Cross. So,
whatever else Christianity comes to be--and it comes to be a great
deal else--the principle of its growth, and the germ which must
vitalise the whole, lie in the personality and the death of Jesus
Christ.

That is not all. The history of the life and the death want something
more to make them a gospel. The fact, I was going to say, is the
least part of the fact; as in some vegetable growths, there is far
more underground than above. For, unless along with, involved in, and
deducible from, but capable of being stated separately from, the
external facts, there is a certain commentary or explanation of them:
the history is a history, the biography is a biography, the story of
the Cross is a touching narrative, but it is no gospel.

And what was Paul's commentary which lifted the bare facts up into
the loftier region? This--as for the person, Jesus Christ 'declared
to be the son of God with power'--as for the fact of the death, 'died
for our sins according to the Scriptures.' Let in these two
conceptions into the facts--and they are the necessary explanation
and presupposition of the facts--the Incarnation and the Sacrifice,
and then you get what Paul calls 'my gospel,' not because it was his
invention, but because it was the trust committed to him. That is the
Gospel which alone answers to the facts which he deals with; and that
is the Gospel which, God helping me, I have for forty years tried to
preach.

We hear a great deal at present, or we did a few years ago, about
this generation having recovered Jesus Christ, and about the
necessity of going 'back to the Christ of the Gospels.' By all means,
I say, if in the process you do not lose the Christ of the Epistles,
who is the Christ of the Gospels, too. I am free to admit that a past
generation has wrapped theological cobwebs round the gracious figure
of Christ with disastrous results. For it is perfectly possible to
know the things that are said about Him, and not to know Him about
whom these things are said. But the mistake into which the present
generation is far more likely to fall than that of substituting
theology for Christ, is the converse one--that of substituting an
undefined Christ for the Christ of the Gospels and the Epistles, the
Incarnate Son of God, who died for our salvation. And that is a more
disastrous mistake than the other, for you can know nothing about Him
and He can be nothing to you, except as you grasp the Apostolic
explanation o