Introduction
Introduction
Each time I have written a book I have said to myself, in some form or other, “Well, this is it. If I can say what I want to say on this subject, I would satisfy a life intention.” And I have meant it. I did not mean, of course, that I had the presumption to think I was going to say the last word on that subject, or the best word. That would be folly. But I did mean that for me this subject is it—if I could say and live what I am writing, then it would meet my deepest need—and the need of others.
But as I look back I see that each book, while meeting a need of my own, and possibly the needs of others, did not move to the very Center, nor did it comprehend the Whole, gathering up the Christian faith into a total concept. This book, I believe, comes nearer the Center and more nearly comprehends the Whole than any I have written. At the close I shall probably send it forth with a sigh, “Well, I haven’t said it! I have picked up some pebbles along the beach, but the great ocean depths are yet to be explored.” While I shall be dissatisfied with my offering, I shall be convinced that whether I have said it or not, the thing itself is the Center—the Word Became Flesh is the Center. This is it! And that circumference is the working out of that Word Became Flesh in the sum total of life.
If I were to put my finger on the most important verse in Scripture, I would unhesitatingly put my finger on this one: “And the Word became flesh.” The whole passage reads this way:
And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth; we have beheld his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father. . . . And from his fullness have we all received, grace upon grace. For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. No one has ever seen God; the only Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, he has made him known. (John 1:14-18)
This verse—“the Word became flesh”—is the Great Divide. In all other religions it is Word became word—a philosophy, a moralism, a system, a technique, but for all time and all people everywhere, “the Word became flesh”—the Idea became Fact.
As a missionary and an evangelist for over half a century, I have stood amid the thought currents of the world—“where cross the crowded ways of life.” These “ways of life” meet in India as in no other place in the world. Here men take religion seriously, ready to live and die for it. And here in large measure, the religious battle of the world is being fought. Among the great philosophical nations of the world—Greece, India, and China—India alone stands and fights for her ways of life. Greece has produced her philosophers, but go to Greece today—you will be shown monuments and archaeological ruins, but no one will debate with you on Mars’ Hill the relative merits of the various philosophies of ancient Greece. A Mecca for photographers, but not for pilgrims. In China the temples are places of picnics or now, under the Communists, places of indoctrination for Marxism. Apparently, the religious issues are wiped out.
But in India it is different. There, the old faiths have vitality still. It is true that many of the gods are worm-eaten. In India the gods lose their vitality and vigor every fifty or sixty years and have to be revived by certain reviving ceremonies and rites. Said a Hindu to me: “Ishwara [God] is growing old and decrepit, is not of much use to us now.” While there is a decay of temple Hinduism, nevertheless philosophical Hinduism is still strong and militant and even invades the West. Even in our Christian Ashrams in America, I get the questions: “What do you think of Reincarnation and Karma?” “Are we one with God, as Vedanta says, or more truly stated, Are we God?”
The reaction of India to the Christian gospel has gone through three stages: (1) It isn’t true. (2) It isn’t new. (3) It isn’t you. The first stage was short-lived. The gospel was so self-verifying to the human mind that it could not be waved out as untrue. The second stage, “It isn’t new,” has lingered and is still in vogue—“Everything you have in your faith is found in our sacred books.” The third stage, “It isn’t you”—“You don’t live it,” is here and is the usual argument against the Christian gospel. There we must humbly acknowledge the truth of what they say. They have a point—a real one. The stage India is in, at present, is a combination of “It isn’t new” and “It isn’t you.”
I have lived with this combination for years. Everything I have presented in the Christian gospel has been met by a bland reply: “Yes, what you say is good; we have the same in our sacred books.” When I arrived in India fifty-four years ago and was traveling from Bombay to Lucknow, I found myself in a compartment with an educated Muslim, and I said to myself: “I am a missionary. I’d better go to work.” So I read him the whole of the Sermon on the Mount. When I finished, he quietly replied: “Yes, we have the same thing in the Koran.” Whether it was true or not was beside the point for him—he must get rid of the uniqueness of the Christian faith.
When I put up the teaching concerning turning the other cheek and going the second mile and loving your enemies, the Hindus would reply: “Yes, our sacred books tell us that we are to be like the sandalwood tree, which, when smitten by the ax, pours its perfume upon the ax that smites it.” I had to acknowledge its beauty while inwardly raising the question, “Then where is the uniqueness of the Christian faith?” When I came to the cross, which certainly must be unique, I thought, I would be met by the statement of the Rig Veda: “Prajapati, the Lord of creatures was himself their sacrifice—he gave himself for them,” and the blue-throated Shiva (one of the Hindu trinity) “drank poison that we might ambrosia taste,” and the parch of blue on his throat is the lodged poison. Everything I brought up had its parallel. Then where was the uniqueness? I was puzzled.
Then it dawned on me. In all these statements from the Hindu scriptures, it was the Word became word—the sandalwood illustration was an exhortation, not an exhibition; Prajapati, the Lord of creatures, giving himself for men in sacrifice was a statement with no historical basis; and the blue-throated Shiva was a legend, a myth. In Jesus, the Word had become flesh—“Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.” And Jesus, the Lord of Creatures, did give himself for them on a cross. And he did drink the poison of our sin that we might taste the ambrosia of forgiveness and a new life.
The center of the faith of the modern Hindu is the Bhagavad-Gita where Krishna, a Hindu divinity, on the eve of a battle says things that strangely parallel the Christian faith. But here, too, it is the Word become word—it is a philosophical discourse put into the mouth of a divine Krishna who never lived. The historical Krishna is hardly the kind of character who could be looked up to and emulated. The philosophical Krishna is the Word become word—a philosophy or moralism.
