Honest Religion for Secular Man

by Lesslie Newbiggin

'I have seen enough to know how powerful a source of evil religion can be; writes Bishop Newbigin. 'Nevertheless religion
is much too great and permanent an element in human experience to be swept out of sight. I want to ask what must be the religion of a Christian who accepts the process of secularization and lives fully in the kind of world into which God has led us.'
It is fascinating to have these reflections on the secular city of the West by an Englishman who spent 23 years as a missionary in India, who then became a leader of the World Council of Churches as Director of the Commission on World Mission and Evangelism, and who has now been called back to South India as Bishop in Madras.

Genres: Theology

Paperback

First published August 5, 2011

Reviews

[Joel Wentz · Rating 5 out of 5]

Outstanding synthesis of historical and philosophical theories about the progress of society, secularization, ethics, and the state of religious practice today. Newbigin strikes a balance that I find inspiring - he is utterly unafraid of secularization (rather, he sees it as a positive outworking of God's plan for the world) but is also sharply critical of the uncritical ways some Christian thinkers attempt to "re-articulate" Christianity along secular lines. He packs an amazing amount of argument in such a small book - secularization as a unifying movement away from "ontocratic" societies, the nature of knowing (epistemology) and how that applied to our knowledge of God, the nature of the church in a secular world (ecclesiology), and drawing on Bonhoeffer, Christian ethics in the light of Christ and the secular man.

Newbigin is a hero me, an unapologetic Christian thinker with philosophical acumen and a deep historical sense. This is, to my mind, one of his best, and for those who think about the concepts of religion and secularity in the human condition, this is a no-brainer recommendation. Highly recommended!