Abstract
Lesslie Newbigin’s contribution to the area of spirituality has remained largely unexplored. It is within Newbigin’s most famous contribution, his missiology of Western culture, that his contribution to spirituality becomes apparent. He applied narrative theology to a central question of spirituality. How ought our life with God be formed, and how should that life be performed publicly in the world? This article explores Newbigin’s answer to both those questions by first situating Newbigin within the schools of narrative theology. Following that, a picture of his missional narrative spirituality is presented in three of his seminal works.
Keywords
Introduction
Lesslie Newbigin’s contributions to missiology, ecclesiology, apologetics, religious and cultural pluralism, eschatology, and public theology, have been explored in dissertations, monographs, and essays. 1 However, his work in the area of spirituality has remained largely unexplored. Geoffrey Wainwright’s rigorous study of Newbigin’s life and thought is illustrative of this lacuna. 2 Although Wainwright suggests Newbigin’s thought played a wide variety of roles—confident believer, direct evangelist, ecumenical advocate, pastoral bishop, missionary strategist, religious interlocutor, social visionary, liturgical preacher, and Christian apologist—his role as a mystic is never given serious attention. Does Lesslie Newbigin have a contribution to spirituality that awaits discovery? If so, why has this gone unnoticed by so many careful students of his writings?
This essay proposes that Newbigin’s contribution to spirituality has gone unnoticed for two reasons: first, there has been a general lack of engagement with his thought among Christian scholarship beyond the confines of missiology and ecumenics; and second, Newbigin gives sparse attention to topics of which he calls “interior spirituality.” This matters, as readers of spirituality often stop at interior spirituality at the expense of its other dimensions, such as exteriority and activism.
The lack of engagement with Newbigin’s broader corpus by the Christian academy is puzzling. Lesslie Newbigin has been called a Father of the Modern Church and is considered one of the most influential missiologists of the twentieth century. 3 Nevertheless, his teaching remains largely unknown in many academic and ecclesial circles. As David J. Kettle notes, “He is remembered with affection by many who knew him, and his message has inspired many in a general way, but his teaching is not often subject to careful reflection.” 4 Because Newbigin remains, by and large, an undiscovered Father of the Modern Church, his contributions in many areas remain open to fresh investigation. 5
Tracing his work in particular areas of theology is also difficult because of the nature of his writing style. The majority of Newbigin’s writings were composed along the busy roadsides he traveled as a missionary and ecumenical statesman. As Wilbert R. Shenk notes, “Virtually everything Newbigin wrote was ‘on assignment,’ that is, in response to a speaking or writing assignment. . .[he] devoted himself to reflecting on the life of faith as it intersects with the world; he was impatient with ‘airy-fairy’ or detached scholarship that flaunted its objectivity.” 6 According to Shenk, even though he displayed a remarkable level of theological acumen, 7 Newbigin was not, strictly speaking, an academic theologian. He did not primarily write theology for the sake of peer review or engagement; he considered himself a pastor and preacher by nature, rather than a scholar. 8 Those who study Newbigin’s writings must look for contributions in the absence of the style and form they encounter from other influential theological voices.
With these clarifications in mind, identifying Newbigin’s specific contribution to spirituality will require patience, due to the volume of his writings, the ad hoc nature of his writing style, and his lack of openly cited and unambiguous critical engagement with the seminal writings of Western spirituality. Because Newbigin’s engagement in theological sparring was not focused on debates within the theology or history of Western spirituality, but rather on contemporary issues in the areas of the theology of mission and ecumenics, his scholarship on spirituality has long been neglected. It is within missiology and ecumenics that his clearest and most abiding contributions have been made, including his most famous contribution: a missiology of Western culture.
This article will argue that it is also within Newbigin’s missiology of Western culture that his contribution to spirituality can be observed. Newbigin believed that because the Western Church was in danger of being naïvely shaped by the story of the Enlightenment, it needed to remember its identity by embracing the unique story found within the biblical narrative: specifically, the narrative of God’s electing love that calls the church to be a missionary people, living as a hermeneutic of the gospel in their culture by spiritually performing the story of their God. To help the Western Church remember God’s story and the Church’s missionary calling, Newbigin applied narrative theology to a central questions of spirituality: How ought one’s life with God be formed and how should such a sacred life be performed publicly in the world? This article explores Newbigin’s answers to both questions by situating his responses to many of the questions raised within the schools of narrative theology during his lifetime. Only when Newbigin has been properly located among the narrative theologians, and his understanding of narrative defined, will a portrait of his missional narrative spirituality sharpen into focus.
