A Few Personal Reflections on Lesslie Newbigin’s Reflections on Christianity & Cultural Solidarity

The following are excerpts from “Salvation, the New Humanity, and Cultural-Communal Solidarity” a lecture delivered in 1973 (!) at the Bangalore Theological Forum by Lesslie Newbigin, missionary-theologian, who popularized the term “missional” and greatly advanced the idea, practically and theoretically, of a service-oriented church. I’ve interspersed my own comments, as you’ll see.

“…our humanness is related to our membership in some kind of group. Human beings are not identical and replaceable monads, like billiard balls. We become human only by inter-acting with other human beings. A baby would not grow into a human being without the loving relationship of a mother, of other members of the family, and later of friends, colleagues, fellow-workers. Of course we are also part of the larger human family, but the fact remains that our becoming and remaining human is bound up with a pattern of relationships which we share with the members of our own family and social group. To imagine that we can be human in a way which eliminates all these immediate relationships is to be the victim of academic illusion.”

Human being is being-with and being-for, it is fellowship and service. It is as we inter-act, act with and for and because of one another, that we are humanized. The “pattern of relationships” constructs and extends the fabric of our lives, our identities, our selves. “It is not good for the human to be alone.”

Newbigin realizes human culture is an artificial, fabricated thing – but he also understands that that doesn’t necessarily render it meaningless or bad. Newbigin is arguing (and I agree) that God sanctions and sanctifies our artifice, our fabrication. God allows us to be homo faber, to be co-creators.

“And yet these relationships do not suffice to make us fully human beings. The word ‘human’ stands for the whole family of mankind, and is misused if it is used to denote something less. One of the meanings of the word ‘salvation’ is ‘making whole’. The English word is connected with the original Sanskrit root sarva, expressing the idea of wholeness. We are familiar with the fact that the same Greek word in the Gospels is sometimes translated ‘save’ and sometimes ‘make whole’. One way of describing salvation is to say that it is the making whole of all things, the uniting of all things with Jesus as their Head (Eph. 1:10). The purpose of God in Christ, according to St. Paul, is to make one new man, in whom there is neither Greek nor Jew, slave or free—and therefore neither Nadar nor Vellala nor Adi-Dravida.

“And yet” – a profoundly important caveat. This “and yet” separates the ultimate and most-important from the penultimate and next-to-most-important. This “and yet” gives us a place from which to critique our own fabrications, our own versions of reality.

We only have access to this “and yet” because of the revelation of God in Jesus Christ. Only in light of the Gospel, which tells us of the Kingdom of God that supersedes all cultures – all human artifice and fabrication whatever -, can we see rightly to judge what we have made. (Although, admittedly, even with that light, it remains excruciatingly difficult to see rightly.)

The Kingdom of God supersedes all human making (including meaning-making), but it does not destroy it. Instead, it purifies and stabilizes and rectifies it. As people who believe in the “restoration of all things” (Act 3.21), the liberation of all creation (Rom 8.20-24), “whether things on earth or things in heaven” (Col 1.15-20), we do not despise the work of humans minds and hands. Remember, we are those who gather around a God incarnate, a bodily-resurrected Savior and Lord. We believe that in the End (telos), God will perfect God’s creation, bringing it to its fullest self-expression.

It is because we believe that in Christ all ethnic, gender, and class separations are superseded that we affirm ethnicity and gender and class, though in nuanced and interminably critiqued ways. Because we put ultimate things first, we can condone, even celebrate, the penultimate things. Our critique is the ground of our love and acceptance.

Newbigin goes on to contradict the idea of an “indigenized Christianity,” in part because

the implication is that there is a ‘culture-free’ core of religious truth which can then be ‘adapted’ to various cultural situations. This has only to be stated to be dismissed. Every human activity, including the human activity in which Christians see the decisive action of God, is culturally conditioned.

Those who operate in the guise of “indigenization,” are often blind to their own cultural prejudices, and those unintentionally impose them upon others in the name of the “pure” Gospel. Instead, he says, we need a “contextualized Christianity.” By “contextualized Christianity” he means to name

the notion that every man is in a context which is not static but subject to movement. The culture which he shares is itself something changing and he has a part in directing the change. To speak of contextualisation in this connection means that each man has to seek to understand the way in which Christ is lead own people towards the fulness of the New Man, and to try to follow and help others to follow.

I agree with Newbigin: culture, a thing manufactured by and for human inter-action, is a dynamic, altering and alterable thing. It is “subject to movement,” which means it is subject to critique and improvement (or debasement). I also agree each Christian has the right and responsibility to play a part in critiquing and improving his or her culture along Christian lines. (Again, though, admitting this is terribly difficult to put into practice.)

This means that his relation to his culture is a double one: there is both an identification and a separation. A man should love and care for his own people, his own culture, his own traditions man who has lost that love is less than human. But it has to be a critical and discriminating love.

In Karl Barth’s terms, the Christian must be able to say both Yes and No to his or her own culture, people, and tradition. The Christian must have “a critical and discriminating love” – but it is a love nonetheless. The Christian’s

participation in the New Humanity through Christ makes him aware of the fact that his own culture cannot be absolutised. It has to grow and change in the direction that the Gospel points out. Every Christian, in his relation to his own culture, must live in this tension – the tension that is always involved in true leadership, for a leader must both be one with those whom he leads and also be more and see more than they.

There is no avoiding this tension, this uncomfortability of being caught in-between. On the one hand, the Christian must speak the truth to power, and stand willing to expose cultural standards as hegemonic devices. To take an example, the Christian cannot be blindly patriotic. She or he must call oppression by its name, even when it works in the name of liberation and democracy. And so on. It is only there, in the middle, the in-between-ness, that we can be authentically Christian. For that is where, after all, Jesus lived and died.