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Signs Amid the Rubble: The Purposes of God in Human History
The late Lesslie Newbigin was widely regarded as one of this generation's most significant voices on Christianity in relation to modern society. Now that he is gone, there is a call for his unpublished writings to be made available. To that end "Signs amid the Rubble" gathers some of Newbigin's finest statements on issues of continuing relevance. The first set of chapters consists of the 1941 Bangalore Lectures, in which Newbigin speaks powerfully of the kingdom of God in relation to the modern - severely deficient - idea of "progress." The second group of writings, the Henry Martyn Lectures of 1986, deals mainly with the importance of Christian mission. In the last piece, his address to the World Council of Churches conference on mission and evangelism in Brazil in 1996 - which editor Geoffrey Wainwright calls his "swan song on the ecumenical stage" - Newbigin wonders aloud how future generations will judge today's practice of abortion.
130 pages, Paperback
First published February 1, 2003
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About the author
Lesslie Newbigin
93 books102 followersBishop James Edward Lesslie Newbigin was a British theologian, missiologist, missionary and author. Though originally ordained within the Church of Scotland, Newbigin spent much of his career serving as a missionary in India and became affiliated with the Church of South India and the United Reformed Church, becoming one of the Church of South India's first bishops. A prolific author who wrote on a wide range of theological topics, Newbigin is best known for his contributions to missiology and ecclesiology. He is also known for his involvement in both the dialogue regarding ecumenism and the Gospel and Our Culture movement. Many scholars also believe his work laid the foundations for the contemporary missional church movement, and it is said his stature and range is comparable to the "Fathers of the Church".
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November 15, 2012
This collection of previously unpublished lectured by the bishop and missiologist Lesslie Newbigin is a real gem. I've previously read Newbigin's The Open Secret, an introduction to the theology of mission, and this develops many themes for which Bishop Newbigin is known: election, conversion, missionary witness to the modern West. The lectures here focus on the nature of the kingdom and its relationship to the church and the world, the question of the unconverted, and ecclesiology. He has withering critiques for anyone that would confuse programs of social progress with the Kingdom of God, and invites all of us to recognize the ways in which evil is often side-by-side with the good in all our attempts at socio-political engagement. Highly recommended and worthy of multiple readings.
November 19, 2015
Much of the missional church movement owes its beginnings to Lesslie Newbigin. His books have ignited a love for local church communities, helping me connect my calling to mission with what God is wanting to do in Western societies. I can't give enough praise to Newbigin's work.
Questions: I will take the first two questions together.
1. What is the “end” of humanity; how does the dogma of “progress” affect our understanding of mission?
2. What challenge does Newbigin bring to my understanding of the discipleship of nations?
Much has been made of the this call to disciple all nations, or ethne. The objective of missions, it is said, is not the conversion of individuals but of whole communities. While I agree that to seek for the conversion of individuals in many cultures is, for the most part, impossible. I understand why frontier missionaries are working for what McGavran calls the Homogeneous Unit Principle, working to bring a whole community into the faith at one time. This is the modern people movement strategy of mission. Interestingly, Newbigin points out that missions strategies in Western nations have also been adverse to the conversion of individuals; “they have addressed themselves rather to the structures of society.” (87)
Newbigin examines the idea of progress as a dogma that progress is the law of human development and as the opinion that progress is a fact of past history. Then he offers a third approach to the examination of progress; he considers it a faith in the possibility of a better world in the future. Newbigin asserts that such faith has been the inspiration of much of the noblest heroisms of recent centuries. It is widespread breakdown has been accompanied by a distressing paralysis of moral effort in the sphere of politics and social life. Then Newbigin suggests that it is the “fact of its own falsity,” which has caused this faithlessness. It is the belief “that the aim of human life ought to be to work towards the coming of a perfect society on earth” is what Newbigin challenges. (16)
This book has challenged my understanding of the discipleship of nations on many levels. On this point of progress, Newbigin challenges the notion that people are merely a “means to an ulterior end,” even if that end is the discipleship of nations. The Western notion of progress, working toward an earthly utopia, may have “gladdened the eyes of men in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, however it led to the “pitiless and dehumanizing idolatries of the twentieth.” (17)
This dogma of progress has been of central importance to the development of what we call European civilization. While Newbigin argues that a purely secular enthusiasm for earthly progress as the complete end of [humanity] is ultimately self-destructive and futile, he asks, “may it not nevertheless be true that the Christian believing in God, believing in His rule over history, and believing also in a personal survival of death in which the full fruition of the individual is achieved, may work in this faith and in the promised power of the Spirit, to achieve a better state of society on earth?” (18) Clearly there is a subtle difference. Well-meaning people, serving the common good of humankind, may be divided between the modern materialistic and universal story of progress and that of the Supernatural and Universal Story Teller.
