The Gospel in a Pluralist Society Quotes

“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, The Gospel in a Pluralist Society

“If we cannot speak with confidence about biblical authority, what ground have we for challenging the reigning plausibility structure?”
― Lesslie Newbigin, The Gospel in a Pluralist Society

“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 Gospel in a Pluralist Society

“The minister’s leadership of the congregation in its mission to the world will be first and foremost in the area of his or her own discipleship, in that life of prayer and daily consecration which remains hidden from the world but which is the place where the essential battles are either won or lost.”
― Lesslie Newbigin, The Gospel in a Pluralist Society

“And since the gospel does not come as a disembodied message, but as the message of a community which claims to live by it and which invites others to adhere to it, the community's life must be so ordered that it "makes sense" to those who are so invited.”
― Lesslie Newbigin, The Gospel in a Pluralist Society

“If the relativist claims that, since all reasoning is embodied in a particular social context, no claim to know the truth can be sustained, one has to ask for the basis on which this claim is made. It is, after all, a claim to know something about reality — namely that reality is unknowable.”
― Lesslie Newbigin, The Gospel in a Pluralist Society

“If I do not know the purpose for which human life was designed, I have no basis for saying that any kind of human life-style is good or bad.”
― Lesslie Newbigin, The Gospel in a Pluralist Society

“When coercion of any kind is used in the interests of the Christian message, the message itself is corrupted.”
― Lesslie Newbigin, The Gospel in a Pluralist Society

“What is true in the position of the social activists is that a Church which exists only for itself and its own enlargement is a witness against the gospel, that the Church exists not for itself and not for its members but as a sign and agent and foretaste of the kingdom of God, and that it is impossible to give faithful witness to the gospel while being indifferent to the situation of the hungry, the sick, the victims of human inhumanity. I”
― Lesslie Newbigin, The Gospel in a Pluralist Society

“The light cast by the first rays of the morning sun shining on the face of a company of travelers will be evidence that a new day is coming. The travelers are not the source of that witness but only the locus of it. To see for oneself that it is true, that a new day is really coming, one must turn around, face the opposite way, be converted. And then one’s own face will share the same brightness and become part of the evidence. This”
― Lesslie Newbigin, The Gospel in a Pluralist Society

“For Greek thought this was impossible since the essence of perfection is changelessness, and perfection cannot arise from the changes of human history. By contrast the Old Testament writers look forward to a glorious and terrible consummation of history. History has meaning in the sense that it has a goal.”
― Lesslie Newbigin, The Gospel in a Pluralist Society

“There is surely no part of Christian teaching which has been the subject of so much ridicule and indignant rejection as the doctrine of election.”
― Lesslie Newbigin, The Gospel in a Pluralist Society

“In contrast to the long period in which the plausibility structure of European society was shaped by the biblical tradition, and in which one could be a Christian without conscious decision because the existence of God was among the self-evident truths, we are now in a situation where we have to take personal responsibility for our beliefs.”
― Lesslie Newbigin, The Gospel in a Pluralist Society

“The sociology of knowledge has taught us to recognize the fact, which is obvious once it is stated, that in every human society there is what Peter Berger calls a “plausibility structure,” a structure of assumptions and practices which determine what beliefs are plausible and what are not. It is easier to see the working of the plausibility structure in a culture of a different time or place than it is to recognize it in one’s own.”
― Lesslie Newbigin, The Gospel in a Pluralist Society

“Does the use of the word “revelation” mean that reason has been left behind? Obviously not. Both the discovery by Kepler of a new pattern in the movement of the heavenly bodies and the disclosure to Moses of a personal calling become the starting point of a tradition of reasoning in which the significance of these disclosures is explored, developed, tested against new experience, and extended into further areas of thought.”
― Lesslie Newbigin, The Gospel in a Pluralist Society

“Opinions about how it ought to function can only be personal opinions, and any assertion that the purpose for which human life exists has in fact been revealed by the One whose purpose it is, is treated as unacceptable dogmatism.”
― Lesslie Newbigin, The Gospel in a Pluralist Society

“The difference is not between the use of reason and its abandonment; it is the difference between two ways of understanding the world, one in which the self is sovereign and the other in which I understand myself only in a relation of mutuality with other selves.”
― Lesslie Newbigin, The Gospel in a Pluralist Society

“The curiosity which is always seeking to discover more seems to be one of the necessary conditions of life. But seeking is only serious if the seeker is following some clue, has some intuition of what it is that he seeks, and is willing to commit himself or herself to following that clue, that intuition. Merely wandering around in a clueless twilight is not seeking. 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, The Gospel in a Pluralist Society

