Edward Heppenstall's True Christianity

This is a rewrite of a sermon by Edward Heppenstall, True Christianity, preserved in a recording several decades old. The scripture he read is quoted here from the reader's own Bible and the passages he alluded to are linked.

The text is the first chapter of the First Epistle to the Corinthians, beginning at verse 18.

A rescue religion

If you were asked to define the Christian religion, what would you say? Suppose you were asked to state it in a few sentences, briefly and to the point. Christianity is a religion of redemption. That means it is a rescue religion. It is a saving operation. And that means that something has gone wrong with the world in which we live.

You and I live on this guided missile that has been going through space for six thousand years. It is different from all other planets. There is sin and there is death on our planet, and you cannot get off. Of all the billions who have ever lived, you can count on one hand those who have gotten off alive. And this means that man cannot possibly help himself; the rescue must come from beyond us.

It is the claim of Christianity that Jesus Christ, the Son of God, was sent on a mission of rescue and redemption, and that the crisis of the world and of the universe resides here.

According to the Bible, the case for man and for God goes something like this. Originally, man was created perfect, in a state of close fellowship with God, in a state of belonging to God. Then man succumbed and gave allegiance to Satan and his angelic forces, who had rebelled and broken away from God. As a result, man was alienated from the source of life, and death reigned and involved everybody in death and sin.

However, God the Father, seeking to maintain His position as Father, refusing to give up His children, determined to restore the relationship, and sent His beloved Son in the disguise of a man to reveal His great love for His children.

He came to die

So the key figure in this universal drama is Jesus Christ. The most shocking thing about the drama is that to redeem us, the Son of God met the most violent death, perhaps the most horrible death imaginable: death by crucifixion. The Bible states that Jesus Christ came to die. Time and again Jesus said that the Son of Man must suffer and be killed (Mark 8:31), and that he had a baptism to be baptized with (Luke 12:50).

Nothing is plainer than that this divine sacrifice was a voluntary act on the part of all members of the Godhead. Nobody was pushing God around. When Jesus came to the earth, He could have put on a demonstration of power that would have had the world at His feet, impressing them with His majesty. He could have avoided the last visit to Jerusalem; had He remained away, it is very doubtful that the priests would have hunted Him out. They would have been glad to be rid of Him. He could have retired to a safe retreat to write out His teachings in incomparable treatises and given the world the greatest literature it has ever produced. He could have established a school of philosophy and gathered a lot of smart people around him, a school that would have transcended those of Plato and Aristotle right down to our time.

But our Lord came to die, and this became a shocking thing. His death was accompanied by every imaginable aggravation of cruelty. And when one remembers who he was, the Son of God, one member of the Godhead that rules the universe, and remembers what he has done, how he passed through the ordeal with love to the uttermost, this death becomes the most terrible indictment of the moral government of the world.

The most tragic, the most portentous occurrence of all man's aching, bloody and frantic history is the death of Christ. It is not only the most monstrous, it is the most criminal thing that was ever done in the career of humanity. It outweighs in gravity and wickedness all that men or nations have done or can do. Here is a darkness beyond all eclipse: the case of a world that wants to kill God. And at the same time, this is God's gift to the world.

The cross is, of all our problems, the most baffling — or it is the solution of them all.

The offense of the cross

The Christian sees the cross of Christ as the center of the Christian religion and the center of the moral universe, and he draws his energy from it. We sing the great hymn, "Beneath the Cross of Jesus", and I think sometimes these hymns make liars out of us. "Beneath the cross of Jesus I fain would take my stand" — and then we fail to make that kind of commitment. We so often know about it, and so often preach about it, that it has become blasé.

But the non-Christian sees in the tragic death of Christ an obstacle which makes faith impossible. He sees it as an offense, a scandal and a stumbling block.

Peter was the first to feel it as an offense. When Jesus began to show his disciples that it was necessary for him to go to Jerusalem to suffer many things and be killed, Peter, loyal to his own idea of what a messiah ought to be, broke out in violent protest (Matthew 16:21–23). He was outraged. A man upon a cross — worse, a God upon a cross — who would let himself be killed.

