|
Description: What is the Christian message in a society marked by religious pluralism, ethnic diversity, and cultural relativism? How does the prevailing climate of opinion affect, perhaps infect, Christians' faith? Newbigin addresses such questions in this incisive analysis of contemporary culture, and he suggests how Christians can more confidently affirm their faith in such a context.
|
|
Review Summary: A Profound Book that Challenges its Readers |
Date: 2008-10-17 |
|
| |
Details: In his book The Gospel in a Pluralist Society, Lesslie Newbigin provides a healthy challenge to the defenses of the secular humanistic plausibility structure, and he challenges Christians to live such lives that bear witness to the living Savior they profess. I have to agree with Newbigin that it is time for secular humanists and Christians to examine and prove their beliefs. If Christianity is true, we should see it demonstratively portrayed among those who profess it. Newbigin asserts that this is Christians' mission; he also challenges secularists to defend their worldview.
Newbigin calls out secularists as practicing hypocrisy by cynically questioning and dismissing Christian dogma while refusing to question or even admit our own secular dogma. He writes, "In our contemporary world...the readiness to question dogma is regarded as one of the marks of intellectual maturity and competence." (Newbigin 5) He cites the sharp distinction among us between what we call "facts" and what we call "values." Secularists, he writes, usually think of their own dogma as "facts" and any religious dogma as "values" that can therefore be dismissed.
Newbigin contends that secularism's belief in relative moral and spiritual truths is an avoidance of reality. He writes,
"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." (Newbigin 22)
Newbigin refuses and rejects any type of coercion to Christianity. Instead he turns to Christians and essentially writes that if they expect unbelievers to turn to Jesus Christ then they better start living lives that bear witness to their Lord's presence.
Newbigin calls Christians to a "radical kind of conversion...a transformation by the renewing of the mind so as not to be conformed to this world, not to see things as our culture sees them, but...to see things in a radically different way." (Newbigin 38)
If Christians begin consistently and generally living lives as Newbigin urges that "prove that faith true in circumstances which seem to call it into question," the world could not help but to take notice. (Newbigin 63) The witness of the church should, according to Newbigin, contradict the most fundamental beliefs of our culture.
He writes that God has chosen to save all people through Jesus Christ:
"The cross of Jesus is the place where all human beings without exception are exposed as enemies of God, and the place where all human beings without exception are accepted as beloved of God, objects of his forgiving grace." (Newbigin 86)
Newbigin is adamant to explain that this "good news" does not translate to universalism--a belief that everyone will gain eternal salvation, but it also does not exclude anyone as being beyond God's saving reach.
Newbigin emphasizes the community of believers that ought to exist in the world as a witness to the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. He writes that "the distinguishing mark of this community will be hope." (Newbigin 101) This hope springs from the belief that Jesus Christ who died and was raised to life will come again in glory. This hope contrasts what Newbigin calls the culture's "absence of any sense of worthwhile future." (Newbigin 101)
For Newbigin, Christians do not have the luxury of living isolated lives enjoying their personal salvation. He asserts throughout this book that Christians are called to live in fellowship and communion with one another as much as with the Lord.
According to Newbigin, the church might be falling short in its duty to overcome the enemy through its Lord. As its mission is to bear witness to Jesus Christ, it faces ongoing conflict with the forces of darkness. Newbigin challenges the church to target its real enemy. He writes,
"When it goes the way the Master went, unmasking and challenging the powers of darkness and bearing in its own life the cost of their onslaught, then there are given to the Church signs of the kingdom, powers of healing and blessing which, to eyes of faith, are recognizable as true signs that Jesus reigns." (Newbigin 108)
Newbigin exhorts the church to follow its Lord in self-sacrificing prayer and in taking on spiritual powers behind the evil in the world. He claims that it is only when the church engages in such battle that it will be empowered to bring blessing and healing.
Newbigin writes that the church in affluent societies keeps its faith and hope to itself. To Newbigin, this privatized faith is anathema to the mission of God in the world. This mission is to present a new reality to the world that prompts inquiries that can then be answered by the gospel.
He calls Christians to discipleship, which is a closer relationship with Jesus. He writes,
"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...is the place where the essential battles are either won or lost." (Newbigin 240-241)
Newbigin is not shy about admitting the church's guilt in allowing its own interests to get ahead of Jesus' interests. Newbigin implies that without the power and presence of the Holy Spirit the church's witness is not going to be effective regardless of what they do.
Newbigin advises his readers to accept the reality of pluralism but not the message it espouses. For him, Jesus Christ, the divine man, is the one way to salvation--not one among many. I am thankful that he also reminds Christians that their Lord and the heart of the biblical vision is not imperial power but the Lamb of God who was slain for the sins of the world.
Craig Stephans, author of Shakespeare On Spirituality: Life-Changing Wisdom from Shakespeare's Plays |
| |
|
Review Summary: Profound and eye-opening |
Date: 2007-11-02 |
|
|
| |
|
Details: Newbigin has a gift for making the profound understandable and the complex accessible to the lay reader and the church professional. This is must reading for anyone who is serious about evangelism in our pluralistic, post-modern society. |
| |
|
Review Summary: must reading !!! |
Date: 2007-01-22 |
|
|
| |
|
Details: This is simply a must read for bible believing christians. This is not a book that rants and raves about "bad pagans". No, this book is a very thoughtful work on the subject of the biblical gospel of Jesus as related to the various societies and cultures in a modern/post-modern setting. An eye opening work that should be learned from. |
| |
|
Review Summary: Excellent theology. |
Date: 2006-11-13 |
|
|
| |
|
Details: I cannot recommend this book too highly. Newbigin shows us how to avoid the pitfalls of liberalism and fundamentalism, and how to express the Gospel unequivocally in today's language. My heart raced throughout the process of reading this book and, when done, I started over and read it again. |
| |
|
Review Summary: A Needed Challenge for Western Christianity |
Date: 2006-03-03 |
|
| |
Details: Though slightly pessimistic about the future of the church in the West, Newbigin provides a needed challenge to the modern church. The church in North America is in a new situation--there are a plurality of cultures represented in our major cities, and this plurality is spreading to smaller towns. How does the church reach out to and minister to their neighbor who is Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, or Jewish--when the impression given is that some of these individuals of other faiths are more devout and holy than many Christians that we may know? What is a proper posture to take when standing for "the fact of Jesus?" How is the church to minister in a post-Enlightenment context, which has created a different worldview from that which dominated for the first 1800 after the coming of the Messiah?
This book is a good read--it provides challenges and a loose framework for how to move forward. |
| |
|
out of 20 Reviews
