Other formats

    Adobe Portable Document Format file (facsimile images)   TEI XML file   ePub eBook file  

Connect

    mail icontwitter iconBlogspot iconrss icon

Salient. An Organ of Student Opinion at Victoria University College, Wellington N.Z. Vol. 21, No. 3. April 1, 1958

Anglican Society — The Christian Commitment

Anglican Society

The Christian Commitment

God is, and is the almighty, loving, and consistent creator of men who live in a real, though dependent, world, and whose destiny it is to come into a loving relationship to their creator and their fellows through the grace of God. Moreover, God's nature is not simple but is a diversity within a greater unity. This was the ground from which the Rev. Charles Harrison developed his argument concerning "The Christian Commitment" when he gave three addresses to the Anglican Society recently.'

Religion is man's total response to his total environment, and so will operate on every level of human: existence. The Christian commitment is also the Christian religion. In his Godward relation, the Christian's commitment is his response to the loving initiative of God calling him to accept his vocation of worship and leading him into the realm of numinous mystery. Out of this worshipping relationship to God, which has the three aspects of apprehension, acceptance and appropriate action, springs the Christian's relationship to his fellow men, to animate and to inanimate nature. He is not in the world to shun it, or to wallow in it, but to transform it, by acting as the loving servant of men, and the priestly steward of nature. Only thus can his worship of God be fulfilled aright.

The Christian who is living his commitment will find that by the grace of God he has become a perpetuation of Christ's Incarnation, a channel for God to work in the world, and so, as part of the Church, is able to co-operate with God in transforming the damaged world to its proper state of holiness. Only the appropriate, interdependent worship of everything and everybody, performing his God-given function blindly or consciously, can achieve that transformation which is the Atonement; when the whole world glorifies God by reflecting His nature of love and unified diversity, and does His will, when the Christian commitment becomes the Christian reward.

Here and now the commitment is expressed in the Holy Eucharist, which is the focus and climax of every aspect of man's worship, on every level of his life. The Christial must live out his commitment at the altar, in his family, at his work, in fact every waking and sleeping minute.

The Rev. Harrison, a visitor from Dunedin, is vicar of All Saints', the O. U. Parish Church.