The Way to Life

The Way to Life is a religious and ethical work by Henry Churchill King, the American Congregational minister, philosophical theologian, and Oberlin College president who lived from 1858 to 1934. The book reworks material from King’s earlier substantial study Ethics of Jesus and presents it in a more accessible form suitable for general readers and for use in church study groups, college religious organizations, and similar settings.

The central material is King’s account of the ethical teaching of Jesus as presented particularly in the Sermon on the Mount and the related teachings preserved in the synoptic gospels. King treats this material as a coherent ethical vision that can be reconstructed through careful study and that has continuing relevance for the practical conduct of modern life. The book works through the major themes of the gospel ethical teaching in turn, presenting each in language accessible to readers without specialized theological training and applying each to the practical situations of contemporary American Christian life.

King was working within the broadly liberal Protestant tradition that took the ethical teaching of Jesus as central to Christian faith and that treated the doctrinal disputes that had divided Christians across the centuries as less important than the practical moral vision that all the major Christian traditions shared. His approach to the gospel material reflects the influence of late nineteenth and early twentieth century biblical criticism, which had substantially shaped the way liberal Protestant writers understood the historical Jesus and the development of the gospel tradition.

The book belongs to the substantial body of early twentieth century American Protestant devotional and ethical writing that was being produced for the substantial audience of educated Christians who wanted serious engagement with the ethical teaching of the New Testament without the technical apparatus of academic biblical scholarship. King wrote with the particular authority of a college president and respected theologian, but the book itself is accessible to readers without theological training.

The book runs about two hundred pages and is suitable for study group use as well as individual reading. It is one of the more readable of King’s works and is a good introduction to his thought for readers approaching him for the first time. It pairs naturally with his earlier Ethics of Jesus and with his various other writings on practical Christian ethics. The broader context is the Social Gospel movement and the early twentieth century American liberal Protestant tradition.