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Lesslie Newbigin Quotes & Sayings

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Famous Quotes By Lesslie Newbigin

Lesslie Newbigin Quotes 2051992

It is God who chooses, calls, and sends. When — Lesslie Newbigin

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Christ is the clue to all that is. — Lesslie Newbigin

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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

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The business of the church is to tell and embody a story — Lesslie Newbigin

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Live in the kingdom of God in such a way that it provokes questions for which the gospel is the answer. — Lesslie Newbigin

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Mission is not just something that the church does; it is something that is done by the Spirit, who — Lesslie Newbigin

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The church is not meant to call men and women out of the world into a safe religious enclave but to call them out in order to send them back as agents of God's kingship. — Lesslie Newbigin

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To make the improving of our own character our central aim is hardly the highest kind of goodness. True goodness forgets itself and goes out to do the right thing for no other reason than that it is right. — Lesslie Newbigin

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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

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This withdrawal of theology from the world of secular affairs is made more complete by the work of biblical scholars whose endlessly fascinating exercises have made it appear to the lay Christian that no one untrained in their methods can really understand anything the Bible says. We are in a situation analogous to one about which the great Reformers complained. The Bible has been taken out of the hands of the layperson; it has now become the professional property not of the priesthood but of the scholars. — Lesslie Newbigin

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The "home base" of missions is now nothing less than the worldwide community, and — Lesslie Newbigin

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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

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The attempt to interpret human behavior in terms of models derived from the natural sciences eventually destroys personal responsibility. — Lesslie Newbigin

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God does not cancel his calling.
If — Lesslie Newbigin

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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

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Since total skepticism about ultimate beliefs is strictly impossible, in that no belief can be doubted except on the basis of some other belief, indifference is always in danger of giving place to some sort of fanaticism that can be as intolerant as any religion has ever been. — Lesslie Newbigin

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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

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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

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A society which believes in a worthwhile future saves in the present so as to invest in the future. Contemporary Western society spends in the present and piles up debts for the future, ravages the environment, and leaves its grandchildren to cope with the results as best they can. — Lesslie Newbigin

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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

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Postmodernists' replacement of eternal truths with a story. But there is a profound difference between the two. For the postmodernists, there are many stories, but no overarching truth by which they can be assessed. They are simply stories. The church's affirmation is that the story it tells, embodies, and enacts is the true story and that others are to be evaluated by reference to it. — Lesslie Newbigin

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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

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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

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during the latter part of the seventeenth and through the eighteenth centuries, while ordinary churchgoers continued to live in the world of the Bible, intellectuals were more and more controlled by the humanist tradition, so that even those who sought to defend the Christian faith did so on the basis that it was "reasonable," that is to say, that it did not contradict the fundamental humanist assumption. — Lesslie Newbigin

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When coercion of any kind is used in the interests of the Christian message, the message itself is corrupted. — Lesslie Newbigin

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The resurrection is the revelation to chosen witnesses of the fact that Jesus who died on the cross is indeed king - conqueror of death and sin, Lord and Savior of all. The resurrection is not the reversal of a defeat but the proclamation of a victory. The King reigns from the tree. The reign of God has indeed come upon us, and its sign is not a golden throne but a wooden cross. — Lesslie Newbigin

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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

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Nietzsche, he says, was the first to realize that the operation of the modern critical principle would make it impossible any more to speak of right and wrong. The factual, ontological basis for using such language had been removed. There could only be personal choice. And what could guide that choice except the will? We choose what we want. So we are left with the will to power. — Lesslie Newbigin

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The witness of which the New Testament passages speak is God's gift, not our accomplishment. — Lesslie Newbigin

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Our societies appear to be intent on immediate consumption rather than on investment for the future. We are piling up enormous debts and exploiting the natural environment in a manner which suggests that we have no real sense of any worthwhile future. Just as a society which believes in the future saves in the present in order to invest in the future, so a society without belief spends everything now and piles up debts for future generations to settle. "Spend now and someone else will pay later." — Lesslie Newbigin

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Separation of church from mission is theologically indefensible. More — Lesslie Newbigin

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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

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The Spirit himself is sovereign over the mission, the church can only be the attentive servant. In — Lesslie Newbigin

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Do things that will get people asking questions, the answer to which is the Gospel. — Lesslie Newbigin

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The reign of God is his reign over all things. — Lesslie Newbigin

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The history of Christian attempts to discern the signs of the times makes discouraging reading. At — Lesslie Newbigin

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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

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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

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Part of the terrible irony of war is that it enlists the best in human nature for purposes of mutual destruction. — Lesslie Newbigin

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Ministerial leadership is, first and finally, discipleship. — Lesslie Newbigin

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Every proposal to seek authorization elsewhere than in the gospel itself must lead us astray. The — Lesslie Newbigin

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A conscience that is forbidden to operate in the choice of goals for economic activity is not conscience in the sense in which any moralist, pagan or Christian, has every understood the term. And the family (which [Michael] Novak regards as vital to the spirit of democratic capitalism) is precisely the place where the noncapitalist values have to be learned, where one is not free to choose his company and where one is not free to pursue self-interest to the limit. Because capitalism pursues the opposite goals - freedom of each individual to choose and pursue his own ends to the limit of his power - the disintegration of marriage and family life is one of the obvious characteristics of advanced capitalist societies. — Lesslie Newbigin

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A person who wields power cannot see truth; that is the privilege of the powerless. — Lesslie Newbigin

