Transcript
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER 1: If you were not in chapel this morning, Bishop Lesslie Newbigin is a Presbyterian pastor. That perhaps, that combination of Bishop and Presbyterian pastor may be one of the first things, introductory things to say about him. A lifelong missionary in south India, one of the founding architects
of the Church of South India, and a bishop in that church for many years. A, more recently, a professor of mission in Selly Oak and now pastor of a small United Reformed Church in Birmingham. And, in between times, a General Secretary of the Old International Missionary Council. I'm just repeating what Charlie Ryerson said in chapel this morning, but let me, in my introduction, emphasize
that the ecumenical dimension for a just a moment, because it is on that subject that Bishop Newbigin will be speaking. I remember the first time that I met Lesslie Newbigin. It was at a World Council of Churches meeting and we were talking, as would be appropriate, about evangelism, as I remember. At that time, he was a member of a group called "The Committee of 25,"
which included such other figures as Karl Barth, and Emil Bruner, and Reinhold Niebuhr, and who else? The, was it the Archbishop of Canterbury was in it, I think also. And their job was to formulate the Christian understanding of hope for the second assembly of the World Council of Churches. I think Bishop Newbigin was the draftsman for that
committee. Or were you the chairman? I think you were the chairman. Yes, the chairman. Many an ecumenical document, however, has had Lesslie Newbigin as its drafter who pulled together the vastly different strands of thought in an ecumenical meeting where people were at loggerheads and found the formulation which brought the church one step forward in its self-understanding or its understanding of the issues
before it. The books which he has written reflect this also. Almost every one of them points directly, goes directly into a contemporary issue at stake in the ecumenical movement. From the very first one, "The Household of God," which was an attempt to bring ecclesiologies together in dialogue with one another; the different ecclesiologies which might
then lead toward a greater understanding of the churches of one another and lead to a greater and a deeper church union, which was materialized later in the church of South India, or, "Faith for This One World," an effort to pick up some of the themes of the, the themes of secularity and the challenge of the secular world to Christian mission
or "The Open Secret," one, the most recent book that is out, which is a systematic theology, and anyone in a basic course in theology should feel quite justified in picking that up as an introduction to theology itself, and yet it is theology written from the point of view of the church on its frontier; that is to say, the church where it is in mission, where it is speaking
to those who are non-Christian as well as speaking to itself and therefore not just an internal exercise. That, I think, is fundamental to Bishop Newbigin's entire life; the formulation, the understanding of the Christian faith on its frontier where the integrity of the message and its communication with the non-Christian world is at stake. This afternoon, Bishop Newbigin will
give his commentary on the recent dialogue about the mission of the church as it has been expressed in the ecumenical stream of missionary theology and strategy as expressed in the World Council of Churches and the Commission/World Mission and Evangelism, and on the other side, the conservative evangelical stream which has had its
other expressions and he will branch out from there, and I hope that, I hope that you will perceive the theology in what he has to say, and welcome to the dialogue which is already in our midst and which once again I think he will bring into focus for us. Lesslie.
NEWBIGIN: Thank you. Thank you very much. I'm getting quite embarrassed by all these introductions, but I do appreciate the kindness that lies behind them. I do very greatly value the opportunity to be here for this brief period and I look forward especially to the time period of discussion afterwards.
One of the sad facts about the situation of the church today in its world mission is that it is so deeply split right down the middle; not by the old confessional divisions, but by the new division which was advertised to the whole world so vividly last year when the two great world conferences
on mission at Melbourne, and Pattaya in Thailand, succeeded one another within a few days and a great deal has been written about the differences and agreements between these two manifestations of missionary concern. I personally believe very deeply that they need each other; that both of them are to some degree distorted by their opposition to each other
and that it is of tremendous importance that a real living dialogue should take place between them. There are a great many issues that one could pick up, on which they are divided; questions about the inspiration of Scripture, questions about the limits of God's saving work, questions about the relation between missions and churches. But I have decided to take up one particular
issue, which was evidently felt by the folks at Pattaya. Do people know what I'm talking about when I talk about Pattaya? Pattaya is a place in Thailand where a conference took place, organized by the Lausanne Continuation Committee, the conference on world evangelization. And Melbourne was the conference of the Commission on World Mission and Evangelism of the World Council of Churches. And evidently, from the point of view of those who were at
Pattaya, one of the absolutely crucial issues was about the place of evangelism in mission. In one of his articles on the Pattaya conference, Peter Wagner, who is in the leadership of that movement, wrote this: "The first question relates to the primacy of evangelism in the total mission of the church. From beginning to end, the Conference on World
Evangelization," that is, Pattaya, "took a clear and distinct stand on this issue, while recognizing that the cultural mandate is indeed part of holistic mission. The conference refused to go the route of the World Council and make it either primary or equal to evangelism; that is to say, to make social action primary or equal to evangelism."