The division between the materialistic view of progress and the duty laid upon the Church by the Master to serve the common good, suggests that both views of progress may, at one time, be present in a Christ follower’s mind. Paul wrote to the Church at Corinth, with this exhortation, “Now to each one the manifestation of the Spirit is given for the common good.” (I Cor. 12:7 NIV) It appears the gifts and manifestations of the Spirit are given for the benefit of all. When Jesus taught his disciples to pray “Thy Kingdom Come,” there was implied a process, which may be hastened in the asking. Newbigin asserts that “the widespread belief that the destiny of the world is that it should gradually be subdued and sanctified by the redeeming power of Christ so that at last a perfect state of society wholly obedient to God’s will shall come to be on earth, and that the task of the Christian is to take his share in the accomplishing of this task.” This, Newbigin explains is the Christian “belief in progress.”
Newbigin points out two fatal objections to the idea that the proper goal of Christian effort is the perfect society, the Kingdom of God on earth. His objections lie in the notion that there are two perfect societies, one on earth from which “all but the final generations are shut out”, and one in heaven of which many will have never worked toward, a gift of grace, and others will be rewarded for their labors as “a substitute for their disappointed hopes.” Newbigin calls this “nonsense…a sheer self-contradiction.” He goes on, “If to seek the Kingdom of God means, as is often said, simply to labor for the coming of a perfect society on earth and not to bother about heaven, and if heaven be the place where those who have faithfully striven on earth go to when they die, then the Christian’s fate is to seek that which he is absolutely debarred from ever finding and to find that which he is advised not to seek.” I agree; this is absurd.
The fact that we are transient “biological organisms subject to the law of decay and death” makes such striving for perfection in society equally absurd. We can never satisfy on earth our spirit’s thirst for perfection. (22)
Newbigin continues, “The human nature, as we know it, requires struggle and effort in order to achieve character.” (23) “All attempts to picture a perfect human society under earthly conditions suffer shipwreck on the facts of [humanity’s] biological and spiritual nature.” For these reasons, Newbigin concludes that we cannot accept as it stands the belief that the aim of a Christian life is to work towards the creation of a perfect society on earth.
3. What is the alternative to the notion of progress as “working toward the perfect society on earth”? What problems does Newbigin point out with this alternative?
It would seem many in recent generations have adopted a view that our goal is in another world, suggested in their hymns and spiritual songs, “This world is not my home.” Is it a world one enters only in the act of dying? Newbigin continues with objections to this view as well. First, he asserts that it is “untrue to the whole Christian idea of salvation by centering in on “individual redemption out of the world rather than upon the redemption of the world.” This view of pulling oneself from the “bonds of worldly existence to enter – as an individual – into the experience of release,” Newbigin argues, is more Hindu than it is Christian. The gospel message is very different; it presents the “divine plan to sum up all things in Christ,” as St. Paul writes. Newbigin argues, “The kingdom of God cannot be enjoyed in full till all share it, because it is the Kingdom of love.” (24)
To embrace the individualistic view of the Kingdom “robs human history as a whole of its meaning.” If you adhere to this view, you believe that the significance of life in this world is exhaustively defined as the training of individual souls for heaven. Therefore there is no connected purpose or story; we are all disconnected and pursuing our own individual purpose. There is no goal of history with this individualistic view. With this view, Christian leaders have no reason to devote themselves to the betterment of society. The only true purpose for humankind is to prepare oneself and others for the destiny of heaven. “The existence of world history as a whole would remain an inexplicable mystery.” (24)
A worldview, which concerns the destiny of the individual and has nothing to say about the destiny of society as a whole has, strictly speaking, no guidance whatever to offer on a social problem, such as unemployment, health care, or water purification. (26)
How, then, are societal ills addressed in societies where no biblical understanding is offered? Society, especially those of the modern globalized world, with “technical conditions of production, trade, and finance, require enormous units of organization,” Newbigin explains, and “such units can only be controlled in the interests of society as a whole by enormously strong and unified political power.” (26) The centralization of political power in turn is only possible on the basis of some commonly acceptable view of the social purpose, for the sake of which people will surrender their liberties to this central control. So far the totalitarian countries have achieved this control but on the basis of a social theory which destroys all freedom. Too many Christians have embraced the individualized faith position “with no say about the destiny of society as a whole. Therefore, they have nothing to say about the central problems of our civilization and about three-fourths of the workaday life of the ordinary person.” (26) A major problem with missiological implications for ministry, as I see it, is that many have forgotten the basis of the Constitution of the United States and the method employed by the USA of federalized control, which does not destroy freedom. The central problem of mission, I suggest, is to find a view, which does justice to both aspects of the problem – individual and social – and which resolves the apparent contradictions between them.