“discussions about the authority of the gospel the word “reason” is often used as though it were an independent source of information to be set alongside tradition or revelation. But clearly this is a confusion of categories. Reason does not operate in a vacuum. The power of a human mind to think rationally is only developed in a tradition which itself depends on the experience of previous generations. This is obviously true of the vast edifice of modern science sustained by the scientific community. The definition of what is reasonable and what is not will be conditioned by the tradition within which the matter is being discussed. Within an intellectual tradition dominated by the methods of natural science it will appear unreasonable to explain things in terms of personal will and purpose. But if God exists and he is capable of revealing his purpose to human beings, then the human reason will be summoned to understand and respond to this revelation and to relate it to all other experience. It will necessarily do this within a tradition which determines whether or not any belief is plausible — in this case the tradition of a community which cherishes and lives by the story of God’s saving acts.”
― Lesslie Newbigin, The Gospel in a Pluralist Society

“In a consumer society where the freedom of every citizen to express his or her personal preference is taken as fundamental to human happiness-whether this personal preference is in respect of washing powder or sexual behavior-it will be natural to conclude that adherence to the Christian tradition is also simply an expression of personal preference.”
― Lesslie Newbigin, The Gospel in a Pluralist Society

“Natural theology, in other words, is in no way a step on the way toward the theology which takes God's self-revelation as its starting point. It is more likely, in fact, to lead in the opposite direction.”
― Lesslie Newbigin, The Gospel in a Pluralist Society

“To maintain, in this new situation, the old missionary attitude is not merely inexcusable but positively dangerous. In a world threatened with nuclear war, a world facing a global ecological crisis, a world more and more closely bound together in its cultural and economic life, the paramount need is for unity, and an aggressive claim on the part of one of the world’s religions to have the truth for all can only be regarded as treason against the human race.”
― Lesslie Newbigin, The Gospel in a Pluralist Society

“Where there is a believing community whose life is centered in the biblical story through its worshipping, teaching, and sacramental and apostolic life, there will certainly be differences of opinion on specific issues, certainly mistakes, certainly false starts. But it is part of my faith in the authenticity of the story itself that this community will not be finally betrayed.”
― Lesslie Newbigin, The Gospel in a Pluralist Society

“It has often been said that during the period of liberal Protestantism, when innumerable “lives of Jesus” were written, designed to help educated middle-class Europeans and Americans to respond to the gospel, the portraits that resulted were very obviously self-portraits. They told you more about the writer than about Jesus.”
― Lesslie Newbigin, The Gospel in a Pluralist Society

“Clearly, therefore, the preaching is an explanation of the healings. On the one hand, the healings — marvelous as they are — do not explain themselves. They could be misinterpreted — as in fact they were by Jesus’ enemies, who attributed his healing works to Satanic power. The works by themselves did not communicate the new fact. That had to be stated in plain words: “The kingdom of God has drawn near.”
― Lesslie Newbigin, The Gospel in a Pluralist Society

“If we turn to the Gospels we are bound to note the indissoluble nexus between deeds and words. A very large part of the first three Gospels is occupied with the acts of Jesus — acts of healing, of exorcism, of feeding the hungry. And while in the Fourth Gospel there is a larger proportion of teaching, yet most of this teaching is explanatory of something Jesus has done: the healing of a paralytic, the feeding of a multitude, the giving of sight to a blind man, and the raising of a man from death.”
― Lesslie Newbigin, The Gospel in a Pluralist Society

“I have listened to young Indians who said, “Christianity taught me to believe in the possibility of a different world; Marxism showed me how to get it.” It does not take more than a generation to discover that Marxism necessarily betrays the hopes by which it lives.”
― Lesslie Newbigin, The Gospel in a Pluralist Society

“Perhaps my title, “The Logic of Mission,” may seem an odd one, but I am concerned to explore the question how the mission of the Church is rooted in the gospel itself. There has been a long tradition which sees the mission of the Church primarily as obedience to a command. It has been customary to speak of “the missionary mandate.” This way of putting the matter is certainly not without justification, and yet it seems to me that it misses the point. It tends to make mission a burden rather than a joy, to make it part of the law rather than part of the gospel.”
― Lesslie Newbigin, The Gospel in a Pluralist Society

“Against both of these temptations the New Testament warns us with its insistent call for a patient hope, a hope which is — on the one hand — confident and sure, an anchor of the soul, and on the other hand patient and enduring.”
― Lesslie Newbigin, The Gospel in a Pluralist Society

“The scientist starts with the conviction that the world is rational and that events at different times and places in the natural world can be related to one another in a coherent way. Without this conviction, which is a matter of faith, he could not begin his work. But the goal of his work is to prove the truth of the faith from which he began, to prove it in ever new situations.”
― Lesslie Newbigin, The Gospel in a Pluralist Society