Chapter VIII, Christianity, The Mind of the Church, Summary and Analysis

Experience and not mind was what first drew people to Christ. The need to understand something of the mystery of the church can be summarized in the tenets of the Incarnation, the Atonement, and the Holy Trinity. The essence of religion is not primarily ethics but wisdom of the highest order. The doctrine of the Incarnation concludes that God in the form of Jesus Christ became human and lived among us. That idea so foreign to a world where even kings could be thought of as divine, together with the egalitarian nature of the Christians, made them worthy of persecution. Furthermore, the Christian Jesus did not fit the quasi-human, quasi-god model of the Greeks and Romans. The full humanity of Christ is what that set him completely...