The biblical understanding of the Kingdom of God, which is already at work, Newbigin explains, is “the self-communication of God’s will, grasped by faith here and now, which enables us already to live in the light of its final goal.” We possess this reward now, and we are to enter into His rest by faith, even as we work out His unfolding will in our acts of obedience.
4. What are the core missiological and theological issues raised by Newbigin in this book?
Newbigin points out how most people reject the notion of an eternal judgment, a finality of all things. He writes, “Fundamentally it is due to the belief that time cannot be a reality for God. This is the place where the Greek philosophical tradition has profoundly, and I believe disastrously, deflected Christian thought off biblical lines. For those deeply influenced by that tradition (and Hindu tradition), it is an axiom that all time – past, present, and future – is equally present to God. This, it is felt, is the only view which is congruent with belief in divine omniscience and perfection. If God, it is argued, has to suffer like us the experience of watching the present slip irretrievably into the past, and awaiting the still unknown future, then He is not perfect and omniscient.” (34) What a challenge!
If we believe prayer changes things, and therefore changes the future, then we understand that the future is not the same to God as the past. “The past and the future are radically different for God Himself.” (36) What Newbigin stresses is the importance of time to spiritual life. “You cannot conceive spiritual life except in temporal terms.” Repentance has no meaning without a literal turning away from the past you once took. You do not apologize first, then do the evil deed; that would be hypocrisy. So our understanding of God and spiritual life must be in literal, temporal terms. We do not escape, when salvation becomes real to us, into a condition of union with a God for whom time is unreal. The believer possesses eternal life by faith – her personal commitment to and union with and love for God – “which enables [her] to grasp in some degree already that goal to which God is working, and therefore to refresh [her] soul by it in anticipation.” (37)
Newbigin tackles the questions of inclusivism and exclusivism with striking clarity. He points out that the Fourth Gospel, “which contains the classic statement of the universality of God’s life-giving grace, tells us that the light shines on everyone, but it shines in darkness – and the subsequent story shows that it is religion which is, above all, the area of darkness.” (70) Newbigin is absolutely clear about this. While he encourages dialogue, in no way does he advocate that salvation comes by any other name than the Name of Jesus Christ. However, Newbigin carries forward his argument by turning on those who emphasize the question of personal salvation. He writes, “The urgent question is not: How shall I be saved? But: How shall God’s name be hallowed, His Kingdom come, His will be done on earth as in heaven?” (71) He continues, “We must not identify the working of God’s grace with the presence of religion. Wherever there is kindness, goodness, faithfulness, truthfulness, there the grace of God is at work and everyone who loves God will acknowledge it, welcome it, rejoice in it – whether it be found in a religious person or a person of no religion.” (72) Newbigin emphasizes that our focus should be on “knowing and doing the truth now, so that we may be partakers of the corporate and cosmic consummation at the end. The question in Scriptures is not “How can I leave the world for another?”, but “How will God come to this world to communicate His purpose for the whole creation?” The plan of salvation is not a way of escape, but a way of establishing God’s purposes.
The ultimate purpose of God, fundamental to any biblical doctrine of mission, is that God’s glory be manifested in a redeemed creation and a redeemed humanity. Therefore, the logic of election is not for individual salvations, but all humanity, the family of humankind. The glory of God will be shared and will embrace all for whom it is intended, not disconnected individuals, but all humanity and all its history. “We are thus bound to one another in that very act by which we are taken up into God’s saving action.” (73)
4. Explain the definition of terms according to Newbigin, especially the terms “gospel”, “culture”, and “Christianity.”
Language is the heart of culture. The over-arching question in the communication of the gospel is in finding points of contact. Newbigin asserts, in contradiction to Karl Barth, that there are points of contact for the gospel in the non-Christian religions of the world, else there would be no communicating the gospel. “Communication has to use the language of the people to whom it is addressed.”
