Friday! (Taken with instagram)
The fundamental and unifying fact is the personal nature of God’s self-disclosure and man’s valuation are inseparable parts of one whole relationship. Only so do we see God’s revelation not as a piece of information, but as the love which discloses its nature in the act of seeking its object, and man’s response not merely as the mastering of an advanced lesson in metaphysics, but as the answer of heart and mind and will to the love that is seeking him.
“Revelation” (1936) from Lesslie Newbigin, Missionary Theologian: A Reader
We may sum up [the] two-sided examination of the teaching of the New Testament about revelation by saying that, on the one hand, God’s purpose for man is made known not by the up-reach of human moral and intellectual striving, but by the down-reach of God’s saving grace. But that - on the other hand - that saving grace achieves its end only as it is recognized and accepted by man’s deepest insights, and that it will take no other road. Our own unaided insight will not bring us to God; yet only as it accepts Him will He come to us; we only receive His light as we recognize it for the light; yet it may be very different from what we had expected. God’s saving word is not spoken through our highest faculties; but it is spoken to them.
“Revelation” (1936) from Lesslie Newbigin, Missionary Theologian: A Reader
The problem which revelation raises for human thought may be said to be a part of the problem of Grace - the problem of stating the relations of God and man in a way that shall not either annihilate man, or reduce God’s revelation to a mere phrase covering nothing more than human discovery. It may also be said to be a part of the problem of knowledge - of how we can know any truth seeing that knowledge must on the one hand be wholly our own inward understanding and valuing, and on the other hand must be wholly concerned with reality external to our mind.
“Revelation” (1936) from Lesslie Newbigin, Missionary Theologian: A Reader
We may fairly say that the central importance ascribed to revelation in Christianity depends upon two beliefs about the nature of the world and of man. Firstly the belief that the meaning of the world is personal. For if the final meaning of the world is less than personal, then it [is] best understood by those methods of scepticism and experiment which are the requisites of scientific enquiry, but which would be the complete destruction of any personal understanding. For we know a person only as he chooses to reveal himself, and only as our own spirit is sensitive and trustful to respond to his revelation, and if the meaning of the world is personal then revelation is the only path by which it can be made known to us.
Secondly the belief that the meaning of man’s life is in fellowship: if it were otherwise, we should not only expect that every man would be able to achieve for himself, apart from co-operation with his fellows, the necessities of physical existence and culture, and that pain and pleasure would always be distributed in mathematical accordance with sin and merit; but also that every man would be able to receive by direct revelation from God - apart from human telling - the knowledge necessary for blessedness. But if it be true that man was made for fellowship then we can understand not only the meaning of the co-operation which economic facts make necessary, and the strange incidence of pain and pleasure, so monstrously unjust by the standards of the law courts; but we can also understand the immensely significant fact that the revelation which is the key to our highest blessedness does not descend to us straight from heaven, but has to reach us passed from hand to hand of our fellow men along the chain of a historic community.
“Revelation” (1936) from Lesslie Newbigin, Missionary Theologian: A Reader
God does not desire a history of individual human beings, but the history of the human community. however, God doess not want a community that absorbs the individual into itself, but a community of human beings. In God’s eyes, community and individual exist in the same moment and rest in one another.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer - Sanctorum Communio
DA Caraon's God Who is There Series
I read the book first then found the videos for free. They are just as good as the book.
