Why the Church Must Speak to the Nations Again

By the same token, the church today cannot without guilt absolve itself from the responsibility, where it sees the possibility, of seeking to shape the public life of nations and the global ordering of industry and commerce in the light of the Christian faith. Even where the church is a tiny minority with no political power, it has the duty to address the governing authority of the civil community with the word of God.
~Lesslie Newbigin, Foolishness to the Greeks

The Church and the Public Square

Egalitarianism is a spirit of our age and an equalitizing principle that removes distinctions and advocates for, not only equal treatment, but equal standing for all people. This commitment to equality is found within the modern evangelical church, but it also manifests itself in social, political and economic domains in the form of secularism. Secularism is another principality and power that is closely aligned with egalitarianism. Secularism refers to the principle of separation between government and public institutions from religious institutions and beliefs. It advocates for a religiously neutral state and claims to not endorse or discriminate against any particular religion, ensuring freedom of thought, conscience, and religion for all.

By advocating for freedom of religion and government neutrality, secularism claims to protect the rights of individuals to believe or not believe as they choose, fostering a climate of religious tolerance and preventing the imposition of one religion’s beliefs on others. The secularism project tries to reduce religious discrimination and contribute to a more egalitarian society where individuals are judged based on their actions rather than their religious affiliation. But after two hundred years, we’ve learned that secularism writes checks that it cannot cash. Secularism is not a matter of eliminating religious claims in the pursuit of neutrality, but of privileging other religious claims over Christianity.

Egalitarianism, in concert with secularism, helped to produce what we call “pluralism.” In the opening page of The Gospel in a Pluralist Society, Newbigin shared his understanding of pluralism for his readers.

“It has become a commonplace to say that we live in a pluralist society – not merely a society which is in fact plural in the variety of cultures, religions, and life-styles which it embraces, but pluralist in the sense that this plurality is celebrated as things to be approved and cherished. In much of the Western world pluralism is contrasted with a situation perceived to have existed in earlier times in which there was an accepted public doctrine, shaped by Christianity, providing the norm by which all belief and conduct was to be judged. Pluralism is conceived to be a proper characteristic of the secular society, a society in which there is no officially approved pattern of belief or conduct. It is therefore also conceived to be a free society, a society not controlled by accepted dogma but characterized rather by the critical spirit which is ready to subject all dogmas to critical (and even sceptical) examination.”¹

Newbigin encountered this pluralism when he returned from India to the West. By the time he came back to England in the late twentieth century, pluralism had become the dominant plausibility structure that shaped the thinking of most citizens in Europe and Northern America. Newbigin strongly resisted pluralism because it created harmful separations between things like truth and belief, fact and value, public and private, and finally the church and the public square. Newbigin believed that Christ was the world’s principle of concretion and cohesion, meaning that in Christ all things were made and in him all things hold together. He was firmly committed to the dogmatic claim that all authority in heaven and on earth was given to Christ and that Christ is Lord in heaven and on earth. 

As the church wrestled with how to evangelize the West within the constraints of pluralism, “inter-faith dialogue” became a popular strategy among evangelicals. Such dialogue required the softening of convictions, leading to compromise, but Newbigin was unwilling to capitulate and held fast to Christian dogma. Ken Myers, host of the Mars Hill Audio Journal, interviewed missiologist Paul Weston, after the publication of his anthology of Newbigin’s works. In the opening monologue of the interview Myers notes, 

“Few 20th century theologians were more perceptive about the cultural challenges posed to the church in the West than Lesslie Newbigin. He diagnosed all of the threats to Christian faithfulness, instigated by the enlightenment, all of the false gods honored in public life when it was deemed backward and narrow-minded to honor the true God. There was no room for half-hearted piety or compromised theology. While some modern theologians urged the church to be a little less Christian so it could somehow better fulfill Christ’s commands to love our neighbors, Newbigin insisted that Christian love began with the recognition of Christ’s uncompromising authority. Newbigin’s theology was always unapologetically christocentric when he participated in interfaith dialogue. He never checked his loyalty to King Jesus at the door.” ²

