So long as a man confines his ideas of Christ to a rather
misty hero figure of long ago who died a tragic death, and so
long as his ideas of Christianity are bounded by what he calls
the Sermon on the Mount (which he has almost certainly not
read in its entirety since he became grown-up), then the
living truth never has a chance to touch him. This is plainly
what has happened to many otherwise intelligent people. Over
the years I have had hundreds of conversations with people,
many of them of higher intellectual calibre than my own, who
quite obviously had no idea of what Christianity is really
about. I was in no case trying to catch them out: I was simply
and gently trying to find out what they knew about the New
Testament. My conclusion was that they knew virtually nothing.
This I find pathetic and somewhat horrifying. It means that
the most important Event in human history is politely and
quietly bypassed. For it is not as though the evidence had
been examined and found unconvincing: it had simply never been
examined.
J. B. Phillips