Society 'Repudiates' Christianity, Bishop States in Noble Lecture

"The Christian faith is explicitly repudiated by most of the members of Western society," declared the Right Rev. J. E. Lesslie Newbigin last night in the first of this year's William Belden Noble lectures. He called for a return to a cyclical religion in the first of the series, "A Faith for Our World."

"To 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.

The lecturer, Bishop of Madura and Ramnad, further observed that modern western society cannot have the cyclical, chronological viewpoint found in the East. He cited his own country, India, as an example: time there is observed in sixty year cycles, with no distinction of progress from one cycle to the next.

The 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."

We must derive a faith for our world, from this New Testament picture of universal organization, in which all people are drawing together into a single unitary world history, he concluded.