Chapter 4. The Essence of Christianity

p. 126 What is Christianity? For this question a very wide range of material for study lies at hand, since forming a proper concept of the essence of Christianity is a task at once historical and dialectical.¹ By the historical method we must first examine Christianity's actual form, which keeps its particular character, its historical place as a concrete fact, and the experience of living gained from a history lived through; then, from the standpoint of normative science, we must point out the general features that Christianity contains, and weigh what contribution Christianity can make to culture and to human progress.

Christianity is a historical religion. In the form in which it arose, it was felt, known and judged within the limits of a people and the constraints of social conditions, and through the long span of nineteen hundred years it has stood in the closest contact with the realities of human life, with all its rises and falls, its twists and turns. In other words, Christianity arose at a certain time and in a certain place, and passed through particular circumstances and experiences² to bring forth its own distinctive experience. And this historical form of Christianity holds a distinctive place in our thought and life. It may also happen that this historical tradition damages, mistakes or departs from the essence of Christianity in its normative sense. But p. 127 there is no room to dispute that the various forms of Christianity expressed in historical experience point to Christianity's central concept, or are its source. We cannot build some system of thought as we please and then tie the label "Christianity" to it. An individual's ideals or reasoning may be a way of understanding the tradition of historical Christianity, but they cannot take its place.

Yet we believe that in the historical development of Christianity "something general that moves from division and obscurity toward unity and clarity" lies at the root.³ Christianity works in close relation with the activity of the spirit⁴ and with morality, politics, economics, art and every cultural movement; but Christianity is not this working or its explanation. It is the vigorous movement of life that lies at the root of this living. What, then, is the principle of Christianity? Here we meet the general perplexity that attends inferring the universal from the particular. When we consider the process of Christianity's historical change, its path is broad and its sides many, so that among Christianity's complex institutions, rites, creeds, doctrines, experience and faith it is extremely hard to discern what its main trunk⁵ is and where its roots are. The Christianity of the established churches does not necessarily guarantee the truth. Theologians each insist that their own conviction is orthodox thought. So a definition of the concept of the essence of Christianity needs normative evaluation beyond purely historical description. In other words, despite the differences of time and place, the divisions of language and culture, and the distinctions⁶ of rite and creed, there is amid all this variety a general characteristic that gives Christians a common Christian consciousness.

p. 128 But normative evaluation too becomes too broad and, as in the saying "concepts contain falsehood,"⁷ is apt to ignore the real content of Christianity and lose itself in logical formulas or philosophical theories. So at times it goes as far as to claim that Christianity existed before the world was created, or that the true Christianity is a synthesis of the truths that the world's religions each assert.

From what has been said, we may say that a proper understanding of Christianity is reached through a fitting study of its historical forms together with a proper recognition of its timeless universality. Below, this question will be studied under four heads in order: first, the forms in which Christianity has developed and changed with social and historical conditions; second, the fundamental historical tradition of Christianity shown in its historical development; third, the general characteristics that distinguish Christianity from other religions and from culture in general; fourth, the distinctive value that Christianity can contribute to the life of humankind.⁸

(1) The Aspects of Christianity⁹

The apostles of the early church regarded Christianity as a kind of reformed Judaism. The aim of Jesus' preaching was not to destroy the tradition of Judaism but to fulfil it (Matt. 23:3).¹⁰ Even after Jesus died, his apostles did not separate from Judaism, but tried to keep as close a relation to it as they could (Acts 2:46; 14:5).¹¹

p. 129 But the newly risen Christianity had something distinctive and vital that could not be confused with the stale and decadent Judaism of the day. Jesus received the true spirit of Judaism entire. But he was no heir by birth who submitted to the classics of Judaism without criticism. He was made known as "the Word of God" that judges the age and redeems the age. Jesus' disciples, too, were fired by a lived experience too revolutionary for them to compromise with the traditional religion. "In Antioch they were first called Christians" (Acts 11:26).¹² Already at this time those who followed Jesus became aware that the vital demand from which the particular religion called Christianity had to be formed was plainly present in the life and thought of Jesus.

