Preferential Option for the Poor in India

Throughout the 1940‟s and 1950‟s Newbigin practiced what is today called a “preferential option for the poor.” This phrase, which originated with Catholic theologians in Latin America in the 1970‟s,349

and has since been given endorsement by Protestant thinkers like Bosch,350 points to mission taking its starting point from a position of identification, or “solidarity” with the poor.351

Newbigin expressed this solidarity with the poor by his physical presence with them, at some cost to himself. As both a pastor and bishop he was dedicated to personally visiting the village churches and communities under his care. E. H. Johnson, General Secretary of the Student Volunteer Movement for Christian Mission in 1951, summarizes Newbigin‟s solidarity with the marginalized as follows:

Here [among the outcastes, dispossessed and poor] is where Newbigin begins. [emphasis mine] He spends much of his time with the poor, for his task is to identify himself with them.... His mission is to be one with these who are struggling out of poverty, injustice, and filth.... He considers his primary task so to identify himself with those in trouble that they might feel that he is one of them, sympathetic with their needs and determined to help them. When the poor find their wells dry, he tries to help them get water. When a farmer is hurt, he goes to serve him. When a mother is deserted, he is there to find ways of support. He writes, “Surely it is of immense

significance that the Church has become rooted here and among the lowest strata in society.”352

As a district missionary in Kanchipuram from 1939 – 1946 Newbigin deliberately chose to return to the practice of an earlier generation of missionaries, although with far less comfort, of staying overnight in the villages to which he went. 353 He

continued this practice as a bishop of Madurai diocese (1947-59), spending three days each week among some of the seven hundred congregations in the diocese. He

349 _{G. Gutierrez, A Theology of Liberation, xxvi. Gutierrez points out that this “formula” was then used}

by the Third General Conference of Latin American Bishops at Puebla, Mexico, in 1979, and thereby given their endorsement.

350

D. Bosch, Transforming Mission, 445ff. It is a pleasant coincidence that Bosch begins his discussion of this with a partial quote from Newbigin concerning the wealth enjoyed at that time by millions. He uses Newbigin to finish his sentence by pointing to the growing “gulf between the rich minority and the abjectly poor majority” (Foolishness to the Greeks, 110).

351

Gutierrez states that preference is being used in the sense of the poor being the ones with whom the church should “first . . . be in solidarity” (A Theology of Liberation, xxvi).

352 _{E. Johnson, prologue to That All May Be One: A South India Diary - The Story of an}

Experiment in Christian Unity, by L. Newbigin (New York: Association Press, 1952). This is an

American edition of A South India Diary.

353 _{L. Newbigin, Unfinished Agenda, 57. Newbigin points out that the village churches in the area were}

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described this as being like the “old days in the villages around Kanchipuram except that it was on a much bigger scale.”354

Newbigin mentions the problems of

transportation and the requirement of walking on foot, sometimes in the heat of the Tamil Nadu day, and of the sense of despair this work also involved: “There would be many long tramps in the dark, many village visits and many hours of talking which produced nothing at all.”355

One of the discomforts which he doesn‟t mention is his living arrangements in the village. While some of the congregations lived by the sea and Newbigin, the bishop, could “take my bedding roll down to the shore and go to sleep on the beach with the sound of the surf in my ears and the jagged outline of the palm trees etched against the spangled beauty of the night sky,” this would not have been typical of a stay in many villages where he would be staying in the poorest quarter of the village. The church of the villages was largely a church of the

outcastes, and the outcaste quarters of the village were frequently places of the worst squalor, crowding and lack of sanitation in the whole village. Newbigin describes the joy of seeing a “lovely little church” in “the midst of the appalling squalor of the leatherworkers‟ quarter of the village.”356

In the context of discussing his efforts to develop a market for baskets made in the village he writes of the “deplorable squalor of a village which had been completely Christian for half a century,” and yet

produced beautiful baskets.357 He wrote, in 1943, from first hand experience of “the problems [caused by the war] of hunger and pestilence in the villages.”358

