For some other thoughts on Lesslie Newbigin I ran across this article and wanted to link to it here at Missio Links.
Here’s a great quote:
For Newbigin a ‘missionary encounter’ with culture is central to being an authentic Church. Yet the influence of liberal theology had inflicted deep wounds on the Church’s confidence to engage faithfully.
“As time went on I began to receive invitations to take part in conferences…I began to feel very uncomfortable with much that I heard. There seemed to be so much timidity in commending the gospel to the unconverted people of Britain”[5]
Consequently, a central theme in Newbigin’s writings is the ‘proper confidence’ that the Church needs to display in the gospel of Jesus Christ. This deep confidence is in contrast to the brittle form of confidence shown by fundamentalism or the lack of confidence shown by reductionist liberal theology. Newbigin argued that both of these were enslaved in different ways to enlightenment thinking. Instead he urged Christians to be confident in a worldview shaped by God’s revelation in the Bible and with the ‘fact of Jesus Christ’ as the central ‘clue to history’.
Source: ‘Proper Confidence in the Gospel’: the theology of Lesslie Newbigin
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