The Offering of Man

The Christian religion is the religion of the Incarnation: God fully in man, and man fully in God. Just as our Lord Jesus Christ was exactly that, it is our divine business to be fully human by being brought into the closest possible relationship God--a relationship allowed only by the Incarnation. There must be a divine-human blend; we dare not take one without the other. We cannot be truly man without God and his church; we cannot be truly God's by offering him only part of our humanity. We fail to offer our full selves to God by making our religion exclusively intellectual, exclusively spiritual, exclusively moral, exclusively emotional, or exclusively physical. If we want the grace of God to bear upon our whole lives and upon the world, life in its wholeness must be offered to God--by worship, by prayer and meditation, by study, by obedience, by charity, by peace, and in Christ. There must be doctrinal certainty, ecclesiastical authority, and supernatural orientation. We must know the Truth, learn the Way, and lead the Life; one, or two, without the other(s) invites damnation.