Lesslie Newbigin on John 3:16

"God's love is known to us because he has given is only Son that whoever believes might have life. The uniqueness and the universality are counterparts of each other. To reject both in the alleged interest of mutual tolerance among the world's religions is to deny the message at its center. If there are many different revelations, then the human family has no center for its unity...Each of us is - n the end - shut up in his own world of ideas. He must find God in the depths of his own being because there is no action of God by which he gives himself to be known by us.

The uniqueness ("his only Son") corresponds to the universality ("whoever") because God is love in action."

(p. 43, Lesslie Newbigin, 'The light has come: An exposition of the fourth gospel')

The blind men and the elephant

It is such a famous story to illustrate religious pluralism that it has its own wikipedia page.

I've heard two problems with the story which people have pointed out to me:

1. It is told from the perspective of the one man who can see

"In the famous story of the blind men and the elephant… the real point of the story is constantly overlooked. The story is told from the point of view of the king and his courtiers, who are not blind but can see that the blind men are unable to grasp the full reality of the elephant and are only able to get hold of part of it. The story is constantly told in order to neutralize the affirmations of the great religions, to suggest that they learn humility and recognize that none of them can have more than one aspect of the truth. But, of course, the real point of the story is exactly the opposite. If the king were also blind, there would be no story. What this means then is that there is an appearance of humility and a protestation that the truth is much greater than anyone of us can grasp. But if this is used to invalidate all claims to discern the truth, it is in fact an arrogant claim with the kind of knowledge which is superior that you have just said, no religion has." (p. 9, Lesslie Newbigin, The Gospel in a Pluralist Society)

2. The elephant is passive

It presumes that we are on a quest to find a 'God' who is doing nothing to make himself known. Gloriously the truth is that God speaks while the elephant remains silent, pursues us rather than waiting to be found and opens our eyes to see him.

with thanks to my housemate

Means and ends

Recently I posted on how the church is both a gathered and a scattered people. Another way of saying that is that the church is both a means and an end, as Lesslie Newbigin does brilliantly:

The Church is both a means and an end, because it is a foretaste. It is the community of the Holy Spirit who is the earnest of our inheritance. The Church can only witness to that inheritance because her life is a real foretaste of it, a real participation in the life of God Himself. Thus worship and fellowship, offering up praise and adoration to God, receiving His grace, rejoicing in Him, sharing one with another the fruits of the Spirit, and building up one another in love all essential to the life of the Church. Precisely because the Church is here and now a real foretaste of heaven, she can be the witness and instrument of the kingdom of heaven. It is precisely because she is not merely instrumental that she can be instrumental. This is not a merely theoretical matter, but one of real practical importance. There is a kind of missionary zeal which is forever seeking to win more proselytes but which does not spring from and lead back into a quality of life which seems intrinsically worth having in itself. If we answer the question, ‘Why should I become a Christian? simply by saying ‘In order ‘to make others Christians,’ we are involved in an infinite regress.

(The Household of God)

This chimes with what PT Forsyth says about prayer:

"Prayer is often represented as the great means of the Christian life. But it is no mere means, it is the great end of that life."

"A chief object of all prayer is to bring us to God. But we may attain His presence and come closer to Him by the way we ask Him for other things, concrete things or things of the Kingdom, than by direct prayer for union with Him."

(p. 16, The Soul of Prayer)

Four dimensions of alienation

From Krish Kandiah's personal reflection on Lesslie's Newbigin's influence on him:

In “Sin and Salvation”, (Newbigin 1956) a book Newbigin wrote on the boat journey as he travelled out to India, he explained how sin amounts to four dimensions of alienation. In a chapter entitled “What is Salvation?” he outlines this four-dimensional schema as follows:

• Man is in a state of contradiction against the natural world
• Man is in a state of contradiction against his fellow man
• Man is in a state of inner self-contradiction
• Man is in a state of contradiction against God

The right kind of certainty

Lesslie Newbigin finds in 2 Timothy 1:12 the right kind of certainty that Christians should have about their faith:

"I know whom I have believed, and I am convinced that he is able to guard until that Day what has been entrusted to me."

