The Open Secret

An Introduction to the Theology of Mission

Lesslie Newbigin

• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Year: 1995
• ISBN:
  9781467420747
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Ministro del culto cristiano

Aimed at bringing contemporary concerns in mission theology to a wide-reading public, this volume flows from Newbigin's extensive experience in the mission field and from lectures developed especially to prepare men and women for missionary service. Newbigin describes the Christian mission as the declaration of an open secret—open in that it is preached to all nations, secret in that it is manifest only to the eyes of faith. The result is a thoroughly biblical attempt to lead the church to embrace its Christ-given task of presenting the gospel in our complex modern world. This revised edition includes a helpful index and a new preface.

CHAPTER 1

The Background of the Discussion

“CHRIST is the light of the nations.” With these majestic words the Second Vatican Council began the greatest of its documents, the “Constitution on the Church.” Fundamental to everything else that came forth from the council were the reaffirmation of the missionary character of the church, the recognition of the unfinished task which that implies, the confession that the church is a pilgrim people on its way to the ends of the earth and the end of time, and the acknowledgment of the need for a new openness to the world into which the church is sent.

This new readiness to acknowledge the missionary character of the church, to confess that “there is no participation in Christ without participation in his mission to the world,”¹ is not confined to the Roman Catholic church. All the old established churches of the Western world have been brought to a new recognition that mission belongs to the very being of the church. “Mission,” of course, is not a new word, but it is being used in a new way. All the churches of Western Christendom — Catholic and Protestant — have been familiar with missions. But missions were enterprises that belonged to the exterior of church life. They were carried on somewhere else — in Asia, Africa, or the South Pacific, in the slums of the city, or among the gypsies, the vagrants, the marginal people. In many contexts a “mission church” was the second-class institution in the downtown quarter of the city, in distinction from the well-heeled institution in the affluent quarter, which was just “the church.” In some forms of ecclesiastical vernacular, a “missionary diocese” was a diocese that had not yet graduated to the full status of a diocese without qualification. Theological faculties might have provided a place for “missions” as a branch of practical theology, but it had no place in the central teaching of Christian doctrine. To put it briefly, the church approved of “missions” but was not itself the mission.

In the preceding paragraph I have used past tenses. No doubt there are large parts of Christendom where the present tense would still be applicable. However, most thoughtful Christians in the old, established Western churches can no longer use this kind of language. They recognize that, with the radical secularization of Western culture, the churches are in a missionary situation in what once was Christendom. Moreover, the struggles through which the younger churches born of Western missions have had to pass in order to graduate from “mission” to “church” have forced the older churches to recognize that this separation of church from mission is theologically indefensible. More and more Christians of the old churches have come to recognize that a church that is not “the church in mission” is no church at all. Consequently the agenda papers of church conferences are liberally sprinkled with discussions about the church’s mission. For the first time in many centuries the question of the nature of the church’s missionary task is a burning issue for debate within the heart of the older churches. Deeply held convictions on the subject clash with each other and — in some places at least — polarization has reached the point where anathemas are in the air. (See, for example, the “Frankfurt Declaration on the Fundamental Basis of Mission,” 1970.) This is a new situation, and it is full of promise. The present discussion is written in the hope of placing the debate in a broad biblical perspective and in the hope that to do so will release new energies for the contemporary mission of the church, not only in its global dimensions but also in its application to the tough new paganism of the contemporary Western world.

I

It seems wise to begin the discussion with a glance at the historical background of missions. Any attempt to deal with the present without awareness of what has gone before can only lead to distorted vision and false judgment. At the risk of absurd oversimplification, let me try to sketch the earlier chapters of the story in which we now have to play our part.

