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The Gospel in a Pluralist Society QUOTES

The Gospel in a Pluralist Society QUOTES

1 " 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

2 " 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

3 " 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

4 " 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

5 " 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

6 " 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

7 " 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

8 " 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

9 " 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

10 " 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

11 " 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

12 " 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

13 " 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

14 " 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

15 " 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

16 " It seems to me clear from the whole New Testament that the Christian life has room both for a godly confidence and for a godly fear. The contrast between these is not a contradiction. "

― Lesslie Newbigin , The Gospel in a Pluralist Society

17 " 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

18 " But one may acquire what MacIntyre calls a “second first language,” a language which is learned in the same way that a child learns to use the native tongue. A missionary or an anthropologist who really hopes to understand and enter into the adopted culture will not do so by trying to learn the language in the way a tourist uses a phrasebook and a dictionary. "

― Lesslie Newbigin , The Gospel in a Pluralist Society

19 " 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

20 " It is impossible to write history without some vision of its meaning from which judgments of significance can be made. And if there is no meaning, why be a historian? The "

― Lesslie Newbigin , The Gospel in a Pluralist Society