Religious Reality | Page 5

make it a tacit condition of our
Christianity that we shall not be crucified.
Is it not true that we habitually refuse to take seriously His teaching
about man; that we water down His paradoxes and conventionalize His
sayings; that we blunt the sharpness of His precepts, and shirk the
tremendous sternness of His demands?
And does His teaching about GOD fare any better? GOD was to Jesus
Christ the one Reality that mattered; is that in any serious sense true of
us? GOD, He taught, cares for the sparrows, numbers the hairs of our
heads, sees in secret, and reads our inmost hearts. GOD knows all about
us, loves us individually, thinks out our life in all its relations, and
makes provision accordingly. There is nothing which He cannot or will
not do for His children.
He is near and not far off: He is also on the throne of all things-- the
Universe is in our Father's hand, and His will directs it. "O ye of little
faith, wherefore did ye doubt?" Fear, on the ground that things are
stormy, is a thing Christ simply cannot understand.
GOD, moreover, is loving and generous, royal and bounteous:
forgiving sinners: sending His rain with Divine impartiality upon the
just and the unjust alike. "His flowers are just as beautiful in the bad
man's garden." He loves even His enemies, for He is equally the Father
of all.

And man is made for GOD, and belongs to GOD. GOD and man need
one another: all that is requisite is that they should find one another:
and that is the Good News. The discovery of GOD is the Pearl of great
price, a Treasure worth the sacrifice of everything else: the experience
of a life-time, and a life-time's acquisitions, apart from GOD, are not
worth anything at all.
We who call ourselves Christians, do we seriously believe these things?
Do we really share Christ's outlook upon GOD, or His hope for man? Is
our view of life centred in GOD, as was His? Or do His words of
reproach fit us, as they fitted S. Peter--"You think like a man, and not
like GOD"?
"The way to faith in GOD, and to love for man," it has been said, "is to
come nearer to the living Jesus." If we would learn Christ's great
prophecy about man and GOD, we must read the Gospels over again,
with awakened eyes. We must take seriously the man Christ Jesus. We
must hear the words of His prophecy, and face honestly the challenge
of His sayings. We must confront the central Figure of the Gospels in
all its tremendous realism, watering down nothing, explaining nothing
away; "wrestling with Jesus of Nazareth as Jacob wrestled with the
angel, and refusing to let Him go except He bless us." In the end He
does bless those who wrestle with Him, and we shall not in the end be
able to stop short of confessing Him as GOD.
For the message of the Gospel story is ultimately not even the teaching
of Christ: it is Christ Himself. He, alone among the world's teachers,
perfectly practised what He preached, and embodied what He taught.
And therefore the truth of GOD and the ideal for man in Him are one.
In Him we see man as he ought to be, man as he is meant to be. And
because we instinctively judge that the highest human nature is divine,
and because also we feel that GOD Himself would be most divine and
worshipful if we could conceive of Him as entering in and sharing our
human experience and revealing Himself as man, those who have
reflected most deeply about the matter have commonly been led to
believe that so indeed it is. They have felt that in Jesus Christ man, as
the mirror and the Son of GOD, reflects the Father's glory. They have

felt that in Jesus Christ GOD, the Eternal Source of all things, has
expressed and revealed Himself in a human life: that GOD has spoken
a Word, a Word which is the expression of Himself: and that the Word
is Christ. "Have I been so long time with you, and yet hast thou not
known Me, Philip? He that hath seen Me, hath seen the Father." For
there is, in truth, something in Jesus of Nazareth which compels our
worship. And if we will take seriously the human Jesus we shall
discover in the end Deity revealed in manhood, and we shall worship
Him in whom we have believed.
But that, of course, is dogma: in other words, it is the deliberate
judgment of Christian faith. It is the expression, as a truth for the mind,
of the value which a soul which is spiritually awake comes to set