The Gospel in a Pluralist Society

Newbigin, Lesslie. The Gospel in a Pluralist Society. Cambridge and Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1989.

BIO
Lesslie Newbigin was British missionary and theologian born in 1909 and educated in a Quaker school. He was converted to faith in Christ in Queen’s college at Cambridge in 1928 and began to work with the Student Christian Movement. He was ordained in 1936 by the Church of Scotland and was sent to Madras, India as a Presbyterian missionary. He eventually became Bishop of Madras in the fledgling Church of South India, an ecumenical group of Protestants (Wikipedia). After his retirement in 1974, he moved to Birmingham and became a pastor and a lecturer at a nearby college. He died in 1998.


From Wikipedia:
“He is remembered especially for the period of his life when he had returned to England from his long missionary service and travels and tried to communicate the need for the church to take the Gospel anew to the post-Christian Western culture, which he believed had unwisely accepted the notions of objectivity and neutrality developed during the Enlightenment. It was during this time that he wrote two of his most important works, Foolishness to the Greeks (1986) and The Gospel in a Pluralist Society (1989)”


Christopher Duraisingh from the forward:
“Newbigin has the courage to take up a position and the conviction to defend it against what sometimes appear to be impossible odds. What he has to say—and says with refreshing clarity—comes out of his background of long pastoral experience, missionary commitment, ecumenical vision, and unwavering confidence in the gospel."

Here is a passage on page 9 that adjusted some of my own thinking:
“In the famous story of the blind men and the elephant, so often quoted in the interests of religious agnosticism, 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 the truth. The story is constantly told to neutralize the affirmation 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. The story is told by the king, and it is the immensely arrogant claim of one who sees the full truth which all the world’s religions are only groping after. It embodies the claim to know the full reality which relativizes all the claims of the religions and philosophies.”

ok -- my new copy of McLaren just arrived as I was writing this ...I'll hit it this week.