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"I also saw that quite a lot of evangelical Christianity can easily slip, can become centered in me and my need of salvation, and not … in the glory of God.

"From that time on, in preaching in India, I never started by talking about sin and salvation, I talked about God and what he has done . …

"I remember once spending a whole day with a man from a very, very primitive hill tribe, which has never been touched by what we would call Hinduism, or by Christianity. He was a cave dweller. I spent the whole day with him, following him through the jungle as he used his bow and arrow to shoot little rabbits and little animals. … I had a long talk with him, and one of the questions I put to him was, 'Who do you think made us?' Immediately he said Kadavul, which is one of the words for God, but it is a very basic word that is a combination of the verbal root kada, which means to go beyond, to transcend, and ul, which is the word for meaning or for being. … So Kadavul is 'The Transcendent Being.' It's a wonderful word for God.

"When I preach in a village where Christianity is not known, and where the name of Jesus is not known … I have to begin by using the word Kadavul. But of course when I use the word Kadavul they're thinking of Vishnu or Shiva or some other Hindu God. I know that, but I can't help it. It's only when I begin to tell the stories of what God has done that they begin to say, 'Kadavul is not what we had thought.' "

In a sense, these Indian experiences form the basis of Newbigin's approach to the modern West. "Truth," Newbigin says, "is not abstract ideas or mystical experiences, but a story of what God has done." This is no less true in the West, where ordinary people have lost hold of the gospel story that fills God with a Christian meaning. A bold proclamation of the Bible story, especially of the historical life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, make up the central authority for Christian preaching, East or West. For Newbigin, all other apologetics take a subsidiary role. "If someone says, 'Newbigin says it's all a matter of faith, that means Newbigin is ultimately a relativist,' my answer is, there is no stronger way of affirming a statement than to say I will gladly die for it."

Wanted: Believing congregations
That last statement catches the tip of something important. Newbigin's writings give more than missionary thinking. He communicates blue fire. His words make a credo, a marching song. It is a spirit almost lost among modern Christians, who are (as Newbigin notes) so pleased that the church is now multicultural but so embarrassed by the method by which it came to be so.

Unlike many Christian leaders, Newbigin was never for any great length of time an academic, a church bureaucrat, or (never at all) a media savant. He has, however, done a great deal of street preaching before skeptical crowds. As a bishop in India, he set his priority on congregational ministry, traveling out to remote, illiterate villages, spending the night in local homes, conducting services in the open air. He could get on the next plane for Geneva to parley with great theologians. (Beginning in 1952, for example, he chaired the "Committee of Twenty Five," an assemblage of feisty theologians, including Karl Barth, Emil Brunner, and Reinhold Niebuhr, leading them in drafting a statement on Christian hope.) Yet he came back to engage insistently the life of the church at a congregational level, just as he would do decades later at Winson Green after his retirement.

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December 9 1996, Vol. 40, No. 14