When they had followed him to Gethsemane through thickening gloom and he was arrested, they all left him. What had become of his matchless teachings, his miraculous powers, his titles — the Messiah, the Son of God, the Son of Man? Where had gone the exultation of the crowds on the previous Sunday, when they wanted to make him king and proclaimed "Hosanna to the Son of David" (Matthew 21:9)? Surely, when they called him derisively to come down from the cross, he would fling the challenge in their teeth. And when the tragedy fell, and his chin dropped upon his breast, they were struck blind and dumb, and amazement seized them. In a horror of great darkness they fled the scene. Forsaken of God he was, they believed; his cause hopeless at last, and no future for them. When the tomb closed around the broken body of Christ, the cross had killed their faith.

As for the Jewish leaders: Annas, the high priest of avarice, monopolist, profiteer, grafter, who had made the temple a marketplace, a den of robbers (Matthew 21:13), and whom Jesus had cursed three years before when he drove the traders from the courts of his Father's house (John 2:14–16). Annas had the first drink of this intoxicating cup, which he drank to the dregs, delighted when he saw this young Jewish fanatic led out of the court with his hands tied behind his back. And Caiaphas, politician and opportunist and dispenser of final wisdom, counseled to put the Galilean out of the way:

As for the Apostle Paul, the crucified Messiah was a stumbling block. Paul was not in Jerusalem when Christ was crucified. But when he returned after considerable absence, probably from some synagogue appointment in the provinces, he found the city from one end to the other, from top to bottom, astir over the announcement that a man who had been crucified was the Messiah. His whole nature burst into flame. Amazement mounted in him to horror, to frenzy, and threw him into a career of opposition to Jesus Christ. A Messiah who let himself be crucified? He would save the Jewish faith from such a horrible profanation. Nothing is more infuriating to a clear-minded man than to see a lot of people whom you love led away by some form of so-called fanaticism. He knew he was ordained to stamp it out. But he was the man who would later proclaim:

I wonder, if you and I had been there, whether we would have been any different. I doubt it.

The pride of man

What is the explanation of this repulsiveness of the cross to the mind of man? The center of sin is selfishness, and the center of selfishness is pride. When man is told that God has come to save him, taking upon himself, in the person of his Son, the united judgment of eternity on sin, modern man meets the proposition with a towering independence: "This is my own affair. I will attend to it." Modern man believes that he has all the resources for salvation within himself.

We see him as Prometheus, hurling titanic defiance at Jupiter in the pride of man's unconquered and unconquerable soul. We see him as the devotee, climbing the long, long stairs to the South Gate of Heaven on China's sacred mountain. We see him toiling through the ages to escape, as Gautama Buddha did, the endless chain of rebirth into a miserable world; for the central affirmation of Buddhism is that the renunciation of desire, even the desire to live, is the way of escape from the misery of existence. Or we see him, in some quest of reality, vanishing into the impersonal allness of Hindu speculation, nirvana. Or following Mohammed, where God is God and Mohammed is his prophet — the prophet without miracle and without mystery, a morality without love, which has always encouraged a thirst for blood and which began and ended in the most unbounded sensuality. In every case and in every way, man refuses to surrender his boast and his claim to independent greatness: "I am the master of my fate. I am the captain of my soul."

After the French Revolution, humanity was enthroned as the grand master of destiny, as it is today. Goethe, the great immoralist of his epoch, is a typical example of the claim to a man wholly emancipated from Jesus Christ and from the depravity of human nature. His successors and imitators are a great multitude, and their deepest aversion is to this man who let himself be crucified.

Nietzsche was fond of saying that the only Christian died on the cross, and he poured continual contempt on Christian morals and on dependence on Christ as "the collective egoism of the feeble-minded."

George Bernard Shaw, who claimed for himself and others the right to refuse the atonement that Christ came to give, said:

No, thank you. I prefer to retain my full moral responsibility. It is not good for me to be able to load a scapegoat with my sins. I should be less careful how I committed them if I knew they would cost me nothing.

The modern mind is interested in a redemption of a sort, but it is not redemption from sin to holiness. It is redemption from immaturity, from ignorance, from defect — to maturity, to culture; from social problems, from poverty. And humanism is the name of the religion. If this denomination ever goes astray, it is going to go astray on humanism.

Humanism is a system whereby man, beginning absolutely by himself, tries to build rationally out from himself, having man as his integration point, and believing that there reside in him the answers to the questions. And God, if there is a God, is there to approve and crown the development of this beautiful creature, man. The cry is, "Take the chains off and let man have his way. Let him obey his impulses and fulfill himself." But this man upon a cross, who invites men to die to self, to take up the cross and follow him (Matthew 16:24) — away with him. This line of humanistic moralism and aestheticism poses today, impressively, as the rival of Christianity.

