Honest Religion for Secular Man
Overview
“Religion is much too great and permanent an element in human experience to be swept out of sight,” writes Lesslie Newbigin. “I want to ask what must be the religion of a Christian who accepts the process of secularization and lives fully in the kind of world into which God has led us.”
His answer involves relating the universal fact of secularization to the biblical picture of the nature and destiny of man. It involves, too, some criticism of recent Christian responses to secularization—but Newbiggin never resorts to sanctomonius diatribes. The emphasis is on knowing God, being God’s people, and living the Christian life in a secular world.
For more by Lesslie Newbigin, see Select Works of Lesslie Newbigin (7 vols.).
Key Features
- Relates the universal fact of secularization to the biblical picture
- Criticizes recent Christian responses to secularization
- Emphasizes knowing God, being God’s people, and living the Christian life in the secular world
Top Highlights
“Thus positively with some inexactness, but negatively with an agonizing sharpness, men see themselves sharing a common history, facing towards a common danger and a common hope. This is something new.” (Page 12)
“I have said that in the New Testament the Church is depicted as a body of people chosen by God and trained and empowered for a missionary task. It is a task force which exists not simply for the sake of its members, which would be absurd, but for the sake of the doing of God’s will in the world. The visible structures of church life which we have inherited from the corpus Christianum of mediaeval Europe do not correspond very obviously to that description.” (Page 105)
“In every country the direction and the pace of human life are set by the big cities, and these constitute now a single network of interdependent thought and activity, linked together by innumerable commercial, political and cultural relationships, so that a movement in any part immediately affects every other.” (Pages 11–12)
“commitment to Christ is a living, personal, religious reality.” (Page 135)
“It was not long before he realized that this mission station was not really in India at all. It was an outpost of Portugal, and the converts who had attached themselves to it had really been lifted out of India and put down inside the Portuguese compound wall to become imitation Portuguese Christians. An Indian Christian Church did not yet exist, and there was no hope whatever that the cultured Brahmins of Madura would ever accept the invitation addressed to them to join the only Christian congregation visible to them. De Nobili decided that this was not what he had come for.” (Page 109)
- Title: Honest Religion for Secular Man
- Author: Lesslie Newbigin
- Publisher: Wipf and Stock
- Print Publication Date: 2011
- Logos Release Date: 2015
- Pages: 160
- Language: English
- Resources: 1
- Format: Digital › Logos Research Edition
- Subjects: Christianity › 20th century; Secularism
- ISBNs: 9781610975834, 1610975839
- Resource ID: LLS:HNSTRLGNSCLRMN
- Resource Type: Monograph
- Metadata Last Updated: 2022-09-30T00:33:55Z