Relationality
- Persons
- Mutuality
- Necessity of both vertical and horizontal relationships
- The interpretive key to history
- Missional by nature
- Has a essential connecting truth
- A love relationship must be visible
- The center of reconciliation
- Essential presupposition for mission
- Imaged by the proclaimed Son
- What is the theological justification for a visible community composed of multiple congregations? Is this what Newbigin is actually proposing? What are some alternatives?
- What is the essential, binding truth? Which differences, if any, necessitate separation?
- How does Newbigin support his claim that the Trinity is the essential presupposition for mission? If his claim is valid, what are the implications for ecclesiology and missiology?
Page 20: The fundamental and unifying fact is the personal nature of God and of man. Only in the light of this fact can we see how God's self-disclosure and man's valuation are inseparable parts of one whole relationship.
Page 22: There is expressed, if you will, the ideal of knowledge from the biblical point of view -- the total mutual self-revelation and surrender of persons to one another in love.
Page 22-27: Knowing is an activity of persons... in community... within which there is at least some real measure of mutual knowledge and trust... [T]here are realities which we know by faith... Knowledge of another person involves the recognition of another centre of decision which it is not in my power to control... [O]ur language about knowing God is to be interpreted in terms of what we have described as personal knowledge... Personal knowledge depends upon mutual trust.
Page 50: From beginning to end it relates us to God only through a relationship with our neighbor. One is related to God's saving acts not by any kind of direct, unmediated spiritual experience, however it may be formulated. One is related by becoming related to God's people and to the history of God's people, and the central and decisive acts in the history of God's people, which are the substance of the apostolic message.
Page 51: The mission of the Church is the clue to the meaning and the end of world history. But the Church does not exist for itself, it exists for the sake of fulfilling God's purpose for the world.
Page 63: If we are to know where to act, where to throw our weight, where to commit ourselves, we must have some provisional answer to the question: 'Where is God at work and where is the Devil?'
Page 70: Yet, by their covenanting together to form this Council [the WCC] and by many public statements, they have confessed that there is a truth which holds them together in spite of the differences which hold them apart.
Page 72: It is the very essence of such a relationship that it must issue in a visible community. Love is nothing if it does not issue in words and deeds by which the lover binds the beloved to himself. Love is infinitely more than tolerance. Tolerance requires no visible community to express it, but love does. The deeper and stronger the love, the more binding will be the mutual obligations to which it will lead. Therefore, it belongs to the very essence of the atonement wrought by Christ, that it leads to the creation of a visible community binding men together in all nations and all generations.
Page 75: The world is now a neighborhood, and the implications of the missionary character of Christianity are forced right upon our attention, whether we like it or not. If Christianity is true, then it is the center -- not merely in theory but in a concrete visible community -- for the reconciliation of mankind. If it is not that center, then it is untrue in its central affirmations and ought to be abandoned.
Page 84: Thus even in its most elementary form the preaching of the Gospel must presuppose an understanding of the triune nature of God. It is not, as we have sometimes seemed to say, a kind of intellectual capstone which can be put on to the top of the arch at the very end; it is, on the contrary, what Athanasius called it, the arche, the presupposition without which the preaching of the Gospel in a pagan world cannot begin.
Page 88: Here, then, is the first answer to the question: 'Who is Jesus?' He is the Son, sent by the Father and anointed by the Spirit to be the bearer of God's kingdom to the nations. This is the Jesus who was proclaimed by the first Christians to the world of their time.
...more later
Tag(s): missional ecclesiology newbigin lesslie newbigin
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“Unless otherwise noted Scripture quotations are from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version, copyright © 2001 by Crossway Bibles, a division of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.” http://www.esv.org/
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