The Impersonal Life

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====== The Inner Life ======
== THE HERALD OF THE NEW AGE | OCTOBER 1938 ==
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==== A WITNESS FROM INDIA ====
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The following extracts are taken from THE CHRIST WHO LIVES IN ME, by Chakkerai Chetty, B. A., B. L., a chapter in the volume entitled “The Cultural Heritage of India,” published in 1937 by the Sri Ramakrishna Centenary Committee in Calcutta, India.
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THIS PAPER on Christianity is prepared in response to a request that I should write something on this subject for the Commemoration Volume. Only one condition was imposed on me—it was to avoid controversy, to which I gave ready consent. Dialectic may have its place elsewhere but not in describing “The Christ Who lives in me,” for it is an incommensurable quantity, or rather a quality.

In the first instance, I should say that I do not regard Western civilization as Christianity. Nay, I hold that it has a life of its own running apart from, and even contrary to it. There may be seen in it some elements of Christianity, but it is a thing that is historical and of the soil and soul of the West. I owe no allegiance to it in the name of Christ. Secondly, even the various historical forms of Christianity are not identical with the Word of God, the Lord Jesus Christ. At best they are reactions of the human soul to His voice, and at worst they are revolts against His mind. To an Indian like me, brought up in a different historical and cultural milieu, they are interesting though not always inspiring.

The many forms of Western Christianity now in India, called churches, will be superseded and surpassed by Indians who, while recognizing kinship in matters of the Atman¹, with the devout bhaktas² of the West, will appeal direct to the living spirit of the Lord who is today, what He was in the days of His flesh. He speaks now and here to us, as He spoke then and there to them. This is the dominant truth, and if it is not true, then there is no truth in Christianity. Above the witness of traditions and institutions, there is the Lord who calls men to Himself and leads them to the heavenly places. I do not like to use the word Christianity, for true Christianity is not a religion, nor even the religion, as some of its adherents have tried to distinguish it. I regard it as the pure act and movement of God. Man can add—nothing to it nor take anything from it. It cannot be dissolved in the stream of historical cultures and dogmas, nor manipulated and managed by priests and pieties.

The norm of the Word of God is found in the witness of the New Testament. But behind this written witness is the Eternal Word Himself. Even the New Testament is not the Lord of the human soul any more than John the Baptiser, who pointed to the Lord, was that Light. He came to bear witness to the Light. Here emerges what I consider to be the function of the Christian guru¹. He can never come between the Lord and ourselves. He can never reveal the Lord to us. The Lord Himself alone meets man in the intimacy and privacy of His Presence. No human logic, rational or emotional, can bring Him to us. He comes as and when He wills, even as He came to His disciples beside the Syrian Sea, and in the fields and villages of His land. Our faith in Him does not proceed from man, nor even from the mystic deeps of our Atman, but from Him who is the Author and Finisher of it. The New Testament witness has been authenticated by the experience of Christian bhaktas all down the ages, and it forms an array of the nearest witnesses to the Lord, the Lord Himself as the Spirit witnessing within us. His witness is true, certain and infallible, and no one who has once heard it can doubt it. “My sheep hear My voice, and I lead them unto living fountains of water.”

There is a mystery surrounding Christ’s life in the world that all the historical insight of the last century and the present has not penetrated. It is the mystery of the Incarnation of the Eternal Word of God. Albert Schweitzer in The Quest of the Historical Jesus, a work of wonderful interest, gave a thrilling account of the giant efforts of the profoundest minds of Germany to elucidate this mystery, but, as he says, they have all ended in tragic failure. Many and varying pictures have been given of Him. The collective merit of them all is that they have destroyed each other. Christ has been variously described as a revolutionary, a Bolshevik, a liberal theologian, and above all that jejune thing, a mild prophet, preaching the Fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man—a doctrine that no one would dream of disputing till it is attempted to be put into practice.

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All interpretations fail to account for the rise of the Christian consciousness of Jesus as Lord that the New Testament embodies. The death of Jesus on the cross ought, by every known rule of historical evolution, to have made an end of Jesus, except as leaving a rightful feeling in the memories of his disciples, as of a last attempt to realize the Unknown. According to some superfine scholars, He taught nothing original, nothing that had not been better said by others before and since, though a few things like the parable of the prodigal would repudiate such a suggestion. But anyhow they claim, there was an end. The grave was there outside Jerusalem.

