Painted Windows: Studies in Religious PersonalityBegbie, Harold
Religion
Painted Windows: Studies in Religious Personality
Begbie, Harold
Clergy -- England
We all seek for truth. But, whereas to some truth seems a tide
destined to rise and sweep destructively across lands where Jesus
reigned as the Son of God, to me it is the power which will set
free new streams to irrigate His Kingdom.
As is obvious to everyone, all the Churches realise, though some do
not acknowledge, the necessity of presenting the Christian Faith in
terms of current thought.
We have seen the urgent need of a fuller knowledge of the structure
of the human mind if we would explain how Jesus was related to God
and how we receive grace from God through Christ.
I am an Evangelical; I cannot call myself a modernist. I have
welcomed the intervention of those who, disclaiming any knowledge
of scholarship or theology, have in simple language revealed the
power of Christ in their lives. For theory and practice,
speculation and life, cannot be separated. We cannot begin to
explain Jesus until we know how men and women are transformed by
the love of Christ constraining them.
Those to whom religion is external and worship formal are of
necessity pretentious or arid in speaking of such matters as the
Person of Christ or the value of creeds.
We do not affirm that the Lord's Person and work have been central
in Christianity in the past. There is much to be said for the view
that they were, from the end of the second century to the close of
the Middle Ages, concealed beneath alien ideas derived from the
mystery religions; that the Reformation was the hammer which broke
the husk within which, under God's providence, the kernel had been
preserved during the decline and eclipse of European civilisation.
. . . as religion grows in richness and purity, Jesus comes to His
own.
Reason and intuition combine to justify the belief that our Lord
had a right understanding of what man can become.
We say that man is not only a part of the evolutionary process. His
highest attributes must serve to show its purpose. They reveal the
nature and the end of God's plan.
. . . as man develops in the way predestined by God, he will
continually approach the standard set by Jesus. Jesus will ever
more completely draw men and inspire them because they will more
fully understand that He explains them to themselves.
The present degradation of human life is due to man's refusal to
accept Christ's estimate of its values and duties. It will endure
so long as the work and Person of Christ are refused their right
place in human thought and aspiration.
Jesus still lives, great and unexplained.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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