Effectively Engaging Pluralism and Postmodernism in a So-Called Post-Christian Culture
All of this thus far has been a kind of introduction to Newbigin’s real purpose regarding the project of Christian missions in a postmodern and pluralist society. For him, the Church’s mission is not built on guilt over lost souls so much as an irrepressible “explosion of joy” rooted in and arising out of the gospel itself. Usually this is responsively offered to inquiries when the gospel is observed in practice. Pentecost is a prime example (cf. Acts 2:12). The Church’s mission is a divine initiative in which we are ever learning what Christ’s lordship means. Christian mission is only understood aright in terms of the Trinity in light of the missio dei (mission of God). The Father sent the Son and the Spirit into the world to create a community of faith as a foretaste of the Kingdom of God ultimately available for all. Accordingly, “The Church is not so much the agent as the locus of mission.” It simply rehearses and reenacts “the story which has given it birth”—the story of Jesus Christ. For Newbigin, though obviously important, the salvation or perdition of individual souls is not the solidifying center of New Testament missions. Significantly, more central is that the “the true meaning of the human story has been disclosed” in Christ and “must be shared universally.” Missions become a kind of testing ground for present provisional validation of faith in the gospel. Only eschatologically will it be known and shown that “the real clue to the story of every person” is Jesus Christ. Meanwhile, readiness in sharing the good news of Christ is the test of real belief. Ultimately, however, missionary activity is not pointed toward humans at all, Christian or non-Christian; it is doxological—a joyful act of divine worship. Nevertheless, it proclaims the gospel to humanity and propels humanity toward God’s goal in Christ in the power of the Holy Spirit. Thus New Testament apocalyptic passages are assurances that God will consummate the crisis of human history precipitated in Christ at God’s own divine initiative. Until then, neither evangelism nor social action exclusively exhaust Christian mission. Only when word, deed, and being come together in Christ does mission become an appropriately holistic endeavor. Of course that calls for “true contextualization”—not merely adopting customs and language where one endeavors to minister or identifying with this group or that cause, but “so to proclaim and embody the life of Jesus that his power to sustain and judge every human culture is manifest.” Such contextualization is both local and ecumenical. When we start with the primacy of scriptural witness to the gospel and answer the human question then “the sovereign Spirit of God can do his own surprising work.”
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