Lesslie Newbigin Quotes

Christ is the clue to all that is.

I am neither an optimist nor a pessimist. Jesus Christ is risen from the dead.

It has never at any time been possible to fit the resurrection of Jesus into any world view except a world view of which it is the basis.

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.

...our societies appear to be intent on immediate consumption rather than on investment for the future. We are piling up enormous debts and exploiting the natural environment in a manner which suggests that we have no real sense of any worthwhile future. Just as a society which believes in the future saves in the present in order to invest in the future, so a society without belief spends everything now and piles up debts for future generations to settle. "Spend now and someone else will pay later."

The missionary calling has sometimes been interpreted as a calling to stem this fearful cataract of souls going to eternal perdition. But I do not find this in the center of the New Testament representation of the missionary calling.

Congregational life wherein each member has his opportunity to contribute to the life of the whole body, those gifts with which the Spirit endows him, is as much of the essence of the Church as are ministry and sacraments.

The victory of the Church over the power which was embodied in the Roman imperial system was not won by seizing the levers of power: it was won when the victims knelt down in the Colosseum and prayed in the name of Jesus for the Emperor.

Do things that will get people asking questions, the answer to which is the Gospel.

Live in the kingdom of God in such a way that it provokes questions for which the gospel is the answer.

Modern capitalism has created a world totally different from anything known before.

A society which believes in a worthwhile future saves in the present so as to invest in the future. Contemporary Western society spends in the present and piles up debts for the future, ravages the environment, and leaves its grandchildren to cope with the results as best they can.

The Church, wherever it is, is not only Christ's witness to its own people and nation, but also the home-base for a mission to the ends of the earth.

The Church must be seen as the company of pilgrims on the way to the end of the world and the ends of the earth.

To make the improving of our own character our central aim is hardly the highest kind of goodness. True goodness forgets itself and goes out to do the right thing for no other reason than that it is right.

It is less important to ask a Christian what he or she believes about the Bible than it is to inquire what he or she does with it.

Likewise, the world of action, of politics, is reduced to a conflict of views about how to keep the cycle of production and consumption going. Questions of ultimate purpose are excluded from the public world.

The necessary precondition for the birth of science as we know it is, it would seem, the diffusion through society of the belief that the universe is both rational and contingent. Such a belief is the presupposition of modern science and cannot by any conceivable argument be a product of science. One has to ask: Upon what is this belief founded?

God's grace is not limited by any ecclesiastical barriers.

The whole attempt to advance the kind of consumer society that depends for its growth on the ceaseless stimulation of unlimited covetousness among the rich, while the poor majority rot in their poverty-this is surely something against which a Christian should be a nonconformist.

Our confidence...is not in the competence of our own knowing, but in the faithfulness and reliability of the one who is known.

The effect of the post-Enlightenment project for human society is that all human activity is absorbed into labor. It becomes an unending cycle of production for the sake of consumption. The modern concept of "built-in obsolescence" makes this clear. The cycle of production and consumption has to be kept going, and the work of the artist or craftsman who aims to create something enduring becomes marginal to the economic order.

The church is not meant to call men and women out of the world into a safe religious enclave but to call them out in order to send them back as agents of God's kingship.