Faith & Spirit Quote by Kenneth L. Pike

A mouthful of a sentence, but the bulk is the point: Pike is trying to make "Christianity" heavy again, less a label and more an operating system. The phrasing insists that faith doesn't survive as an idea or a set of propositions; it survives only as a practiced pattern that becomes visible in human behavior. "Stands or falls" is courtroom language. It frames religion as something on trial in the world, judged by outcomes, not claims.

The engine of the quote is its ladder of lives: life of God through the life of Christ into the life of man. Pike stacks "life" repetitively to deny readers the escape hatch of abstraction. You can't retreat into theology as a private mental hobby; the argument demands embodiment. The insistence on "program" is striking for a 20th-century social scientist: it borrows the language of systems and implementation. Christianity, in this view, is less a museum of doctrines than a protocol for living that either runs in real communities or crashes.

"Concretely living Christ" signals a subtextual fight with two temptations of modern religiosity: reduction to ethics ("be nice") and reduction to metaphysics ("assent to the right beliefs"). Pike stakes out a third path: ethics powered by incarnation, belief proven by practice. Coming from a sociologist, there's also a disciplinary edge: religions are not best evaluated by what they say about themselves, but by the forms of life they produce. The quiet provocation is that Christianity's truth-claims are inseparable from its social performance; its credibility is public, not just personal.