Christianity and Civilization 
By Jens Tandberg 
However manifold the forms in which life is revealed, life itself 
remains always an insoluble riddle. This is true of the natural life and 
ot that of the spirit, including* the religious life: its root is never bared. 
“Your life is hid with Christ in God.” 
The more clearly we Christians 
learn to understand ourselves, the 
more convinced we shall be that the 
roots of our inner life are in Christ. 
It is he who has determined the ideals 
that govern our life. It is true, we 
often have a humiliating sense that 
the realities of our conduct are far 
from reaching the lofty standards of 
these ideals, but we are sure that, if 
we could live always in the light of 
His truth, then, and not until then, 
our personality would develop all its 
human possibilities. And we are sure, 
too, that it is this Christian faith which 
has sustained the generations in their 
labor and struggle, and that all the 
best which stirs in the nations—self- 
sacrifice, faithfulness, patriotism, a 
human sense of fellowship, and a fine 
and high intellectual life—all this 
stands in the same relation to Christ as the flowers and leaves in summer 
stand to the sun which creates the summer. 
Therefore we can not help feeling pained at the estrangement 
which in the last generation has grown up between the Christian view 
of life and that which claims to be the bearer of modern civilization. 
We are told: “If the personality is to attain its full development, 
and the race advance toward the high goals which we discern dimly in 
the distance, then we must dissociate ourselves from that view of life 
for which Christianity has made itself the spokesman.”—“It has once 
suited, it suits no more”—to quote from one of the pioneers of our age. 
“Christianity,” they say, “is in its original form a negation of the 
world, an ascetic view of life. Christ and the early Christians took it 
for granted that a world revolution was close at hand, a judgment on 
the world which would overturn all existing earthly relations. How, 
then, could they be warmed to ardor by the thought of an aspiring 
human race laboring to conquer this world? Wherever aspiration 
Bishop Tandberg 
t March 21, 1922 
