p. Page Ten | Rediscovering Christ by Keld J. Keynolds

Pacific Press Publishing Association · Mountain View, California · Apr 3, 1928

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 55, No. 14.

Rediscovering Christ

By Keld J. Keynolds

Shall we stop with the modernists at Calvary, or go on with the fundamentalists to Pentecost?

KELD J. KEYNOLDS

THE rediscovery of Christ is the greatest task to which the church of to-day can dedicate itself. But it is a task which the church as an institution can never hope to accomplish. It must be an individual discovery, a personal achievement of the individual Christian. No amount of legislation can bring Christ to the church; neither can any elaborate plan of church union or coöperation. Only the Spirit of God working in human hearts can bring them to Christ. And that is being done.

Call it what you will,—the latter rain, a spiritual quickening, a mighty layman's movement,—it is here. We are seeing a revival of religious interest among the laity such as has not been since the sixteenth century Reformation. Just as the eve of that great spiritual revolution witnessed the formation of Bible classes over Central and Northern Europe, which did much to give purpose and direction to the movement, so to-day, at the threshold of a new and more significant reformation, laymen are searching for and studying religious questions with a zest as gratifying as it is unusual.

But, at the same time, religion is being reëxamined by the experts. Literary criticism is retelling, or attempting to retell, the story of the origin, the collection, the transmission, and the interpretation of the Bible. The psychology of religion is studying the laws of the inner life. Comparative religion is seeking the least common denominator of the faiths and cults of the world. The philosophy of religion is seeking the meaning of all religious experience. In short, Christianity is being “modernized.”

To date, the mighty laboring of the experts has brought forth little more than a colorless, insipid Christianity. Religion, in their hands, has come to mean believing in the existence of a God or going to some church or engaging in some form of social service or, sometimes, simply being a decent, respectable, and reasonably law-abiding citizen.

This kind of teaching is a skimpy diet for hungry souls. There is therefore a growing conviction that the shepherds are climbing the heights for the sake of the æsthetic satisfaction the view affords them, and not for the grass needed by their flocks. But in the same way that a bad ruler is a public good if only he is bad enough, the present state of affairs, because it is recognizably bad, serves a good purpose. It leads to criticism, and criticism serves to clarify the issues.

It is coming to be felt that the churches which claim to speak for God are failing to produce men and women who act as if they had heard God speaking; or who, having heard, can repeat what God has said to them in ways that can carry conviction to others.

Religious lines are being redrawn. Of two who have been occupying the same pew, the one is being taken, the other left. The one is seeking civic salvation in social service and legislation; the other is finding personal regeneration, in an indwelling Christ. The one knows only the Jesus of history; the other knows the Christ of experience.

Out of the criticism and disappointment on the part of the laity with reference to modernist leadership is emerging the fact that that leadership has failed to meet the world's crises and the people's need, because it knows only the Jesus of history. Its efforts are expended on the study of the psychology of the Man. It has found in Him a religious philosopher, a social reformer, a man of genius,—but nothing more. Its biographical studies end at Golgotha.

Were the modernists to continue their studies as far as Pentecost, their whole philosophy would have to be changed; for Pentecost presents a climax in the history of redemption. The Old Testament is the record of the dealings of God with men and the forecast of the God-among-men of the Gospels. But Pentecost presents a new bond, a closer and a more intimate bond between God and man. The Pentecost experience can be explained only as a manifestation of God in man. And this is a different, a new, relationship. Peter's words, This Jesus whom ye crucified is risen, linked with Jesus' own promise, “I will dwell in them, and walk in them,” presents this experience of the believers as the point of convergence and divergence of all history. The Jesus of history here becomes the Christ of experience.

Those who stop at Calvary and those who go on to Pentecost are of totally different camps, separated by an age-old line of cleavage. It is the difference between believing in God as an idea and experiencing Him as a fact. It is the difference between the philosopher and the man of prayer. It is the contrast between knowing about Jesus and knowing the Christ as a personal Saviour. It is preaching a creed as against living the gospel. It is a church tepid and hesitant as against the church militant and triumphant.

He who belongs in the camp of the latter, and he only, can know what Jesus meant when He told of the man who gladly sold all that he had to possess himself of the pearl of great price. For this is the pearl, that the church may have the Christ of experience, the indwelling Spirit of God.