More on Newbigin
A friend (Jeff P) sent me this in response to the recent posting on Lesslie Newbigin. What great quotes …
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Hey Brian,
I appreciate the blog post you did last week giving your responses to the “Newbigin” critique of your work. You responses were well said and helpful. I have been rereading Foolishness to the Greeks the last few weeks so his thinking was fresh in my mind when I saw your blog. I too feel like you work is very much in line with Newbigin’s. A few passages stood out as I was reading the critique and your responses. Both come from Newbigin’s essential of a Christian doctrine of freedom.
“Second, the church, which is entrusted with the truth, is a body of sinful men and women who falsely identify their grasp of truth with the truth itself. The paradox of grace, that the church is a body of forgiven sinners, both forgiven and sinful, applies to the church’s understanding of the truth. At the very point of his confession of the truth, Peter could become an agent of Satan (Mar 8:29, 33). He grasped the truth but immediately made it an instrument of falsehood. Because sin remains a reality in the life of the forgiven community, the church can and does allow the truth entrusted to her to be turned into an ideological justification of her own human interests, and God constantly has to use his other savants, and especially the state, to bring the church to repentance.” pg 138-139
“Thus a true understanding of the gospel itself ought to enable Christians to be firm in their allegiance to Christ as the way, the truth, and the life, and also to be ready to enter into a genuinely listening dialogue with those who do not give this allegiance but from whom they know that they have to be ready to learn. The mind that is firmly anchored in Christ – knowing that Christ is much greater than the limited understanding of him each of us has – is at the same time able to enter freely into the kind of missionary dialogue I have described. This is the foundation on which a true tolerance, not indifference to the truth, can be founded. True dialogue is as far as possible from neutrality or indifference. Its basis is the shared conviction that there is truth to be known and that we must both bear witness to the truth given to us and listen to the witness of others.” pg. 139-140.