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The living God is a God of justice and mercy and He will be satisfied with nothing less than a people in whom his justice and mercy are alive. — Lesslie Newbigin

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Our confidence ... is not in the competence of our own knowing, but in the faithfulness and reliability of the one who is known. — Lesslie Newbigin

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How can this strange story of God made flesh, of a crucified Savior, of resurrection and new creation become credible for those whose entire mental training has conditioned them to believe that the real world is the world which can be satisfactorily explained and managed without the hypothesis of God? I know of only one clue to the answering of that question, only one real hermeneutic of the gospel: a congregation which believes it. — Lesslie Newbigin

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The Church must be seen as the company of pilgrims on the way to the end of the world and the ends of the earth. — Lesslie Newbigin

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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

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I am neither an optimist nor a pessimist. Jesus Christ is risen from the dead. — Lesslie Newbigin

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If we define the word Theos as that on which everything else depends but which itself depends on nothing else - a reasonable definition - then none of these scientific theories is theologically neutral. All of them rest on fundamental assumptions which can be questioned. But the questioning, if it is to be rational, has to rely on other fundamental assumptions which can in turn be questioned. It follows (and this is Polanyi's point) that there can be no knowing without personal commitment. We must believe in order to know. — Lesslie Newbigin

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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

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The victory of the Church over the power which was embodied in the Roman imperial system was not won by seizing the levers of power: it was won when the victims knelt down in the Colosseum and prayed in the name of Jesus for the Emperor. — Lesslie Newbigin

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But if the biblical story is true, the kind of certainty proper to a human being 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

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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

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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

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the mission is not ours but God's. — Lesslie Newbigin

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The effect of the post-Enlightenment project for human society is that all human activity is absorbed into labor. It becomes an unending cycle of production for the sake of consumption. The modern concept of "built-in obsolescence" makes this clear. The cycle of production and consumption has to be kept going, and the work of the artist or craftsman who aims to create something enduring becomes marginal to the economic order. — Lesslie Newbigin

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God's kingship is present in the church, but it must be insisted that it is not the property of the church. It — Lesslie Newbigin

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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

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The whole attempt to advance the kind of consumer society that depends for its growth on the ceaseless stimulation of unlimited covetousness among the rich, while the poor majority rot in their poverty-this is surely something against which a Christian should be a nonconformist. — Lesslie Newbigin

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Bureaucracy is the rule of nobody and is therefore experienced as tyranny. — Lesslie Newbigin

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If we cannot speak with confidence about biblical authority, what ground have we for challenging the reigning plausibility structure? — Lesslie Newbigin

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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

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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

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At every point in the story of the transmission of biblical material from the original text to today we are dealing with the interaction of men and women with God. At every point, human judgment and human fallibility are involved, as they are in every attempt we make today to act faithfully in new situations. The idea that at a certain point in this long story a line was drawn before which everything is divine word and after which everything is human judgment is absurd. — Lesslie Newbigin

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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

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

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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

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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

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The business of the missionary, and the business of the Christian Church in any situation, is to challenge the plausibility structure in the light of God's revelation of the real meaning of history. — Lesslie Newbigin

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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

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The Church, wherever it is, is not only Christ's witness to its own people and nation, but also the home-base for a mission to the ends of the earth. — Lesslie Newbigin

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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

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The nation state has taken the place of God. Responsibilities for education, healing and public welfare which had formerly rested with the Church devolved more and more upon the nation state ... National governments are widely assumed to be responsible for and capable of providing those things which former generations thought only God could provide - freedom from fear, hunger, disease and want - in a word: "happiness". — Lesslie Newbigin

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the authority of Jesus is ultimate, the — Lesslie Newbigin

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God's grace is not limited by any ecclesiastical barriers. — Lesslie Newbigin

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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

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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

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In the twentieth century we have become accustomed to the fact that - in the name of the nation - Catholics will fight Catholics, Protestants will fight Protestants, and Marxists will fight Marxists. The charge of blasphemy, if it is ever made, is treated as a quaint anachronism; but the charge of treason, of placing another lyalty above that to the nation state, is treated as the unforgivable crime. The nation state has taken the place of God. — Lesslie Newbigin

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The modern antithesis of observation and reason on the one hand versus revelation and faith on the other is only tenable on the basis of a prior decision that the whole cosmic and human story has no purpose and therefore no meaning. It — Lesslie Newbigin

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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

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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

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The working concept of God for most ordinary Christians is - if one may venture a bold guess- shaped more by the combination of Greek philosophy and Islamic
theology that was powerfully injected into the thought of Christendom at the beginning of the High Middle Ages than by the thought of the fathers of the first four centuries. — Lesslie Newbigin

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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

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Universality and particularity do not contradict one another but require one another. How — Lesslie Newbigin

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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

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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

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When the Church tries to embody the rule of God in the forms of earthly power it may achieve that power, but it is no longer a sign of the kingdom. — Lesslie Newbigin

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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

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Modern science has placed in human hands the power to do things that were previously unimaginable. Technology, the development of ever more sophisticated
means for achieving any end we choose, dominates modern and modernized societies. But there is a growing perception that science and technology are no substitute for wisdom - for the power to discern what ends are in accordance with the truth and the power to judge rightly between alternative ends. — Lesslie Newbigin

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In the attempt to be "relevant" one may fall into syncretism, and in the effort to avoid syncretism one may become irrelevant. — Lesslie Newbigin