Newbigin was unapologetically christocentric and he resisted pluralism’s requirement that he sequester his faith from public life. Newbigin believed that in order for the church to be faithful to Christ as King, and faithful to its responsibility to proclaim the gospel, then the church must take its rightful place in the center of the city and speak a public word. In a 1987 article entitled “Evangelism in the City”, Newbigin wrote, 

“Christ’s message, the original gospel was about the coming of the kingdom of God. That is to say God’s kingly rule over the whole of creation and the whole of humankind. That is the only authentic gospel, and that means that every part of human life is within the range of the gospel message. In respect of everything the gospel brings the necessity for choice between the rule of God and the negation of that rule. If the good news is to be authentically communicated, it must be clear that the church is concerned about the rule of God and not about itself. It must be clear, that is, that the local congregation cares for the wellbeing of the whole community and not just for itself.”³

Newbigin not only believed that the church was given hands and feet for public ministries of mercy, but also a public voice and a responsibility to speak a word to Caesar and to the nations. 

“It is totally wrong, therefore, to separate the private from the public areas of human life and thereby to remove politics from the sphere of Christian responsibility. To work for the reformation of structures, to expose and attack unjust structures, and, when the point is reached at which all other means have failed, to work for the overthrow of an evil political and economic order is as much a part of the mission of the church as to care for the sick and to feed the hungry. Part of it, but not the whole; and if the legitimate call to political action is allowed to replace the call to compassionate service, then the church has betrayed its gospel.”⁴

Pluralism prohibits the public facing and prophetic dimension of the church. As a result, evangelicals who wanted to avoid conflict with the world, developed programs of dialogue, cultural engagement and winsomeness. Slowly, the church receded from the public square, creating slack in the joints, allowing for a new cultural arrangement between the church and state. 

Newbigin recognized that following the religious wars of the seventeenth century, the “nation-state” displaced the church as the centerpiece in the post-Enlightenment political landscape. Europe settled for a principle of religious coexistence, but the entity to which one’s ultimate loyalty was due was now the nation-state. The state came to occupy the apex position on a scale of value, and there was no longer room for God above the state. The state became primary and demanded fealty. Failures of allegiance to the state were met with serious repercussions. “The charge of blasphemy, if it is ever made, is treated as a quaint anachronism; but the charge of treason, of placing another loyalty above that to the nation state, is treated as the unforgivable crime. The nation state has taken the place of God. Responsibilities for education, healing and public welfare which had formerly rested with the Church devolved more and more upon the nation state.”⁵

Over time the church lost its prophetic voice. Moses no longer speaks the word of the Lord to Pharaoh; Elijah no longer speaks authoritatively to Ahaz and Jezebel; Paul no longer stands before Caesar. The church conceded the world to the powers. Without the light of the gospel shining in the public square, the new post-Enlightenment arrangement produced a great darkness.

Surveying the Rubble 

The late modern dualism of private religious faith and public secular truth ushered in by egalitarian pluralism had devastating cultural and political consequences. How has the West fared since the church went silent in the public square? The answer is, not well at all. Radical individualism has proliferated and gone unchallenged, producing cultural disorder and chaos. One of the most obvious pieces of evidence for this is the sexual disorder and gender confusion in the West.

