Quotes from Lesslie Newbigin

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.

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.

God does not cancel his calling. If

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

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.

The value of the word contextualization is that it suggests the placing of the gospel in the total context of a culture at a particular moment, a moment that is shaped by the past and looks to the future.

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

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

separation of church from mission is theologically indefensible. More

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.

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.

the mission is not ours but God's.

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.

the "home base" of missions is now nothing less than the worldwide community, and

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.

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.

the history of Christian attempts to discern the signs of the times makes discouraging reading. At

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

When Jesus says to Simon, "Follow me," the response is a single act of faith and obedience; there is no gap between a mental action of believing and a bodily action of following. The human person is not a mind attached to a body but a single psychosomatic being.

In the words of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, "Only the obedient believe, and those who believe are obedient" (The Cost of Discipleship, p. 69).