But that did not make an end, rather it was a beginning. Jesus may have ceased to live, as his enemies desired, but Christ began to live. In the New Testament it is said that the grave could not hold Him and that the Holy One should not see corruption. The Resurrection is the coming out of Jesus Christ in His totality from death, mysteriously transformed and transfigured. It is His conquest over death as the general law of human life and history. It is bursting of eternity into time, of the life of God over death. St. Paul’s summing up is true today as then. “If Christ be not risen, then our faith is vain.”

What, then, is this faith that the Christian holds, rather that which holds the Christian in its firm grasp? In the first place and most emphatically, it is not a philosophical deduction. This faith is not a catalogue of beliefs. Founded on the Word of God, it comes from Him and returns to Him. The certainty of this faith is the authority of God. All else founded on human history and even on church authority rests on frail foundations like the house built on sand.

The cross, or the crucifixion of the Blessed One, is regarded more often than not, as an act of self-sacrifice. And so it is, but in a sense, the depths of which have not yet been plumbed by the most daring saints of Christianity. When an individual man is drawn to the experience of the cross, he dies with the Lord on that instrument of shameful death. “I am crucified with Christ,” cries St. Paul. What does this tremendous assertion mean? It is not a mere rhetorical exaggeration, or a fervid fancy. It means that the hostile self, the ego of sin in the misery of its self-bondage, receives its death-blow on the cross in the identification by faith with His death. This identification by faith is the Revelation of God.

This is the meaning of faith in the New Testament and that which is involved in opposing it, is reason. The cross is thus the challenge of God to man to halt, and to His judgment on him. In this crisis, the sentence of death is passed and accepted. But with this submission, there arises the justification—man’s acceptance with God. This is the faith, the mystery of godliness, the manifestation of God in the flesh and the acceptance of the ungodly and the sinner. “While we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.” Thus I am dead and buried with Him.

Beyond the mystery of the death of the Lord is another mystery, the Resurrection. The fact of the Resurrection is the origin of the extraordinary spiritual power, including every other dynamic, that is at the back of the Christian movement in history, and at the back of the new life of the Christian. This is a force not generated by human events, but is God, as the New Testament says, or the Holy Spirit who was in Jesus and raised Him from the tomb. As he was raised from the dead, even so the Christian who joins himself to Him is raised from the grave of his old self to newness of life.

Everywhere in the pages of the New Testament is this evident, not as a speculation of theology, but as an indubitable fact of the experience of Christians. After passing through the cross, the extinction of his old life in the flesh with all its attendant miseries and sins and illusions, the Christian emerges into the new life, or rather the new life of Christ takes possession of him. Thereafter, as Paul put it, it is “not I that live but Christ that liveth in me.” It is in verity a participation in the glorified life of the Risen Lord who, having lived in the flesh as a historical figure amidst the tragic and turbid stream of life as we know it, has been exalted to the Majesty on High, as it is called in the New Testament. To this fourth dimensional or heavenly life is the Christian also raised by the same power, the power of God, the miracle of miracles, coming from beyond the line of our mortality, beyond this world of maya. It is a new creation just as truly as Adam was. And so Jesus is called the second Adam, the life-giving Soul, the Giver of Eternal Life to as many as receive Him.

After this, it is not to be supposed that the Christian has to fold his hands and sleep. In the Christian life there is no finale, though there is a beginning when the crisis is passed. This is because the redeemed soul lives between two ages, between the—past which was the world of human contingency, the flesh as it is called, and the coming, the age of Christ. The night is gone, the day is at hand. And so the soul experiences the tension of the transition. It calls for struggle, alertness and suffering. The Christian life, though in its inner depths, is one of joy and peace in the Holy Spirit, is on the surface convulsed by the waves of human life, now placidly, now agitated by fierce storms. In the midst of this, toiling and rejoicing, the Christian goes in the faith of the cross and in the power of His Resurrection, the mightiest in all the world. Thus there is no escape into an artificial solitude, and no seclusion, except for seasons and periods of reflection and recollection. But he knows that the world and its fashion is passing away. The reign of Christ, the transcendent Kingdom of God, not as the salvation of the individual soul, is coming. Thy Kingdom come! This faith containing the eternal hope, and filled with love, rises like a fountain day and night. The seer, a prisoner for the Lord, as St. John on the island of Patmos, saw the New Heavens and the New Earth, the New Jerusalem descending like a Bride adorned for the Bridegroom. In it there shall be no more sorrow caused by sin, and no more death, the wages of sin, but the Lord shall be the Light thereof. And the Christian who has joined himself to Him shall behold in undimmed radiance the Beloved Face.
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