And then, Peter Wagner refers to a group at Pattaya who tried unsuccessfully to get something into the report which would have treated social service on an equal level with, or part of evangelism. Peter Wagner continues, "The conference not only said no to the World Council position of the primacy of social service, but also to those evangelical persons who are attempting to
load the word evangelism with meanings that it never had. If they had prevailed, a new word would have to be invented, but the conference held the line at that point." So, obviously, this is felt to be a very fundamental question, and I think it raises very important issues. Before I start, let me just have a moment on semantics. I'm using the word "mission" to describe the total mission of the church;
everything that the church is sent into the world to do. I'm using the word "missions" as those particular enterprises which are sent with the intention of creating a Christian presence in a place where it was not, or where it was ineffective. And I'm using the word evangelism in the strict and narrow sense of the communication of news, which means that evangelism in the sense that I'm using it is a verbal operation; words spoken or written.
But I'm using the word evangelism in this strict sense. I'll give reasons later why I think it should be so used. But, so that I don't be misunderstood, I say that at the beginning. If I understand the voluminous writings on both sides of this discussion, no one is saying that evangelism is the whole duty of the church. No one is denying that, for instance, the duty of compassionate service to those in need,
is part of the total mission of the church, but clearly it was felt by the fathers and brethren at Pattaya that it was essential to hold the line, and to insist on the primacy of evangelism over every other element in the church's mission. Now what is the issue at stake? Is it simply a matter of the relative importance of words and deeds? If that were so, it would surely be the most futile
of all debates, because no priorities can be assigned between words and deeds because each of them without the other is ultimately vain because the Gospel is the Word made flesh. The deed without the word is dumb, and the word without the deed is empty. As Hendrikus Berkhof said in Mexico nearly twenty years ago, "There are times when
words are cheap and deeds are costly; and there are times when deeds are cheap and words are costly." And surely the dichotomy between these two is one that is part of the deep-going dualism which we inherit from the pagan Greek roots of our culture, and which the biblical witness has never been able to eradicate from the Western European mind.
This seems to me to be something that is always with us, and I do not find this dichotomy between word and deed in the New Testament. In the mission charge given to the twelve, according to Matthew, the authority given is for healing and exorcism. In the initial charge, there is no reference to preaching at all. The word which they are charged later on to speak
namely, "The kingdom of heaven is at hand," is the interpretation of the deeds. The healing and the good news are not two things, but one. The good news is that there is healing, and because there is healing, there is good news. Words and deeds both point to the same reality, namely the presence of the reign of God. There is not, and there cannot be, any allocation of priority between them. Both are essential. The kingly power of God is present
in mighty acts and in the words which interpret these acts. And neither can be subordinated in principle to the other. But I think that to have said that is not yet to have come to the heart of the matter. There is, I think, a real misreading of the New Testament which lies behind the insistence that evangelism must be given priority over compassionate, or action for justice
in society. And to make clear what I mean, I want to look afresh at the New Testament evidence. Since the time of William Carey, it has been customary to take the closing verses of Matthew's gospel as the fundamental mandate for mission. This text has often been referred to as "The Great Commission," and missionary work has been understood essentially as obedience to a mandate from the Lord. Those of you who have read the book,
of Harry Boer, "Pentecost and Missions," which is a book I strongly recommend, will note his very carefully documented study in which he shows that this did not function in that way before the time of William Carey and that Carey had to make this text so central in his apologia for missions
because he had to overthrow the view that it applied only to the first apostles and not to the church in all generations. But Harry Boer shows that this way of understanding the nature of missions is not that of the New Testament. At no point does any of the apostolic writers seek to lay upon the conscience of his readers the duty of evangelism as an act of obedience to the Lord.
