At the Origin of the Christian Claim

The new volume for School of Community aims at helping us to understand the passage from the religious sense in general to the event of Jesus Christ, i.e., the Christian religious experience.
Therefore, after the introduction in which all the salient aspects of the reflection on the “religious sense” are summed up, it will be very important to grasp properly all the passages that the School intends to illuminate. And this may even be done using quotations that aim at enriching the text with examples on the religious thought of peoples in history and the results of the work of great scholars. But all this must not confuse us or deviate us from our path.
The line to follow implies first of all realizing that man, in all times, from his most remote origins, has felt the need to put himself in relationship with the ultimate “mystery,” and thus various attempts have given birth to the various “religions.”
The impossibility of achieving clarity and security has made man feel the urgency or the necessity of a help offered by the “mystery” itself, that is to say, a “revelation.”
But all the affirmations in this sense in the various spiritual histories of peoples have been “surpassed” as it were by an exceptional fact: at a certain moment in history, a man, Jesus of Nazareth, not only “revealed” the mystery of God, but identified Himself with the divine.
How this event began to capture man’s attention; how it created a clear conviction; how it communicated the mystery of His Person; how it confirmed its revelation with a new and perfect conception of human life–all this will make up the most desired content of our meditation, so that the grace of the Spirit may lead us to intuit in faith the mystery of God made flesh, and to be attached to Him with all our heart.
Luigi Giussani