Article August 1, 1914 Issue

There is nothing in the present controversy which need...

Rev. R. S. Loring

Christian Register

There is nothing in the present controversy which need prevent us from believing that there is something deeper in Christianity than that figure around which both conservative and liberal theologians have woven curious and conflicting dogmas. There is the more mysterious figure which has touched the hearts and the imagination of artists and musicians and poets and saints, and has been an illustration of faith more than a rule of faith, an inspiration to religion rather than any code of religious law.

We may not be able to accept the Christ of theology without doing violence to our modern view of the world, to our critical study of the Bible, to our new conception of what a socially efficient religion should be. We may not even be able to sing, with complete intellectual assent, that hymn by Theodore Parker which seems to center religion in the past, and speaks of Jesus as the Truth, the Light, the Way, and so seems to cramp our new desire for a world-wide and universal type of religion. But that other figure, whose personality we can feel rather than describe, who has made such an impression on the imagination of men, by simple, direct parables, by the gentle and loving life, by the tragic end, that even the busy theologians have not been wholly able to hide this figure from men's sight,— of this influence the world can continue to sing, and from the idealized story of this life it can continue to draw inspiration and hope long after the present intellectual disputes about "Jesus or Christ" have been forgotten and outgrown.

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