The Prodigal God, Timothy Keller

It is hard for us to realize this today, but when Christianity first arose in the world it was not called a religion.

It was the non-religion.

Imagine the neighbors of early Christians asking them about their faith. ”Where’s your temple?” they’d ask. The Christians would reply that they didn’t have a temple. “But how could that be? Where do your priests labor?” The Christians would have replied that they didn’t have priests. “But… but,” the neighbors would have sputtered, “where are the sacrifices made to please your gods?”

The Christians would have responded that they did not make sacrifices anymore. Jesus himself was the temple to end all temples, the priest to end all priests, and the sacrifice to end all sacrifices.

No one had ever heard of anything like this. So the Romans called them “atheists”, because what the Christians were saying about spiritual reality was unique and could not be classified with the other religions of the world.

The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson.

 Here is a description of Dr Jekylls struggle with his addiction to sin:

“All things therefore seemed to point to this: that I was slowly losing hold of my original and better self, and becoming slowly incorporated with my second and worse. Between these two I now felt I had to choose…”

“…To cast in my lot with Jekyll was to die to those appetites which I had long secretly indulged and had of late begun to pamper. To cast it in with Hyde was to die to a thousand interests and aspirations, and to become, at a blow and for ever, despised and friendless….”

“…I chose the better part and was found wanting in the strength to keep to it. Yes, I preferred the elderly and discontented doctor, surrounded by friends and cherishing honest hopes; and bade a resolute fairwell to the liberty, the comparative youth, the light step, leaping pulses and secret pleasures, that I had enjoyed in the disguise of Hyde.”

“I made this choice perhaps with some unconscious reservation, for I neither gave up the house in Soho, nor destroyed the clothes of Edward Hyde, which still lay ready in my cabinet. For two months, I was true to my determination; for two months I led a life of such severity as I had never before attained to, and enjoyed the compensations of an approving conscience.”

“But time began at last to obliterate the freshness of my alarm; the praises of conscience began to grow into a thing of course; I began to be tortured with throes and longings, as of Hyde struggling after freedom; and at last, in an hour of moral weakness, I once again compounded and swallowed the transforming draught.”

Get this at a second hand bookstore if you can - mine was £1.95 :)

“The Reason for God” by Timothy Keller