You can trace the decline rather clearly over the last 65 years beginning with the creation of the birth control pill (1960), followed by Second Wave Feminism and the promotion of sexual expression, egalitarianism and reproductive rights (1960-1980). In 1967 there was the summer of love, the rise of Hugh Heffner and the popularization of pornography, which gave way to no-fault divorce (1970) and then the legalization of abortion in the Roe v. Wade decision (1973). Also in 1973, the Episcopal Church in America ordained its first woman to the priesthood and 1978 we saw the creation of the first rainbow flag. The 1990s ushered in Third Wave Feminism and the promotion of intersectionality and sexual diversity and the 2000s saw the expansion of “hookup” culture on university and college campuses. May 17, 2004 is the date of the first legal same sex marriage in Massachusetts and June 26, 2015 marks Obergefell v. Hodges and the Supreme Court ruling legalizing same sex marriage in our country. From 2015-present our culture has witnessed the acceleration and proliferation of gender identity, gender fluidity and gender reassignment, resulting in irreversible damage to scores of confused adolescents.⁶

The suffering of children under secularism has been significant, as well as that of teens and college students. They have inherited a secular world of disorder and have no word from the Lord to help anchor them. In the absence of the church, many young people turn to psychology looking for help. One recent survey of the disorders of children and their parents is Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt’s 2018 book, The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas are Setting Up a Generation for Failure. The book masterfully identifies the growing social anxieties, catastrophizing and cultural fracturing among families and college students.

Their book seeks to refute three great untruths that have come to dominate our culture. The first untruth is this: “Whatever doesn’t kill you makes you weaker,” the second, “always trust your feelings,” and finally, “life is a battle between good people and evil people.”⁷ To these untruths, the authors attempt to apply wisdom, but it is secular, psychological wisdom. Some of the wisdom is sound, like “Prepare the road for the child, not the child for the road.” Other wisdom, while well-meaning, comes up short. The problem of evil and promotion of the good is met with little more than increased secularism and egalitarianism.

The human mind, the authors state, has evolved toward tribalism, but we must combat that instinct with the vague spirituality of “common-humnaity identity politics” that sees everyone equally. Their approach never gets to the root and papers over the problem of evil by ignoring it. Anxieties are not alleviated; they’re just managed. Only the proclamation of the truth, that Jesus Christ conquered sin and death, that he removed the dividing wall of hostility, that he judged evil on the cross and will one day remove it from his good creation, can offer the anxious mind the reassurance it really wants. As the church remains silent, the anxieties only grow.

Secularism has had devastating social consequences and wreaked havoc on our political order. Egalitarianism’s elimination of the distinctions between good and evil, right and wrong, creates confusion and consequently saps political courage along with political will. Our political leaders no longer know what is right or where to go. They are in the dark because the church is absent. There is no one to cast a vision, and when there is no vision, the people perish (Proverbs 29:18). Today, our leaders don’t know how to lead. They have no conception of the good, they lack clear direction, so they don’t know where to go or how to get there. The result is what Ross Douthet refers to as a “kludgeocracy.” According to Douthet, the U.S. government today functions through a series of negotiations and power struggles between the judiciary, the Oval Office, and the deep state,

“Which, of course, produces policies that are more arbitrary and opaque and unstable and subject to sudden reversals than legislation forged in democratic deliberation. The political scientist Steven Teles, borrowing from computer science, calls this tendency ‘kludgeocracy,’ meaning a system in which every solution is basically ‘an inelegant patch put in place to solve an unexpected problem and designed to be backward-compatible with the rest of the system.’ As with computer programming, the pileup of kludges creates ‘a very complicated program that has no clear organizing principles, is exceedingly difficult to understand, and is subject to crashes.’ The frequency of these crashes feeds a quite rational public distrust of government, which makes legislators even more hesitant to do anything but posture.”⁸

Kludgeocracies are inherently unstable and not good for society. They are a sign of societal decay. They develop because leaders abdicate their responsibilities and offload risk to other branches of government. They offload risk because they are in the dark and don’t know where to go. Sailors aren’t the only ones who can find themselves in the dark, lost at sea, so can nations. But the gospel is a word that breaks forth like the dawn. It is not meant just for the salvation of individual souls, the gospel is a light for nations, for cultures and for the pluralist society. “How then will they call on him in whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe in him of whom they have never heard? And how are they to hear without someone preaching? And how are they to preach unless they are sent? As it is written, “How beautiful are the feet of those who preach the good news!”” (Romans 10:14–15). The church must recover a willingness to speak a word to the nations. 