The one who felt most deeply what was distinctive in Christian experience was the apostle Paul. While he walked in the ways of the old religion he was named Saul, but after his life and thought were suddenly changed through Christ, he changed his name to Paul. For Paul the old religion was a religion of law, and the new religion a religion of grace (Rom. 3:19–30).¹³ Christianity, he taught, sets forth the new religious principle that appeared in the great personality, thought and work of Jesus, and realized the ideal of the relation of parent and child between God and humanity through Jesus, who became the power of God that saves the world (1 Cor. 1:23–31; Rom. 3:14–16; Gal. 3:1–5).¹⁴ In Paul's thought, Christianity meant that life is wholly changed through Christ, and it meant the thrill of a new grace. The marks of this spiritual life were righteousness,¹⁵ trust, love and freedom. This was gained by being joined with Christ, as p. 130 the spirit of Christ¹⁶ dwells within the heart. Christ, he believed, accomplished and secured the work of redemption by his life, his cross and his resurrection.

After this the Greek fathers sought to understand Christianity as a speculative mysticism. For they held that the aim of religion lay in receiving a share in the eternal divinity of God.¹⁷ This holy divinity is granted to believers through the mediation of certain sacramental elements. Eating the holy bread, they said, is the good medicine by which one gains eternal life, the nourishment by which one does not die but lives forever in Christ.¹⁸

They held the historical fact that Jesus appeared in the world in the flesh to be important. And so to some degree they kept the ideal of early Christianity, centered on the personality of the historical Christ. But gradually, under the influence of Greek thought, they turned it into doctrine; its ethical color faded, and they laid their weight on the mystical union of God and humanity through the sacramental elements.

In asserting the truth of Christianity, Greek theology did not try to appeal to the power of the state or the authority of the church, but to the authority of the Christian's critical self-awareness, of the experience of faith, and of the moral life. Their God was not a vast, abstract, transcendent God, but an immanent divinity experienced in people's actual living. So they held that their Christianity, too, was not so much a repository of revelation resting on external authority as something grounded in the essence of life that appears in the ordered development of human history.¹⁹

But their religion leaned toward setting out complicated theories. p. 131 Rather than a life of faith aflame with passion, a sophistry cut off from substance prevailed. So they had no power to hold back the northern barbarian peoples, whose culture was undeveloped; and leaving Christianity to the freedom of experience made the unlearned masses wander in vast ideas with no concrete standard, and among the educated it became the occasion of church divisions.

The Roman Catholic Church knew the defects of the Greek church well. Within two hundred years of the apostolic age the attitude of Christianity changed completely. The Western church, as a body with the political backing to put down the division of its many sects, was able to take the whole Roman Empire under the power of the Christian church. Christianity did not leave the common people to a vast²⁰ freedom of faith, but, aiming at the training of their souls, laid down exact rules and came to control and govern the body of believers by fixed and concrete conditions. Whether we look at the character of the Latin peoples or at the social conditions of the time, we cannot but call this a valuable development, one that could make up for the defects of the Greek church.

The Latin peoples showed a special gift for respecting tradition and organizing institutions. They organized, governed and united the church, and by it they sought to conquer the barbarians, to absorb foreign peoples, and to train the spirit of the nation. The church is the ship of salvation that carries the saints across the waves of sin in this fallen world to the far shore of the kingdom of heaven.²¹ Because it was built on the rock of an exact tradition and kept the orthodoxy of revelation, it claimed the authority to govern the actions and thought of all people.

By this the Latin church carried out the mission of its age. Had Christianity not passed through this process of great organization, p. 132 it might have sunk into one more Eastern mystery religion. But it is also a fact that the institutionalizing of Christianity forgot the essence of a deep faith and hindered the true spirit of religion. When churches are organized to carry out functions, and works are created to provide employment, the elaborate constitutions and enlarged works of their agencies can become, on the contrary, a hindrance to people who seek true spiritual freedom.

