ABSTRACT
A comparison between John Hick and Lesslie Newbigin is particularly worthwhile because of interconnected experiences and themes in their biographies and work. For instance, both realized they had quiet, devoted mothers, but neither was especially sensitive to gender politics.1 Both were educated in Quaker schools, which, as with Hick, led to Newbigin’s initial pacifism.2 Thus their politics were similar – on the liberal-left, concerned about rampant capitalism.3 What is most striking, though, is that, while their early scepticism regarding religious faith would be transformed partly due to extraordinary conversion experiences, their oddly similar paths would then diverge increasingly. Hick’s initial evangelicalism would evolve, as we have seen, influenced by Kant’s universal ethical religion; whereas Newbigin’s initial liberalism would metamorphose into a conservative stance dependent on the ‘objectivity’ of the atonement.4 So, whilst Hick’s modernist framework would come to emphasize tolerance (though ironically suppressing dissent), non-discrimination (though ironically discriminating in favour of Western presuppositions) and the universal ethic of self-lessness (though ironically overlooking the particularity of this norm and obscuring its own individualism), Newbigin, by contrast, would emphasize God’s self-revelation in Jesus Christ, its finality as the clue to the meaning of all history, and its ‘elected’ missiology by which God chooses the particular to bear witness to God’s acts for the sake of others.
