Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Lesslie Newbigin (1909-1998) was a renowned theologian, missionary, and church leader. Born and educated in England, he later ministered for several decades in India. Over the course of his career, he held leadership roles in the International Missionary Council and the World Council of Churches. In recognition of his accomplishments in missiology and ecclesiology, he was awarded honorary doctorates from numerous institutions, including the University of Cambridge and the University of Edinburgh. He published more than twenty books, including Foolishness to the Greeks: The Gospel and Western Culture and The Gospel in a Pluralist Society.

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The Open Secret

William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company

Contents

Preface to the Second Edition............................................................viPreface to the First Edition.............................................................vii1. The Background of the Discussion......................................................12. The Question of Authority.............................................................123. The Mission of the Triune God.........................................................194. Proclaiming the Kingdom of the Father: Mission as Faith in Action.....................305. Sharing the Life of the Son: Mission as Love in Action................................406. Bearing the Witness of the Spirit: Mission as Hope in Action..........................567. The Gospel and World History..........................................................668. Mission as Action for God's Justice...................................................919. Church Growth, Conversion, and Culture................................................12110. The Gospel among the Religions.......................................................160Index....................................................................................191

Chapter One

"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," 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...