The Essence of Christianity

Dominion, Volume 30, Issue 261, 31 July 1937, Page 1 (Supplement)

The Essence of Christianity

THROUGHOUT the whole course of religious history there has run one fundamental distinction in the religious forces of the world, writes the Rev. Lawrence Redfern, M.A. 8.D.„ of the English Unitarian Church, who is visiting New Zealand, in bis book, “Essential Christianity and the Present Religious Situation”

It is a distinction betw’een those who accept religion as something unchanging and authoritative, a faith once and for all delivered to the saints, and those who feel that religion is something free and flexible, ever being vitalised and reshaped through fresh visions and experiences. That is not only the real and persistent division, but one that is natural and inevitable, because religion is the child of both permanence and change. “No religion,” it has been said, “can live and be a power in an evolving world unless it changes and adapts itself to its environment, and no religion can minister to the deep needs of men unless it reveals permanent and time-transc<nding realities.”

When men are timid grown and thoughtless and indifferent, then official religion emphasises the conventional and static elements, and tends to become reactionary and dogmatic. But whenever men think vigorously and independently, then liberty of conscience and the right of private judgment arcasserted and religion becomes dynamic and prophetic.

Under authority religion works from without inward. Under freedom religion works from within outward. Its worship is spontaneous and not formal, its message is prophetic and not traditional.

In our own day this division between authority and freedom has become more and more apparent, and an ever-widening gulf is opening between the adherents of a static type of theology and those who follow the open way. It is an age-long conflict, though never so acute as now. All down the ages, through all the theological diversities and ecclesiastical systems of the world have flowed the currents of a vital spiritual religion, dependent not on books or church councils or creeds, but on the direct and intimate consciousness of a Divine presence and guidance, a first-hand experience of eternal rea’ities. All down the ages there have been those who have sought to maintain religious fellowship without any rigid ecclesiastical system, without any dogmatic exclusiveness, but simply by an insistence upon the spirit of the Gospel and the unity which is created by the common possession of “goodnews.” They have insisted upon two things—the essential unity of those who are united in the spirit of Christianity, and, secondly, the fundamental importance of truth in the religious life.

They have maintained, and they still maintain, that what man knows

and thinks and believes, what. lie is profoundly and sincerely convinced of and utterly loyal to, is the sacred concern of his inner life, and that the inner life gives shape and form to the outer life. And inasmuch as theology relates to these inner things and is, in fact, made up of a man’s deepest thoughts and feelings about them, it is essentially a human interest in which truth must be the first and only consideration.

Now, during the past half-century, the evolutionary conception of life and thought, of the world and the universe, has taken possession of educated minds everywhere. Under its influence religion is being explained and appreciated in a new and clearer light, and all our social institutions are being understood and appraised from new and larger points of view. Taken all in all, it constitutes the greatest enrichment of human learning that the world has known. It makes the world of our time more wonderful and inspiring than former generations ever dreamed.

In the light of this conception we see how religions have grown and changed with changing times and civilisations, rising from the crudest superstitions to the most enlightened and noble ethics and spirituality. We see the Bible no longer as a “miraculous collection of miraculous books,” but as a library of books composed at many different times, and in widely-different circumstances, and exhibiting not uniformity, but diversity and progress; the spontaneous expression of the ruling ideas and convictions which possessed its writers at different stages in the unfolding life of the race, as vital and inspired as the noblest poetry and preaching in the world. In the light of this conception of development, we get a thrilling vision in the Bible of the vital power of religion.

When we turn to the New Testament we perceive with fresh interest the growth and development of the teaching of Jesus from the Judaism into which he was born. In the synoptic gospels we have incomplete and fragmentary sketches of that wonderful life with certain interpretations and constructions put upon incident and event, not always the same in each gospel, and in the fourth gospel differing most of all. And, yet, taken all together, we get a vivid composite picture of this Jesus of Nazareth. Nowhere are things definitely, precisely, and finally determined for us, and the interpretations of the significance of that life are not always the same. But behind the recorded facts and sayings and incidents, there is revealed a spirit which has been one of the most vital, emancipating, and redeeming forces in the history of the world. That spirit is the fundamental thing in the religion which Christ preached, and the possession of that spirit the vital thing in any Christian discipleship.