Word: christiane
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Bishop Newbigin, who has spent twenty-two years in India as a missionary, and has thought deeply about the meaning of his experiences, dealt with massive tidal movements of society in our time, only one of which is the repudiation, implicit or explicit, of the Christian faith by most members of western society. This declaration, on which you have based your headline and lead sentence, can be understood only in the context of the entire lecture. Further, that a Harvard reporter can state in one paragraph, "He called for a return to a cyclical religion," and two paragraphs later report...
Meanwhile, the Christian faith, which in the West has given birth to this scientific culture, is now denied or tacitly ignored by most western men. At the moment when our western culture has penetrated all the world, that culture has disintegrated. The absolutes on which people base their lives are no longer those provided by Christian faith; this at the same time that our scientific culture has become the property of all nations. Thus emerges the general question with which the lectures are to deal: what is the relation of Christianity to this world civilization? The remainder of this first...
...first sight there is nothing particularly Christian about a physics formula. But the scientific world civilization is more than abstract thought. It consists of a body of knowledge, its systematization, the multiplication of tools and implements for using the knowledge, and an implicit belief that human life can and ought to be changed. This last aspect requires that human history be seen as a linear, irrversible movement, and is therefore opposed to the deeply-rooted belief of eastern religions in a cyclical theory of change in human experience. Further, can science, which has grown up in the Christian notion...
Thus two facts present themselves: 1) the idea of purposive change must eventually destroy the eastern religions or be strangled by them; and 2) this idea of linear, purposive movement is based in the Christian faith, in which western culture has been grounded...
...Cooperation is the necessary starting point, but it cannot be considered the goal," Newbigin continued. The Christian unity, the "binding in Christ," makes manifest a total commitment that makes it impossible to evade the question of full Church unity throughout the world. Newbigin strongly asserted the imminence of the problem and the importance of its solution. "The issue of Church unity," Newbigin concluded, "must be treated as an issue not for tomorrow, but for today...