. The result was The Household of God.
The book grabbed the attention of not only the ecumenical world of Protestantism but also the Roman Catholic world. It was a book the Second Vatican Council in Rome a decade later seriously considered, and the Pope's "Light of the World" pro-
nouncement (Lumen Gentium) was influenced by Newbigin's book. Beyond that, Newbigin's book was one of the first to recognize Pentecostals as a group that needed to be invited into discussions about the future church. He became one of the few theological thinkers who could speak to all poles of Christendom: the liberal, the evangelical, the charismatic, and the Catholic.
The key to effective missionary work, he said, was to raise up believing congregations. "How can this strange story of God made man, of a crucified Savior, of resurrection and new ere-ation, become credible for those whose entire mental training has conditioned them to believe that the real world is a world that can be satisfactorily explained and managed without the hypothesis of God? I know of only one clue to the answering , ^ ״ , of that question, only one real hermeneutic of the gospel: con] gregations that believe it."
He was horrified by the kind of attitude among Christians that says, "Well, I happen to be a Christian, but of course 1 wouldn't expect you to think that." He expressed his concerns about the directions of the ecumenical movement. All religions are not equally valid. Christianity is unique because Jesus is uniquely the Son of God; he is the only Way. Religion isn't a matter of personal taste. A bold proclamation of the Bible story, especially of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, must make up the central authority for Christian preaching, whether the preaching is in the East or the West. It is not true, he said, that all roads lead to the peak of the same mountain. Some roads lead over the precipice, When the World Council of Churches heard Pete Seeger sing, "Pie in the sky when you die" at its 1968 Uppsala Assembly, Mewbigirr was deeply disturbed by the mockery of the Christian hope.
This surprising man might be traveling the dusty roads of a remote Indian village one day and then flying to Switzerland the next day to meet with the great theologians of the world. In 1952, for instance, he chaired the "Committee of Twenty-Five," a group of the world's most noted theologians, which included Karl Barth, Emil Brunner, and Reinhold Niebuhr, as they drafted a statement on Christian hope. Afterward he returned to the villages of India to resume his missionary work, strengthening the household of God.