Transcript
NEWBIGIN: My dear brothers and sisters in Christ, I feel a very deep sense of awe as I come for the very first time to this so great and famous center of theological learning and teaching. As I came into the vestry, I was encouraged to note that some brother, perhaps sensing the situation, had put out on the table a book of which
the title was, "Fear and Trembling." And I can assure you that that is how I feel as I rise to speak in this chapel in this seminary at this time. I would simply ask you to remember of your charity that a ordinary working district missionary gets very little time to read all of the theological books, which a person who speaks
in Princeton ought to have read, and that you will forgive the manifest gaps and failures that arise from that fact. I also have to confess that I have been unable to fit what I want to say very neatly into four equal-sized boxes, whether that is my fault or the fault of what I want to say, I am not sure. But I hope you will forgive me if there is a certain amount of overlapping as between lecture and lecture
in the material that I put before you. I want to direct your attention in these four days to the general theme of the situation, or let me put it this way, the Christian World Mission in the twentieth century. And what I have to say falls, really, into three parts, of which the second is the major part. The first will be an attempt to survey the cultural and political setting
of the Christian mission in the world today. And on Tuesday and Wednesday, I hope to try to say something which might be expressed as towards a theology of the Christian World Mission. And on the last day, to speak of some implications of what we have said, for the mission of the church, on the local level and on the ecumenical level. Let me begin,
then with something about the social and cultural and political setting of the Christian mission in the world today. It is not, if we think of it, surprising that there should be a great deal of self-criticism and self-examination in the missionary movement today. The rise of the modern Christian missionary movement coincided with the cultural and political expansion of Western Europe and America.
And its development over these past two centuries, two and a half centuries, has been in close connection with the extension of the cultural and political power of Europe, European and North American civilization, an expansion to the point where it now dominates the globe. That extension has been, in large measure today, halted. The movement
of expansion has been reversed. And it is therefore but natural that the Christian World Mission should find itself faced with a totally new situation, calling in question what has hitherto been taken for granted. Of course, this coincidence of the Christian missionary movement with European political and cultural advance is not a mere accident; that would be a too superficial view of the situation.
The thousand-year period in which Christianity, hemmed in by the forces of Islam from South and East, was put into a kind of pressure cooker with the peoples of Western Europe, ended as we know in a vast explosion in which the products of that culinary operation were carried throughout the whole world. And in that immense explosion, we can distinguish three elements which are
usually described as the reformation, the counter-reformation and the renaissance, the latter with the whole vast chain reaction which it has set up in the world, a reaction in the midst of which we still are, and the speed of which is still accelerating with cumulative power. It would be a profound mistake to think that the global drive towards technical progress, towards political emancipation,
towards social and economic equality belongs to a quite different area of reality than the one we are talking about when we speak of the Christian World Mission. In a sense, in a certain sense, they all have the same origin. However, the main point here is that in its political aspect, and in many, though by no means all, of its cultural aspects, that movement of expansion has been halted and reversed.
