This is a collection of seventeen sermons, addresses and articles by Bishop Lesslie Newbigin, most of them hitherto unpublished, spanning the period 1960–92. It opens with a sermon preached at the Riverside Church in New York in 1960 (on the occasion or the 50th anniversary of the famous Edinburgh missionary conference) outlining the principle of ecumenical partnership in world mission. It ends with a stirring call for the evangelization of Europe, given at a missionary congress in Hanover, Germany, in 1992. Sandwiched between these are messages delivered to various audiences in America and Europe, on subjects ranging from urban parish ministry to the cultural captivity of Western Christianity. Since most of these were originally spoken rather than written, the editor, Eleanor Jackson, is to be congratulated for retaining the conversational style of the material, thereby making them readily accessible to the general Christian reader.

For the beginner, this is an excellent introduction to Newbigin’s thought; for Newbigin aficionados there is little here that is not found in his major published works. But it still provides refreshing reading, and the brief autobiographical glimpses (such as his experiences of mission in parish settings as far afield as Madras, India, and Winston Green, Birmingham) are always illuminating. Newbigin is most impressive, indeed awesome, when defending the universality of the Christian gospel and exposing the muddle-headedness and loss of nerve that have turned many Western churches into domestic chaplaincies rather than launching-pads for cross-cultural mission at home and abroad. Where he is most vulnerable is in his readings of the historic roots of the contemporary alienation of the Church from the public realm. In his last address in this volume, Aquinas joins the more familiar figures of Locke, Kant and Descartes as the arch-villains of the story. They stand condemned for having dug the Grand Canyon separating ‘faith’ and ‘knowledge’, the unbridgeable gulf responsible for the modern malaise. No doubt Newbigin has been influenced here by Michael Buckley’s interpretation of the structure of the Summa (in his magisterial At The Origins Modern Atheism, Yale, 1987). However, like Newbigin’s readings of Locke, this reading too is questionable.

A work such as this is, inevitably, repetitive. But the Indonesian General Simatoupong’s question to Newbigin, ‘Can the West be converted?’, which reverberates through many of these chapters, serves as a unifying and haunting refrain for the book as a whole. Many of the questions Newbigin raised and addressed over 30 years ago are still provocative today; as, for instance, whether our methods of training and education can become ‘the means by which the ordinary church member in Europe or America is prepared for a real meeting of the gospel with the non-Christian faiths?’ (p. 20). How, I wonder, do the curricula of theological institutions in the West reflect a serious grappling with either question?

It would be a great pity if books such as this were read only in courses on that new-fangled subject ‘missiology’. They need to be read by both teachers and students of theology, and all who train for pastoral ministry.

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