Then I got hold of this difference: in all other religions it is the Word become word, but only in Jesus Christ did the Word become flesh. Then everything fell into its place. I had the Key, and this Key fitted everything in East and West. In the West we have studies in comparative religion in our theological seminaries and universities. In these courses the teachings of the various religions are outlined, and parallels are pointed out. The Christian faith emerges a little more moral, a little more consistent in its view of God and man, and a little higher in general, but nothing very unique. So many students came out of these institutions with little or no convictions and with nothing to preach—nothing except a philosophy or moralism, but no gospel, no Good News. That is the paralysis that lies upon the Christian ministry; for the most part they are preaching the Word become word—a moralism, an exhortation to be good. Hence the barrenness.
I was being interviewed on TV by a brilliant commentator, who came to the point by saying: “You go throughout the world preaching. What do you have to preach that others do not have?” It was a good question—and valid. Just what did I have? The answer was simple and simply given: “I have Jesus Christ—the Word become flesh.”
This brought a difference not only in degree, but in kind. The Christian faith is not just a little better than other faiths—a little more moral, more free from contradictory elements, more lofty in its conceptions. It is that, but it is more—it is different in kind. Religions are our search for God. The gospel is God’s search for us. Therefore, there are many religions, but only one gospel. Religions are the Word become word; the gospel is the Word become flesh.
This verse, “And the Word became flesh,” sets the Gospel off in a class by itself. And yet while it is in a class by itself, a sui generis, nevertheless it relates it to everything—God, life, the material everything. For it is planted in life—spiritual, material, social. But planted in life, it is different, apart, unique. No wonder William Barclay, perhaps the greatest authority on John’s Gospel, could say, “Here we come to the sentence for the sake of which John wrote the Fourth Gospel: ‘The Word became flesh.’” And then goes on:
Augustine afterwards said that in his pre-Christian days he had read and studied the great pagan philosophers and their writings, . . . but he had never read that “the Word became flesh.” The one thing that no Greek would ever have dreamed of was that God could take a body. To the Greek the body was an evil, a prison-house in which the soul was shackled, a tomb in which the spirit was confined. Plutarch, the wise old Greek, did not even believe that God could control the happenings of this world directly; He had to do it by deputies and intermediaries, for as Plutarch saw it, it was nothing less than blasphemy to involve God in the affairs of the world. Philo could never have said it. He said: “The life of God has not descended to us; nor has it come as far as the necessities of the body.” The great Roman Stoic Emperor, Marcus Aurelius, [said] “Despite the flesh—blood and bones and a net-work, a twisted skein of nerves and veins and arteries.” “The composition of the whole body is under corruption.”
And yet, in the face of all that—the highest thought of the day—the Gospel quietly says: “And the Word became flesh.” It reversed everything and revealed Everything. No wonder Barclay could add: “It might well be held that this is the greatest verse in the whole New Testament.”1
Without this verse the Christian faith is the Word become word—an idea, a philosophy, a moralism; with it the Christian faith is the Word become flesh, a fact—a Redemptive Fact, the Supreme Fact.
Compared with this, the differences between the Christian way and other ways are marginal and indecisive, but this is central and decisive. And compared with this, the questions of the manifestations of the Christian faith are marginal and indecisive: If the manifestation of the Christian faith is not the Word become flesh—a decision—then it is the Word become word—a discussion, hence sub-Christian.
This book will deal with these two phases: Is this idea the Word become word or the Word become flesh? And is this manifestation of the idea of the Word become word or the Word become flesh? The one deals with faith and the other with life, and the touchstone in both cases is—the Word became flesh.
Someone asked me which of my twenty-three books I liked the best. My reply was: “Please don’t make me choose between my babies.” But if I were asked as to the message I would like to leave, I would unhesitatingly choose the message of The Way. My readers apparently have not agreed with me, for it hasn’t sold as much, for instance, as The Christ of the Indian Road and Abundant Living, each of which has sold over a million copies. I must not have said it too well. But the message of The Way seems to me the most important thing I have been trying to say through the years. If the Christian faith is written not merely in the Scripture but also into the nature of things, then that is not only important—it is decisive. In this present book, I have reiterated the message of The Way in the first part of the book, since it fitted the present theme, hoping that this re-emphasis would call attention again to what I consider the most important thing in the Christian faith, namely, that the Christian Way is the Way and that “Way” is written not merely in texts of Scripture but into the texture of our beings.
I have used repeatedly in this book the phrases, “The Word became word,” and “The Word became flesh.” I have done so deliberately, for these phrases side by side bring into focus the issues in this book and in the world of faith. If we can make the transition from one to the other, we can be saved—we and our world. If not? Well, “The Word become word” has run its course and is near bankruptcy. Nothing can save us except that transition to “The Word became flesh.”
The question arose in my mind: Shall I make this a book reading straight through without a daily division for daily devotion, or shall I make it a devotional book—a page a day? The publishers advised the devotional form. And rightly, I believe. For in the devotional, one reads not merely for information, but for transformation. One reads to become a better person; consciously or unconsciously we want the literature to become life, the worship to become work. In other words we want the Word to become flesh. So the devotional is more in line with the title. It can be read straight through for information, for one there runs through the whole, but it can also be read for transformation. And that is the real purpose of this book—transformation to individuals and society. To discuss “the Word became flesh” as a proposition is to make the Word become theology; but to discuss it, not as a proposition, but as a proposal for change and action—that would be nearer “the Word became flesh.”
If it means to the reader what it is increasingly meaning to the writer, then the purpose of this book will be accomplished. What for me began as a question is now turning into a quest—a quest to embody in some way, however faint and imperfect, the Word become flesh.
E. STANLEY JONES
1 The Gospel of John, tr. William Barclay (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1955); pages I, 44–46.