The story begins with the vast explosion of love, joy, and hope released into the world by the resurrection from the tomb of the crucified and rejected Jesus. The shock waves of that explosion spread within a few years to all the quarters of the compass. We are familiar with its spread westward to Rome and so throughout Europe, but characteristically we forget the other parts of the story. From Antioch, the first great missionary center where there were both Greek- and Syriac-speaking Christians, the gospel spread not only westward into the Greek-speaking world but eastward in its Syriac form along the ancient trade routes linking the Mediterranean with central Asia, India, and China. By the end of the second century Edessa was the capital of a Christian state. By the year 225 there were more than twenty Christian bishops in what is now Iraq. Armenia was a Christian nation by the end of the third century. In 410 the Persian Empire granted recognition to the church in a concordat that established the separate authority of the church over its own members — the system later to be adopted by the Muslims. By the fifth century there were Christian bishops in Meshed, Herat, and Merv, and the gospel had made its way right into the heart of Asia. Many of the Arabian tribes had become Christian as early as the second century. The gospel had come to India — possibly with the coming of Thomas himself. Ethiopia had accepted the gospel by the middle of the fourth century.

It was into the midst of this Eastern Christendom, so largely forgotten by the Western church, that Islam was born. Another mighty explosion forged the half-Christian tribes of Arabia into a warrior nation and carried the power of Islam, within a century of the Prophet’s death, right through the old heartland of Christendom, subduing the mighty Persian Empire, Syria, Egypt, and the whole southern shore of the Mediterranean. From there it was not long before the armies of Islam had conquered Spain, southern France, Sicily, and southern Italy and had marched right up to Rome itself, where the bishop was forced to pay tribute to the Muslim power.

Meanwhile, the pagan tribes from the north were ravaging the whole of northern and western Europe, wiping out the Christian culture so wonderfully developed in the preceding centuries. An observer living toward the end of the ninth century could have been forgiven for thinking Christianity was a lost cause. In the vast areas held by Islam, Christians had become second-class citizens enclosed within the confines of the Millet system and precluded from any active evangelism. And the Western Church itself had become something of a large ghetto, dominated and largely surrounded by the superior culture and military power of Islam.

It is important for a right understanding of the issue with which this book is concerned to remember that a great deal of the substance of the Western Christian tradition — its liturgy, theology, and church order — was formed during the long period in which Western Christendom was an almost enclosed ghetto precluded from missionary advance. Church and people were one society struggling to maintain itself against a superior power. There was little possibility that the church could see itself as a society sent out in mission to all peoples.

The movement by which Western Christendom began to gather strength to reassert itself against the power of Islam has interesting parallels with the recent history of national movements among the colonies of the Western powers. Historians of the Indian national movement (to take only one example) agree that it was the injection of European ideas through the educational system that fueled the beginnings of nationalism. In a similar way the revival of Western Christendom after the Dark Ages was greatly indebted to the infusion of new thought through the translation into Latin, from early in the twelfth century, of the Arabic thought that had been developed by the synthesis of Greek science and philosophy with Islamic theology. (For this gift Western Christendom remains permanently indebted to Islam, and beyond that to the Nestorian and other Eastern Christians who were the teachers of Greek learning to the semibarbarian peoples from Arabia in the early centuries of Islam.)

The long struggle of Western Christendom to break out of the Muslim grip had its focus in the Iberian peninsula. When after centuries of struggle the Iberian peoples achieved their liberation, they were the pioneers in daring voyages of exploration designed to circumvent the Muslim power, break its grip on the trade with the East, and find a way to the sources of the spices of East Asia, without which Europe could not live.

