Tradition and Modernity: Christian and Muslim Perspectives

Newbigin and the Critique of Modernity

Newbigin and the Critique of Modernity p au l w es to n Life in Brief F ollowing lesslie newbigin’s death in 1998, the obituary in The Times described him as ‘‘one of the foremost missionary statesmen of his generation,’’ and ‘‘one of the outstanding figures on the world Christian stage in the second half of the century.’’1 Born in 1909 to Quaker parents, he studied at Cambridge University and went to India in 1936 as an ordained missionary with the Church of Scotland. He spent the best part of thirty-eight years there until retirement in 1974. During his early years there, he was involved in the discussions that led to the formation of the ecumenical Church of South India in 1947. He became one of its founding bishops, serving the new diocese of Madurai and Ramnad. He was soon drawn into the work of the World Council of Churches (WCC) and in 1961 became the first director of the new WCC division of World Mission and Evangelism and editor of the International Review of Missions. In 1965 he returned to India on his election as Bishop of Madras, and, alongside his diocesan responsibilities, continued to travel extensively both to speak and to lecture, and to take part in various consultations in connection with the WCC. During his working life, he also wrote extensively, with significant publications on the nature of the church, on ecumenism , and on trinitarian approaches to mission.2 Newbigin ‘‘retired’’ to the United Kingdom in 1974 and was appointed to the staff of Selly Oak Colleges in Birmingham to teach students training for missionary work. He became a minister in the United Reformed Church (becoming its national moderator in 1978–79), and in 1981—at the age of seventy-two—took on the leadership of a small inner-city congregation in Winson Green, Birmingham, which he led for the next seven years. 141 142 Paul Weston It was during this time that Newbigin’s engagement with the questions facing the church in the West began to take a coherent shape. He had written a short pamphlet arising out of a working party convened by the British Council of Churches, which was published in 1983 under the title The Other Side of 1984: Questions for the Churches.3 It soon became a bestseller and was the first in a series of publications by Newbigin that concentrated on the missionary challenges raised by the dominance of an increasingly secularized culture in the West. He was genuinely surprised at how rapidly the questions it raised were taken up by churches both in the United Kingdom and abroad. What became ‘‘The Gospel and Our Culture’’ program soon gathered pace and led to two regional conferences in 1990 and 1991 and to an international conference of four hundred delegates held in July 1992 at Swanwick in Derbyshire. In tandem with these public discussions, Newbigin’s writings began to focus increasingly on the issues that were being raised by the missionary challenge of the West. A further 14 books and 160 articles and smaller pieces followed the publication of The Other Side of 1984, the most well-known of these being Foolishness to the Greeks, The Gospel in a Pluralist Society, and Proper Confidence.4 Lesslie Newbigin died in 1998 at the age of eighty-eight. Introductory Comments on Newbigin and Modernity At the heart of Newbigin’s later writings is a critique of, and response to, the Western church’s captivity to the culture of ‘‘modernity.’’ His diagnosis is predominantly philosophical and more especially epistemological, tracing the origins of the crisis of modernity to the thought of philosophers such as René Descartes and John Locke in the seventeenth century. It was these thinkers, he argues, who effectively laid the philosophical foundations upon which postEnlightenment assumptions in the West about knowledge and truth are based, and they have undergirded the culture of modernity in the West ever since. Newbigin argues that at the center of the Enlightenment ‘‘project’’ was a decisive move away from the kind of ‘‘fiduciary’’ approach to knowledge that was characteristic of earlier thinkers such as Augustine who saw the knowledge of God as the predicate upon which all other knowing is based.5 Descartes effectively replaced this with a more circumscribed view of the process of knowing predicated on the only thing we could know to be certain: the existence of the thinking individual as an autonomous knower (summed up by his dictum: cogito ergo...