Two streams

Years ago, when in my graduate work I spent a lot of time with Greek philosophy, with the Platonists and with Aristotelianism, I felt then, as I feel now, that the most fateful conjuncture in history was the point at which the stream that rises in Sinai and flows by Calvary met the stream that rises on Mount Olympus and flows by the Acropolis. These two streams represent two estimates of human nature and two concepts of redemption: the one finding ground for ultimate optimism in the progress and the great achievements of man in our own age; the other seeing the one hope for our race in God's judgment of its sin and its pride on the cross, and in forgiveness for sin made at last, and once for all, possible through the cross of Christ.

The modern mind, narcotized by an advanced civilization, by an advancing science, by an advanced culture, engrossed with material and practical ways of living, has neither the insight nor the inclination to inquire whether its muddled interior may not be crumbling on the way to final disaster. This modern mind, equipped with all the resources of science and art and culture, is committed to salvation — but will have none of salvation by way of the cross.

The surrender

The final reason is that the acceptance of the cross begins in a surrender: a surrender of self in a confession of sin and the weakness it entails; a surrender of all our determination to conquer the world; a surrender even of the idea, which some hold, that Adventism is the superior church in the world — because that kind of comparison can be satanic.

The modern mind can easily confess its ignorance, for has it not always undertaken to abolish ignorance by the advancement of knowledge? It can confess its error, for has it not always been committed to the search for truth? It can confess its diseases, for did not Christianity come into the world to create doctors and nurses and comforting counselors? It can go so far as to confess its stupidity, because are we not all pleased at times when somebody makes a fool of himself? We can confess our feebleness, for have we not dedicated ourselves to the worship of power and to playing gods? But to confess our sins and guilt before God, really in need of a redeemer and a savior — never.

George Bernard Shaw speaks of the Christian coming to Christ in complete dependence upon this man, and calls it:

That pathological system of that sort of conscience and nervous constitution which brings us under the tyranny of two deadly terrors, the terror of sin and the terror of death. Away with it.

How is it that to many good, mild men who live in this modern world, many of whom know well the issues of life and death, the cross of Christ has become an offense and a stumbling block, and the less they hear about it the better? Many of these people are highly intellectual people, and some of them are scholars and teachers in the field of religion.

Christianity is the religion of redemption in Christ, in whom we have forgiveness of our sins and reconciliation with God the Father. And if Christians are right, then Goethe and Nietzsche and Shaw are wrong.

I often hear men insist upon openness of mind in facing the facts, and I say, by all means. But open-mindedness costs too much when a man wakes up some morning to find that he has no major premise, that he has no absolutes, and that he is entirely on his own. This church needs to be crowded back upon divine reality and divine power, and not upon our own ability any more.

The Christian world needs most of all a savior who forgives, and also one who says, "Go and sin no more" (John 8:11). When Christ said that, he was putting up a standard, not debasing it. The notion that Christ shed his blood in order that every petty thief and adulterer and libertine might wallow in it and come out as white as snow cannot be attributed to him who said:

A Christian is not afraid to look facts in the face, even such terrifying facts as sin and death, and to appeal to the one source of life who alone has the answer, Jesus Christ. Let us never forget that Jesus is the most unique, the most revolutionary person that ever lived. The Bible does not allow us to think of the cross as an incident in the life of a good man, because if it were that, we should find no more significance in it than in the death of any good man.

We look to the day when every knee shall bow:

That is our mission. The cross is the moral and spiritual crisis of the world, of the universe and of eternity. It is the last crossroads for all men, where a man takes either the narrow way up to the Kingdom of God or the broad road that leads to the abyss. When a man dazzled by his own brilliance — even in our cause — and by his own importance and self-sufficiency turns his back on Christ, the central sun of all the universe, he goes his own way indeed. The minister who sets out on it and caters to his own self-importance is walking in his own shadow. And men take this road to that tragic destiny which Christ called the outer darkness (Matthew 8:12).

