Christianity or the Church?

Christianity is presented here not as an abstract teaching to which mental assent is given, but as a life which unites separate persons in a way which can be said to be similar to the unity of the Persons of the Holy Trinity. Following the teaching of Khomiakov the author sees in "the denial of the Church the most characteristic feature of both Roman Catholicism and Protestantism." The teaching of Leo Tolstoy is seen to exemplify most clearly an understandng of Churchless Christianity. He concludes, "It must be considered the most vital necessity of the present time that Christ created precisely the Church and that it is absurd to separate Christianity from the Church..." This work was originally written in Russian in 1912, shortly before the beginning of World War I and the Bolshevik revolution. The author, an Archbishop of the Russian Orthodox Church, subsequently gave his life for his faith in a Soviet labor camp.