The “Centre” of Christianity
June 1, 2010
There are lots of debates out there about what the core of Christianity is. Seems to me if we’d listen more to guys like the late James S. Stewart the debates would quiet down a bit.
This from Stewart:
“What then is our basic need? If it is not a reinterpretation of Christianity intellectually and socially) though both of these, as we have seen, are included), what is it? It is a rediscovery of Christianity as a vital relationship to a living Christ. There is nothing so fundamental as this. The longer one lives and the more deeply one ponders the human dilemma, the clearer does this become. … The indispensable centre of Christianity is Christ; and we ruin our religion if we centre it anywhere else. … For the fact is that the burning focus of our faith is not the question, ‘What think ye of this or that or any other ideology?’ but ‘What think ye of Christ?’ This is the centre. … There is nothing in the Gospels more significant than the way in which Jesus deliberately places Himself at the very centre of His message. He does not say with other teachers, ‘The truth is everything, I am nothing’; He declares ‘I am the truth.’ He does not claim, with the founders of certain ethnic religions, to suggest answers to the world’s enigmas; He claims to be the answer—‘Come unto Me, and I will give you rest.’ He does not offer the guidance of a code or a philosophy to keep men right through the uncertainties of an unknown future; He says, ‘Lo I am with you always, even unto the end of the world.’ As Kierkegaard expressed it: ‘All other religions are oblique; the founder stands aside and introduces another speaker; they themselves therefore come under ‘religion’—Christianity alone is direct speech’ (Journals, 52). There is no question that if Christianity is to be true to the intention of Jesus, it must be a relationship between two real persons. It is either this or nothing. …the real secret of Paul’s terrific impact on history was…the fact there here was a man pervaded and possessed by Jesus. ‘To me…to live is Christ!’ … ‘I live, yet not I, Christ liveth in me.’ That is Christianity: a decisive relationship to a living Person. …this is the indispensible centre of the faith, this is what Christianity fundamentally is: a decisive relationship to a living Person. … He is risen! He is not nineteen hundred years away. And when you say your prayers to-day, He is really there at your side” (A Faith to Proclaim, 143-153).