Situating Newbigin Among the Narrative Theologians
To appreciate Newbigin’s place among the narrative theologians of the twentieth century, the following questions require clarification: (1) What is understood as narrative theology in this article? (2) Are there emphases shared among different schools of narrative theology? If so, did Newbigin share those themes in his writings? (3) What kind of relationship did he have with some of the seminal voices of the Yale School of Narrative Theology? (4) Finally, how does narrative theology relate to his contribution to Western spirituality?
An Introduction to Narrative Theology
Narrative theology experienced a resurgence during the mid-twentieth century, as the Western Church began to awaken from its historical-critical slumber and rediscover the narratival nature of the Bible. This awakening was part of a larger narrative turn that was occurring as the West moved toward late modernity. The enthusiasm that surrounded historical-criticism in the early modern period had led to a decline in interest in the literary nature of Scripture, which also left the narrative nature of the Bible under-appreciated. In the early modern period, the Western Church read the Bible less as a story primarily about its life with God in the present and more as a story about how biblical writers and their audiences related to God in a world now far removed from modern spiritual concerns. 9 Figural and narrative readings fell by the wayside as historical criticism emerged. According to Newbigin, modern readers of Scripture struggled between reducing the Bible to a set of private values and treating Scripture as a source containing public facts that could govern the lives of modern readers. 10 Under the influence of the Enlightenment, the Bible was objectified, and its readers’ concerns shifted from seeing their life and times through the text to making historical discoveries about the lives of the writers and the original audience behind the text. Michael Legaspi has argued as much in The Death of Scripture, noting that modern biblical criticism “focuses on the world of the Bible (rather than the world seen through the Bible).” 11 For Newbigin, spirituality, especially exteriority, is performed when the world is seen afresh through the biblical narratives.
Initially, the proposed objectivity of modern biblical criticism held the promise of liberating the biblical text from the constraints of the church’s theology, an unshackling that many scholars believed the early Reformers initiated. The effect of that liberation, according to some, “has not been to reorient the churches around a revitalized biblical center.” Instead, as Timothy George avers, “The historical-critical approach breaks the Bible down into discrete units to be further dissected in terms of competing hypotheses about authorship, literary form, original context, source of origin, and so forth.” 12 The Bible, under the influence of historical criticism, no longer told the true story of universal history; instead, its message left readers with a medley of competing, confused, and contradictory narratives. 13
Several scholars disillusioned by the failed promises of historical criticism began to retrieve the power of narrative. 14 The power of narrative hermeneutics, as experienced by the pre-modern Western Church, was forgotten by the early modern Western Church due to the desire to disassociate from pre-Enlightenment readings that were characterized as theologically biased and historically naïve. Pushing against that kind of disassociative way of receiving the past, several scholars sought to recover the power of narrative, including H. Richard Niebuhr and Hans Frei. The recovery of narrative readings of Scripture began with H. Richard Niebuhr’s stirring chapter in 1941, “The Story of Our Life,” which informed Hans Frei’s article in 1974, “Apologetics, Criticism, and the Loss of Narrative Interpretation.” Biblical scholars, pastors, and theologians alike, with increasing energy, mounted arguments in favor of locating the power of the Bible’s authority in its ability to help its readers live using the biblical narrative. Hans Frei aptly articulated this when he said, “What is real, and what therefore the Christian really lives, is his own pilgrimage; and to its pattern he looks for the assurance that he is really living it.” 15 Narrative theologians, as they were later classified, emphasized the danger of historical criticism, championed the unity of the biblical narrative, and proclaimed the narrative nature of the Bible. In turn, the spirituality of narrative theologians such as Newbigin, was a narratival spirituality.
Newbigin’s Agreement with the Emphases of the Narrative Theologians
Lesslie Newbigin embodied these emphases of narrative theologians. He was concerned about the dangers of historical criticism, believing that underneath a hermeneutic of suspicion, which modern critical biblical scholarship used to establish distance between the Bible and its readers, lay a more problematic hermeneutical approach: the rejection of scripture’s subjective relationship to its readers. Because of that concern, Newbigin said, “There is no longer a conversation between two subjects, the biblical characters and the modern reader. It is now strictly a subject-object relation.” 16 Newbigin argued that the nature of God’s word as both an object of study and the subject that mediates the living voice of God could not be faithfully grasped when readers only looked at the Bible through historical-critical questions. The living, subjective voice of Scripture was grasped when they look through the narrative of Scripture at themselves and the world. 17 A genuinely Christian spirituality embraced the story of Scripture and reimagined the world through that story. Such a story did not arrest all doubts or lead to perfect certainty, but rather, in Newbigin’s language, offered people proper confidence.