Islam was a theocratic system in which there was a fusion of religious faith and political power even more complete than was the case in the Christian society. The counterattack against Islam was likewise an enterprise in which religious faith, political and military power, and commercial enterprise were inextricably mixed. Spanish and Portuguese penetration into Asia and the Americas made little distinction between political and ecclesiastical control. When the northern European powers — Danish, British, and Dutch — joined in the game, the emphasis was perhaps more on its commercial aspect, but the essential character of the enterprise was the same. Asia, the Americas, and — later — Africa experienced the impact of Western missions as an integral part of a whole movement in which the military, political, commercial, cultural, and religious aspects were indissolubly blended. In this respect the global expansion of Western power was neither new nor strange. It was one more example of a constantly repeated human experience. It has been, perhaps, the most far-reaching in history. It looms large in our view because it is the most recent of its kind. It is too near us to be seen in its true proportions or to be evaluated in all its mixture of good and evil. The one thing that can certainly be said about this chapter of human history is that it is over. For more than two centuries it has provided the framework in which the Western churches have understood their world missionary task. To continue to think in the familiar terms is now folly. We are forced to do something that the Western churches have never had to do since the days of their own birth — to discover the form and substance of a missionary church in terms that are valid in a world that has rejected the power and the influence of the Western nations. Missions will no longer work along the stream of expanding Western power. They have to learn to go against the stream. And in this situation we shall find that the New Testament speaks to us much more directly than does the nineteenth century as we learn afresh what it means to bear witness to the gospel from a position not of strength but of weakness.

The reader will rightly recognize that I am indulging in very sweeping historical generalizations. The picture is much more complicated when one begins to look at the detail. To look only at the most recent chapter of the story shows that the rejection of Western leadership by the rest of the world has developed through various stages and is not yet complete. A century ago the Western nations so dominated the world that most of the rest of mankind stood in awe of the white man and accepted his claim to political, cultural, and religious leadership. Even when the movements for political emancipation began, the leaders of national movements accepted in large measure the cultural leadership of the West, using Western languages, political ideas, and forms of organization. A second stage can be observed (for example, in the movements that have ousted Congress from power in India) in which these are rejected and recourse is had to native languages and cultures and to more ancient traditions of social life. But even with this there is still a general readiness to accept the science and technology of the West because of the tangible benefits that they seem to bring. It is not clear that this will continue to be so. The West is coming to realize the fearful human cost of its science and technology and cannot assume that it will continue to enjoy forever the almost universal authority that is now accorded to them. We have lived through two decades in which “development” was held out as the goal to which all efforts should be directed, and development was understood as the third-world people’s movement in the direction taken by the peoples of Europe and North America. We are now emerging from this period. It can no longer be assumed that this is the goal. We must expect that the rest of the world will raise yet more radical questions about the goal that the developed world has taken for granted since the period of the Enlightenment and that still governs most of our thinking.

One almost universal feature of the world scene, however, seems unlikely to change in the near future. It is what has been described as the revolution of rising expectations. People in every part of the world are agreed in making demands upon society which in former ages were made only by a small segment in each nation. The French and American revolutions opened a radically new chapter in human history by establishing governments committed to the restructuring of human life on the principles developing during the Enlightenment. These principles were embodied in a popular and explosive form in Thomas Paine’s “The Rights of Man.” They were experienced in revolutionary movements through the nineteenth century and achieved apocalyptic expression in the Marxist vision of a new world to emerge from Armageddon — a world in which every man’s need would be met by the willing contribution of each according to his ability. The driving force of this vision extends far beyond its Marxist expression. It is embodied in the “Four Freedoms” of F. D. Roosevelt and in the promises which any political party must now make if it is to have a hope of power. It is indeed true that there are still millions of men and women patiently tilling the fields of Asia as their ancestors did, with no expectation that life will ever be otherwise than it has always been — a life of almost ceaseless labor, or recurrent hunger, and of very drastically limited freedom. But the movement is inexorably toward the rejection of this agelong bondage. Everywhere people demand and governments promise “the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” and everywhere people grow impatient and rebellious when the promise is not fulfilled; if there is one generalization about the human situation today that is almost universally valid, it is surely this. The inner relationship between this expectation of a new world and the Christian gospel of the reign of God is one of the issues that must be discussed in any contemporary theology of mission.

One more key fact in the new situation of the Christian world mission remains to be stated. It is, of course, that the church now exists as a global fellowship present in almost every part of the world and is increasingly conscious of its universal character. This “great new fact of our time,” as William Temple called it, is the fruit of the missionary work of the past three centuries. Whatever criticisms we may have to make of that work, nothing can take away from our sense of wonder and thanksgiving as we contemplate this new fact. All thinking about the world mission of the church today must thankfully and joyfully take account of the fact that the “home base” of missions is now nothing less than the worldwide community, and every proposed expression of the church’s missionary outreach must be tested by asking whether it can be accepted by the whole ecumenical family as an authentic expression of the gospel.

