I just finished The Gospel in a Pluralist Society which I have been quoting so often lately.  I have to say I was really blown away by the book.  It’s too bad that Newbigin has such a scholarly approach to writing because I think more people could benefit from his writing and the way he approaches theology.  The problem is that books like this aren’t an "easy read" for most people.  You would never see this title on a Christian Bestseller List at your local bookstore.  It took me quite a few months to work through it.

But if you enjoy writers like C.S. Lewis or Dallas Willard that really challenge you to think about your beliefs, you should definitely give this book a try.  It’s opened up some new ideas for me and helped me see the gospel, Scripture, and the function of the Church in a new light.  Very challenging!  I’ll leave you with one last quote from the book regarding the importance of having a multi-cultural faith:

As so often, the answer to the complex questions about the relation of the gospel to human culture has to be a practical one and not merely a theoretical one.  It is only by being faithful participants in a supranational, multicultural family of churches that we can find the resources to be at the same time faithful sustainers and cherishers of our respective cultures and also faithful critics of them.  The gospel endorses an immensely wide diversity among human cultures, but it does not endorse a total relativism.  There is good and bad in every culture and there are developments continually going on in every culture which may be either creative or destructive, either in line with the purpose of God as revealed in Christ for all human beings, or else out of that line.  The criteria for making judgments between one and the other cannot arise from one culture.  That is the familiar error of cultural imperialism.  There can only be criteria if God has in fact shown us what his will is.  He has done so in Christ.  If that is denied in the name of religious pluralism, then there is no valid criterion by which the positive and negative developments in human culture can be assessed.  On the other hand, the content of the revelation in Christ, defined crucially by the twin events of cross and resurrection, provides a basis on which the great diversity of cultures can be welcomed and cherished and the claim of any one culture to dominance can be resisted.