Word: newbigin
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...second William Belden Noble Lecture, Reverend Newbigin disputed three solutions to the problem of finding a modern world faith...
...seeks to reduce all religious concepts to a common denominator of mystical truth. But in retracting his mind from all contact wtih his senses, the Hindu fails to extract the essence of all religion, and instead attempts to find the way to essential truth through his mystical vision. Newbigin declared that men are too much caught in the concentration of life to avoid its problems by inward contemplation...
...argument was with Toynbee, who classifies religions into higher and lower categories. Toynbee stands above faith and accuses Christianity and Christians of pride because they will not admit that their religion's major ideas, even the concept of divine self-sacrifice, are to be found in other world religions. Newbigin asked what Toynbee's criterion of judgment could be; how by setting himself above all religions he can have standards by which to criticize them...
...many people in the so-called Christian west, science has become a faith in itself. If they have any hope of salvation, it is the salvation science can bring about through improvement of the natural world," the Rev. Newbigin postulated. It is this faith in the ability of men to change their world, opposed to the non-scientific beliefs of the Eastern religions, he said, which enable the science ethic to exist...
...modern process of purposeful change is "demonic," even though it is a "secularized form of the Kingdom of God," the Rev. Newbigin asserted. Before the second coming of Christ, there must be a return to the old cyclical conception: evaluation of time by the number of epochs between the appearances of the Messiah. The present technological culture of Christian society cannot remain religiously neutral; society "must revolve around Christ or the anti-Christ, around the true Absolute or its negation...