Professor George Santayana of Harvard said:

The time will come, astronomers tell us, when life will be extinct on this weary planet, and all the delights of sense and imagination will be over. The masses of matter which the worldlings have transported with their machinery and carried from one place to another will remain to bear witness to their sinfulness. The collocation of atoms will never be what it would have been if their feet had less continuously beaten and destroyed the earth. Because of them, in their foolishness and pride, the earth will then be like the craters of the moon.

One may not like the prospect, but a Christian lives in a wholly different sphere. He looks for the new heavens and the new earth wherein dwells righteousness (2 Peter 3:13), where Jesus Christ reigns supreme. But to get there, Christ has got to reign supreme in our hearts, and we should not kid ourselves. Men will ultimately confess Jesus Christ one way or another, both saved and lost, when every knee shall bow before the Lord of heaven.

Where is he now?

The Roman Emperor Julian, the nephew and successor of the Emperor Constantine, was called Julian the Apostate because of his hatred for Jesus Christ and for the Christians. He fought a lifelong losing battle in the name of the fair glories of the pagan world. And shortly before his last conflict with death, he recounted a dream that he had:

Where is he now, this Galilean? Has he been at work elsewhere since that happened at Golgotha? I dreamed of him lately. I dreamed that I had ordained that the memory of the Galilean should be rooted out on earth. Then I soared aloft into infinite space till my feet rested on another world. And behold, there came a procession by me on the earth where I stood, and in the midst of the slow-moving array was the humble Galilean, alive, and bearing a cross upon his back. Then I called to him, "Whither away, Galilean?" He turned his head toward me, smiled, nodded slowly, and said, "To the place of the skull." Where is he now? What if that death at Golgotha near Jerusalem was an eternal matter, a thing done, as it were, for all the universe? What if he goes on and on, and suffers and dies and lives and conquers again and again, from world to world? What if he is the King of Kings and Lord of Lords? The Galilean has won.

Today we are offered Julian the Apostate, and Goethe and Nietzsche and George Bernard Shaw and a host of brilliant men who follow in their train; and we are offered again this humble man, Jesus Christ. They represent two worlds and two ways. And above our dark world and beyond it, just ahead of us, is a world where neither sin nor death will prevail. There our lives will reach transfiguration and transformation in the light of the holy, righteous love of the eternal God, the God who spared not his own Son (Romans 8:32) that righteousness may reign and holiness cover the earth.

Jesus Christ is still the crisis of the moral world in which we live. Somehow this church is going to have to find a way to communicate this Christ to people — because is anybody really listening to us? There are people in plenty, and they are not all outside our schools either, who do not seem to have the faintest perception of what Christianity really is. They are converted to a message and to a church, and they are not converted to Jesus Christ. You may call Jesus Christ Lord and Savior and be a Christian, or refuse to do so and not be a Christian. It is absurd to think ourselves safe and secure when our attitude to Jesus is that he shall not invade our lives and be our complete master.

For us ministers, there is no place like the ministry where self can be so exaggerated. If a minister in his church does not discover Christ as the center, he will inevitably discover himself as the center of power. I think sometimes that the most difficult thing in all the world is the complete surrender of human pride, and I think this is the reason why God cannot trust us very much with the power of the Holy Spirit.

Jesus speaks to us from the heart of God in the midst of the applauding feats of modern civilization. He calls us to look back to a cross, asking us to humble ourselves. As Mrs. White says, "Righteousness by faith lays the glory of men in the dust." The cross comes to us with an attack on human independence and human wisdom, on its pride and its sophistication. And here his hand is upon our shoulder, his yoke is upon our necks, his goad of love is behind our feet, and his call of love is within our hearts. We can know that we are loved by God and that we belong to God.

It is not the things that belong to us that are important. We find in our hands a tray full of toys — automobiles and radios and televisions and new cars. It is not these things that are important. It is the quality of the person to whom we belong, Jesus Christ.

The Lamb slain

Jesus Christ troubled the world in the first century: to the Jews a stumbling block, to the Greeks foolishness (1 Corinthians 1:23). And yet his way is the solution to all our problems, and he speaks to us today as the living Christ. He is still a disturbing fact to the modern mind, shattering man's pride, telling us that God's last word to us is not condemnation. We must never forget, when we are dealing with other churches and judging them, that we are the people under the grace of God, and we have been forgiven. Accepting God's forgiveness and righteousness in Christ involves the abandonment, by the man, of human wisdom and self-assertion, and it is not easy.

