Throughout this book, Goheen faithfully conveys Newbigin's compelling account of the holistic gospel, which simultaneously humbles and emboldens the church to witness to God's transformative power in weakness. Goheen shows how Newbigin challenges both evangelical and ecumenical Christianity (where I position myself), urging reticent churches to regain confidence, confronting idols and interrogating sectional, spiritualised and ‘timeless’ notions of the gospel.
Goheen especially demonstrates the ‘painful tensions’ of Newbigin's gospel – which unites personal, communal and cosmic dimensions, encourages complex conversation between culture(s) and church(es) in pursuit of the kingdom, and encourages us to integrate our being, doing and telling. If Newbigin's tension is not consistently sustained, it is because he prioritises the unified nature of the gospel narrative, which determines the parameters of his ‘contextualisation’. I return below to this question of whether Newbigin/Goheen allow for the narrative's disruption by others.
This book is the first of a two-part project. The second will explore Newbigin's missionary heirs, while this articulates Newbigin's missiology in itself. To keep it accessible, Goheen explains that he is not engaging with Newbigin's critics, though the footnotes point towards further argument. He also overwhelmingly agrees with Newbigin, noting only minor differences with him. Consequently, it is an easy read but, since he is deeply immersed in the material, not simplistic.
In chapters 1 and 2 Goheen outlines how, for Newbigin, like Moltmann, the church takes its cue from the missio Dei. However, Barth's definitive influence is not discussed. In Jesus the goal of God's reign is effected, the Spirit bringing the end into the present, but in the weakness of the cross. This generates a community, the church, which is called to witness to God's reign. The comprehensiveness of that reign and the church's partial demonstrations of it should keep the church humble. Nonetheless, this community is given the gifts to be distinctive and missionary.
In chapters 3 and 4, Goheen attends to Newbigin's account of the church's internal life, which serves its missionary role. Notably, Newbigin challenges divergent wings of the church to unite as witness to God's reconciling reign and looks for worship and mission nourishing each other. Chapter 5 crucially turns to the church's relationship with culture. Goheen explains how, as a cross-cultural missionary, Newbigin recognises that cultures have distinctive plausibility structures, credos, idols, even ‘gods’ – pervasive stories conditioning us, and with which the missionary church must engage critically, while recognising how they affect churches too. The gospel narrative generates tension with each credo, causing the church to suffer for its faithfulness, as it both judges idols and affirms creation's good. To lean one way or the other is to distort the missionary vocation.
Chapter 6 effectively argues that the western church has veered to syncretism with its culture. Newbigin thus calls the church to see this essentially as an epistemological crisis: western reasoning, purporting to be neutral, has tamed the gospel's claim that truth is known through its audaciously universal narrative. The solution is not to return to a lost innocence or revive Christendom but to be a publicly distinctive and missionary community. As Goheen encapsulates Newbigin's legacy, chapter 7 affirms that the gospel's domestication has left globalisation, consumerism and inequality insufficiently under judgement – and non-contextual theological education has not resourced the church to unpick the gospel/culture confusion.
I have two further reflections. First, it is curious that Goheen has not explicitly addressed Newbigin's suggestion that other religions can remind the church that its self-righteousness is also judged by the cross – even though this reminder is consistent with his unified narrative. Secondly, despite Goheen's recognition of Newbigin's ecumenical sensitivity to the postcolonial critique of mission, exposure of an idolatrous western credo and encouragement to the diverse church to listen to what others say, it remains unclear whether their unified narrative is open to disruption. This is where engagement with Newbigin's critics would have been illuminating: for example, Foust has identified a ‘dual discourse’ whereby Newbigin deploys Polanyi's ‘from below’ epistemology in order to humble the western credo, but leaps to a ‘from above’ revelational positivism to leave the gospel-narrative invulnerable to critique. Consequently Newbigin (and Goheen) regard the apparently self-contained narrative as truth itself. Their understanding of contextualisation betrays this conflation, recognising that the singular universal narrative is partially inculturated in diverse contexts, but not that the gospel narrative might itself be an open story of receptivity to reconfiguration through encounter with otherness.
My reservation also betrays my ‘ecumenical’ rather than ‘evangelical’ positionality, but Goheen's book overall is commendably persuasive in terms of Newbigin's ‘painful tensions’ and his holistic understanding of the gospel.
