459 - Unfinished Agenda: An Autobiography

Unfinished Agenda: An Autobiography
Lesslie Newbigin
Grand Rapids, Eerdmans, 1985. 263 pp. $11.95.

Author of more than a dozen books, missionary to India for 38 years, elected a bishop of the Church of South India-which he helped to found-before the age of 40, Associate General Secretary of the World Council of Churches, five years a teacher at Selly Oak, and pastor of an inner city church in Birmingham, England, the Rt. Reverend Lesslie Newbigin has lived a life full of adventure, service, and faith. This book is subtitled an autobiography but it is more accurately a memoir. A life as full as his cannot fit into 263 pages. Inevitably, a work such as this reads at times a bit like a telephone directory, full of names and places.

Yet is is fun to read. The numerous witty anecdotes ensure this. My favorite is one that occurred when the Bishop was taking his first tour in a

460 - Unfinished Agenda: An Autobiography

diocese largely composed of an uneasy mix of SPG Anglicans and Congregationalists. He arrived in Ramnad, an SPG center, to discover a huge procession, complete with elephant, brass band, and a rose-covered landau drawn by two white horses, awaiting him. He was invited to step into the landau. "I tried to imagine what my Presbyterian friends would think. 'But I can't,' I said. 'Why not? Is there any problem?' was the courteous and worried reply. 'Well,' I said, 'when Our Lord went into a procession he rode on a donkey…''Of course! He did that so you could do this. Please get in.' I did." This anecdote is not only humorous; it tells much about the proud, clever, wily Tamils of South India that the bishop so loves.

So, one reads this book and laughs and cries, pausing often in wonder at an especially acute insight. On the next to last page, I read these words "I do not now believe that the 'modern' secular culture of the post-Enlightenment West has an assured future. It seems to me to show all the signs of disintegration. I look back with real penitence on the occasions when, as a missionary to India, I censured some things and commended others on grounds which-I now realize-were not evangelical but merely cultural."

Here is demonstrated the honesty and humility which only great persons are able to display. With these words, Newbigin has set the still almost unbegun theological agenda for future theological, ecumenical, and missiological reflection and practice. In my opinion, this book is essential reading for anyone interested in missions and/ or ecumenics or for any academic courses dealing with those interrelated subjects. Indeed, one of the greatest values of the book is to demonstrate how often "missions" have led the way to greater ecumenicity and how much ecumenicity aids mission.

For all my admiration of the book and of the man, I have some quibbles. Newbigin relates how in 1957 he sat up all night on a plane from Bombay to Rome reading the New Testament and noting every reference to the "world." He was preparing a talk he had to give at Bossey. "The result was a lecture in which I advanced the thesis that 'what we are witnessing is the process by which more and more of the human race is being gathered up into that history whose center is the cross.'"

The Dutch missionary-theologian, Arend Th. van Leeuwen, was present at that meeting and Newbigin's talk inspired him to begin writing his enormously influential work, Christianity in World History. That book is arguably the best application of the 1960's "secular theology" to the field of missiology.

Newbigin was, not surprisingly, greatly attracted to it, and yet-as has been pointed out in an earlier quotehe now seriously doubts the future of Western history. In a series of lectures at Princeton Seminary in 1984 (just published by Eerdmans under the title Foolishness to the Greeks), he gives a Christian response to Western secularism. What continues to puzzle me is why the Bishop has not demonstrated greater enthusiasm for the research into other cultures and the heart of those cultures, their religions.

Again and again, in the memoir, Newbigin demonstrates how well he could dialogue with Indian villagers and with Indian political movements, and yet in all these pages there is no deep encounter with Hinduism as religious system from which one can learn. His encounter with the Gandhians was largely negative.

I cannot help but feel that, given his current insights about secularization and Westernization, the Bishop-and all the rest of us concerned with the crucial issue of the work of Christ in the world-need to add the empathetic study of religions to the "unfinished agenda."

Charles A. Ryerson
Princeton Theological Seminary
Princeton, N.J.