Image via Wikipedia(Charles P. Henderson, Jr., The Christian Century)"These are just testimony of men and women who had neither axe to grind nor material product to sell. It is the testimony of men and women who in many cases laid down their lives rather than deny what they or their predecessors had seen and heard of Jesus the Son of God. And what is their for human eyes and ears to witness today - apart from this record of what happened long ago? "There is the testimony of millions of men and women of all races and of rank, of all varieties of accomplishment, and of all levels of understanding, that they have found in a person Jesus Christ, a Savior, a brother, a friend, who has lifted the burden of guilt from their hearts and given them peace and stability.
"Do not, if you are an unbeliever, if you are skeptical be put off by the fact that this experience seems to mean a thousand different things to a thousand different people. In one man the heart and core of it seems to consist in a vocation of personal evangelism rooted and grounded in expounding passages of the Bible. In another man the heart and core of it seems to consist in regular attendance at Mass, regular confession to a priest, and the thumbing of beads in prayer. Do not make the mistakes of thinking that these two men are involved in essentially different systems of belief. For both of them devotion to their convictions. Indeed the variety of modes in which Christian devotion to Christ manifests itself is a strength rather than a weakness of the Christian religion. G. K. Chesterton told how he had been compulsively drawn to Christ by the fact that he was a person whom everybody praised for a different reason.
"As we read the Bible, and the works of wise Christian teachers, a hundred Christ's pass before our eyes. There is Christ the King, and Christ the carpenter of Nazareth. There is the Son of God seated at the right hand of the Father in Heaven and the child of Mary lying in a manger. There is the Good Shepherd and the true vine, the Spouse of the Church and its cornerstone, the Sower of seed and the Fisher of Men. Christ is the high priest standing at the altar and the servant with water and a towel kneeling at your door. he is the Lamb sent to slaughter and the promised Messiah.
"It is not surprising that those who claim to serve him can do so in fashions so diverse."
We learn from, Christ himself that the whole world is God's world. We shall learn to live day by day in the light of the truth about God, man and the world modeled through Christ.
We will be using the primary tool God has provided to get to know his son and a tool to get to know Him, the Bible. But the Bible alone, cannot provide us with guidance to life. There is always the danger that we will find in the Bible only what we take with us to it, use it to confirm what we already think, hear only what we want to hear.
To avoid this; we will listen to how other Christians in different times and places and situations, have understood it. We will look at how they define, men's total dependence on God, the claim of God on every area of man's life in the world. The truth is the truth about God, man and the world guided by Jesus Christ as we know him in the Bible and through others.
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