What are the presuppositions of a truly missionary dialogue? It’s not that Jesus Christ is less than truth. In other words, there are no other revelations of God which relativize that which is given in Jesus. “We have been laid hold of by Jesus Christ and called to follow him, but we do not pretend to have the fullness of truth, to possess it. We are learners on the way into the fullness of truth. (76)
“The writer of Acts sees the experience of Peter in the house of Cornelius as a decisive turning point in the story of the church’s mission to the nations. What resulted from that event was not that Cornelius and his household were added to a church which remained unchanged in its essential nature. It was not that a sovereign action of the Holy Spirit changed both Cornelius and Peter, both a pagan family and, when the Jerusalem church had grasped the message, the church as a whole. What was clear from that moment was that discipling the nations did not mean turning them into Jewish proselytes; it meant the coming into being of a new kind of humanity for which a new name had to be found-a Gentile Israel, people who were part of the one household worshipping the God of Abraham, Issac, and Jacob, brothers and sisters of circumcised Israelites, and yet culturally still Gentiles, part of the heathen world, the nations.” (82)
Summary:
Newbigin has brought a clearer focus to the biblical solution to the problem of making disciples of nations. The text in Matthew 28:19-20 does say to “disciple the nations,” that is ethne – people groups. The way it reads to accomplish this is by baptizing and teaching people, that is autous – individuals. Newbigin writes, “there is no other way by which human communities…can be discipled, unless people, individuals, are converted, turned around so as to become believers in the strange truth that the power and wisdo
Questions: I will take the first two questions together.
1. What is the “end” of humanity; how does the dogma of “progress” affect our understanding of mission?
2. What challenge does Newbigin bring to my understanding of the discipleship of nations?
Much has been made of the this call to disciple all nations, or ethne. The objective of missions, it is said, is not the conversion of individuals but of whole communities. While I agree that to seek for the conversion of individuals in many cultures is, for the most part, impossible. I understand why frontier missionaries are working for what McGavran calls the Homogeneous Unit Principle, working to bring a whole community into the faith at one time. This is the modern people movement strategy of mission. Interestingly, Newbigin points out that missions strategies in Western nations have also been adverse to the conversion of individuals; “they have addressed themselves rather to the structures of society.” (87)
Newbigin examines the idea of progress as a dogma that progress is the law of human development and as the opinion that progress is a fact of past history. Then he offers a third approach to the examination of progress; he considers it a faith in the possibility of a better world in the future. Newbigin asserts that such faith has been the inspiration of much of the noblest heroisms of recent centuries. It is widespread breakdown has been accompanied by a distressing paralysis of moral effort in the sphere of politics and social life. Then Newbigin suggests that it is the “fact of its own falsity,” which has caused this faithlessness. It is the belief “that the aim of human life ought to be to work towards the coming of a perfect society on earth” is what Newbigin challenges. (16)
This book has challenged my understanding of the discipleship of nations on many levels. On this point of progress, Newbigin challenges the notion that people are merely a “means to an ulterior end,” even if that end is the discipleship of nations. The Western notion of progress, working toward an earthly utopia, may have “gladdened the eyes of men in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, however it led to the “pitiless and dehumanizing idolatries of the twentieth.” (17)
This dogma of progress has been of central importance to the development of what we call European civilization. While Newbigin argues that a purely secular enthusiasm for earthly progress as the complete end of [humanity] is ultimately self-destructive and futile, he asks, “may it not nevertheless be true that the Christian believing in God, believing in His rule over history, and believing also in a personal survival of death in which the full fruition of the individual is achieved, may work in this faith and in the promised power of the Spirit, to achieve a better state of society on earth?” (18) Clearly there is a subtle difference. Well-meaning people, serving the common good of humankind, may be divided between the modern materialistic and universal story of progress and that of the Supernatural and Universal Story Teller.