Public Anathemas  

Newbigin recognized the problems facing the West. The first was the false belief that the human conscience could discover the truth about social order without the aid of divine revelation and without reference to God. The second was the church’s acceptance of the secularist dichotomy which relegated faith to the private sector and reduced the church to a voluntary association in which individual believers join themselves together to express their personal faith. As a result, the church became hyper-individualized and privatized, with no relation to the state. Newbigin rejected both sides of this arrangement and believed that the church was given a word that must be proclaimed to Caesar.

“…when the Church is seen simply as a voluntary society made up of those individuals who have decided to accept the Christian faith and to join themselves together for its nourishment and exercise, then the danger is that the ethical implications of the gospel come to be regarded as merely house rules for the Church, guidance for Christian behavior rather than the law of the creator with jurisdiction over the entire human family. The freedom of the Church from control in spiritual matters by the state is an empty freedom if it is simply the freedom of individuals to follow their inclinations, and not the freedom which is given by the word of God to speak in the name of God to the state as to every other human institution.”⁹

According to Newbigin, the church is not free to take upon itself the secularist, pluralist, and egalitarian frame. The church is under orders and must remain obedient to Christ and his economy. The church’s life is public, not private, and so it must assume the center of the public square. “For the church simply to be free to do its own thing is not freedom. The proper freedom of the church is inseparable from its obligation to declare the sovereignty of Christ over every sphere of human life without exception.”¹⁰

To remain faithful to its charter, the church must preach to the nations and assert its moral authority. The gospel that Newbigin believed the church was commissioned to preach had to include the law. “It is the very heart of the gospel that it both gives everything and requires everything…it is a distorted preaching of the gospel which does not lead to fresh commitments to follow Jesus in challenging the dominion of evil.”¹¹ To preach the law is to assert the ethics of the kingdom for the benefit and wellbeing of the city. 

 In addition to obediently preaching the truth publicly, Newbigin believed the church had a responsibility to pronounce anathemas over the ideological disorders of society. “I think that perhaps that is the first thing to say about the duty in relation to political issues. The church has to unmask ideologies.”¹² The church must speak truth to the power on the throne and to the powers behind the throne and tear down all ideologies that dare to exalt themselves against the knowledge of God. “We have to reject ideologies which give to particular elements in God’s ordering of things the central and absolute place which belongs to Christ alone.”¹³ The first anathema, according to Newbigin, is directed toward radical individualism. 

“The ideology which we have to recognize, unmask, and reject is an ideology of freedom, a false and idolatrous conception of freedom which equates it with the freedom of each individual to do as he or she wishes. We have to set against it the Trinitarian faith which sees all reality in terms of relatedness. In explicit rejection of an individualism which puts the autonomous self at the center and sees other selves as limitations on our freedom, we have to set the basic dogma entrusted to us.”¹⁴

Another power to be confronted is the goddess Fortuna. “The idea that if economic life is detached from all moral considerations and left to operate by its own laws all will be well is simply an abdication of human responsibility. It is the handing over of human life to the pagan goddess of fortune. If Christ’s sovereignty is not recognized in the world of economics, then demonic powers take control.”¹⁵

The final ideology that Newbigin unmasks is the modern conception of rights. Older Christian societies spoke of duties which were owed to God and neighbor. Today we speak of rights and justice absent a law giver. The church must remind the state that we receive our rights by our creator and are accountable to the Judge of all the World.