Newbigin championed the unity of the biblical narrative throughout his career. In an article from 1954 entitled “Why Study the Old Testament,” he argued the Bible was one organic book centered on Christ. The Bible, Newbigin contended, was not merely a collection of moral or religious teachings 18 or a medley of contradictory messages. 19
We cannot understand the New Testament without the Old and we cannot understand the Old Testament without the New. Therefore, the Church treats them as one book. And the central theme of that book is God’s choosing (election) of a people to be His own people, by whom He purposes to save the world.
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The biblical narratives are held together by a focus on God’s election of a particular people, who were elected in and through a particular individual, God’s Son, Jesus Christ. 21 Newbigin emphatically stated, “Apart from Jesus the Old Testament is a self-contradiction. In the light of Jesus and His cross, we can understand the whole story of God’s people.” 22 The unity of the biblical narrative was a recurring theme in Newbigin’s life. This can be observed in a series of radio broadcasts that he delivered in the mid-1990s. In those radio broadcasts, Newbigin said, “The Bible tells the story of the whole human race in terms of a particular story of one race – that of Israel – and one person within that race – Jesus of Nazareth.” 23
Newbigin believed, in agreement with the narrative theologians, that “the Bible is essentially narrative in form,” 24 one narrative with a central focus on the election of a particular people and the election of a specific person for the sake of the world. 25 To support this argument, he drew directly on the writings of Hans Frei and George Lindbeck. Frei and Lindbeck are widely credited as the founders of the Yale School of Narrative Theology. Paraphrasing Lindbeck’s thoughts from his book The Nature of Doctrine, Newbigin says, “The Bible is, to paraphrase Lindbeck, a narrative that structures human experience and understanding. However varied may be its texture, it is essentially a story that claims to be the story, the true story both of the cosmos and of human life within the cosmos.” 26 For Newbigin, the Bible was at its core a narrative not only because it shared a clear and moving story, but also because the literary mode of Scripture was “realistic narration.”
Realistic narrative provides readers a way to spiritually indwell the story they are reading in their daily lives as a form of what can be called a spirituality of exteriority. Newbigin borrowed the phrase “realistic narration” from Frei to describe how the biblical narrative reshapes the plausibility structure readers use to view their lives and the world. Relying upon Frei’s arguments, Newbigin says, . . .the Bible furnishes us with our plausibility structure. This structure is in the form of a story. In Hans Frei’s phrase, it is realistic narrative which ‘renders’ the character it portrays [that character being God]. . . .we get a picture of the Christian life as one in which we live in the biblical story as part of the community whose story it is, find in the story the clues to knowing God as his character becomes manifest in the story, and from within that indwelling try to understand and cope with the events of our time and the world about us and so carry the story forward.
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Both the message and form of Scripture empower the church to live from a particular narrative identity, one that has implications for how people imagine spirituality within the missio Dei.
Newbigin’s Engagement with the Fathers of the Yale School of Narrative Theology
One can trace how Newbigin interest in narrative theology developed through the time he spent at Yale during his lectures there. The narrative theology of Frei and Lindbeck, who were on Yale’s faculty at the time, contributed to shaping Newbigin’s understanding of the nature of the Bible and how he articulated his missiology for Western culture. Their influence is apparent in Newbigin’s classic missiology of Western culture, Foolishness to the Greeks: The Gospel and Western Culture. The influence of narrative theology, like Newbigin’s belief in the unity of the biblical narrative, persisted throughout his life. 28
The precise time when Newbigin’s relationship with Frei and Lindbeck began is difficult to surmise with historical precision, but what is apparent is that he began to be shaped by their contributions while speaking at several of America’s elite educational institutions in the 1950s as citations from his writings at that time indicate. Having delivered lectures at the University of Chicago and Harvard, Newbigin, in 1966, delivered the Lyman Beecher Lectures at Yale. He altered those lectures and shared them later at Cambridge in the form of the James Reid Lectures. The substance of his Yale and Cambridge lectures was published in his 1969 book, The Finality of Christ. The focus of his lectures at Yale was not narrative theology, but rather the need to clarify the centrality and finality of Christ, which he felt had been obscured in interfaith discussions within the ecumenical movement of the period. 29
During the Lyman Beecher lectures at Yale, Newbigin delighted in reminding his audience that Elihu Yale was a member of St. Mary’s Church in Madras before he donated the money to establish Yale College. As a bishop in the Church of South India, Newbigin had a special affection for Yale because of Elihu Yale’s relationship with St. Mary’s Church. As he recounted in his autobiographical work Unfinished Agenda, “I was happy to tell my audience in New Haven that the ‘mother church’ would always watch the progress of her distinguished daughter with a benevolent eye!”