Colonialism is everywhere in retreat, or on the defensive. Whatever may be the opinion of the Western nations, the younger nations of Asia and Africa, newly emerged from Colonial or semi-Colonial conditions, or seeking to emerge from them, are very conscious of their historical destiny, and are beginning to express that consciousness through, for instance, the Bandung
Conference and its follow-up. And they constitute at least actually not less than one third off the world's population, and potentially certainly more than half of it. These nations are very sure that the clue to world history in the next few decades does not lie as the nations of the West think in the struggle between communism and anti-communism, but lies, rather,
in the ending of that global domination of the white race and the development to their full political and cultural stature of the formerly subject or dependent peoples. I am not going to speak much about the political side of this issue, because it is familiar through our newspapers. But I do want to say something about the cultural and religious side, because I think that the tremendous change which has come about in this sphere is not
as widely appreciated in the West as it ought to be. I may be permitted to speak of India, which I know it firsthand, and which is, in many respects, though not all, typical of much that is happening over a wider area. The earliest missionaries to India generally took it for granted; I mean of the modern period, took it for granted that in going from Christendom to Hindustan, they were going from a higher
civilization to a lower, that they were taking light into darkness, or at least semi-darkness. They did not generally make a clear distinction between the gospel and the culture of Christendom. They even thought of the gospel as the crown of that culture. It is worthwhile today to read the report of that famous debate in the general assembly of the Church of Scotland in 1796, at which a motion to
authorize a collection on behalf of foreign missions was defeated, and to see the arguments that were used to defeat that motion. They were essentially, along these lines, that to try to preach the gospel, to try to teach Christianity as it would rather have been put to the untutored heathen was as absurd as to try to teach Newton's Principia to a
man who did not know his A,B,C. That precise phraseology was used in the debate. And even those who supported the motion, those who sponsored foreign missions, were not free from the same confusion of the gospel with Christian culture. They were confident, over-confident as we see today, that an English education would be a most powerful means of bringing men to Christ. The foundations of that immense
higher educational Christian work in India were laid by the great Scottish missionary, Alexander Duff. And when he was asked what he was doing teaching classes in English and Philosophy and Science instead of preaching the gospel, he replied that he was laying a mine which in due time would explode and blow up the whole of Hinduism. One would be tempted to say that if
Hinduism were a monolithic block, then the detonation of Duff's mind would certainly have shattered it, but that Hinduism is, in fact, a sand bank, that the mine has gone off, but that the sand bank has only somewhat changed its shape. It is still there. But that may perhaps be a too hasty judgment, as I shall try to show later. The earliest
reaction of Indian culture to the invasion of the West was a purely defensive one. There were, of course, those who simply resisted it as the conservative will always resist the unknown. But there were also multitudes who welcomed it, and who, in effect, accepted Western civilization at its own valuation, and accepted the Western valuation of his own culture, and tried, above all, to get a Western education for
himself and his children. I suppose that over much of Africa, that is still the situation. The local culture simply did not have the inherent strength to meet and master the incoming culture, to meet it on its own ground, to take what was [assumable?] and reject the rest while retaining its own identity. In India, on the other hand, and I suppose over most of Asia and even of the Islamic
world, what has taken place is a vast renaissance of these ancient cultures and religions, a renaissance stimulated precisely by the invasion of Western culture. But having now in large measure succeeded in mastering that culture and making it contributory to its own instead of allowing it to displace the ancient culture, of course it
is always dangerous to indulge in these large generalizations. But I think it would be true, in a general way, to say that Hinduism today faces the world with a serene confidence in its own adequacy, in its adequacy to the problems of human existence on this planet, that it is the religion for mankind. Those whose
thinking is expressed in such writings as those of Radhakrishnan, or in the historical writings of (inaudible), assure that they have in the Hindu religious and philosophical tradition the whole full-orbed truth of which, for instance, Christianity and Islam are but partial and one-sided expressions. They are sure that in principle, all truth is contained in germ at
least in the (inaudible). They feel, therefore, spiritually free to plunge headlong into the whole stream of modern scientific thinking and technical development, without feeling that thereby they are going outside the ocean of truth, which is Hinduism. They can say, in a certain sense, all things are ours, whether ancient or modern, whether Western or Eastern, for in the Hindu position,
they have something at the same time as it appears to them infinitely stable and infinitely flexible. Moreover, they are sure that in the realm of practical politics also, Asia, rather than Europe or America, can offer the secret of peaceful coexistence among the nations of the world, the political expression of that faith being the [Pancasila?] of
Pandit Nehru and Zhou Enlai, not the more ancient Pancasila of Dr. [Sakernib?]. They are sublimely sure that the recent period of world history in which the Christian West more or less explicitly asserted, and the rest of the world more or less tacitly admitted the right to control the affairs of the nations is a definitely closed chapter in world history.
