God Our Contemporary by J.B. Phillips
Chapter 9: A New Look at Christianity
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God Our Contemporary by J.B. Phillips
Born in London in 1926, J.B. Phillips was ordained in 1930. In 1940 he became Vicar of the Church of the Good Shepherd, London. He is noted for his work in the field of Biblical translation, and in particular for two books: Letters to Young Churches and Your God is Too Small. Published by The Macmillan Company, New York. Copyright by J.B. Phillips, 1960. Fifth printing 1966. This material was prepared for Religion Online by Ted & Winnie Brock.
If this ignorance is prevalent among the leaders of popular opinion, and I believe it is, we
cannot be surprised that most ordinary people have no idea what Christianity is all about. Many of them have no use for the churches, regard clergy and ministers, as a class, with suspicion, but nevertheless have a certain vague respect for the personality of Jesus. The situation is not made any easier by the fact that almost their only source of knowledge of what modern Christians are thinking and doing is their daily newspaper. They therefore get an entirely negative impression;
they are apt to read about only such things as a denunciation of gambling or Sunday
amusement, a condemnation of modern moral standards, or, now and again, the story of some unhappy parson who has "gone wrong." They read nothing in the national Press of what
Christianity is all about, and they are given negligible information about both the aims and the work of Christian churches throughout the world. It would therefore hardly be an exaggeration to say that very many people look upon Christianity largely as a repressive system, designed to spoil the pleasures of life and offering a man a rather dubious heaven in some vague world to come. I believe that if it were possible to get people to listen with fresh and unprejudiced minds to what Christianity is really saying, they might not accept it, but at least they could not dismiss it as a hangover from childhood, a beautiful but impractical dream, or as mere "religion" quite irrelevant to modern living.
Let us for the moment forget all about the churches’ reputedly narrow views, their "dressed-up bishops," their peculiar language and their apparently naïve ignorance of how life has to be lived by millions of people. Let us forget the churches’ failures over the centuries and their present disagreements -- in fact, let us for the time being forget the churches altogether and get back to the source of the Christian Faith. For Christianity begins with an historical fact, indeed its starting point is the most important event in the whole of human history. The Christian religion asserts that nearly two thousand years ago God, whose vast and complex wisdom science is daily uncovering, visited this small planet of ours in Person. Naturally the only way in which he could do this was by becoming a human being, and this is precisely what Christians believe that he did. This is the heart and center of the Christian Faith, this is the Gospel or Good News which those who had witnessed this extraordinary event went out to tell the then known world. That God so inserted himself into the stream of human history, and that we are
consequently living on a visited planet, are statements audacious enough to take the breath away, and no reasonable person could be expected to accept such a belief as fact without
considerable thought and careful examination of the evidence. To have had God, reduced to the stature of a human being, but indubitably God playing a part in the earthly scene, is a staggering thought. But this is where Christianity starts, this is the rock on which it is founded, and this is the point where men are compelled by the nature of the event to make up their minds as to whether it is true or false.
Let us not concern ourselves about how this startling event has been smothered in decoration, blunted by overfamiliarity, or overlaid by merely secondary considerations. Nothing must be allowed to distract us from considering with adult minds and hearts whether this is true history or a beautiful myth. The decision is so important that it must not, indeed cannot, be avoided.
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Yet this is the point at which so many people take evasive action. They begin to hide behind clouds of criticism of the Church or of particular Christians, or they create a diversion by arguing about the historicity of the Old Testament stories, or, for example, about the Church’s attitude toward war or divorce. I believe that each one of us must eventually face the real issue, which is quite simply: do I believe after adult examination of the evidence that Jesus Christ was what he claimed to be, or am I prepared to assert quite definitely that he was wrong in his major claims and that, though much of his teaching is beautiful, he himself was a self-deceived
fanatic?
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God Our Contemporary by J.B. Phillips
Born in London in 1926, J.B. Phillips was ordained in 1930. In 1940 he became Vicar of the Church of the Good Shepherd, London. He is noted for his work in the field of Biblical translation, and in particular for two books: Letters to Young Churches and Your God is Too Small. Published by The Macmillan Company, New York. Copyright by J.B. Phillips, 1960. Fifth printing 1966. This material was prepared for Religion Online by Ted & Winnie Brock.