And again he describes one “squalid slum” as “Christ‟s outpost” in the village.359

3.4.1.1 Newbigin’s Epistemology and the Poor

One of the ways in which a preferential option for the poor has been developed is to suggest that solidarity with the poor is a starting point for theology, theology‟s “new hermeneutical locus.”360

Newbigin did acknowledge inter-relationship between theology and action, describing liberation theology‟s insistence on this as one of its “strong points.”361

Nevertheless, he rejected taking the starting point for theology as

354 _{L. Newbigin, Unfinished Agenda, 96.} 355

L. Newbigin, Unfinished Agenda, 59.

356 _{L. Newbigin, A South India Diary, 77.} 357 _{L. Newbigin, A South Indian Diary, 120.} 358 _{L. Newbigin, Unfinished Agenda, 74.} 359

L. Newbigin, A South Indian Diary, 90.

360 _{D. Bosch, Transforming Mission, 446.} 361 _{L. Newbigin, The Open Secret, 114.}

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solidarity with the poor in liberative action, on the grounds firstly that this is to move theology into the framework of Marxist analysis. He rejects the idea that “there is no locus of truth outside of proletarian praxis.”362

But secondly, and more significantly, the true action required as a starting point for theology is indwelling the bible story through obedience to Christ from within the fellowship of the church, as he states: “The ultimate model, in terms of which I am to understand what is the case and what has to be done, is furnished by the biblical story.”363 A commitment to Christ is to be kept distinct from a commitment to the poor, although the two may come very close together.

Newbigin understood God‟s concern for the poor in the Bible story and in his own thought the position of the poor was an important point of reference and

orientation. He writes, for example, of his reflection on the relationship between the village and the wider world, as he states: “Sitting on a string cot in a village street, watching a big crowd listening to the Gospel, I often find myself mentally trying to picture this scene in a whole picture of the world.”364

In this instance he writes of the village as the world‟s labour force, doing the “hard and monotonous work of the world.” A more telling piece of evidence that the village formed a persisting reference point in his thought is that he can describe his work as chairman of the WCC Committee of Twenty Five, and his ministry in the villages of Tamil Nadu, as “intimately linked.” Newbigin believed that a proper interpretation of the relationship of the eschatological “hope” to the present, a key issue of discussion within the

committee, was also of particular importance for the village churches in his

diocese.365 The village churches were a key reference point in the development of his own thinking on the subject, and, through him, even in that of the committee itself, as he states:

Several times I passed within a few days from these village visits to the

ecumenical discussions and back again and I tried to link them together, bringing the vivid experiences of the „bottom of the heap‟ in India to Bossey, and bringing them back from our discussions there something for the village congregations.366

362 _{L. Newbigin, The Open Secret, 118.} 363 _{L. Newbigin, The Open Secret, 117.} 364

L. Newbigin, A South India Diary, 44.

365 _{L. Newbigin, Unfinished Agenda, 136.} 366 _{L. Newbigin, Unfinished Agenda, 136.}

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As indicated here, during these first two decades of his ministry Newbigin straddled two very different worlds: the rural villages of Tamil Nadu and the elite academic theologians and church leaders of the ecumenical movement. His

description of his furlough in 1946 is typical of this in which he writes of spending a week in Iona at a conference led by Hendrik Kraemer, among others, and of spending part of the return journey to India in preparing a paper for the WCC Assembly in Amsterdam.367 Newbigin‟s familiarity and engagement with the wider theological community and his interest in the village is brought together in a revealing way in his statement about his anticipation of moving to Kanchipuram and seeing first hand how the “direct evangelism” of the Oxford Group “could happen among outcaste villagers – a milieu so remote from that in which the Groups had their birth.”368

Oxford and the Indian village were very “remote” from each other but Newbigin had intimate familiarity with both.