Christ The Almighty

In the days of Paul it was not difficult at once, in one word, to give the sum and substance of the current theology. It was Christ Jesus. Had you asked anyone of those disciples what he believed, he would have replied, “I believe Christ." If you had requested him to show you his Body of Divinity, he would have pointed upward reminding you that divinity never had but one body, the suffering and crucified human frame of Jesus Christ, who ascended up on high. To them, Christ was not a notion refined, but unsubstantial; not an historical personage who had left only the savor of his character behind, but whose person was dead; to them he was not a set of ideas, not a creed, nor an incarnation of an abstract theory, but he was a person, one whom some of them had seen, whose hands they had handled nay one of whose flesh they had all been made to eat, and of whose blood they had spiritually been made to drink. Christ was substance to them; I fear he is too often but shadow to us. He was a reality to their minds; to us — though, perhaps, we would scarcely allow it in so many words — rather a myth than a man; rather a person who was, than he who was, and is, and is to come — the Almighty.

From a sermon entitled "The First Sermon In The Tabernacle," delivered March 25, 1861. Flickr photo by tanakawho; some rights reserved.