One of the greatest difficulties about the whole matter is the difficulty of deciding where to look for the essential traits of Christianity. Are they to be found in the teaching of Jesus? Are they revealed in the message of St. Paul? Are they embodied in the Messianic hope? Are they exhibited in the primitive apostolic Church? Are they set forth in the great creeds of orthodoxy? Are they expressed in the imperial authoritative Church? Are they to be discovered in the Protestantism of the modern world? This catalogue of preliminary questions shows how complicated the subject really is. To start in on any one of these lines would be of necessity to arrive at a partial and one-sided answer.
Nowhere can we find pure and unalloyed Christianity; always we have it mixed and combined with something else, more or less foreign to it. The creeds contain a larger element of Greek philosophy than of the pure original gospel. The Messianic hope is far more Jewish than it is “Christian.” The imperial authoritative Church is Christianity interpreted through the Roman genius for organization and merged and fused with the age-long faiths and customs of pagan peoples. Protestantism is an amazingly complex blend of ideas and ideals and everywhere interwoven with the long processes of history. Even this did not drop from the sky ready-made! Nor did St. Paul’s message flash in upon him with the Damascus vision, as a pure heaven-presented truth. It proves to be a very difficult task to find one’s way back to the pure, unalloyed teaching of Jesus, and, strangely enough, the moment one endeavors to constitute this by itself “Christianity,” and undertakes to turn it into a set of commands and to make it a “new law,” he ends with a dry legalism and not a vital, universal Christianity.
What, then, is Christianity? In answering this question we can not confine ourselves to the teaching and the work of Jesus. Important as it is to go “back to Jesus” that is not enough. We can not fully comprehend the meaning of Christianity until we take into account the fact that the invisible, resurrected Christ is the continuation through the ages of the same revelation begun in the life and teaching of Jesus. Galilee and Judea mark only one stage of the gospel, which is, in its fullness, an eternal gospel. The Christian revelation which came to light first in one Life—its master interpretation and incarnation—has since been going forward in a continuous and unbroken manifestation of Christ through many lives and through many groups and through the spiritual achievements of all those who have lived by him. Christianity is, thus, the revelation of God through personal life—God humanly revealed. St. Paul and the writer of the Fourth Gospel were the first to reach this profound insight into its fuller meaning, though it is plainly suggested in some of the sayings of Jesus and in the pentecostal experiences of the first Christians. It is the very heart of the Pauline and the Johannine Christianity. Important as is the backward look to Jesus in both these writers, the central emphasis is unmistakably upon the inward experience of the invisible, spiritual Christ. This is the expectation in the Fourth Gospel: Greater things than these shall ye do when the Spirit comes upon you. This is the mystery, the secret of the gospel, St. Paul says, Christ in you.
If this is the right clew, Christianity is not a new law, nor an institution, nor a creed, nor a body of doctrine, nor a millennial hope. It is a type of life, it is a way of living. The most essential thing about it is the fact of the incursion of God into human life, the revelation of the eternal in the midst of time, the new discovery which it brought of God’s nature and character. We nowhere else come so close to the essential truth of Christianity as we do in the life and experience of Jesus. The life at every point floods over and transcends the teaching. He is the most complete and adequate exhibition of what I have called the incursion of God into human life, but even so he is the beginning, not the end, of the revelation of God through humanity—the Christ-revelation of God—and this Christ-revelation of God is God, so far as he is at all adequately known.
Some persons talk as though God were a kind of composite Being, got by adding up the God of the natural order, the God of the Old Testament, and the God as Father about whom Jesus taught. He is, according to this scheme, in some way a compound aggregate of infinite power, irresistible justice, and eternal love. Sometimes one “attribute” is predominant, and sometimes another, while in some mysterious way all the dissonant attributes get “reconciled.” This is surely boggy ground to build upon.
Christianity is essentially, I should say, a unique revelation of God. Here for the first time the race discovers that God identifies himself with humanity, is in the stream of it, is suffering with us, is in moral conflict with sin and evil, is conquering through the travail and tragedy of finite persons, and is eternally, in mind and heart and will, a God of triumphing Love. No texts adequately “prove” this mighty truth. We cannot tie it down to “sayings,” though there are “sayings” which declare it. The life of Jesus, the supreme decisions through which he expresses his purpose, the spirit which dominates him and guides his decisive actions, make the truth plain that God meant that to him and that his way of life revealed that kind of God.
Through all the fusions and confusions of history and through all the vagaries of man’s tortuous course since the Church began to be built, Christ as eternal Spirit has gone on revealing this truth about God and demonstrating the victorious power of this way of life. The making of a kingdom of God in the world, the spread of the brother-spirit, the expansion of the love-method, the increase of coöperation, sympathy, and service, the continued incursion of the divine into the life of the human, these are the things now and always which indicate the vitality and progress of Christianity, and the uninterrupted revelation of God.
Always, in every period of history, the essential truth of Christianity must be revealed and expressed in and through a medium not altogether adapted to it. It is always living and working in a world more or less alien to it. It has at any stage only partially realized its ideal, and only achieved in a fragmentary way the goal toward which it is moving. It means endless conquest and ever fresh winning of unwon victories. It must be for us all a vision and a venture, it must be a thing of faith and forecast. At the same time it is, in a very real sense, experience and achievement. God has entered into humanity. Love has revealed its redeeming power. Grace is as much a reality as mountains are. The kingdom of God though not all in sight yet is, I believe, as sure as gravitation. The invisible, eternal Christ, living in the soul of man, revealing his will in moral and spiritual victories in personal lives, is, I am convinced, as genuine a fact as electricity is. But we shall see all that Christianity means only when the living totality of the revelation of God through humanity is complete.