There is an obligation involved, but it is not a matter of obedience to a command. We will return to the Matthean form of the Great Commission in a moment, but let me look first at the Lucan and Johannine forms of it. Luke tells us that after the resurrection, the apostles came to Jesus and asked whether the promise of the imminent coming of the reign of God was now to be fulfilled. "Do you now at this time restore the kingdom
to Israel?" Since the original good news was that the reign of God is at hand, this was a reasonable question and the answer of Jesus to that question is both a warning and a promise. The warning is to remember that the reign of God is precisely God's reign and not their program. "It is not for you to know the times and seasons that the Father has fixed by His own authority."
It is strictly in God's hands and therefore not a matter for calculation or speculation. Even the most sophisticated techniques for handling statistics about unreached peoples do not render this warning unnecessary. The content of the Gospel is God's reign, not a program or a campaign about which one is permitted to be optimistic or pessimistic. When I was living in Madras
my house was situated conveniently about halfway between the airport and the center of the city, and the result was that I had the privilege of entertaining a great many fleeting guests and at some point in the visit, one always knew that the question would come up, "Are you optimistic or pessimistic about the prospects of the church in India?" And I finally got around to a standard reply because it was such a standard question. I used to reply that "I believe that Jesus rose from the dead"
and therefore the question didn't arise. But, more seriously, can you be optimistic or pessimistic about a fact; the kingdom of God is a fact, that God reigns. You can be believing or unbelieving, but you cannot be optimistic or pessimistic. The fact that you use those words means that you have converted it into a program of your own. So the warning is by no means unnecessary. But the second part of
Jesus's answer is a promise: "You will receive power when the Spirit comes upon you and you will be My witnesses in Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, and the ends of the earth." That is a promise. The question was about the kingdom; the promise is about the Spirit, because the Spirit is the [arrabon?] of the kingdom, the foretaste of the kingdom, the first fruit of the kingdom. And the presence of that first fruit will itself be
the witness. It is not that you are instructed to go and give your witness and the Holy Spirit will help you. That once again shifts the center, the subject away from its proper place. It is that presence of the Spirit Himself will be the witnesses. That is the promise -- will be the witness. That is the promise that is given to him. And this promise as we know was fulfilled, or began to be fulfilled
on the day of Pentecost. Immediately, the apostles were turned into witnesses. In what sense? Not in the sense that they forthwith decided to embark on a preaching campaign. Their being witnesses was not an action or a decision of theirs. They became witnesses by something that God had done, because that something became the occasion for questioning.
"The crowds came running to ask 'What's going on?'" So the first Christian preaching was an answer to a question and if one goes through the New Testament, it's extraordinary to notice how very, very often the Christian preaching which is recorded here is in fact an answer to a question. It was not a campaign initiated by the apostles. The initiative was God's and the action was God's and that action made the apostles witnesses. As in the Gospel narratives, the words
explained the acts. And this is in line with the biblical testimony as a whole, when in former days, the Lord said to exiled Israel, "You are my witnesses," Isaiah 43, verse 10. The reference was not to something that Israel was going to do. It was to something which the sovereign Lord would do to His people, blind and deaf as they are. The initiator, the active agent, is the Lord who is the Spirit.
In other words, the apostolic preaching is not essentially obedience to an order. It is a witness, a testifying, a pointing to the source of happenings, events, actions of which the author is the sovereign Lord Himself, the Spirit, and which are otherwise inexplicable. And this Lucan picture is abundantly supported in other strands of the New Testament.