I am trying to sketch in a few lines the mental and spiritual climate of modern Hinduism, as I see it. Of course, these are very broad generalizations. And one could point to important elements which modify that picture, the fact, for instance, that Hindus are still being converted to Christianity in considerable numbers is one such fact. But I believe that the picture I
have tried to sketch is substantially authentic. An observer from a predominantly Buddhist country would, I believe, give a substantially similar account of the renaissance of Buddhism, in some respects, more impressive than that of Hinduism. In Islam also there is, I understand, a renewed consciousness of a mission to the whole world, though of course for obvious reasons, the situation in the world of
Islam is in many respects very different from that in Hindu and Buddhist countries. The point is that the old picture of the Christian missionary going out from the citadel of Christian civilization to labor in the culturally backward parts of the world now contains much more untruth than truth. It would be much truer now if one thought steadily of one world moved by rival faiths as
to its ultimate destiny. Christianity is certainly not today, if it ever was, the only effectively missionary religion. Not only the new world faith of communism, but the ancient faiths, also newborn, are rising up to claim the world. These thoughts, of course, are by no means new, but I doubt whether they have yet been sufficiently clearly grasped by Christians
in the West. But I want now to go on to point out one vitally important element in the picture, which, in a very important way, modifies the picture that I have sketched. It is true that the general, political and cultural expansion of Europe and North American have been halted and reversed, that there has been a vast renaissance of the cultures of the formerly Colonial or semi-Colonial peoples. But there is one element of Western culture which the rest of the world
has voted almost unanimously that it wants, and wants quickly, and that is Western technology and the science, which is its necessary basis. That element in Western culture is most emphatically still exportable. And as far as most of the world is concerned, the main desire, the dominating passion, is to get as much of it as quickly as possible. That clamant demand is capable of
producing some amusing eddies in the general current of anti-Colonialism. You may, perhaps, have noted the remark of the Liberian delegate to the United Nations, that his country suffered as against Ghana from not having had the advantages of being a colony. It is also less well-known that in India, the declared intention of the constitution that Hindi should replace English
as the national language at the end of 15 years appears likely to be unfulfilled, that the demand to retain English primarily because of the window that it opens into the cultural and scientific world of the West has proved exceedingly strong, apparently much stronger than the drafters of the constitution expected. But as we have seen, at least in the lands
of the ancient Asian religious cultures, there is a strong conviction that you can take Western science and technology and make it sub-serve the ancient culture. The large and increasing body of able graduates from the science faculties -- and I may say in passing that only the science faculties get the able students in the Indian universities today, it is only the leavings which study the humanities.
The large and able body of graduates from the science faculties of the Asian universities, the students flocking to Britain and America and Germany for technical courses, the increasing multitude of educated men going into industrial and mercantile concerns of the Western type -- these men and women are sure that the future belongs to them, that the East can take Western technology on its own terms and use it in its own way
to end forever the Western domination of the globe. This situation raises many profound and interesting questions. How far is the technological and scientific element in Western culture a detachable part? Can it continue to exist and develop in detachment from that culture which gave it birth? Can it be integrated into the ancient, non-Christian cultures
without ultimately disrupting those cultures? I'm not bold enough to offer confident answers to those questions. But I want to suggest the following thesis for your consideration. Is it not a fact, and is it not extremely significant, that the terms of the problems with which these ancient cultures are wrestling today are terms set by Western culture, and ultimately
by the gospel? Let me look very briefly at five of the great practical issues, which the nations of Asia are wrestling with today: The first, and perhaps the greatest, is the problem of population. Whence does that problem arise? I don't need, I think, to speak much about it because it has been written up and probably over-written up in the newspapers of the West. Whence
does that problem arise? It's immediate cause, of course, is the rapid fall in the death rate. And that, in its turn, is due in the first place to improved medical and scientific care, and in the second place, to the improved development of communications of capital, of government making possible rapid famine relief measures in the case of local scarcities. But these things in
themselves ultimately stem from Western technological achievement and from that valuation of the individual. Even the apparently useless individual, which the West has learned from the gospel. Take secondly the problem of creating a welfare state. No free nation among
the younger nations of Asia today is free to accept any other aim for its government than the creation of a welfare state. It is taken for granted that it is the duty of government not merely to maintain law and order and administer justice, but to seek to abolish poverty, illiteracy, disease; to assure to every human being certain
minimum fundamental rights. In other words, it is impossible for the government of India today to rule in the manner of Hyder Ali or Tipu Sultan. And that is so because certain fundamental ideas about the value and dignity of man have sunk so deep into the mines, at least of educated people, that they cannot be overridden by any government or any political party.
