Newbigin: ultimate purpose ignored

Thursday, January 30, 2014
    Commemoration of Lesslie Newbigin, Bishop, Missionary, Teacher, 1998
Meditation:
    Tell them that this is what the LORD, the God of Israel, says: ‘Cursed is the man who does not obey the terms of this covenant—the terms I commanded your forefathers when I brought them out of Egypt, out of the iron-smelting furnace.’ I said, ‘Obey me and do everything I command you, and you will be my people, and I will be your God.
    —Jeremiah 11:3-4 (NIV)
Quotation:
    The effect of the post-Enlightenment project for human society is that all human activity is absorbed into labor. It becomes an unending cycle of production for the sake of consumption. The modern concept of “built-in obsolescence” makes this clear. The cycle of production and consumption has to be kept going, and the work of the artist or craftsman who aims to create something enduring becomes marginal to the economic order. 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 (1909-1998), Foolishness to the Greeks: the Gospel and Western culture, Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, 1986, p. 30 (see the book)
    See also Jer. 11:3-4; Lev. 26:12; Ps. 2:6-9; 17:14; Dan. 7:26-27; Matt. 5:19-21,25-32; 20:25-28; Luke 12:22-30; John 16:33; Eph. 1:18-23; 4:17; Col. 1:15-16; 2:13-15; Heb. 8:10
Quiet time reflection:
    Lord, You will defeat the system of this world. CQOD    Blog    email    RSS
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