Mark, you will remember, followed by Luke, records the promise that when the church is under attack for its faithful witness to Jesus, it is not to be anxious how to answer for "it is not you who speak, but the Holy Spirit." And how often has that promise been fulfilled in the history of the church, and no doubt, in your experience as in mine, how at the point not when the church was riding high, white, and handsome, but when it had its back to the wall, when it knew not what to say, when it was utterly
powerless -- at that moment, in the extraordinary way that God does work, somehow the power of the Spirit has been made manifest and people have been brought to conviction. And in the great Johannine passages about the Paraclete in John 14, 15, and 16, it is precisely in the context of the promise that you will be rejected, you will be hated, you will be cast out, exactly in that context that the promise is made,
that there will be an advocate who speaks when the church does not know how to speak and who will not only be the advocate for the defense, but also the advocate for the prosecution, who will go before the church and convict the world, in respect of its fundamental ideas of sin, of righteousness, and of judgment. If we now turn to the Johannine version of the Great Commission, and I refer to John 20:19-23
where the risen Lord appears in the midst of His disciples. We notice that here also the sending of the disciples is linked to the imparting of the Spirit. He breathed on them and said, "receive the Holy Spirit." It is only as the bearers of His own life that the disciples can fulfill the commission to continue what Jesus came to do. "As the Father sent me, so I send you." And that is the commission to
release men and women from the grip of sin, "Whosoever sins ye remit, they are remitted; whosoever sins ye retain, they are retained." But this account of the sending of the disciples in the power of the Spirit is significantly preceded by the words, "He showed them His hands and His side. Then were the disciples glad when they saw the Lord." It was, as we understand, by these marks of the passion, that the disciples recognized
the risen Lord and were glad. And it is in this context that we must understand the little conjunction "as." "As the Father sent me." What does this "as" portend? In what manner did the Father send the Son to be the bearer of His kingly rule? Not in the manner of the kings of the nations, exercising authority and power over others, but in the manner of a servant who gives his life a ransom for many.
And the scars of the passion are the visible marks therefore by which the body of Christ will be recognizable. It will be by those same marks that the church will be recognizable as the authentic bearer of God's gift of peace, of reconciliation through the forgiveness of sins. Not simply by having the cross on its buildings, or on its altars, but by having the marks of the cross
in its corporate life will be church be recognizable as the bearer of the reign of God. But what does that mean? What does it mean to say that the church must go the way of the cross? Here we have to guard I think against a very long tradition inherited I suppose from medieval Catholic piety which has seen the cross primarily as submission
to the power of evil. The drooping, pain-drenched, defeated figure of the medieval crucifix does not truly represent the passion as it is portrayed in the New Testament and as it was portrayed in the earliest Christian art. The passion was not passive. It was a mighty victory in which the prince of this world was cast out from his usurped dominion. Jesus's way to the cross was not the way of passive submission
to the dominion of evil, but of uncompromising challenge to it in deed and word, whether it was manifested in sickness of body or mind, in demon possession, in the loveless self-righteousness of the godly, in the hypocrisy of the ecclesiastics or in the brutality of the rulers. It was a challenge in deed and word, and the Gospels lay enormous stress upon the deeds of Jesus, upon His mighty works of
deliverance, and upon His compassionate companionship with the rejects of society. I was immensely influenced when I was a student by the book of that grand old reformed teacher, D.S. Cairns of Aberdeen, called "The Faith That Rebels." I don't know whether anybody reads that now. Does anybody read that? The Faith That Rebels? Well, I recommend it; I'm sure it's in your library. Cairns.
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER 2: It's there.
NEWBIGIN: It's there; I'm sure it is. I preached on this in South Africa and then I went to the library and I found they had three copies in the seminary library; I was very pleased. Cairns's point was that you can go right through the Gospels and you will never find a case where someone who is sick or blind or paralyzed comes to Jesus, and Jesus says, "Accept it as God's will and it will purify your soul." In every case, the only response is to cast out
