From avatar to Lord

I've been slowly working my way through the outstanding introduction to the writings of Lesslie Newbigin compiled by Paul Weston. This is rich and eye-opening stuff! Here's a snippet from the chapter on the Trinitarian foundation of Christian mission, which was a major topic of Newbigin's later writings.

As a missionary in India I often shared in evangelistic preaching in villages where the name of 'Jesus' has no more meaning than any other strange name. I have heard speakers use many different Tamil words to explain who he is. He is Swamy ('Lord'). Or he is Satguru ('the true teacher'). He is Avatar ('incarnation of God'). Or he is Kadavul ('the transcendent God') who has become man. What all these words have in common is that they necessarily place Jesus within a world of ideas which is formed by the Hindu tradition and which is embodied in the language of the people. Swamy is usually translated 'Lord', but it does not have the meaning that the word Kurios has for a Greek-speaking Jew. It denotes not Yahweh, the Lord of the Old Testament, but one of the myriad gods who fill the pages of the Hindu epics. Avatar is usually translated 'incarnation', but there have been many avatars and there will be many more. To announce a new avatar is not to announce any radical change in the nature of things. Even to use the word kadavul will only provoke the question: 'If Jesus is kadavul, who is the one to whom he prays?'

Newbigin gives that personal example to illustrate the difficulty in preaching an accurate representation of Jesus—the Son eternally begotten from the Father—to cultures unfamiliar with the Athanasian and Nicene formulations of the Trinity. He argues that Christian mission must be first of all Trinitarian in nature, otherwise men and women will not be able to give an accurate answer to the question "Who is Jesus?" Christianity is a Trinitarian faith, and it's significant that the mission of the early church to the pagan Roman world was accompanied by a centuries-long struggle to articulate the relation of God the Son to God the Father. Most of the heresies of the early church revolved around this question. There's no explicit doctrine of the Trinity in the New Testament, so it had to be forged through controversy. I've only scratched the surface of Newbigin's thought here.

Difficult as it may be to translate concepts first articulated in a 4th-century Greco-Roman context to places where Christ has not yet been preached, Newbigin stresses the good news that the Spirit goes before the missionary, preparing hearts to receive the message, and then enabling men and women of every culture and language to make that supernatural confession of Peter and the apostles: "You are the Christ, the Son of the living God." (Matt. 16:16-17, 1 Cor. 12:3). Newbigin again:

Jesus is now not just Lord, but unique Lord, not just avatar, but unique avatar. The word kadavul can no longer refer to a monad: it must refer to a reality, within which there is a relationship of hearing and answering. The event by which the old structure is broken is not a natural happening. . . . It is the work of the sovereign Spirit to enable men and women in new situations and in new cultural forms to find the ways in which the confession of Jesus as Lord may be made in the language of their own culture. The mission of the church is in fact the church's obedient participation in that action of the Spirit by which the confession of Jesus as Lord becomes the authentic confession of ever new peoples, each in its own tongue.

Quotes from "The Open Secret" (1978) as excerpted in Lesslie Newbigin: Missionary Theologian: a Reader, edited by Paul Weston (pp. 85 & 86)