Article July 8, 1916 Issue

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with contributions from Louis Wallis, Roland Ringwalt, T. Rhondda Williams, J. Clifford Banham

[The Biblical World]

We shall never fully understand Jesus until we stop looking at him through the atmosphere of a conventional piety. We have so veneered his thought with theological terms and confessional formulas that we have failed to look at it with the same objectivity — if academic patois may be permitted — with which we look, for example, at the teaching of Socrates. As a result we too frequently have failed to grasp its essential sanity. In consequence we have underrated the good sense of Jesus. Sometimes this has resulted from our blind disregard of conditions in the midst of which his teachings were given and the persons to whom they were addressed. We have erected his directions for particular needs and particular tasks and particular persons into general principles. When we have not been ready to follow the results of treating his words in this fashion, we have injured our consciences by casuistical evasions of our own conclusions ; and a man's integrity is always at stake when he tries to make unwelcome moral ideals appear to be illegitimate.

The man who recognizes the authority of Jesus should see that he actually knows what the teachings of Jesus are. Exegesis is an admirable handmaid for piety. Prejudice and practice are enemies of good sense in the case of Jesus as in that of other teachers. History has so built words and practices into the life of the world as to make it difficult to understand Jesus except as a divine idealist introducing ideals fit for heaven but impracticable on the earth. There could be no more serious mistake.

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