Lesslie Newbigin Quotes

19 Sourced Quotes

Mission begins with a kind of explosion of joy. The news that the
rejected and crucified Jesus is alive is something that cannot possibly
be suppressed. It must be told. Who could be silent about such a fact?
The mission of the Church in the pages of the New Testament is like the
fallout from a vast explosion, a radioactive fallout which is not lethal
but life-giving.

Lesslie Newbigin
Modern capitalism has created a world totally different from anything known before.

Lesslie Newbigin
It has never at any time been possible to fit the resurrection of Jesus into any world view except a world view of which it is the basis.

Lesslie Newbigin
The relativism which is not willing to speak about truth but only about 'what is true for me' is an evasion of the serious business of living. It is the mark of a tragic loss of nerve in our contemporary culture. It is a preliminary symptom of death.

Lesslie Newbigin
There is an appearance of humility in the protestation that the truth is much greater than any one of us can grasp, but if this is used to invalidate all claims to discern the truth it is in fact an arrogant claim to a kind of knowledge which is superior to [all others]...We have to ask: 'What is the [absolute] vantage ground from which you claim to be able to relativize all the absolute claims these different scriptures make?

Lesslie Newbigin
Likewise, the world of action, of politics, is reduced to a conflict of views about how to keep the cycle of production and consumption going. Questions of ultimate purpose are excluded from the public world.

Lesslie Newbigin
If the biblical story is true, the kind of certainty proper to a human begin will be one which rests on the fidelity of God, not upon the competence of the human knower. It will be a kind of certainty which is inseparable from gratitude and trust

Lesslie Newbigin
Through the repeated hammer blows of defeat, destruction, and deportation, interpreted by the faithful prophets, Israel has to learn that election is not for comfort and security but for suffering and humiliation.

Lesslie Newbigin
It is less important to ask a Christian what he or she believes about the Bible than it is to inquire what he or she does with it.

Lesslie Newbigin
To be elect in Christ Jesus, and there is no other election, means to be incorporated into his mission to the world, to be the bearer of God saving purpose for his whole world, to be the sign and the agent and the firstfruit of his blessed kingdom which is for all.

Lesslie Newbigin
Congregational life wherein each member has his opportunity to contribute to the life of the whole body, those gifts with which the Spirit endows him, is as much of the essence of the Church as are ministry and sacraments.

Lesslie Newbigin
One does not learn anything except by believing something, and -- conversely -- if one doubts everything one learns nothing. On the other hand, believing everything uncritically is the road to disaster. The faculty of doubt is essential. But as I have argued, rational doubt always rests on faith and not vice versa. The relationship between the two cannot be reversed.

Lesslie Newbigin
The gospel is not just the illustration (even the best illustration) of an idea. It is the story of actions by which the human situation is irreversibly changed.

Lesslie Newbigin
The New Age movement, for all the validity of its protest and the value of some of its recommendations, is in truth a very old blind alley. There is a very long history to remind us of what happens when nature is our ultimate point of reference.... Nature knows no ethics. There is no right and wrong in nature; the controlling realities are power and fertility.

Lesslie Newbigin
The missionary calling has sometimes been interpreted as a calling to stem this fearful cataract of souls going to eternal perdition. But I do not find this in the center of the New Testament representation of the missionary calling.

Lesslie Newbigin
So we already have the evidence of the dichotomy that runs through our culture. We all engage in purposeful activity, and we judge ourselves and others in terms of success in achieving the purposes that we set before ourselves. Yet we accept as the final product of this purposeful activity a picture of the world from which purpose has been eliminated. Purpose is a meaningful concept in relation to our own consciousness of ourselves, but it is allowed no place in our understanding of the world of facts.

Lesslie Newbigin
There is a need for what [Michael] Polanyi calls the critique of doubt. When we undertake to doubt any statement, we do so on the basis of beliefs which—in the act of doubting—we do not doubt. I can only doubt the truth of a statement on the ground of other things—usually a great many things—which I believe to be true. It is impossible at the same time to doubt both the statement, and the beliefs on the basis of which the statement is doubted.

Lesslie Newbigin
What is striking about the books which were written, especially during the eighteenth century, to defend Christianity against these attacks, is the degree to which they accept the assumptions of their assailants. Christianity is defended as being reasonable. It can be accommodated within these assumptions, which all reasonable people hold. There is little suggestion that the assumptions themselves are to be challenged. The defense is, in fact, a tactical retreat. But, as later history has shown, these tactical retreats can—if repeated often enough—begin to look more like a rout.

Lesslie Newbigin
The necessary precondition for the birth of science as we know it is, it would seem, the diffusion through society of the belief that the universe is both rational and contingent. Such a belief is the presupposition of modern science and cannot by any conceivable argument be a product of science. One has to ask: Upon what is this belief founded?

Lesslie Newbigin