Protestantism arose from this longing for spiritual life. Protestantism means, first, opposition to Catholicism. It opposed all external authority, and stressed that church organization centered on the pope and the priests, and the rites and liturgy built chiefly on the church's traditional material offerings²² and meritorious works, handed down from without, have no more than a secondary meaning for the life of faith. But seen positively, Protestantism held that the experience of grace and redemption, centered on the doctrine that "we are justified by faith,"²³ is the fundamental heart of Christianity.

Protestantism's toleration in religion and its claim of freedom by grace broke the outward unity of the Christian church and made possible its division into many denominations. At times Protestant evangelicalism flowed into emotional excitement and tended to neglect concrete rules of living. But through Protestantism the gospel of Christianity threw off the thought and forms it had long held sacred, took part in the progress of human culture as a whole, applied its spiritual and moral principles to every ultimate question of human life, and made the power of the gospel work in daily living to bring new life.

(2) The Tradition of Christianity

p. 133 The center of Christianity is Jesus Christ. In history the interpretations of Christianity have been of every shape and color: some are incomplete, some one-sided,²⁴ and some give rise to contradiction and conflict. Yet in the end it is general to take the transcendent personality of Jesus Christ as the center. Christianity is the religion of Christ, the religion that believes in Christ and follows him. Some say that Jesus is a mythical figure made by the imagination and not a real person of history; others claim that Jesus' thought is no more than something drawn out of the traditional literature of the Jews and repeated. Of course, as someone has said, "It cannot be avoided that myths arise around a great figure, and various myths and legends may well have arisen about Jesus too. But these myths and legends, rather than denying the real life of Jesus, bear witness to his towering personality."²⁵ And we can by no means²⁶ make light of the great spiritual movement that arose through Jesus. "Leaving aside the whole of church history, if we look only at the history of the first and second centuries, it is plain that Christianity renewed people's lives by its miraculous power and started a new movement in society."²⁷ An epoch-making change like this would have been impossible without the transcendent personality of Jesus and his influence. But Jesus was not only a man of nineteen hundred years ago. In our own day his personality shines still more brightly. Jesus is the most distinctive gift that Christianity has given to the religious life of humankind. We must be able to find the Jesus whom neither intricate theological theories nor the claims of form and doctrine can fully express.

Christianity possesses Jesus, and at the same time it possesses the gospel. The gospel is the account of the grace of God p. 134 that appeared in Christ, and of the lived experience of redemption gained through that grace. The account is simple and brief, but it is the most striking of forms. Professor Harnack divides Jesus' preaching under three heads: first, the kingdom of God and its coming; second, God the Father and the infinite value of the human soul; third, the better righteousness and the commandment of love; and he says that these contain the whole teaching of the gospel (Yamaya Seigo, tr., Kirisutokyō no honshitsu, Idea Shoin edition, p. 57).²⁸ It is true that Jesus' thought can be comprehended under the idea of "the kingdom of God." The kingdom of God, he says, is above the world, a gift given from above and not a product of natural life; it is purely religious in character, the inward union with the living God, the most important and most decisive thing a human being can experience, which runs through and governs the whole range of a person's existence (ibid., p. 69).²⁹

Finally, besides Jesus and his gospel, Christianity has the unique influence and effect that Jesus has had on humankind. Through Jesus, over twenty centuries, countless human beings have gained salvation in their own experience. We can by no means make light of the fact of this salvation. Through many centuries and many surroundings Christianity has been a power that moves life, and it has enriched a living grounded in the noble personality of Jesus. The forms of that living have differed with circumstances; the degree to which Jesus was understood has varied from person to person. But in our living, the claim of Christianity has never been abstract. It is "what we have heard, what we have looked upon closely, what we have seen with our eyes, what our hands have touched" (1 John 1:1).³⁰ This is the historical experience that becomes the tradition of Christianity, and at the same time the true image of each person's lived experience.³¹

