There is timely saying of that searching Christian genius Kierkegaard – the great and melancholy Dane in whom Hamlet was mastered by Christ:
“For long the tactics have been: use every means to move as many as you can – to move everybody if possible – to enter Christianity. Do not be too curious whether what they enter is Christianity. My tactics have been, with God’s help, to use every means to make it clear what the demand of Christianity really is – if not one entered it.”
The statement is extreme; but that way lies the Church’s salvation – in its anti-Nicene relation to the world, its pre-Constantinian, non-established, relation to the world, and devotion to the Word. Society is hopeless except for the Church. And the Church has nothing to live on but the Cross that faces and overcomes the world. It cannot live on a cross which is on easy terms with the world as the apotheosis of all its aesthetic religion, or the classic of all its ethical intuition. The work of Christ, rightly understood, is the final spiritual condition of all the work we may aspire to do in converting society to the kingdom of God.
