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This missionary mindset is quite distinct from evangelistic enthusiasm. Evangelism can be (and usually is) carried on within the constraints of a culture. For example, Jesus can be preached as satisfying modern desires for self-fulfillment. The missionary, however, sees the gospel as an invasive force, challenging culture, compelling a higher allegiance.

Since the time of Constantine, few Western Christians (including Western missionaries) have been able to look at their own societies that way. Christianity was identified with European culture ("Christian civilization"), which by definition could not be converted, since it already had been. More recently, modern Western culture offered truths to which Christianity was expected to conform. Christianity had to be converted, demythologized, or otherwise transformed to meet the requirements of Western culture.

Newbigin's years in India developed habits of mind that he used to rethink all that. In India he had engaged a powerful, religious world-view, as intellectually sophisticated as anything in Europe. Preaching in Tamil (a difficult language that few outsiders master), he had to think through the Christian doctrines in a language formed by Hindu thought, to people accustomed to a Hindu way of thinking. He learned to read a culture with a view to its transformation in Christ.

Naming God
As a young missionary, Newbigin regularly visited a Hindu monastery, its great hall "lined with pictures of the great religious figures of history, among them Jesus. Each year, on Christmas Day, worship was offered before the picture of Jesus. It was obvious to me as an English Christian," says Newbigin, "that this was an example of syncretism. Jesus had simply been co-opted into the Hindu world-view; that view was in no way challenged. It was only slowly that I began to see that my own Christianity had this syncretistic character, that I too had to some degree co-opted Jesus into the world-view of my culture." He saw this particularly when he studied the gospel accounts of evil spirits and realized that simple villagers understood them more readily than he.

The Hindu monastery belonged to the Ramakrishna Mission. In it Newbigin joined a weekly study group that read alternatively (in Sanskrit and Greek) from the Svetasvara Upanishad and John's gospel. One member was a scholar in the vishishtadvaita philosophy, a theistic form of Hinduism with a very strong doctrine of sin and grace, memorialized by Rudolph Otto in India's Religion of Grace and Christianity. Newbigin "set himself to school" to learn this philosophy.

"There came a moment in my meetings with this scholar when he put to me the question, 'What do you mean by salvation?' [In answering] I emphasized sin and forgiveness in the work of Christ. When I finished, my teacher said, 'That's very interesting, because what you have said, apart from the name of Jesus, is exactly what I would have said.'

"So I said, 'In that case, tell me, what is the basis of your assurance that God does forgive your sins?'

"And without a moment's hesitation, he said, 'If he wouldn't, I would go to a god who would.'

"I suddenly saw that … someone could use all the language of evangelical Christianity, and yet the center was fundamentally the self, my need of salvation. And God is auxiliary to that.

"Whereas for a Christian brought up on the Bible, the figure of God, Yahweh, this formidable, inescapable, masterly figure is so deeply engraved in our minds, that a Christian could never have said that. But it came straight off his lips, without a moment's hesitation . …

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December 9 1996, Vol. 40, No. 14