the power of evil. And is the main Christian tradition not really very much at fault here? Is it not significant that the Apostles' Creed goes straight from "born of the Virgin Mary," to "crucified under Pontius Pilate," that the mighty works of Jesus which have such a tremendous place in the New Testament are totally ignored in so much of our preaching. Is it not significant that Jesus did not
go straight from His baptism in Jordan to His cross? He did indeed in Jordan take on Himself the sin of the world. He did indeed take on the cross in a sense at that point, but He did not go straight to Calvary. He went out into the desert for that mighty conflict with the powers of evil and then into the streets and lanes and villages of Galilee to challenge the powers of evil in all their forms
and to carry that challenge right through to the very end. I was deeply moved on one of the days when my wife and I had the chance of a visit to the Holy Land and we spent one day on the shores of the Dead Sea visiting Masada and Qumran, and I couldn't help thinking of those two places as being the end points of the two roads that Jesus did not take;
the road of the zealot which led finally to that tragic, mass suicide on the top of the great fort of Masada, and the road of the Essenes to withdraw from the conflict into the desert and pray and wait which ends in those crumbling ruins at Qumran. Jesus took neither of those roads but carried right through to the very end that challenge, that uncompromising challenge
to the reign of evil. And that we have surely terribly much neglected in the main teaching tradition of the church. It is therefore impossible to put the deeds and the words of Jesus against each other and to assign priorities between them, because the words interpret the deeds and the deeds
validate the words. The point is that it is this active, uncompromising challenge to the powers of evil which takes Jesus to the cross. And when the risen Lord commissions the disciples to go on the same mission that He received from the Father, He shows them the scars of His passion to remind them of the way that the mission must take. It is only as the church goes that way, not submitting to or
compromising with the powers that enslave men and women, but actively challenging them in deed and word and paying the price of that challenge in its own life. Then it will be in truth the bearer of Christ's mission in the power of the Spirit. The presence of the Spirit, who is the active witness, is given to the church which goes the way of the cross. If then in the light of these
Lucan and Johannine versions of the Great Commission, we turn back again to the Matthean form of it, we see, don't we, that on the one hand, it is misread if it is read in isolation from the others, and on the other hand, that the other two are letters to notes in Matthew's text which we might otherwise have missed. It is indeed a command to be obeyed, but like the law as a whole, it is misunderstood if it is read
simply as law without its basis in the Gospel. The first sentence, "All authority in heaven and on earth is given to Me," is a great shout of good news. Jesus reigns. Death is overcome. And it is because He reigns that He can and does pour forth the gift of the Spirit and it is this which makes possible the discipling of the Gentiles, as the Old Testament had consistently taught that it would be in the end of days, that the Lord Himself
would put forth His power and gather the Gentiles to be His people. The last days have indeed come and God Himself, God the Holy Spirit, will gather the nations to be His own people and the church as the appointed witness of God's action will be the place, the locus, and the instrument of that gathering, and this discipling will lead on to the believers in corporation into
that baptism of Jesus which began, yes, in Jordan, but was fulfilled in a ministry of active challenge to the powers of evil and consummated on the cross of Calvary. Reflecting on these three forms of the Great Commission, I'm led to the following observations: Firstly, there is indeed an inescapable element of constraint, of obligation, in any true
understanding of the missionary motive. "The love of Christ constrains me," says Paul. And "Woe is me if I do not preach the Gospel." And yet is it not significant that the same apostle who wrote those words is never in any of his epistles to be found laying it upon the conscience of his readers that they ought to be evangelists, that they ought to be missionaries? He has immensely strong
stress to lay upon their obligation to absolute faithfulness to Christ; immensely strong warnings against anything in the nature of falling away from the simplicities of the Gospel; but never in his writings a command laid upon their conscience that they ought to be missionaries. It is surely that the obligation comes from the Gospel itself and must never be turned into a new
law. One of the things that strikes me so often when I'm asked to come and talk in meetings about mission is the atmosphere of gloom which prevails, the sense that mission is a great burden laid upon us which we are unable to carry, but God forgive us, we will somehow struggle to our feet and stagger along a few yards with this burden on our heads. Now this is not how the New Testament presents the mission of the church to us. It is an overflow of Pentecost.