“The Church, in its general domestication into the culture of the Enlightenment, has adopted the same language; it speaks much of rights and of justice, little of sin and punishment. If there is no judge, then justice is as each of us defines it and rival claims for right are mere conflicts of interest which rend the fabric of society to shreds. We have the responsibility to bear witness that there is a judge of all the nations, that his judgment is replete with mercy, and that the clue to all public issues as to all personal life is to be found at the one mercy seat where the sin of the whole human race was both judged and pardoned.”¹⁶ 

Public Affirmations

The church exists as the first-fruit, foretaste and instrument of the Kingdom of God for the sake of the world. As such, the church has a responsibility to affirm its public role and to speak truth to the nations. As it speaks truth, it pronounces anathemas over the ideologies of our day, but it also makes gospel affirmations. According to Newbigin, “The church must affirm the truth of the gospel, the fact of the sovereignty of Christ as sole Lord and Savior, and the Trinitarian faith, the given starting point, the dogma which must shape all our thinking and revising.”¹⁷ 

Such affirmations must be made boldly and publicly, but Newbigin also understood the necessity for patience and the wisdom of not telegraphing every assault against the enemy. In addition to proclamation, Newbigin was an advocate for the subversive. 

“If I understand the teaching of the New Testament on this matter, I understand the role of the Christian as that of being…a subversive agent. When Paul says that Christ has disarmed the powers (not destroyed them), and when he speaks of the powers as being created in Christ and for Christ, and when he says that the Church is to make known the wisdom of God to the powers, I take it that this means that a Christian neither accepts them as some sort of eternal order which cannot be changed, nor seeks to destroy them because of the evil they do, but seeks to subvert them from within and thereby to bring them back under the allegiance of their true Lord.”¹⁸

A full frontal attack on the indifference toward God and his kingdom in our nation has its place, but it can also displace and scatter like a car blowing leaves on a country road. Certainly, there are times when it is necessary to be direct, firm, pronounced, and confrontational. But there is also wisdom in patient subversion. 

Jesus was a master at subversion. He used parables to slip past people’s defenses so the kingdom of God could quietly displace prejudices, vices and soften recalcitrant hearts. The kingdom of God is like a warrior who binds up the strong man but it is also like a mustard seed, small and inconspicuous, the smallest of all the seeds, but when sown it grows into the largest and most glorious tree in the garden. Newbigin was at heart a reformer not a revolutionary, so he was patient. 

We have a great lesson from Martin Luther that shows us the difference between subversive reformation and revolutionary uprising. Not many would accuse Luther of being subtly subversive, given his personality. Nevertheless, he was a man who wanted to see the church and state reformed by the Word. He wanted to see the image of God reformed in the people. His reformation strategy was local, patient and biblical. Thomas Müntzer, however, allegedly called Luther a monkey because of his patience and adherence to scripture. Müntzer’s revolutionary fire ran wild and his uprising led to doctrinal incineration and peasant revolution. The subversive pastor’s approach must resist revolutionary fire and instead, adopt a posture of boldness and patience. 

If the church is going to call the state back to obedience, then there must first be a reformation in the household of God. Newbigin believed in the priesthood of all believers, who serve as agents of subversion. Christians must be formed in Christ, learning to obey all that Christ commanded. They must be delivered from the reigning plausibility structures and formed through the church so they can be sent out to the world Monday through Saturday as agents for gospel change.

“This priesthood is, clearly, something to be exercised in the midst of the secular life of the world. Every Christian in the course of secular employment is to be present as representative of the whole priesthood, thus bringing the secular world into its proper relation to God. The Church gathers on the Lord’s Day to renew the priesthood by renewing its incorporation in the one High Priest. It should become part of the normal work of the Church to equip its members for the exercise of this priesthood in the many different areas of secular life, and in terms of the specific powers that rule in these areas.”¹⁹

Benevolent Infections

Reformation happens “between Sundays.” Dr. Richard Halverson was the pastor of Fourth Presbyterian Church in Washington D.C. and former chaplain to the U.S. Senate. Halverson, like Newbigin, resisted pluralistic dualism and the private/public divide on matters of faith. He had a vision of the church gathering for worship and then scattering into the world to live as the salt, light and leaven of the kingdom of God. Halverson writes,

