The Essential in Christianity

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Tacoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Sep 24, 1908

The Essential in Christianity

There is rapidly gaining ground such an interpretation of Christianity as makes it apply primarily and chiefly to the things of this life. According to this view it is the first and principal business of the Christian to make men good citizens of this world, and to ameliorate the unfavorable conditions which surround the lives of the many. This rather utilitarian and materialistic view of Christian experience has been expressed in these words:—

What is necessary is to believe that what Jesus Christ has come to do in the world is worth doing; to believe that the spirit in which he has undertaken that work is worth having; and receiving that spirit from him, to give ourselves to the work to which he calls us. It is so to carry on our business that our industrial work will be glad tidings to the poor; so to carry on our social life that our hopefulness will be comfort to the broken-hearted; so to carry on our charitable work as to furnish help to those less fortunate than ourselves,—the blind, the deaf, the sick, the ignorant; so to carry on our political work as to make for liberty and justice.

It is by such teaching as this that the evidences of Christianity as revealed in the relations between man and man are substituted for that inward experience which results from the contact of life with Life, and by which a new being is created in the image of God. The tree can not be made good by attaching good fruit to it by mechanical means. The heart can not be made right by an attempt to live a model life according to the best standards. What is really necessary is to receive Christ as the very life of our life, and then by submission to his will and co-operation with it, to reveal the fruits of righteousness. There is much more to Christianity than the admission that Jesus Christ was a moral hero, and the mere human determination to imitate his example.