ome such process, if Christianity was
ever to wield an influence in the world at all. Again, one must consider
that the process of the recovery of pure Christianity must begin at
exactly this point, namely, with the recognition of how much in current
Christianity is extraneous. It must begin with the sloughing off of
these extraneous elements, with the recovery of the sense for that which
original Christianity was. Such a recovery would be the setting free
again of the power of the religion itself.

The constant touchstone and point of reference for every stage of the
history of the Church must be the gospel of Jesus. But what was the
gospel of Jesus? In what way did the very earliest Christians apprehend
that gospel? This question is far more difficult for us to answer than
it was for those to whom the New Testament was a closed body of
literature, externally differentiated from all other, and with a
miraculous inspiration extending uniformly to every phrase in any book.
These men would have said that they had but to find the proper
combination of the sacred phrases. But we acknowledge that the central
inspiration was the personality of Jesus. The books possess this
inspiration in varying degree. Certain of the books have distinctly
begun the fusion of Christian with other elements. They themselves
represent the first stages of the history of doctrine. We acknowledge
that those utterances of Jesus which have been preserved for us, shaped
themselves by the antitheses in which Jesus stood. There is much about
them that is palpably incidental, practically relevant and
unquestionably only relative. In a large sense, much of the meaning of
the gospel has to be gathered out of the evidence of the operation of
its spirit in subsequent ages of the Christian Church, and from remoter
aspects of the influence of Jesus on the world. Thus the very conception
of the gospel of Jesus becomes inevitably more or less subjective. It
becomes an ideal construction. The identification of this ideal with the
original gospel proclamation becomes precarious. We seem to move in a
circle. We derive the ideal from the history, and then judge the history
by the ideal.

Is there any escape from this situation, short of the return to the
authority of Church or Scripture in the ancient sense? Furthermore, even
the men to whom the gospel was in the strictest sense a letter,
identified the gospel with their own private interpretation of this
letter.