Journal: Bibliotheca Sacra
Volume: BSAC 57:227 (Jul 1900)
Article: Religion As A Personal Relation
Author: Henry Churchill

BSac 57:227 (July 1900) p. 553

Religion As A Personal Relation

Prof. Henry Churchill

Our thinking cannot be without its finally profound reaction on our living. False conceptions of the religious life, then, must injure the life itself; true conceptions, on the other hand, must prove of positive help against mistakes and discouragement Theology too is only a thoughtful and unified expression of what religion means to us. The conception of religion, therefore, will be of determining significance for theology also. And reasonable agreement in the conception of religion would do more than anything else to bring unity into our theologies. The needs, then, of both our religious living and our religious thinking demand the utmost care in our conception of religion—the closest possible approximation to Christ’s thought here—for it is only with the Christian religion that this article is concerned.

All Christians would doubtless agree that the ideal of religion for the individual would be to come into such ethical and spiritual relations to God as those in which Christ stood. Now whatever else was true of this relation, it was, first and foremost, a personal relation. And this commonplace—religion, a personal, filial relation to God in Christ —carefully heeded, has consequences of the highest importance for both our Christian life and thought. In truth, the writer believes there is no greater need, in religious living and theological thinking to-day, than a thoroughgoing and consistent hold on Christ’s thought of religion as a personal relation to God. Many practical and theoretical

BSac 57:227 (July 1900) p. 554

difficulties, that have grown up in the course of the Christian centuries, yield readily to this simple solvent. More often than otherwise we have originally created our difficulties by substituting, for the actual concrete personal relations, abstract or mechanical conceptions of some sort.

But this conception of the Christian life as a deepening friendship with God is so important and so enlightening when accurately grasped, that it is the more necessary that certain points be made clear, that we may guard against extravagant and misleading statements.

In the first place, the God with whom we come into personal relation is not the God of mere religious fancy or mystical experience, nor the God of philosophical speculation, but the God revealed concretely, unmistakably, in the ethical and spiritual personality of Jesus Christ. He alone is the supreme and religiously adequate revelation of God. There are other partial manifestations of God without and within, but only he who has seen Christ has adequately seen the Father. The Christian seeks personal relation with God in Christ. Other notions of Go...