“Christianity is made for the road not the sanctuary…‘Sanctuaryism’ has isolated Christianity from life. Church now means a building; and the average American, Christian or otherwise, consciously or unconsciously relates Christian faith to what goes on inside the building at certain stated times in certain technical ways. And he fails to see any connection between that and what goes on downtown Monday through Saturday…Authentic Christianity is a life to be lived midst the hard facts of history. It is designed for the home and community, the office and the shop, the club and the campus, the market, the factory and farm! Christianity is for everyday, wherever one is, under whatever circumstance. Sunday may be particularly devoted to the sanctuary, but worship and practice should never be limited to this. Christianity is for between Sundays!”²⁰  

A problem the church must rectify is the dichotomy that Christians accept to live in two worlds, divorcing the private from the public. But America is more religious than it admits and we spend most of our time in an admixture of sacred and secular. I like Halverson’s thoughts on the situation and his promotion of the power of “Christian influence” in the public square. 

“Real impact of the Church is not some huge religious combine, power bloc or pressure group, overpowering by sheer force of numbers…not a massive show of solidarity or organizational might. The power of Christ’s church is infinitely more subtle, infinitely more effective. The Divine strategy is the Christian man, at his job day in and day out, bearing witness to Christ by life and lip right where he lives and works…Multiply these by a million—by ten million—by a hundred million, and you have the true picture of Christian influence…invincible Christianity! Each Christian in his God-directed place, doing his job for God’s glory, faithful to his church, strengthened by daily Bible study and prayer, saying a word for Christ as opportunity affords. Making his little world a better place by being there, like a benevolent infection, spiritually contagious. Like salt making life savory; like light shining in a dark place.”  

Christians are benevolent infections. The truth dazzles gradually through Christian witness. This is a beautiful image and a noble calling for Christians. Our best hope for dominion is the subversive, the benevolent infection that slowly spreads the truth of the reign of Jesus Christ over the earth. Newbigin hopes that such benevolent infections will even reach public office. “We could look for a time when many of those holding responsible positions of leadership in public life were committed Christians equipped to raise the questions and make the innovations in these areas which the gospel requires.”²¹

Whither the Church

Newbigin argued for the primacy of the local church. According to Newbigin, the local church is central in God’s economy. As a witness to the Kingdom of God, the church must occupy the center of the public square as it seeks to influence and change the social order of nations. The church represents a new order, God’s order, on earth as it is in heaven. This order is not private; it is public. 

“The most important contribution which the Church can make to a new social order is to be itself a new social order. More fundamental than any of the things which the Church can say or do is the reality of a new society which allows itself to be shaped by the Christian faith. The basic unit of that new society is the local congregation. I have the impression that the local congregation has too often been regarded in the best ecumenical circles as something which needs to be dragged along rather than as the primal engine of change in society.”²² 

The church’s place is in the center of the city, in the nation and even in the world because the church is God’s engine of social change and reformation. Too often the church retreats into pious ghettos. As the chaos of our culture becomes increasingly evident, the question that arises is this: Will the church take its rightful place in the culture?

In 2020, Carl Trueman wrote his insightful and timely book, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self. Trueman states that his book is in many ways a prolegomena to the many discussions that Christians and others need to have about the most pressing issues of our day. He opens his book by saying, “I have no privileged access to the shape of the future and therefore can offer only some preliminary suggestions as to how the arguments of this book might form a prolegomenon to addressing various matters as they manifest themselves in Western society in the coming years.”²³

At the end of the book, Trueman identifies several key categories he believes the reader should consider more closely as we make our way in this strange new world. One such category is the church. He titles this section with a question, “Whither the Church?” Trueman asks, “Given the rather bleak analysis above, what should the church be doing at this present moment?”²⁴ He asks Christians to think more deeply about how the church should respond to this disordered world and the modern self it created. Trueman then goes on to offer some insights, which he briefly expands upon in his follow-up book, Strange New World. 

In 2021, I had the privilege of interviewing Dr. Trueman about his work. Of the many things discussed, we touched briefly on the introductory nature of his project and how he hoped some of his ideas might be expanded. We talked about the church and discussed the role of the church in the modern world. We also considered the responsibilities laid upon the church to provide leadership for Christians and guidance for the world.