He observes that there three aspects of this kind of certainty:

1. Certainty rests not in the competence of my knowledge, but in the faithfulness of the one whom I know.
2. It is something in via. I don't possess it. I am on my way to it. I am looking forward to that day when it will be fully known to me.
3. It is a matter of grace ("What has entrusted to me")

Lesslie Newbigin MP3s

• Confessing Christ in a Multi-Religion Society (Rutherford House)
• Christ: unique and universal (The Christian Institute)
• Nihilism (The Christian Institute)

FD Maurice's famous dictum

"A man is most often right in what he affirms and wrong in what he denies." Why is that?

I was recently skim reading a bit of Lesslie Newbigin in which he makes two great statements we could all do with absorbing, but commits the error Maurice saw so often:

"election is for responsibility, not for privilege"

[Christ] bears witness to the presence of the reign of God, not by overpowering the forces of evil, but by taking their full weight upon himself"

Surely in both instances it is both!

I admit I often do the same though. Why do the best of us, make this mistake over and over again?

Contextualization and names for God

The BBC News website brings out a concrete question, of wide-significance, on how we communicate the gospel. It reports that:

The interception by Malaysian authorities of thousands of Bibles bound for Christians in the country has produced the latest flashpoint.

The reason - the Bibles use the word "Allah" to described God, and that's been banned by the government...

Muslim groups claim that Christian use of a word so closely associated with Islam in Bibles and children's books could be aimed at winning converts.

That sparks off lots of connexions in my head. Firstly it reminds me of a quote from Lesslie Newbigin I read yesterday about his time in India:

When I preach in a village where Christianity is not known, and where the name of Jesus is not known ... I have to begin by using the word Kadavul. But of course when I use the word Kadavul they're thinking of Vishnu or Shiva or some other Hindu God. I know that, but I can't help it. It's only when I begin to tell the stories of what God has done that they begin to say, 'Kadavul is not what we had thought.'

Secondly, it reminds me of the Old Testament use of the word 'El' to describe God.

God's name is important to him. But I don't know quite when contextualization becomes accommodation. A difficult question I think, but I suspect we may be too cautious.

Newbigin on Science

Further to my ambitious recent post about TF Torrance on science, here is a quote from Lesslie Newbigin which has some overlap:

Like all visions of ultimate truth, science is necessarily involved in a circular argument. It has to assume from the beginning the truth of what it seeks to prove. It begins from the conviction that the universe is acessible to rational understanding, it refuses to accept as final evidence that which seems to contradict this faith, and it seeks with a passion which is one of the glories of human history to prove that the faith is true.

(p.48, The Gospel in a pluralist society)

Newbigin on telling stories

I have done a good deal of street preaching in my life and I have often stood in a street to preach the gospel where the name of Jesus is quite unknown. It is no use mentioning the name of Jesus because no one knows what that means, but I have to use the word God. Of course I must find one of the many Tamil words for God and there are many words. And when I use one of these words, I know that in my hearers' minds they will be thinking of perhaps Shiva or Vishnu or Murugan or Subramanya or Ganesha or Hanuman. they will certainly not be thinking of the one whom I think of when I say the word God, the one I have learned to know through Jesus Christ. So what difference has my preaching made? So far, none at all. It will only make a difference when I begin to tell stories about what this God has done. Then you begin to see that God is different from what we thought, because you come to know who a person really is only be understanding that person's life, knowing how she behaves, how she responds in different situations, by interacting with her.

(p.117 "...and Culture" in Signs Amid the Rubble: The Purposes of God in Human History by Lesslie Newbigin)

Very true, and one reason why I am loving being part of sharing the Gospel through the gospel of Mark using Christianity Explored.

The only unhelpful thing about it is that by focusing on stories about God's actions, we can distance ourselves more easily than if we focus on what God has said. Although it is less fashionable, it is actually more personal to focus on the latter. Both are true though.