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While it is unclear when Newbigin’s relationship with Frei and Lindbeck began, it is evident that the scholars of the “distinguished daughter” were happy to return that benevolent gaze back to their mother’s bishop. Lindbeck, in his review of The Gospel in a Pluralist Society, demonstrates a warmth and familial association with Newbigin: The author eschews labels, but the trend his work exemplifies has been variously called “postmodern,” “postliberal,” and, by the unsympathetic, “neotraditionalist.” Such theology utilizes developments in philosophy (e.g., for Newbigin, A. Maclntyre), the understanding of science (e.g., M. Polanyi and T. S. Kuhn), sociology of knowledge (e.g., P. Berger), and scriptural interpretation (e.g., H. Frei and W. Winks) in order to escape from the polarized progressivisms and conservatisms that continue to emerge in the wake of the Enlightenment. . . Perhaps such scope and insight is possible only for someone who has spent a lifetime as a missionary in another culture, has been active throughout that time in the ecumenical movement, and has continued, not least since his retirement, to read widely and with lively curiosity and openness in a variety of disciplines.
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This essay posits that Newbigin’s move toward narrative theology was first, relational in nature, and only later, a matter of theological conclusion. Rather than forming a formal connection to narrative theology, Newbigin developed an informal association with the values of narrative theology through his relationships with Frei and Lindbeck. For those who may seek to argue that Newbigin was not strictly speaking a narrative theologian, his intimacy with the Yale School remains unassailable. At the very least, Newbigin’s missiology of Western culture was, in modern parlance, narrative theology adjacent.
Newbigin’s Spiritual Formation through Narrative Theology
Not only was Newbigin’s body of work aligned with the values of narrative theology, but the way he practiced his faith also affirmed the power of narrative formation. In the preface to Faith in a Changing World, Sandy Millar highlights this element of Newbigin’s spirituality.
It is, of course, the story he had come to see as true above all other stories. It is the only story that, in its ending, foreshadowing Christ’s resurrection, holds out hope for the world. It is the story that had shaped him and in which he lived. It is the story that he brought to life with consummate skill and applied to every aspect of not only church life, but also the broader culture of the world.
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Newbigin believed that stories profoundly shape people. While one does not have to be a person of faith to make a narratival purchase on themselves and the world, the story of God’s saving presence in Christ was the open secret given to the world to give life its shape. For those living from former, non-spiritual narratives, Newbigin held out the promise of a spiritual story. Through the biblical story people gain insight into the truth about God, and about the world and themselves. Through reflecting on the story of God in Christ, individuals can deepen their spiritual growth. That was true for Newbigin personally and evident in his documented writings of spiritual autobiographical character.
Not only did he argue for a missional narrative spirituality, but Newbigin’s autobiographical writings document the effects that spirituality had on his life. Reflecting on the stories of Scripture was formative for the beginning of his early spiritual formation while he was a student at Queens College in Cambridge. As he recounts, “If I wanted to be a Christian, how would I begin?. . .I began to get up earlier in the morning to read the Bible and to pray. I did not know whether God existed. I did know there were many things with which I could not cope.”
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The practice of reflecting on the biblical story continued to shape him throughout his life. As Newbigin wrote toward the end of his life in an article originally written in 1992 (six years before he died), I more and more find the most precious part of each day to be the thirty to forty minutes I spend each morning before breakfast with the Bible. All the rest of the day I am bombarded with the stories that the world is telling about itself. . .As I immerse myself in the story that the Bible tells, my vision is cleared, and I see things in another way. I see the day that lies ahead in its place in God’s story. I can then go into the unpredictable happenings of the day knowing that I will not be lost.
