Lesslie Newbigin

[KingsGambit]

Has anybody read anything by him? I came across an article that recommended his book The Household of God, which deals with some issues I've been pondering lately regarding church unity.

[lee_merrill]

"The Christian is one who has forever given up the hope of being able to think of himself as a good man. He is forever a sinner for whom the Son of God had to die because by no other means could he be forgiven. How ready we are to take Christ as our pattern and teacher only, using the words of the Gospel, and yet never allowing ourselves to face the experience of forgiveness at the foot of the Cross—the humiliating discovery that, so far from our being like Jesus, there is literally no hope for us at all except that He has forgiven us. There is a whole universe of moral and psychological difference between saying, 'Christ is my pattern, and if I try I can be like Him', and saying, 'I am so far from goodness that Christ had to die for me that I might be forgiven.' The one is still in the world of legalism, and its center of attention is still the self. The other is in the world of grace, and its center of attention is another to whose love it is our whole and only aim to give ourselves. The one must always lack what the other increasingly has, the spontaneity and whole-heartedness that come when there is the whole force of an emotionally integrated life behind action." (Lesslie Newbigin)