"When I come to the New
Testament, I feel myself in the Gospels, confronted by the most wonderful
Personality which has ever drawn breath upon the earth. The more conscious I am
of the lack of subtlety, the absence of trained historical method that the
writers display, the more convinced I am of the essential truth of the Person
and teaching of Christ, because He seems to me a figure so infinitely beyond
the intellectual power of those who described Him to have been invented or
created. The words and sayings of Christ, the ideas which He disseminated, seem
to me so infinitely above the highest achievements of the human spirit, that I
have no difficulty in confessing, humbly and reverently, that I am in the
presence of One Who seems to me to be above humanity, and not only of it. If
all the miraculous events of the Gospels could be proved never to have
occurred, it would not disturb my faith in Christ for an instant. Dealing with
the rest of the New Testament, I see in the Acts of the Apostles a deeply
interesting record of the first ripples of faith in the world. In the Pauline
and other epistles one has amazing instances of the effect produced, of the
same overwhelming Personality, the Personality of Christ. I claim a Christian
liberty of thought, while I acknowledge, with bowed head, my belief in God the
Father of men, in a Divine Christ, the Redeemer and Savior, and in the presence
in the hearts of men of a Divine Spirit, leading humanity tenderly forward. Arthur Christopher Benson.
Sunday, July 10, 2016
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