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The biblical story served as a tether and an anchor, allowing Newbigin to find a center from which to understand himself and to reflect upon all the stories he encountered in the world. His missional narrative spirituality offered him both an interiority and an exteriority, both rooted in an understanding of God revealed in Christ.
Newbigin’s deep commitment to centering his life on God in the biblical narrative is illustrated in the themes he focused on as a writer and public speaker, as manifested in his published commentaries, 35 and his well-attended Bible study lectures that exhorted his audience to understand their lives in light of the biblical narrative. 36 For him, the stories people are invited to inhabit through the Bible, as well as the stories they corporately perform in the weekly liturgy, shape their spiritual identity. 37 The biblical stories bear an undeniable missional character.
The Missional Character of Newbigin’s Narrative Spirituality
What follows is an outline of the missional character of Newbigin’s narrative spirituality, drawn from his seminal and widely-read works. Three distinct examples illustrate how he uses his interest in missiology to put forward a narrative spirituality, often by addressing questions that arise in traditional missiology discussions. Those questions include the question of how to acknowledge and explore divine revelation in interfaith relationships; how to address the challenge of cross-cultural communication, especially in a post-Christian society; and how to engage the popularization during his time of the sociology of knowledge, which argues that people know themselves through communal relationships. Newbigin addressed these questions over a twenty-year period in the writings included here as a sample case study. His commitment to adopting a missional narrative spirituality remained consistent across these sources. The examples are: The Open Secret, published in 1978, Foolishness to the Greeks, published in 1986, and The Gospel in a Pluralistic Society, published in 1989.
In The Open Secret, the missional character of Newbigin’s narrative spirituality is evident in his response to the question of the universal and particular nature of God’s revelation in interfaith discussions. He suggests that the same interfaith acknowledgment of the universal and particular can be found within the singular Christian faith tradition. The tension between the universal meaning of the Gospel and its particular revelation to specific people appears across the biblical narrative. As Newbigin argues, “THE GOSPEL that Jesus preached is the good news of God’s universal reign. It is directed to the whole human and cosmic reality. And yet it is also bound up with particular names of people and places belonging to particular cultures.” 38 To receive the particular message of the Good News is to become a bearer of its universal meaning and influence.
The emancipating story becomes the missional calling. It also begets the vocation one lives out, which includes a commitment to supporting the particular faith commitments of others, while encouraging “truth-seeking” conversations about the universal. In Newbigin’s words, “the particular is chosen for the sake of the universal.” The missional encounter with other faith traditions does not amount to proselytization, such that they become less distinct or representative of a religious pluriformity; rather, the substance of that missional encounter is to embrace God’s holistic view of the needs, stories, and concerns of the world, to remain people of confession while also remaining people open to truth-seeking with neighbors whose differences are substantial. For Newbigin, it is important not to put forward a solution for interfaith discussions that pushed all the faith traditions’ differences down, nor to erode the particulars into a universal of sameness. In his words, “we have to face the fact that it is impossible.” 39 Even the kind of non-narrative interior spiritual encounter with a Transcendent other, as suggested by John Hicks, was for Newbigin, a solution that left people of faith disembodied.
Newbigin intentionally skewers any form of interior spirituality that would seek to downplay or overly-center interiority at the expense of the exteriority of human life in a multifaith world. In his words: In short, the Bible invites us to see the really human, but not by looking within and finding at the core of human reality a purely spiritual entity that is the object of God’s saving purpose. On the contrary, it invites us to see the really human as the life of mutual responsibility for the created world and therefore to see God’s saving purpose in terms of this real world of real people.
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A “real world of real people” should instead be embraced as a gift, requiring mutual responsibility. Christian missional narrative spirituality was Newbigin’s particular “starting point,” shaped by the stories of the biblical narrative writ large, but centrally shaped by Jesus, who “is for the believer the source from whom his or her understanding of the totality of experience is drawn.” 41 It is because of the particularity of the Christian faith tradition that interfaith dialogues can happen in fulsome ways.
In his book, Foolishness to the Greeks, one of the primary questions Newbigin addresses is the encounter between the gospel and culture. The encounter occurs between the local church community, comprising indigenous and foreign missionaries, and the culture in which it resides. That missionary encounter, he believed, included a necessary narratival dimension. As Newbigin’s argues: If one begins with the example of cross-cultural mission, one sees a group of people called missionaries who already organize their corporate life around a story that is told in a book and is continually reenacted by word and sacramental action in their liturgy.
