Select Works of Lesslie Newbigin (7 vols.)

This book—written six years before 9/11—examines the roots of political Islam and its offshoots in Britain. In describing the indifference of policy makers and government officials to religion, it warns of extremism taking root among disaffected young Muslims—and offers a vision of hope tempered with realism that might have helped avert tragedy had it been more widely heeded.

Modern man finds the concept of finality alien to his whole way of thinking. Science teaches him that human history is only a moment in the life of an infinite universe. His study of world religions calls into question the uniqueness of Christianity. Western man’s uneasy conscience—due to the excesses of colonialism—makes him hesitant to press his own faith on others.

By taking the issues of finality out of the classroom, Lesslie Newbigin demonstrates its importance to Christians with loyalties both to the community of the church and to the community of man. He asserts that conversion does not involve either a denial of the value of a person’s previous faith or a blanket acceptance of the church’s way of doing things. Nebiggin looks for the place of the gospel in secular history. The gospel is the announcement of an event which demands that all men make a decision for or against. It is the clue to history—the history of mankind and of the individual.

“Religion is much too great and permanent an element in human experience to be swept out of sight,” writes Lesslie Newbigin. “I want to ask what must be the religion of a Christian who accepts the process of secularization and lives fully in the kind of world into which God has led us.”

His answer involves relating the universal fact of secularization to the biblical picture of the nature and destiny of man. It involves, too, some criticism of recent Christian responses to secularization—but Newbiggin never resports to sanctomonius diatribes. The emphasis is on knowing God, being God’s people, and living the Christian life in a secular world.

The central question in the ecumenical debate is this: what is the nature of the Church? Lesslie Newbigin sketches the present context of the discussion and touches on the Biblical meaning of the word “Church.” He then presents the Protestant, Catholic, and Pentecostal answers to this question. Ultimately, he argues that the Church is at once eschatological and missionary—and both aspects imply “the ends of the earth.”

When Lesslie Newbigin’s The Reunion of the Church was first published in 1948, F.J. Taylor wrote in The Churchman, “There is hardly a page which does not bear evidence of shrewd insight, profound theological grasp, and evangelistic passion.” The book served as an explanation of the theology behind the infant Church of South India in which Dr. Newbigin was a bishop. For this edition, first published in 1960, Dr. Newbigin wrote a new introduction drawing out the significance of the Church of South India’s experience after 1948.

Originally written to educate South Indian teachers in the basics of the Gospel, this primer by Lesslie Newbigin addresses the unique misunderstandings of the Tamil people to whom Newbigin ministered. The Tamil language was so limited, says Newbigin, that 1 Timothy 1:15 might as well be translated, “Christ Jesus came into the world to provide free board and lodging to rascals!” With this challenge in mind, Newbigin presses the desperate condition in which sin has left us, and our profound need for God’s unmerited grace.