Or even someone who quotes one of his followers briefly.

centuri0n: not sure what you mean by “pluralism vs. exclusivism” (did you mean inclusivism vs. exclusivism?), so the following remarks may be irrelevant to your concern. Pluralism can be descriptive or normative. So can exclusivism. The least controversial aspect of pluralism is descriptive: we can look around America in the 21st century and come to the fairly straight-forward conclusion that classical Christianity is a minority culture today. The more controversial aspect of pluralism is normative: ought we be a minority culture? If so, how do we interact with the broader, secular culture and the disparate and fragmented subcultures? Can we be faithful to the gospel and at the same time content with our minority status? Are we looking back lamenting the loss of a christian “heritage” (whether real or imagined) or forward in eager expectancy of what God will do with diminished numbers in the midst of an aggressive secularized culture?

I think Newbigin’s missiology is right on the money. Michael highlighted “challenge” as the end of his approach. I would add that a crucial step along the way is “illuminate.” This is where controversy erupts. Where one might fear Newbigin’s call for commitment to others as the wide-open path to inclusivism, another might see it as an opportunity to get in the thick of God’s common grace. The gospel illuminates; the law condemns. But illumination is not acquiescence to a worldview. Illumination also highlights the shadows and darker corners. That’s subversive and the gospel of grace excels at undermining everyone’s elaborate ways of self-justification. I think when you interact with the committed believer of another major religion, you will have lots of opportunities to illuminate them (as well as be illuminated yourself), for you will share with that person a view of the world that is explicitly religious and theological, more or less coherent and comprehensive. Since all of creation, including man’s deepest longings and hopes and fears, proclaim the glory of God for one who trains the ear to hear, I think with patient care and true sacrifice, you will find the points at which you are scaling the same pyramid with the other (to borrow an image from C. S. Lewis).

A caveat. I don’t think it’s so easy to take this strategy of dialogue with other world religions and apply it to contemporary American cultures. Too much of the fractured, confused stories that our less explicitly religious neighbors hold are a mishmash of individual preferences, commodified platitudes and nostalgic tokens clung to amidst the blur of frenetic change and activity. In many ways, we’re in the same boat with them so it should be easier to dialogue. But what they lack is the overarching, coherent story of what’s going on. All in all, I think Newbigin’s strategy is more difficult to embody in our own communities than it is, say, with a Sufi Muslim.

Why take the trouble to learn another worldview so extensively? One answer you would get comes from a very popular approach to worldview thinking, e.g., Jim Sire’s, which says to compare the claims of the other worldview according to the interpretive grid of Creation, Fall, Redemption. Find where its narrative goes “wrong” and attack those points. I don’t like this approach. Too intellectualized, too abstract and remote from the thick of life. It seems “safer” because you’re clearly not trying to shoehorn the gospel into a foreign context. But I don’t think it illuminates that foreign context either. And I don’t think a challenge to someone’s worldview will be taken seriously unless, as Newbigin says, you really commit yourself to the other worldview. It’s the difference between looking at a pair of glasses on the display case and actually trying them on to see what the world looks like when you wear them. The latter is risky, and we are human and fallible after all, but I do believe it is truer to the NT witness of what our wandering little newly-freed community in Christ is supposed to look like and act like in the world. What we bear witness to is not the “solution” to a “problem,” nor true teachings over false teachings, nor the perfection of what others have only imperfectly, but a token, the firstfruits, of what God has purposed for the world. We don’t have it because of a superior or correct worldview or by winning the denominational lottery, but by lives lived in the grace of God through Word and sacrament, by which we are continually brought back to the cross, sometimes even by the judgment of the other (cf. Luke 11:31-32). This is the gospel mandate of “engagement” that has, truth be told, even an element of self-interest in it.

It sounds like you’ve already studied Newbigin, but in case you haven’t gotten to these works, do check out:
Foolishness to the Greeks: The Gospel and Western Culture
The Gospel in a Pluralist Society
The Open Secret: An Introduction to the Theology of Mission

Thanks for reading.

“And you see this is the kind of issue that one faced in trying to communicate the gospel in India. You obviously had to take seriously the whole Hindu worldview, with its great elements of rationality and strength, which I found enormously impressive. In that kind of situation you have to ask yourself, not ‘How can we fit the gospel into this?’, but, ‘At what points does the gospel illuminate this, at what points does it question it, at what points does it contradict it?’

But one has to express those things in a way which the listening Hindu will recognise as his own language. That’s the crucial thing. And that I think was the difficulty, because if you’re going to use another language, you’re at least provisionally accepting the way of understanding the world which that language embodies, and you therefore have to commit yourself to the other worldview, at least up to that point – but in order to challenge it.”

In order to challenge it. In order to challenge it.

That’s my understanding of Newbigin and everything he represents in missional thinking. I am contextualized with my students, and I am obligated to understand their worldview and culture in order to communicate with it and to challenge it with the Gospel.

The battle we are fighting here is with the insistence of many that to get to that point is itself a compromise of the essentials of the Gospel, and that the only platform for communication is the assumption that I have no context when I have an open Bible and and a sermon.