There is in the Louvre in Paris a famous picture by Caravaggio of the exiles outside Paradise, and in the distance can be discerned the figure of an angel with a flaming sword. But the eyes of the exiles, Adam and Eve, are not fixed upon him. They are gazing far above his head, and there, outlined faint but unmistakable, the artist has painted a cross. In wondering awe their gaze is fastened upon it, for there is a Lamb slain from the foundation of the world (Revelation 13:8). The cross was planted in the heart of God from the first moment sin darkened human history, and it will not be removed till the last repentant sinning soul is gathered in.

The truth of a God who sacrificed and suffered for His children is found only in Christianity. His power is the power of love, and His searching eyes are full of tears.

To the Greek, the only man who counted was a man who could think. To the Jew, the only man who counted was a man who kept the law. To the Roman, the only man who counted was a man who could conquer. And then came Jesus Christ, and even the hairs of your head are numbered, and not a sparrow falls to the ground without His noticing it (Matthew 10:29–30). How would you write it in a single sentence — that God loves me, that God suffers that He may find me, that God dies to redeem me, that God wants me?

This beloved Son is captured and mocked and derided and beaten, and taken to the place of a skull, and a crown of thorns is on His brow. God, why don't You do something? All the angels of heaven are waiting to burst through and deliver the Son of God, but they are held on the leash of love. Man can never be redeemed by a God who, like some divine burglar, enters the human heart by force, interferes with man's free will, and stays the hand which is bent on evil.

If I were God, I say to myself sometimes, I would not wait for slow evidence to get the job done. I would flare across the heavens every night, crying out for mercy twenty-four hours a day. But the world will only be redeemed by a love which suffers and waits till man, at last satiated with sin, shall turn to see what sin has cost God — who through the long eternal years treads His own self-chosen Via Dolorosa and is nailed by sin to that cross.

The cross is the greatest event of all history, and it speaks to us of the eternal love of God and the intolerable nature of evil.

King of Kings

How is it we were redeemed? Christ went to the cross as the King of Kings. He did not simply come out of it as a king. He came down from heaven as King of Kings. He died for all of us as King of Kings. He rose as King of Kings. He lives now as King of Kings. He will come again as King of Kings (Revelation 19:16). And without that perspective, everything that men see and do is out of focus.

Enlightened self-interest is still self-interest, and human brilliance is human brilliance still. Self-achievement is still self-sufficiency. Pride of accomplishment takes us no further than the greatness of man. We live in a brilliant civilization which says it is too clever to turn back toward the cross. Our science is so brilliant, our sophistication so comfortable, our way of life so easy — and the more we have, the less we can do with it. But however self may disguise itself, it will wreck the world to achieve its end.

Jesus Christ, the Son of God, who descended from heaven and made Himself of no reputation (Philippians 2:7) in order to win men back to God, tasted death for every one of us (Hebrews 2:9). Toward the redemption of our world the whole creation moves, unrealized and unsatisfied, until the day when every man will confess that Jesus Christ is King of Kings and Lord of Lords. Then He will march forth with the armies of heaven (Revelation 19:14); He will break in pieces all the kingdoms of the world and reign for ever and ever (Daniel 2:44). No millenniums of progress by brilliant men can bring that kind of redemption about.

The Christ who went to the cross to redeem us all stands at this very moment at the heart of the universe and at the heart of the world for which He gave His life. He alone is the way, the truth and the life (John 14:6).

This crucified man, Jesus Christ — what if He is the King of Kings and Lord of Lords? Pilate's question is still the question:

What have we done with Him that is called the Christ? What difference has this man upon a cross made in our private lives and in our public ministry?

Additional notes

The narration on this page is not the original recording. The tape that preserved this sermon had degraded too far to be listened to with comfort: the sound is muffled and uneven, with hiss and dropouts, and stretches of it are hard to make out at all. Rather than publish it in that state, the audio was reconstructed with ElevenLabs Studio, an AI text-to-speech tool, using a voice modelled on samples of Edward Heppenstall's own recorded sermons, and reading the edited text of this article rather than the transcript of the sermon as preached. The audio was then post-processed with ffmpeg: slowed slightly, the loud passages brought down and the levels evened out. The wording, the pauses and the delivery are therefore a machine's reading of his words, in a voice made to resemble his, not his voice as it was heard in the room.