It is a spillover of the joy and power of the Holy Spirit. And surely it is significant that even from the very beginning we find that while in the New Testament there are descriptions of what I have called missions, of deliberate intentional activities sent for the purpose of creating a Christian presence where it was not,
the great paradigm being of course, the sending of Saul and Barnabas, by the church in Antioch. While that is true, nevertheless, an immense amount of the evidence from the New Testament suggests what we know in fact through church history, that most of the expansion of Christendom takes place in all kinds of informal ways, the scattering of the disciples from Jerusalem after the death of Stephen was the occasion for the coming into existence of the church of
Antioch. Two of the greatest Christian communities of the ancient world, Alexandria and Rome, came into existence through the witness of people unknown to us. And in my own experience as an evangelistic missionary, I have found the same to be true. I learned I think fairly early that although it was my joy and privilege to engage in what one might call intentional evangelism, going around the villages preaching and preaching in the streets
of Conjeevaram and [Mandalay?]. Nevertheless, I had to accept the fact that an enormous amount of what was really happening, the things by which people were actually coming to Christ and coming to know Him and coming to love Him usually had nothing whatever to do with what I was doing and what any organized church agency was doing, but that they were, in all kinds of ways, being communicated. I have talked with scores of people
to ask them what it was that brought them to Christ and one finds an incredible variety of different stories, all kinds of things formal and informal; very often visions and dreams. And even the best organized missionary society has not yet got around to organizing dreams for other people. It is extraordinary how many people have come to Christ, that the decisive thing was a dream or a vision. Now of course there is always a background of all kinds of other
contacts, but more often than not, it is informal conversations, answers to prayer, visits when one was in trouble from a Christian friend, reading a book, perhaps even hearing a sermon, but all kinds of informal contacts play such a tremendous part in the actual spreading of the Gospel. But the center is always
the contagion of a joy which must communicate itself, rather than the consciousness of a duty which must be discharged; a burden that must be carried. Secondly, that in the communication of the Gospel, word and act belong together. The word is essential, because the name of Jesus cannot be replaced by any other name. But the deed is equally essential because the Gospel is the
good news of the active presence of the reign of God and because this presence is to be made manifest in a world which has fallen under the usurped dominion of the evil one. And the preaching of the name of Jesus, which does not challenge this usurped dominion, which does not arise out of the common life of the body of the risen Lord where that dominion is being challenged and resisted and where the wounds of that conflict are being patiently suffered,
is a false preaching. When the church is making this challenge and is bearing these wounds, it becomes a place where men and women can recognize in Jesus the presence and the power of the reign of God, but when on the other hand, the church invites men and women to take refuge in the name of Jesus, without this challenge to the domain of evil,
then it becomes a sign against the kingdom, and the more successful it is in increasing its membership, the more it becomes a sign against the sovereignty of God. And evangelism which seeks to evade this challenge and this conflict which, for example, welcomes a brutal tyranny which allows missionaries into the country rather than a humane regime which puts difficulties in their way, becomes a sign against the Gospel.
Surely we have the authority of the Lord Himself for saying that church growth which does not bear fruit is only providing fuel for the fire. And thirdly, word and deed are related to each other through the shared life of the body of Christ. Every member must be ready with the word when called upon to give an account of his hope as Peter says, and you remember of course the context there is the police
interrogation cell, and not the pulpit. But the -- equally everyone must be ready to do the compassionate deed, even when Jesus is not recognized. But not every deed must have a word attached to it, and not every word must have a deed attached to it. The members of the body have different gifts and not all are evangelists. It is not always necessary, for example, that the man on the operating table should have a sermon preached to him before the
anesthetic is administered. Some hospitals have that practice. But when all the members are acting in harmony together in accordance with the different gifts given by the one Spirit, when the gift of the evangelists and the gift of the political activists and the gift of the compassionate server are not put against each other so that the bearers of these gifts are not in competition
with each other and running each other down, but when they are seen to arise, all of them out of this one common, shared life of which the secret is that Eucharist in which we are made partners in the dying of Jesus in order to be partners in His life. When that happens, then the Holy Spirit, in His own way, takes these acts and words and uses them for His own mighty work of witness.
