Quotes from The Gospel in a Pluralist Society

“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, quote from The Gospel in a Pluralist Society

“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, quote from The Gospel in a Pluralist Society

“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, quote from The Gospel in a Pluralist Society

“If we cannot speak with confidence about biblical authority, what ground have we for challenging the reigning plausibility structure?”
― Lesslie Newbigin, quote from The Gospel in a Pluralist Society

“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, quote from The Gospel in a Pluralist Society

“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, quote from The Gospel in a Pluralist Society

“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, quote from The Gospel in a Pluralist Society

“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, quote from The Gospel in a Pluralist Society

“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, quote from The Gospel in a Pluralist Society

“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, quote from The Gospel in a Pluralist Society

“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, quote from The Gospel in a Pluralist Society

“Opinions about how it ought to function can only be personal opinions, and any assertion that the purpose for which human life exists has in fact been revealed by the One whose purpose it is, is treated as unacceptable dogmatism.”
― Lesslie Newbigin, quote from The Gospel in a Pluralist Society

“When coercion of any kind is used in the interests of the Christian message, the message itself is corrupted.”
― Lesslie Newbigin, quote from The Gospel in a Pluralist Society

“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, quote from The Gospel in a Pluralist Society

“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, quote from The Gospel in a Pluralist Society

“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, quote from The Gospel in a Pluralist Society

“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, quote from The Gospel in a Pluralist Society

“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, quote from The Gospel in a Pluralist Society

“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, quote from The Gospel in a Pluralist Society

“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, quote from The Gospel in a Pluralist Society

“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, quote from The Gospel in a Pluralist Society

“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, quote from The Gospel in a Pluralist Society

“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, quote from The Gospel in a Pluralist Society

“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, quote from The Gospel in a Pluralist Society

“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, quote from The Gospel in a Pluralist Society

“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, quote from The Gospel in a Pluralist Society

“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.”
― Lesslie Newbigin, quote from The Gospel in a Pluralist Society

“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.”
― Lesslie Newbigin, quote from The Gospel in a Pluralist Society

“Ministerial leadership is, first and finally, discipleship.”
― Lesslie Newbigin, quote from The Gospel in a Pluralist Society

“discussions about the authority of the gospel the word “reason” is often used as though it were an independent source of information to be set alongside tradition or revelation. But clearly this is a confusion of categories. Reason does not operate in a vacuum. The power of a human mind to think rationally is only developed in a tradition which itself depends on the experience of previous generations. This is obviously true of the vast edifice of modern science sustained by the scientific community. The definition of what is reasonable and what is not will be conditioned by the tradition within which the matter is being discussed. Within an intellectual tradition dominated by the methods of natural science it will appear unreasonable to explain things in terms of personal will and purpose. But if God exists and he is capable of revealing his purpose to human beings, then the human reason will be summoned to understand and respond to this revelation and to relate it to all other experience. It will necessarily do this within a tradition which determines whether or not any belief is plausible — in this case the tradition of a community which cherishes and lives by the story of God’s saving acts.”
― Lesslie Newbigin, quote from The Gospel in a Pluralist Society

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Popular quotes

“But whatever dismal appearance of things there may be in the world, we need not fear the ruin of the church by the most bloody oppositions. Former experiences will give security against future events. It is built on the rock, and those gates of hell shall not prevail against it.”
― John Owen, quote from The Glory of Christ

“He hadn’t observed Kowalski or Debany licking their mates’ hands.”
― Anne Bishop, quote from Marked in Flesh

“Put. That coffee. Down. Coffee's for closers only.”
― David Mamet, quote from Glengarry Glen Ross

“أنا الذي أشكك بكل شيء ، كيف لا أشكك كذلك بشكوكي ؟”
― Amin Maalouf, quote from Balthasar's Odyssey

“Taking Off Emily Dickinson’s Clothes

First, her tippet made of tulle,
easily lifted off her shoulders and laid
on the back of a wooden chair.

And her bonnet,
the bow undone with a light forward pull.

Then the long white dress, a more
complicated matter with mother-of-pearl
buttons down the back,
so tiny and numerous that it takes forever
before my hands can part the fabric,
like a swimmer’s dividing water,
and slip inside.

You will want to know
that she was standing
by an open window in an upstairs bedroom,
motionless, a little wide-eyed,
looking out at the orchard below,
the white dress puddled at her feet
on the wide-board, hardwood floor.

The complexity of women’s undergarments
in nineteenth-century America
is not to be waved off,
and I proceeded like a polar explorer
through clips, clasps, and moorings,
catches, straps, and whalebone stays,
sailing toward the iceberg of her nakedness.

Later, I wrote in a notebook
it was like riding a swan into the night,
but, of course, I cannot tell you everything—
the way she closed her eyes to the orchard,
how her hair tumbled free of its pins,
how there were sudden dashes
whenever we spoke.

What I can tell you is
it was terribly quiet in Amherst
that Sabbath afternoon,
nothing but a carriage passing the house,
a fly buzzing in a windowpane.

So I could plainly hear her inhale
when I undid the very top
hook-and-eye fastener of her corset

and I could hear her sigh when finally it was unloosed,
the way some readers sigh when they realize
that Hope has feathers,
that Reason is a plank,
that Life is a loaded gun
that looks right at you with a yellow eye.”
― Billy Collins, quote from Picnic, Lightning

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