II

In what ways and with what degree of success have the Western churches adjusted their thinking about missions to meet the new realities? Once more I must take the risk of trying to answer this question with a few sweeping generalizations in order to provide the perspective for the discussion that follows.

The World Missionary Conference of 1910 was already thinking in truly global terms and was aware of the deeply evil elements in the impact of Western power on the peoples of Asia, Africa, and the Pacific. But the younger churches were only marginally acknowledged, and there was a still unshaken confidence in the future of Western civilization as the bearer of the gospel to the “backward peoples.” At Jerusalem in 1928 there was a fuller acknowledgment of the younger churches and a much more acute awareness of the ambiguities of Western power and of the worldwide impact of Western secularism. At Tambaram ten years later there was a new awareness of the worldwide church as the people entrusted with the gospel and called to do battle with a paganism that was showing its power in the heart of the old Christendom.

In the years following World War II, the church-centered concept of mission was further consolidated. At Willingen (1952) there was a strong affirmation of mission as central and essential to the life of the whole church seen as a world fellowship, but in the course of that meeting a new insistence began to be felt upon the need for a missiology that was not domesticated in the church. The 1960 conference, convened at Strasbourg by the World’s Student Christian Federation on “The Life and Mission of the Church,” saw the emergence of a radically secular interpretation of the missio Dei. The assembled students were challenged “to move out of the traditional Church structure in open, flexible and mobile groups” and “to begin radically to de-sacralise the Church.”² In the following decade the concept of mission in those circles influenced by the ecumenical movement was strongly influenced by this radically secular vision. Mission was primarily concerned with the doing of God’s justice in the world and not primarily with increasing the membership of the church. In the influential book of Arendt van Leeuwen, Christianity and World History, the process of secularization was hailed as the present form of the impact of the biblical message upon the traditional societies. The World Council of Churches’ study of missionary structures for the congregation affirmed that it is the world, not the church, that “writes the agenda.”³ And at Uppsala in 1968 the Fourth Assembly of the WCC accepted a definition of mission that identified it primarily with action for humanization in the secular life of the world. The traditional concept of “mission fields,” identified as geographical areas lying beyond the frontiers of Christendom, was replaced by the concept of “priority situations for mission,” identified as situations where, irrespective of the presence or absence of the church, action for human dignity was called for.

Concurrent with these developments, and to some extent related to them, was the development of a new attitude toward the world religions. This called for a relationship of dialogue and (where appropriate) partnership to replace traditional attitudes often stigmatized as “proselytizing.” With a recognition of the secular as the sphere of God’s action in history came the call to recognize also his action within the world religions.

A vehement attack on these developments was launched in 1970 by the “Frankfurt Declaration on the Fundamental Crisis of Missions,” mainly the work of Peter Beyerhaus of Tübingen. Less polemical, but probably more influential, was the “Wheaton Declaration” of 1966, adopted at a conference called by conservative evangelical missionary agencies in the United States claiming to represent the work of more than 11,000 overseas missionaries. This declaration, while rejecting the missiological developments in the World Council of Churches, also sounded the call to take seriously and penitently into account the issues of unity and social justice that were motivating missionary thinking in the WCC. The ensuing decade saw meetings...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface to the Second Edition
• Preface to the First Edition
• 1. The Background of the Discussion
• 2. The Question of Authority
• 3. The Mission of the Triune God
• 4. Proclaiming the Kingdom of the Father: Mission as Faith in Action
• 5. Sharing the Life of the Son: Mission as Love in Action
• 6. Bearing the Witness of the Spirit: Mission as Hope in Action
• 7. The Gospel and World History
• 8. Mission as Action for God’s Justice
• 9. Church Growth, Conversion, and Culture
• 10. The Gospel among the Religions