The division between the materialistic view of progress and the duty laid upon the Church by the Master to serve the common good, suggests that both views of progress may, at one time, be present in a Christ follower’s mind. Paul wrote to the Church at Corinth, with this exhortation, “Now to each one the manifestation of the Spirit is given for the common good.” (I Cor. 12:7 NIV) It appears the gifts and manifestations of the Spirit are given for the benefit of all. When Jesus taught his disciples to pray “Thy Kingdom Come,” there was implied a process, which may be hastened in the asking. Newbigin asserts that “the widespread belief that the destiny of the world is that it should gradually be subdued and sanctified by the redeeming power of Christ so that at last a perfect state of society wholly obedient to God’s will shall come to be on earth, and that the task of the Christian is to take his share in the accomplishing of this task.” This, Newbigin explains is the Christian “belief in progress.”
Newbigin points out two fatal objections to the idea that the proper goal of Christian effort is the perfect society, the Kingdom of God on earth. His objections lie in the notion that there are two perfect societies, one on earth from which “all but the final generations are shut out”, and one in heaven of which many will have never worked toward, a gift of grace, and others will be rewarded for their labors as “a substitute for their disappointed hopes.” Newbigin calls this “nonsense…a sheer self-contradiction.” He goes on, “If to seek the Kingdom of God means, as is often said, simply to labor for the coming of a perfect society on earth and not to bother about heaven, and if heaven be the place where those who have faithfully striven on earth go to when they die, then the Christian’s fate is to seek that which he is absolutely debarred from ever finding and to find that which he is advised not to seek.” I agree; this is absurd.
The fact that we are transient “biological organisms subject to the law of decay and death” makes such striving for perfection in society equally absurd. We can never satisfy on earth our spirit’s thirst for perfection. (22)
Newbigin continues, “The human nature, as we know it, requires struggle and effort in order to achieve character.” (23) “All attempts to picture a perfect human society under earthly conditions suffer shipwreck on the facts of [humanity’s] biological and spiritual nature.” For these reasons, Newbigin concludes that we cannot accept as it stands the belief that the aim of a Christian life is to work towards the creation of a perfect society on earth.
3. What is the alternative to the notion of progress as “working toward the perfect society on earth”? What problems does Newbigin point out with this alternative?
It would seem many in recent generations have adopted a view that our goal is in another world, suggested in their hymns and spiritual songs, “This world is not my home.” Is it a world one enters only in the act of dying? Newbigin continues with objections to this view as well. First, he asserts that it is “untrue to the whole Christian idea of salvation by centering in on “individual redemption out of the world rather than upon the redemption of the world.” This view of pulling oneself from the “bonds of worldly existence to enter – as an individual – into the experience of release,” Newbigin argues, is more Hindu than it is Christian. The gospel message is very different; it presents the “divine plan to sum up all things in Christ,” as St. Paul writes. Newbigin argues, “The kingdom of God cannot be enjoyed in full till all share it, because it is the Kingdom of love.” (24)
To embrace the individualistic view of the Kingdom “robs human history as a whole of its meaning.” If you adhere to this view, you believe that the significance of life in this world is exhaustively defined as the training of individual souls for heaven. Therefore there is no connected purpose or story; we are all disconnected and pursuing our own individual purpose. There is no goal of history with this individualistic view. With this view, Christian leaders have no reason to devote themselves to the betterment of society. The only true purpose for humankind is to prepare oneself and others for the destiny of heaven. “The existence of world history as a whole would remain an inexplicable mystery.” (24)
A worldview, which concerns the destiny of the individual and has nothing to say about the destiny of society as a whole has, strictly speaking, no guidance whatever to offer on a social problem, such as unemployment, health care, or water purification. (26)
How, then, are societal ills addressed in societies where no biblical understanding is offered? Society, especially those of the modern globalized world, with “technical conditions of production, trade, and finance, require enormous units of organization,” Newbigin explains, and “such units can only be controlled in the interests of society as a whole by enormously strong and unified political power.” (26) The centralization of political power in turn is only possible on the basis of some commonly acceptable view of the social purpose, for the sake of which people will surrender their liberties to this central control. So far the totalitarian countries have achieved this control but on the basis of a social theory which destroys all freedom. Too many Christians have embraced the individualized faith position “with no say about the destiny of society as a whole. Therefore, they have nothing to say about the central problems of our civilization and about three-fourths of the workaday life of the ordinary person.” (26) A major problem with missiological implications for ministry, as I see it, is that many have forgotten the basis of the Constitution of the United States and the method employed by the USA of federalized control, which does not destroy freedom. The central problem of mission, I suggest, is to find a view, which does justice to both aspects of the problem – individual and social – and which resolves the apparent contradictions between them.