Since reading Trueman’s book, and following our conversation, I have returned over and over again to the question, “Whither the church?” What is the church to be in this present generation? What is the church to do in this present age? As a Christian and pastor, I am driven to these questions every time I look at the world we live in and the manner in which the church is or is not responding to the challenges of our age. This generation should not try to create its own answers but seek to discover answers as we turn to scripture and return to the wisdom of the church in history and wise fathers in the faith. 

 God wants his church to serve his purposes in every generation. In order to do that, some things will need to change. Some churches need to repent and come back to the household if they want to be faithful and effective. To serve God’s purposes for this generation we must reexamine our understanding of what it means to be the church, as the local, first-fruit and foretaste of the kingdom of God on earth.

We must reexamine what it means to be a church on mission, what it means to form our children after the image of God, and how to better get our message out. We must reexamine God’s economy and ask what it means to position ourselves for the future. To do that we must first diagnose the problems that are besetting Christ’s church, such as secularism, pluralism, expressive individualism and egalitarianism. I believe God has begun a great apocalyptic work in his church, especially in the West. His apocalypse reveals what the church is made of. Either it is made of precious things like gold and silver, or common things like wood, hay, and stubble.

God brings the fire of judgment, to refine what has been built or to remove it. Once we’ve adequately identified the problems then we can seek out solutions. One of those solutions is to build and rebuild, to uproot and to plant (Jeremiah 1:10). We must build upon the foundation of Christ. We must recover the precious things that God has given to the church in order that the church might be glorious. We must be the church and do all that Christ has commanded, for the church has a responsibility to Christ and to the world. The world is disordered but Christ has given the church for the glory of God and the benefit of the world. Whither the church? We must ask the question and we must seek to answer it. 

Photo by Bernd 📷 Dittrich on Unsplash

1. Lesslie Newbigin, The Gospel in a Pluralist Society. (Grand Rapids: W.B. Eerdmans 1989), 1. ↩︎
2.  Ken Myers, Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 83. ↩︎
3.  Lesslie Newbigin, “Evangelism in the City,” Reformed Review 41 (Autumn 1987): 3–8.  ↩︎
4.  Lesslie Newbigin, The Open Secret: An Introduction to the Theology of Mission. Revised edition (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995), 109. ↩︎
5. Lesslie Newbigin and Paul Weston, Lesslie Newbigin: Missionary Theologian: A Reader (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006), 196. ↩︎
6. See Abigail Shrier, Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters (Washington: Regnery Publishing, 2020). ↩︎
7.  Greg Lukainoff and Jonathan Haidt, The Coddling of the American Mind (New York: Penguin Books, 2018), 263. ↩︎
8. Ross Gregory Douthat, The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success. (New York: Avid Reader Press, 2020), 75. ↩︎
9. Lesslie Newbigin, Truth to Tell: The Gospel as Public Truth. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans 1991), 70. The following is taken from the chapter “Speaking the Truth to Caesar.” ↩︎
10.  Ibid, 71. ↩︎
11. Ibid, 72-73. ↩︎
12. Ibid, 74. ↩︎
13. Ibid, 80. ↩︎
14. Ibid, 75. ↩︎
15. Ibid, 77. ↩︎
16. Ibid, 79. ↩︎
17. Ibid. ↩︎
18. Ibid, 81. ↩︎
19. Ibid, 84. ↩︎
20. Richard C. Halverson, Walk With God Between Sundays (Palm Springs: R.N. Haynes Publishers, 1981), 14-15. ↩︎
21.  Ibid, 16-17. ↩︎
22. Lesslie Newbigin, Truth to Tell: The Gospel as Public Truth. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans 1991), 85. ↩︎
23. Carl R. Trueman and Rod Dreher, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self : Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution (Wheaton: Crossway, 2020), 384. ↩︎
24.  Ibid, 402. ↩︎