PPL News Articles

Presbyterians Pro-Life NEWS
Winter 2001

Lesslie Newbigin: Defender of life

Widely regarded as one of the most prominent churchmen of the twentieth century, Lesslie Newbigin, who died in 1998, graced the Christian Church worldwide as pastor, bishop and theologian. Newbigin wrote to support the ministry of PPL in the early1990s and agreed to join the PPL Board of Advisors. Defense of the unborn was an aspect of his own witness and ministry.

Geoffrey Wainwright, professor of theology at the Duke Divinity School in North Carolina, recently completed a biography of Newbigin's life and thought, titled Lesslie Newbigin: A Theological Life, published by Oxford University Press (2000). The book recalls a speech Newbigin made in Brazil at a WCC world conference on mission and evangelism in 1966 when he reflected, as have many others, on slavery and abortion. He said,

...when we stood in the old slave market, on Saturday morning, on those stones which had felt the weight of the bare and bruised and shackled fee of countless of our fellow human beings, when we stood in that place so heavy with human sin and suffering and were told to spend two minutes in silence waiting for what the Spirit might say to us, I thought first how unbelievable that Christians could have connived in that inhuman trade. And then there came to my mind the question: Will it not be the case that our great-grandchildren will be equally astonished at the way in which we in our generation, in our so-called modern, Western, rich, developed culture connive at the wholesale slaughter of unborn children, in the name of the central idol of our culture: freedom of choice?

Newbigin once used limerick to attack the word games used to obscure the reality of abortion. He wrote,

Said an angry young man of Miletus,
"These doctors use jargon to cheat us.
They're quite reconciled
To killing a child
'Cos they're only 'aborting a foetus.'"

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