More from Lesslie Newbigin's "The Gospel in a Pluralist Society":

"Is [your] relationship with God something separate from your involvement in the ongoing life of the world, your family, your neighborhood, your nation in the family of nations? Do you have, or do you seek a relationship with God in which you can really turn your back on these other involvements? Or is your relationship with God necessarily bound up with your acceptance of the part God assigns for you in his purpose for his world? If the latter is the case, then your relationship with God cannot be separated from those acts in which God has revealed and effected his purpose for the world. Your life of devotion to God will be expressed in and through your involvement with history as you are now part of it. You will understand your own life as part of a story which is not a story made up by you, not just the story of your decisions and actions, but the story which is being enacted under God's creative and providential control in the events of contemporary history. It will be the very essence of the matter that the events and places which you read in your Bible are part of the real world and the real history - the same world in which you live, and the same history as this in which you now participate and which is being chronicled with more or less understanding of its meaning in the daily bulletins in press and television."