The Christ the People Want
By Bishop of Liverpool
In apostolic days men advocated a gospel without the cross. But St. Paul would have none of it. In the fourth century Arius taught a Christianity without a perfectly divine saviour, and the church would not have it. In the fifteenth century the Renaissance, intoxicated by the discovery of Greek and Roman literature, despised the “jargon of St. Paul,” and would have paganized Christianity, but the Reformation brought northern Europe back to the Scriptures and to the Christ. To-day men are proclaiming a gospel without the supernatural. They are asking us to be content with a perfect human christ; with a Bethlehem where no miracle was wrought; with a Calvary which saw sublime self-sacrifice, but no atonement for sin; with a sepulcher from which no angel’s hand rolled away the stone. But we must have none of it. We will hold fast, we will transmit the faith once for all delivered to the saints. We will hand down to our children, we will proclaim to all tribes of the earth, Christ incarnate, atoning, risen, ascending, our intercessor at God’s right hand, waiting to come again to judge the quick and the dead.—Bishop of Liverpool.