Great words from E. Stanley Jones

Break Jesus If You Can

There came the time when I inwardly let go. I became willing to turn Jesus over to the facts of the universe. I began to see that there was only one refuge in life and that was in reality, in the facts. If Jesus couldn’t stand the shock of the criticism of the facts discovered anywhere, if he wasn’t reality, the sooner I found it out the better. My willingness to surrender Christ to the facts was almost as great an epoch in my life as my willingness to surrender to him. In the moment of letting go I could almost feel myself inwardly turning pale. What would happen? Would the beautiful dream fade? To my happy amazement I found that he not only stood, but that he shone as never before. I saw that he was not a hothouse plant that would wither under the touch of criticism, but he was rooted in reality, was the very living expression of our moral and spiritual universe – he was reality itself.

I have, therefore, taken my faith and have put it out before the non-Christian world for these seventeen years and have said, “There it is, my brothers, break it if you can.” And the more they have smitten upon it the more it has shone. Christ came out of the storms and will weather them. The only way to kill Christianity is to take it out of life and protect it. The way to make it shine and show its genius is to put it down in life and let it speak directly to life itself. Jesus is his own witness. The Hindus have formed societies call Dharm Raksha Sabhas – Societies for the Protection of Religion. Jesus does not need to be protected. He needs to be presented. He protects himself.

-- (The Christ of the Indian Road: Abingdon Press: New York, 1925, 1927 – pp. 140-141).