The biblical understanding of the Kingdom of God, which is already at work, Newbigin explains, is “the self-communication of God’s will, grasped by faith here and now, which enables us already to live in the light of its final goal.” We possess this reward now, and we are to enter into His rest by faith, even as we work out His unfolding will in our acts of obedience.
4. What are the core missiological and theological issues raised by Newbigin in this book?
Newbigin points out how most people reject the notion of an eternal judgment, a finality of all things. He writes, “Fundamentally it is due to the belief that time cannot be a reality for God. This is the place where the Greek philosophical tradition has profoundly, and I believe disastrously, deflected Christian thought off biblical lines. For those deeply influenced by that tradition (and Hindu tradition), it is an axiom that all time – past, present, and future – is equally present to God. This, it is felt, is the only view which is congruent with belief in divine omniscience and perfection. If God, it is argued, has to suffer like us the experience of watching the present slip irretrievably into the past, and awaiting the still unknown future, then He is not perfect and omniscient.” (34) What a challenge!
If we believe prayer changes things, and therefore changes the future, then we understand that the future is not the same to God as the past. “The past and the future are radically different for God Himself.” (36) What Newbigin stresses is the importance of time to spiritual life. “You cannot conceive spiritual life except in temporal terms.” Repentance has no meaning without a literal turning away from the past you once took. You do not apologize first, then do the evil deed; that would be hypocrisy. So our understanding of God and spiritual life must be in literal, temporal terms. We do not escape, when salvation becomes real to us, into a condition of union with a God for whom time is unreal. The believer possesses eternal life by faith – her personal commitment to and union with and love for God – “which enables [her] to grasp in some degree already that goal to which God is working, and therefore to refresh [her] soul by it in anticipation.” (37)
Newbigin tackles the questions of inclusivism and exclusivism with striking clarity. He points out that the Fourth Gospel, “which contains the classic statement of the universality of God’s life-giving grace, tells us that the light shines on everyone, but it shines in darkness – and the subsequent story shows that it is religion which is, above all, the area of darkness.” (70) Newbigin is absolutely clear about this. While he encourages dialogue, in no way does he advocate that salvation comes by any other name than the Name of Jesus Christ. However, Newbigin carries forward his argument by turning on those who emphasize the question of personal salvation. He writes, “The urgent question is not: How shall I be saved? But: How shall God’s name be hallowed, His Kingdom come, His will be done on earth as in heaven?” (71) He continues, “We must not identify the working of God’s grace with the presence of religion. Wherever there is kindness, goodness, faithfulness, truthfulness, there the grace of God is at work and everyone who loves God will acknowledge it, welcome it, rejoice in it – whether it be found in a religious person or a person of no religion.” (72) Newbigin emphasizes that our focus should be on “knowing and doing the truth now, so that we may be partakers of the corporate and cosmic consummation at the end. The question in Scriptures is not “How can I leave the world for another?”, but “How will God come to this world to communicate His purpose for the whole creation?” The plan of salvation is not a way of escape, but a way of establishing God’s purposes.
The ultimate purpose of God, fundamental to any biblical doctrine of mission, is that God’s glory be manifested in a redeemed creation and a redeemed humanity. Therefore, the logic of election is not for individual salvations, but all humanity, the family of humankind. The glory of God will be shared and will embrace all for whom it is intended, not disconnected individuals, but all humanity and all its history. “We are thus bound to one another in that very act by which we are taken up into God’s saving action.” (73)
4. Explain the definition of terms according to Newbigin, especially the terms “gospel”, “culture”, and “Christianity.”
Language is the heart of culture. The over-arching question in the communication of the gospel is in finding points of contact. Newbigin asserts, in contradiction to Karl Barth, that there are points of contact for the gospel in the non-Christian religions of the world, else there would be no communicating the gospel. “Communication has to use the language of the people to whom it is addressed.”