(3) The Universal Characteristics of Christianity³²

p. 135 Christianity is a personal religion. Christianity means a relation with one historical personality. Humanity's thought and experience were made simple in the living personality of Christ. Jesus is the Word of God as a personality. Christian faith has been concentrated on this personality. The divine will has been at work in history as well. While human beings are in the world, God will reveal himself continually, and hold them fast until they reach their final end. But history is slow and wide. At one point in history we see the revelation of "primal history,"³³ which completes the preparation of the ages. Jesus is God's revelation. In Jesus humankind saw what was full of grace and truth, and came to know that this was the glory of God's "only begotten Son."³⁴ Christian faith, therefore, cannot stand except as a personal, and so a vital, relation with Jesus. The truth of science or philosophy has nothing to do with who proclaimed it. When it is recognized as true for all people, it has its value as truth without our asking who discovered it. But Christianity does not stop at claiming such timeless principles. It means the change of life gained, in lived experience, through faith in one historical personality, the concrete embodiment³⁵ of vital truth, and in a vital relation with that personality.

Second, Christianity is the religion of redemption. It believes that the holy, redeeming love of God appeared in Christ Jesus. "Because it is transcendent, divine and righteous, sent down³⁶ to humanity from above, we call it holy; because it gives its object the best without any selfishness, we call it love; p. 136 and because it is not only humanity's highest goal but the power that transforms human beings, we call it redemptive" (Rall, H. F., A Faith for Today, p. 47).³⁷ Through Christ we believe that the "power" behind this universe is not only holy and righteous but is love, which guides, comforts, encourages and renews our life.

Third, Christianity is a spiritual religion. The religion of the New Testament stressed again and again vital lived experience and the inward spirit. Christianity has institutions, rites, laws and doctrines. But these outward forms and authorities hold only a secondary value, as means that express or foster spiritual facts. Through faith in Christ we feel some transcendent will and power at work most mightily in the whole of our life, and we experience humility, joy, obedience, peace, awe, trust and holiness.³⁸

(4) The Function and Value of Christianity³⁹

The place and role of Christianity in our actual living, individual and social, are great. Of course there is no doubt that through the church of the past Christianity made a great contribution to culture and to the development of humankind; but neither can we boast that the church has never failed at any point. The machinery of the civilization in which we live today is complex beyond comparison with that of former days. Huge populations crowd into the cities; costly industrial concerns carry on production on a vast scale with the whole world as their market; and the rivalry between state and state grows sharper. In p. 137 such an age, what role Christianity can play in this great advance of civilization is a grave question on which the future of Christianity depends.

There is some reason in the claim that the proper work of Christianity is to have people believe in Christ, repent of sin, taste new life, worship God, love Christ, wait for the world to come, and lead a peaceful life. That people worn down by the complicated problems and troublesome affairs of the world can lay down their heavy burdens in religion and receive a last comfort must by no means be mocked as a laggard's idealist escape. What is more, we must not forget that Christianity is grace before it is work, and faith before it is action. But if the role of Christianity stops here, there is a grave error in it. Christianity must become the driving power of our daily living and supply it with concrete standards. "The gifts and activities, the duties and joys of life are not set against the Christian life; rather they will be its occasions and its materials." "If we cannot find God in the home and the school, the market and the farm, religion will have little to contribute to the life of modern people, and whether the Christian church goes on or decays will be of little concern to us."⁴⁰ We must therefore recognize anew the grave mission of the Christian church in an age that is hemmed in, socially, by unrest and dread.

First, Christianity must not be content to imitate or duplicate the work that other social agencies are doing; p. 138 it must supply the conviction, hope and ideals that human life needs. The present age has machines but no spirit, production but no soul. This is plainly an age that has lost faith. Christianity must be able to carry out its prophetic mission in this age with the greatest authority.

Second, Christianity must strive to supply concrete standards by which all the works and activities of humanity can be judged and guided. The standard of living of modern people lies in piling up material conditions to satisfy instinctive human desires. Even of what we acknowledge as so-called Christian standards, it is doubtful whether they truly accord with the actual teaching that Christ gave. As Mr. Stanley Jones has said, if we applied the actual standards that Jesus taught, just as they are, to the whole of our living, Christianity might be made new.⁴¹ To apply the standards of Christianity demands great sacrifice and courage. But we are afraid of the sacrifice and shrink from the courage. In the days ahead Christianity will need extraordinary trials and earnest effort.