Those ideas ultimately stem from the gospel. I am not so foolish as to pretend that they are due entirely, or even in a major degree, to the direct preaching of the gospel by missionaries, although that has certainly played its part. They have come into the fundamental thinking of the average educated Indian through his entire contact with Western culture, and primarily with English literature and English
political and social thought, as he has studied it in his high schools and colleges. But ultimately, it has its origin in the gospel. Thirdly, the challenge of communism. I will not venture at this point a discussion on the truth and error of communism, but merely remind you that whatever you may think of communism, it is a plant which could not have germinated and grown on any other than Christian soil. It is unthinkable
that the communist system of ideas could have developed and could have captured men's imagination in the first place, within the matrix of the ancient Pantheistic civilizations of the East. For take again the demand that I have been speaking of, the demand for technical advance. That again is unthinkable as a product of,
for instance, Hindu Pantheism. It is true, as I have said, that the modern scientifically educated young man or woman in India today is entirely confident that Western technology raises no ultimate problems for him, and is entirely optimistic and carefree as he plunges into the stream of scientific and technological thinking.
He does not find it difficult to relate it to the fundamental ideas of the Vedanta, indeed it is, in many respects, easier to relate it to those than it is to relate it to the gospel. But the point is that that intense curiosity about every tiniest element in the experiences that we have through the five senses, that restless determination to probe
every small inconsistency in our experience, to penetrate every chink that shows itself in the surface of reality as our five senses deal with it, which is the basis of Western science, and therefore of Western technology, is unthinkable as a native product of the soil of Hindu Pantheism with its deep conviction that in the last analysis, the world
is Maya illusion. And finally, the demand in the political sphere for democratic rights, for certain fundamental liberties for the individual, these again, without elaborate argument, could be shown in the last analysis to stem from the Christian gospel. They could not and did not
arise directly out of the soil of the ancient Eastern cultural and religious face. But in relation to all these five things, the same question inevitably arises; will prolonged wresting with these problems not necessarily raise issues for which the ancient non-Christian faiths have no answer? Will
not the ancient faiths in the last analysis be broken up by the struggle of wrestling with these issues? Will not their adherence be compelled to go right outside them, outside their traditional frame of reference, if they are to find answer which will make life tolerable and intelligible to those who have set their heart upon the resolution of
such problems as these? Is it possible, in other words, that Alexander Duff was a truer prophet than at this state he appears to be? Again, I say I am not bold enough to return a confident answer to those questions. I think one must be very hesitant about propounding generalizations over so vast a field. But I want to submit to you for your consideration one statement
which perhaps may be true, and which will form, at any rate, the basis upon which I shall proceed for the remainder of these lectures. I suggest to you that what we are witnessing in the world today is the process by which more and more of the human race is being gathered up into that single history whose center is
the cross, and whose end is the final judgment and mercy of God. May I be permitted to repeat that sentence, because in a sense, the lectures that follow will be the expansion of it. I submit that what we are witnessing in the world today is the process by which more and more of the human race is being gathered up into that single history, that unitary history, whose
center is the cross, and whose end is the final judgment and mercy of God. Many years ago, as an undergraduate, I read a little book in the home university library by J. L. Myres called "The Dawn of History." And I have often remembered the title of the first chapter of that book, which was, "The Peoples which have No History." And that chapter was a reminder to the reader that
vast areas of the human story lie outside of history, that there is no history, no recorded history, that multitudes of people have lived and died and begotten their children, who have in turn lived and died and gone on for centuries of whom there is no recorded history. And I believe that what one can see in the world
today, in a certain sense, can best be described as the process by which the peoples who had no history are being drawn into one single history. I think you'll see it extraordinarily vividly in a very simple experience in the ordinary work of a district missionary in India.
An ordinary Indian village has no history. If you sit down there ask, you will find that nothing is remembered about the past. You will find it impossible to discover the date at which any building was put up, if it was built earlier than living memory. You will find it impossible -- of course, there are the official government records with regard to the sale and purchase of land which are maintained in the registrar's office, but as far as local
knowledge and memory is concerned, you find that there is no history. And there is no history because nothing happens, because in the world of Maya, in that world which is simply a continuous repetition of cycles, in which years are numbered in accordance with a cyclical scheme which ultimately brings you back to naught again, nothing happens. There is no history.