What are the presuppositions of a truly missionary dialogue? It’s not that Jesus Christ is less than truth. In other words, there are no other revelations of God which relativize that which is given in Jesus. “We have been laid hold of by Jesus Christ and called to follow him, but we do not pretend to have the fullness of truth, to possess it. We are learners on the way into the fullness of truth. (76)
“The writer of Acts sees the experience of Peter in the house of Cornelius as a decisive turning point in the story of the church’s mission to the nations. What resulted from that event was not that Cornelius and his household were added to a church which remained unchanged in its essential nature. It was not that a sovereign action of the Holy Spirit changed both Cornelius and Peter, both a pagan family and, when the Jerusalem church had grasped the message, the church as a whole. What was clear from that moment was that discipling the nations did not mean turning them into Jewish proselytes; it meant the coming into being of a new kind of humanity for which a new name had to be found-a Gentile Israel, people who were part of the one household worshipping the God of Abraham, Issac, and Jacob, brothers and sisters of circumcised Israelites, and yet culturally still Gentiles, part of the heathen world, the nations.” (82)
Summary:
Newbigin has brought a clearer focus to the biblical solution to the problem of making disciples of nations. The text in Matthew 28:19-20 does say to “disciple the nations,” that is ethne – people groups. The way it reads to accomplish this is by baptizing and teaching people, that is autous – individuals. Newbigin writes, “there is no other way by which human communities…can be discipled, unless people, individuals, are converted, turned around so as to become believers in the strange truth that the power and wisdo
December 12, 2019
Newbigin is one of my heroes - a prophetic, incredibly clear, and thoughtful voice who could fearlessly critique both Western culture and the shallow philosophies of the day. This collection of lectures (in essay form) is pure gold for the Newbigin fan, though I wouldn't necessarily recommend it to those who haven't read any of his work yet.
For those who have, though, this provides an incredibly compelling synthesis of the growth of themes that would define and establish his important career. The lectures are also, as they are written in lecture form, strong summaries of his thought (rather than the more dense, academic style of some of his other work).
The final pages - a short talk given just one year before his death - are some of the most powerful words from all his work, and I'm glad they were printed here!
For those who have, though, this provides an incredibly compelling synthesis of the growth of themes that would define and establish his important career. The lectures are also, as they are written in lecture form, strong summaries of his thought (rather than the more dense, academic style of some of his other work).
The final pages - a short talk given just one year before his death - are some of the most powerful words from all his work, and I'm glad they were printed here!
June 10, 2013
This is no easy book - no light devotional for a quick read. While skinny to look at, Newbigin's lectures are far too full of teachings and implications that rattle one's cage to be read quickly. These talks on culture, missions, the gospel, and "the purposes of God in human history" are sometimes unsettling, often profound, and I used my underlining pen a great deal as I worked my way through. Sometimes I wondered if he wasn't pushing the edges of orthodoxy, and certainly I wouldn't recommend this book for a new believer; but taken as a whole, and not in fragments, I found him thoroughly solid. Besides, it is good to read writers who jar you and push at your foundations and pull you outside of your box and comfort zone. Newbigin was such a man, and his "Signs Amid the Rubble" is a book worth returning to.
September 14, 2009
This is a book worthy of a 2nd read (and probably more). It’s a collection of lectures from different times in Newbigin’s life, the first 4 dealing with the Kingdom of God and the idea of progress in Western civilization. These were very good. The next 3 (plus two addendums) deal with the relationship between gospel, kingdom, missions, and culture. There were some things I wasn’t sure I could follow Newbigin on here, but he definitely made me think (and he has a glorious way of putting into words very complex subjects in straight-forward fashion).
February 16, 2014
This book was great - very insightful. Up to this point I had only read Newbigin's autobiography, which is good as well. I first discovered him a few years ago when someone did an overview of his life and works at a conference I attended. I've always meant to dive into his stuff, but just haven't got around to it - much to my detriment. This particular book is taken from some lectures he gave in 1941. If you enjoy reading N.T. Wright, there is a similarity in style (and substance) here - it would not surprise me to know that Newbigin had been an influence on Wright.
September 17, 2015
An excellent book - the first I've read by Newbigin but I'll be reading more. A great intro to the tested insights of this missionary/theologian. (There probably shouldn't be any other kind of theologian.)
September 25, 2020
This is a deeply insightful set of lectures examining the interaction between the church and the changing western culture. It is paradigm shifting, a must read for anyone who wants to understand the changes taking place in western culture since the middle of the last century.
April 30, 2014
Outstanding. An absolute must-read for any Christian who is at all interested in the relationship between the gospel and culture; evangelism and cultural renewal; the church and the kingdom.
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