Top 40 Lesslie Newbigin Quotes (2025 Update)

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

— Lesslie Newbigin

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

— Lesslie Newbigin

3. “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.”

— Lesslie Newbigin

4. “The reign of God is his reign over all things.”

— Lesslie Newbigin

5. “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.”

— Lesslie Newbigin

6. “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.”

— Lesslie Newbigin

7. “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.”

— Lesslie Newbigin

8. “To be elect in Christ Jesus, and there is no other election, means to be incorporated into his mission to the world, to be the bearer of God saving purpose for his whole world, to be the sign and the agent and the firstfruit of his blessed kingdom which is for all.”

— Lesslie Newbigin

9. “The business of the church is to tell and embody a story.”

— Lesslie Newbigin

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

— Lesslie Newbigin

11. “Christ is the clue to all that is.”

— Lesslie Newbigin

12. “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.”

— Lesslie Newbigin

13. “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.”

— Lesslie Newbigin

14. “The minister’s leadership of the congregation in its mission to the world will be first and foremost in the area of his or her own discipleship, in that life of prayer and daily consecration which remains hidden from the world but which is the place where the essential battles are either won or lost.”

— Lesslie Newbigin

15. “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.”

— Lesslie Newbigin

16. “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.”

— Lesslie Newbigin

17. “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.”

— Lesslie Newbigin

18. “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.”

— Lesslie Newbigin

19. “Through the repeated hammer blows of defeat, destruction, and deportation, interpreted by the faithful prophets, Israel has to learn that election is not for comfort and security but for suffering and humiliation.”

— Lesslie Newbigin

20. “God’s grace is not limited by any ecclesiastical barriers.”

— Lesslie Newbigin

21. “The living God is a God of justice and mercy and He will be satisfied with nothing less than a people in whom his justice and mercy are alive.”

— Lesslie Newbigin

22. “And since the gospel does not come as a disembodied message, but as the message of a community which claims to live by it and which invites others to adhere to it, the community’s life must be so ordered that it “makes sense” to those who are so invited.”

— Lesslie Newbigin

23. “The sociology of knowledge has taught us to recognize the fact, which is obvious once it is stated, that in every human society there is what Peter Berger calls a “plausibility structure,” a structure of assumptions and practices which determine what beliefs are plausible and what are not. It is easier to see the working of the plausibility structure in a culture of a different time or place than it is to recognize it in one’s own.”

— Lesslie Newbigin

24. “What is true in the position of the social activists is that a Church which exists only for itself and its own enlargement is a witness against the gospel, that the Church exists not for itself and not for its members but as a sign and agent and foretaste of the kingdom of God, and that it is impossible to give faithful witness to the gospel while being indifferent to the situation of the hungry, the sick, the victims of human inhumanity. I.”

— Lesslie Newbigin

25. “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.”

— Lesslie Newbigin

26. “If the biblical story is true, the kind of certainty proper to a human begin will be one which rests on the fidelity of God, not upon the competence of the human knower. It will be a kind of certainty which is inseparable from gratitude and trust.”

— Lesslie Newbigin

27. “The relativism which is not willing to speak about truth but only about ‘what is true for me’ is an evasion of the serious business of living. It is the mark of a tragic loss of nerve in our contemporary culture. It is a preliminary symptom of death.”

— Lesslie Newbigin

28. “God’s kingship is present in the church, but it must be insisted that it is not the property of the church. It.”

— Lesslie Newbigin

29. “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.”

— Lesslie Newbigin

30. “One does not learn anything except by believing something, and – conversely – if one doubts everything one learns nothing. On the other hand, believing everything uncritically is the road to disaster. The faculty of doubt is essential. But as I have argued, rational doubt always rests on faith and not vice versa. The relationship between the two cannot be reversed.”

— Lesslie Newbigin

31. “The nation state has taken the place of God. Responsibilities for education, healing and public welfare which had formerly rested with the Church devolved more and more upon the nation state... National governments are widely assumed to be responsible for and capable of providing those things which former generations thought only God could provide – freedom from fear, hunger, disease and want – in a word: “happiness”.”

— Lesslie Newbigin

32. “For Greek thought this was impossible since the essence of perfection is changelessness, and perfection cannot arise from the changes of human history. By contrast the Old Testament writers look forward to a glorious and terrible consummation of history. History has meaning in the sense that it has a goal.”

— Lesslie Newbigin

33. “In contrast to the long period in which the plausibility structure of European society was shaped by the biblical tradition, and in which one could be a Christian without conscious decision because the existence of God was among the self-evident truths, we are now in a situation where we have to take personal responsibility for our beliefs.”

— Lesslie Newbigin

34. “If the relativist claims that, since all reasoning is embodied in a particular social context, no claim to know the truth can be sustained, one has to ask for the basis on which this claim is made. It is, after all, a claim to know something about reality – namely that reality is unknowable.”

— Lesslie Newbigin

35. “In the attempt to be “relevant” one may fall into syncretism, and in the effort to avoid syncretism one may become irrelevant.”

— Lesslie Newbigin

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

— Lesslie Newbigin

37. “In the twentieth century we have become accustomed to the fact that – in the name of the nation – Catholics will fight Catholics, Protestants will fight Protestants, and Marxists will fight Marxists. The charge of blasphemy, if it is ever made, is treated as a quaint anachronism; but the charge of treason, of placing another lyalty above that to the nation state, is treated as the unforgivable crime. The nation state has taken the place of God.”

— Lesslie Newbigin

38. “If I do not know the purpose for which human life was designed, I have no basis for saying that any kind of human life-style is good or bad.”

— Lesslie Newbigin

39. “If we cannot speak with confidence about biblical authority, what ground have we for challenging the reigning plausibility structure?”

— Lesslie Newbigin

40. “Opinions about how it ought to function can only be personal opinions, and any assertion that the purpose for which human life exists has in fact been revealed by the One whose purpose it is, is treated as unacceptable dogmatism.”

— Lesslie Newbigin

41. “Does the use of the word “revelation” mean that reason has been left behind? Obviously not. Both the discovery by Kepler of a new pattern in the movement of the heavenly bodies and the disclosure to Moses of a personal calling become the starting point of a tradition of reasoning in which the significance of these disclosures is explored, developed, tested against new experience, and extended into further areas of thought.”

— Lesslie Newbigin

42. “Since total skepticism about ultimate beliefs is strictly impossible, in that no belief can be doubted except on the basis of some other belief, indifference is always in danger of giving place to some sort of fanaticism that can be as intolerant as any religion has ever been.”

— Lesslie Newbigin

43. “When coercion of any kind is used in the interests of the Christian message, the message itself is corrupted.”

— Lesslie Newbigin

44. “There is surely no part of Christian teaching which has been the subject of so much ridicule and indignant rejection as the doctrine of election.”

— Lesslie Newbigin