Fourthly, when we look at the history of missions in recent decades, we cannot help but being struck by the number of occasions when devoted bodies of Christians have announced their intention to give absolute priority to evangelism have launched a new mission committed to the principle that the pure preaching of the Gospel shall be their only concern and that they will not become involved in secondary activities
of service and teaching and so forth. And how constantly one finds that if one looks back again, ten years later, we find that those people are running schools and hospitals and clinics, and I think one has to say that it is the logic of the Gospel itself which has driven them into that involvement and we must really ask whether those who successfully held the line at Pattaya on this matter should not listen again to the classic
warning of Gamaliel to the authorities in Jerusalem. When we try to overcome this dichotomy between a message addressed to persons calling them to conversion, baptism, and church membership on the one hand, and a message addressed to societies calling for justice, for structural change, for freedom, and so forth on the other hand. Some use has been
made of the term, "holistic evangelism." In the article from which I quoted, Ralph Winter gives his reasons for rejecting that term, and I agree with him. I think it is only a confusing term. I remember how much confusion was caused in the days when John Arnott was at the height of his power, when he used this phrase, "the larger evangelism," and the larger evangelism became larger and larger
until I remember a friend of mine saying that whenever he picked up an article on evangelism, and got to the second page, he found he was reading about some new way of breeding chickens in South India or something of that kind. I think that if you start using language like this then you have to find another word to describe the particular thing that I have called evangelism, namely actually communicating the name, and that has to have its place. So I agree with
Peter Wagner in rejecting this phrase, "holistic evangelism." But I think that if we are going to meet the issue that it's trying to meet, we have to go a little bit more deeply into the theological issues involved. Surely the human person is to be understood holistically. I suppose there is nowhere in the world
where the attempt to understand the human person in purely spiritual terms has been pursued more relentlessly to its logical conclusion than in India. The Hindu Scriptures try to find the real human person, the [pulsha?] by stripping away all the sheaths, the upadhis, which constitute my visible, contingent, historical being as part of the ever-circling wheel of nature.
And in the sharpest possible contrast to this, the Bible always sees the human person realistically as a living body-soul whose existence cannot be understood apart from the network of relationships, man and woman, parents and children, families, tribes, nations, the whole web of life which binds us into one. The Bible never separates the human person from that
whole reality. And for the biblical writers, continued existence as a disembodied soul is something not to be desired, but to be feared with loathing. And the New Testament is true to its Old Testament basis when it speaks of salvation not in terms of disembodied survival, but in terms of the resurrection of the body, a new creation, and a heavenly city. And this vision of the heavenly polis forbids us to
exclude politics from our understanding of salvation. And yet, on the other hand, the only politics we know deals with structures which are doomed to decay and disillusion as is this physical frame which is for practical purposes called by my name. How can our ultimate concern then be with either of these, perishable as they are? The patients whom we treat in our mission hospitals will all die
in the end. The programs for social and political justice in which we invest our energies will all perish and be forgotten. It is surely not surprising that we are all tempted by the simplicity and rationality of the Hindu solution. Tempted as many Christians also are to take as our ultimate concern the salvation of a soul which will endure
when all the visible frame of this world has perished. To speak of holistic evangelism does not enable us to escape this problem unless we have a very firm grasp of the Christian eschatology. The reign of God is at hand. That is the Gospel as Jesus proclaimed it, or, as we were reminded this morning, the Lord is at hand, which is the post-resurrection translation of that phrase.
But what is "at hand" mean? It is commonly said that the early church was mistaken in expecting the immediate coming of the Lord and that we have now had to learn to live without that expectation. I think that that is profoundly wrong. I think that it is of the essence of our life in Christ whether in the first century or in the twentieth that we do live at the end of the times in the immediate presence of the imminent
reign of God, and that this, and not some indefinite future is the horizon of all our thinking and doing. But this imminence means judgment and grace for all human beings as they really are, not just for this isolated soul, but for the entire reality of human life in all its aspects; spiritual, intellectual, physical, cultural, political.
The new creation promised in Christ, pledged in His resurrection, present in foretaste through the Spirit, concerns this whole existence and not just part of it. And therefore, both the grace and the judgment apply across the whole range of our existence, private and public. Every part of life is confronted with the reality of God's reign as its immediate horizon.
And this reality is both promise and judgment. And it follows that when we try to withdraw the spiritual dimension of our being from the wholeness of human being, and offer salvation to this apart from the whole promise of God, we depart decisively from the message of the Bible. The preaching of the Gospel necessarily means both judgment and promise for the whole
life of human beings. And to offer in effect cheap grace to individuals by so to speak peeling off the social and political implications of the Gospel is to de-nature the Gospel. But that is what happens when compassionate action in society is in principle subordinated to the preaching of a message of individual salvation and the gathering of individuals into the church.
It is not evangelism, but the Gospel itself which is primary and that must be said over and over again. It is the Gospel, the fact of God's reign in Jesus Christ which is primary, but the Gospel is not just words. It is the Word made flesh. It is the actual presence of the reign of God in Jesus Christ. It is the presence of the kingly
rule of God, made known both in mighty works and in the words which point to the source of those works. And to set the one against the other, I believe, is to betray the Gospel itself.