But then the gospel is preached, people become Christians, and then something happens, of which I've only recently come to see the significance; somebody brings along a book, Register of Baptisms. And a whole lot of names are entered in that book, and in a certain sense, from that point, that village begins to have a written history. And if you go to a village which has had a Christian church in it
for a hundred or a hundred and fifty years, you will always find, in my experience, that if you go to the Christians there, they have a history. They will immediately tell you, yes, the first missionary who came here was so-and-so in 1803, and the first church was built by so-and-so in 1849, and the first pastor who came was so-and-so, and he was followed by so-and-so. I don't say that it's all remembered, but at least in principle, there is a history,
because there is a history. Because something happened. Because you have become part of a movement which is not cyclical, but linear. Something which goes from the coming of our Lord to His coming again, which does not ultimately return to naught again, but which is counted A.D., and then added on until the day that He comes again. History, in a sense, has begun.
Now, I want to suggest that in a certain sense, we can understand what is going on in the world today as being the process by which more and more of the human race is being gathered up either out of no history, or out of history which was not within this line, and is becoming part of that single history
whose center is the cross, and whose ultimate, whose end, is the final judgment and mercy of God. A history of which the ultimate issues are finally revealed and determined by Jesus Christ. Now of course, and of course, that statement is not a statement arrived at by a mere survey of the facts; it is a statement arrived at by beginning with the biblical
interpretation of history and using it as a key to interpret our own times, which is, in fact, the only way that we have, as Christians, to understand history. But what I want to suggest is that we can understand what is going on by seeing it as the process gathering momentum as it goes forward, by which human beings, communities, nations are being drawn out of the
ancient static or merely cyclical pattern of human life, and are being drawn into an irreversible movement which is linear and not cyclical, that this process is the result of the meeting of the gospel with the ancient religious cultures of the East, meaning by that not merely the direct preaching of the gospel, which of course is very far from being
the whole story or the whole explanation of the story, but the multitude in us in direct contacts of the gospel with these ancient cultures mediated through the many cultural factors, some of which I have been hinting at, that the fast spiritual forces which are being released in Asia today. And I think one has to live, if I may say so, in a country like India through these years to feel how great are
these new spiritual forces which are welling up out of the soul of an ancient people, as a result, I believe, of the fact that in a very real sense, a contact has taken place between the gospel and these ancient faiths, that these vast spiritual forces which are being released in Asia today by this contact are sweeping these ancient cultures irreversibly into
that unitary stream of world history, of which the Western nations have been until recently the principle elements. And that with the bible in our hands, we are to interpret this whole vast and various process as part of the unremitting action of God in Jesus Christ, whereby men and ultimately the whole human race
are being brought to the final issues of faith and unbelief, propelled, if you like to put it so, through tribulation and conflict and agony to the confirmation in which Christ and anti-Christ are revealed, in which the judgment and mercy of God are set forth, the judgment and mercy revealed in the cross are out,
are finally and conclusively worked out. In other words, it is a movement which I have described as unitary, but which is at the same time dialectical, because at the far end of it, we see the figure not only of Christ, but of anti-Christ, that we have to find the clue to our ultimate interpretation of it in the eschatology of the New Testament. Very
obviously, in saying these things, I am not merely surveying political and cultural tendencies, but trying to give a theological interpretation of them. And this, therefore, is the point at which, in a sense, we make the transition to the next theme towards a theology of mission. But before making that transition, let me commend to you this point: If what I have said
is in any measure the truth, if not the thesis that I have suggested at the end, but the picture that I have tried to sketch in the earlier part of the lecture is in any measure true, then it is clear that the theological interpretation of it is a matter of concern, not merely to a few professional missionaries and mission
bold secretaries, but to every intelligent Christian. If it is in any degree true, then we cannot regard what are called foreign missions as a specialized department which can take care of all that sort of thing. We shall have to accept the fact that as in other spheres, so also here, our Christian thinking will have to be done more and more in global terms.
