Top 60 Lesslie Newbigin Quotes
#1. Modern capitalism has created a world totally different from anything known before.
Lesslie Newbigin
#2. 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
#3. The witness of which the New Testament passages speak is God's gift, not our accomplishment.
Lesslie Newbigin
#4. 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
#6. 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
#7. A person who wields power cannot see truth; that is the privilege of the powerless.
Lesslie Newbigin
#8. 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
#9. 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.
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#10. I am neither an optimist nor a pessimist. Jesus Christ is risen from the dead.
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#11. 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.
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#12. 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.
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#13. 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
#14. If we cannot speak with confidence about biblical authority, what ground have we for challenging the reigning plausibility structure?
Lesslie Newbigin
#15. Live in the kingdom of God in such a way that it provokes questions for which the gospel is the answer.
Lesslie Newbigin
#16. In the attempt to be "relevant" one may fall into syncretism, and in the effort to avoid syncretism one may become irrelevant.
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#17. 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.
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#20. 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.
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#21. 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.
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#22. 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.
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#23. 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
#24. 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.
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#25. The history of Christian attempts to discern the signs of the times makes discouraging reading. At
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#26. 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.
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#27. The Spirit himself is sovereign over the mission, the church can only be the attentive servant. In
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#28. Separation of church from mission is theologically indefensible. More
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#29. 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
#31. 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
#32. 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.
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#33. When coercion of any kind is used in the interests of the Christian message, the message itself is corrupted.
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#34. 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
#35. Ministerial leadership is, first and finally, discipleship.
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#36. 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.
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#37. 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.
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#39. The "home base" of missions is now nothing less than the worldwide community, and
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#40. 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.
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#41. Universality and particularity do not contradict one another but require one another. How
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#42. Bureaucracy is the rule of nobody and is therefore experienced as tyranny.
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#43. Mission is not just something that the church does; it is something that is done by the Spirit, who
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#44. 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.
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#45. Every proposal to seek authorization elsewhere than in the gospel itself must lead us astray. The
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#47. 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
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#48. 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.
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#49. Part of the terrible irony of war is that it enlists the best in human nature for purposes of mutual destruction.
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#50. Do things that will get people asking questions, the answer to which is the Gospel.
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#52. 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.
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#53. God's grace is not limited by any ecclesiastical barriers.
Lesslie Newbigin
#54. 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.
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#55. 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
#56. 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
#57. 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
#58. The attempt to interpret human behavior in terms of models derived from the natural sciences eventually destroys personal responsibility.
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#59. God's kingship is present in the church, but it must be insisted that it is not the property of the church. It
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#60. 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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