The Gospel and Pluralism Today: Reassessing Lesslie Newbigin in the 21st Century (Missiological Engagements) by Scott W. Sunquist

Author:Scott W. Sunquist
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: InterVarsity Press
Published: 2015-11-05T23:00:00+00:00

The Spirit and Mission Theology: Expanding Newbigin’s Reach

This first section is primarily descriptive, albeit with a hermeneutical twist. Chiefly, I read Newbigin as a trinitarian missiologist and epistemologist, though from a Pentecostal perspective.2 I will then retrieve and foreground the pneumatological threads in his writings largely as they pertain to these themes but also show how they can and ought to be filled out in ways and for reasons consistent with his overall project.

Newbigin as trinitarian missiologist: A Pentecostal and pneumatological perspective. If a theologian like Karl Barth was almost single-handedly responsible for revitalizing the doctrine of the Trinity for Christian theology in the twentieth century, it is not too far-fetched to think that Lesslie Newbigin (1909–1998) played an essential role in retrieving trinitarian theology for theology of mission and mission theology in the wake of Barth’s attainments. Newbigin’s 1963 book, Trinitarian Faith and Today’s Mission,3 can now, in retrospect, be viewed as a manifesto that opened up conversations between ecumenists, theologians and missiologists across a chasm that had separated those working in the dogmatic disciplines from those laboring in what was considered the more practical fields of ministry and mission. The brilliance of Newbigin’s trinitarian theology of mission derives at least in part from how he understood the historicity of Christian faith in its pentecostal and especially incarnational events as foundational for Christian witness to the gospel in the modern world.4 Thus the proclamation of the gospel revolved around Jesus, “the one who announces the coming of the reign of God, the one who is acknowledged as the Son of God and is anointed by the Spirit of God.”5 As such, then, Christian mission can be understood no more or less than “as proclaiming the kingdom of the Father, as sharing the life of the Son, and as bearing the witness of the Spirit.”6 Such is manifest as Christian faith, love and hope in action: testifying to the gospel, embodying the gospel in love of neighbor, and living out the gospel in transformative and hopeful action that makes a difference in the world.7

Now while it is more often than not the case that trinitarian theologies are more accurately called binitarian (in terms of their neglect of pneumatology),8 this criticism fortunately applies less to Newbigin. To be sure, Newbigin’s christocentrism is palpable throughout much of his theological output so that one might be tempted to judge that his pneumatology is just as anemic as those found in other putatively trinitarian theological visions.9 Yet this is done only by overlooking the efforts he expended to probe specifically pneumatological matters at significant points over decades of work.10 For our purposes, we can summarize such pneumatological considerations along at least the following three lines.11 First, Newbigin’s pneumatology was part and parcel of his doctrine of God and of God’s redemptive activity. Thus Christians can only bear witness to the gospel in and through the power of the sovereign Holy Spirit. The mission of God for and through the church, including the church’s election,

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