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That reenactment takes place in a culture that is itself shaped by several other stories and liturgies, a culture that often does not recognize a religious tradition formed by the sacred stories of the Bible. What does mission require of the church in such a genuinely cross-cultural situation? This question, Newbigin believed, was not merely hypothetical for his work in India, but was a pressing question for indigenous missionaries living in the post-Christian West. How can the church make an intelligible and plausible call to those who live out of other narratives in a culture haunted by the ghost of Christian tradition?
For Newbigin, the answer was not found in select individuals in the church who were gifted storytellers and performative actors. The story is itself a communal product, requiring a communal performance. He notes, “The Bible comes into our hands as the book of a community, and neither the book nor the community are properly understood except in their reciprocal relationship with each other.”
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The church’s communal spiritual life becomes what Newbigin calls a “hermeneutic of the gospel” to its neighbors. It is in the living out of its narrative spirituality that the church performs its mission. Faith is nurtured in community, as individuals risk encounter with “the other” outside their immediate community, engendering misunderstandings and feelings of dislocation as they learn to see and embrace one another. An acknowledgment of Peter Berger’s sociology of knowledge is required for a genuine missionary encounter to happen. Newbigin argues: The Bible functions as authority only within a community that is committed to faith and obedience and is embodying that commitment in an active discipleship that embraces the whole of life, public and private. This is the plausibility structure within which the faith is nourished.
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That is why he decries calls for religious certainty and invites what he calls “proper confidence.” The mission of God entails not only spiritually forming individuals through particular stories but also moving them toward God and others as storified people living out that story in community.
This theme that Newbigin began to explore in Foolishness to the Greeks receives a much more extensive treatment in his seminal work, The Gospel in a Pluralistic Society. In a chapter titled “The Congregation as Hermeneutic of the Gospel,” he returns to and expands the theme of a community shaped by a story, as the necessary hermeneutic to understand the central message of the Christian faith tradition.
How is it possible that the gospel should be credible, that people should come to believe that the power which has the last word in human affairs is represented by a man hanging on a cross? I am suggesting that the only answer, the only hermeneutic of the gospel, is a congregation of men and women who believe it and live by it.
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This comes as no surprise, as Jesus did not write a book, but rather formed a living community that wrestled with the divine life they observed: writing stories, creating liturgies, and receiving and repeating sacramental rituals that Jesus had himself imparted. The Church is only able to center itself upon Christ through consideration of the story of the Gospel and its history of communal performance. Meeting particulars is for Newbigin what the mission of God is all about for the late modern church, living in a time when the Christian story is often confused, misread, or misinterpreted without a guide. It is the living community of faith that joins today’s Ethiopian Eunuchs to share through performative spirituality what the good news means. As Newbigin says, “The reigning plausibility structure can only be effectively challenged by people who are fully integrated inhabitants of another.” 46 The remembering and rehearsing of the story of Christ, not only for the Christian community’s formation, but also for a witness to neighboring faiths, is Newbigin’s vision of missional narrative spirituality.
Conclusion
This article began noting Newbigin’s lack of recognition in the field of spirituality, suggesting that his contribution to the field can rather be found in his missiology of Western culture, particularly in his application of narrative theology to central question of spirituality: How ought one’s life with God be formed and lived in the world? In one way, Newbigin’s writings answer that question: Life with God is formed and performed in the world through reflecting on the story of God in Christ. God’s story reveals to humanity the truth about God, the self, and the world from a cosmic, divine perspective through congregations that serve as a hermeneutic of the gospel. His approach to narrative spirituality invites his readers to consider which stories have shaped them, and which stories they are sharing in the world. How will the church respond today? How will the people of God offer hope to a world filled with so many counter-narratives? To conclude is Lesslie Newbigin’s response to a similar question at the close of his book, Truth and Authority in Modernity.
In the end, the only answer we have to give to the question is along such lines as these: ‘I have been called and commissioned, through no merit of mine, to carry this message, to tell this story, to give this invitation. It is not my story, nor is it my invitation. It has no coercive intent. It is an invitation from the one who loved you and gave himself up for you.’ That invitation will come with winsomeness if it comes from a community in which the grace of the Redeemer is at work. . .We have to tell and live the story faithfully; the rest is in God’s hands.
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