That will concern, for instance, the issues that are to be discussed in the coming two or three weeks at New Haven concerning the proposed integration of the World Council of Churches with the International Missionary Council. Much, it seems to me, depends upon whether that integration, if it goes forward,
remains a merely organizational and administrative reorganization, or whether it springs from and leads to a penetration far more deep than has yet taken place of the whole consciousness of Christians everywhere, that they're thinking about the issues of the gospel must be in global terms, or else they will be untrue. It concerns also
the position that we take as responsible Christians on political issues, on foreign policy, on tariff policy. And will you feel that I am going out of my beat if I say that there are perhaps few issues more important for the well-being of the human race in the next few decades than the tariff policy of the United States of America,
an issue on which, it seems to me, that Christians are often less well-informed and less sensitive than they ought to be. On racial policy, obvious, I don't need to talk about it. That our responsibility for these issues will not be exhausted by the share we have in what are today technically described as foreign
missions, but will involve our entire Christian obedience. And with regard to what our technically called "foreign missions," it will mean that we must know, and our church people must know, what we are doing when we carry on foreign missions, and why we are doing it. Too often foreign missions have been commended to the sending churches on grounds which we would not like
to see publicized in the receiving countries. A very irresponsible mission executive, as I think the phrase is, said to me once, "We are the victims of our own promotional methods." How often we have used reasons which will not bear global scrutiny. It is not only in the past, but also in the present, that
we Christians have tried to make the gospel sub-serve some lesser end, to regard Christianity as a means of making the world safe for the futile system, or making England safe for the squirearchy, or as a spiritual cement for the British Empire, or as a way of meeting the challenge of world communism. The world is too small now for it to be
possible, for us to use arguments that will not bear global scrutiny. Our speeches in England and America are overheard in Asia and Africa. And I do not need to ask you to imagine the kind of repercussions upon the missionary witness of the task in India when it reaches the headlines that somebody has said that Christian missions are the great way of combating
communism. We have got to learn to think globally. We have got to determine to base our missionary effort always and only upon the one base where it is meant to stand; namely, the cosmic purpose of God to sum up all things in Jesus Christ. That leads me, then, to the second main theme, and will you permit me to spend a few minutes
simply introducing it before the close of this section, towards a theology of mission? The last major cooperative effort to formulate a theology of mission centered in the conference at Villingen, Germany, convened by the International Missionary Council five years ago. That conference had as its theme the missionary obligation
of the church. Those who took part in that conference, I think, are conscious of the fact that for all the great values of that meeting, it did not achieve what it set out to do. And in the paper, the booklet subsequently written by Dr. Wilhelm Anderson with the title, towards a theology of mission, the view is very
ably presented that it was impossible to reach adequate conclusions by starting from that title, the title, "The Missionary Obligation of the Church." And Dr. Anderson advances two reasons for stating that it was impossible to reach adequate conclusions from that starting point; firstly, he says, because the prejudges the question of the relation of
mission to church, that the church, in other words, is not the true center around which the missionary task revolves. And that therefore, the title, "The Missionary Obligation of the Church," was a wrong starting point. And secondly, that the proper question to be asked is not why missions, but what is mission? And hence, says Dr. Anderson,
the comparatively meager results in the realm of formulated theological statement which came out of the Villingen Conference. With regard to these two points, it seems to me that the second is clearly valid, since the answer to the question, "why missions," must necessarily depend upon the answer to the question, "what is mission?" And therefore, we shall accept his guidance at this point and formulate
the question in that way, what is the mission of the church? On the other question, it seems to me that it is necessary to make some reservations. I think that the arguments which have centered in the Villingen Conference concerning the relation of church to mission, and particularly the very strong arguments of the great Dutch
missionary theologian, Dr. Hoekendijk, in favor of removing the church so to say drastically from the center of missionary theology, ultimately rests upon an inadequate doctrine of the church. But that question will, itself, come up in the course of our study, and I therefore want to propose as the subject for our study in the next two questions; what is mission?
And I will ask you to consider that in relation to three fundamental, shall I say, foci of our thinking. In the first, place, the revelation, the kerygma, the message, the given fact of what God has done and made known by doing it. In the second place, the world that for which it has been done. And
in the third place, the church that which is the agency through which it is to be completed. These, then, God willing, will form the themes of our discussion tomorrow and on Wednesday.