Even to attempt to reproduce Jesus’ “healings”, assuming they were genuine, before one had gained enough experience to know what one was doing, would be madness. You must first have learned complete faith in the world of the Spirit. You must have discovered through your practical experience that this is a spiritual world; and have acquired at least a modest competence in it. By “the world of the Spirit”, I include not only the Divine Creative Spirit, and the soldier’s Esprit de Corps with its rather brutal spirit of Victory, but even the lawyer’s subtlety in persuading a witness to say stupid things in the witness-box of his own freewill, which of course destroys his credibility. I regard all these as spiritual affairs. Indeed I would go so far as to say that all professional discipline is spiritual. Not only do I share the old-fashioned view that the so-called “laws of nature” are relations between concepts in the scientist’s mind, rather than between the realities of Nature herself; I share Goethe’s view that the mystery of Nature far exceeds the ability of science to measure and to understand. And you must be familiar with something of this mystery, before you begin.
Nor would it be a very useful exercise to study how Jesus healed people, with his emphasis on spirit possession. That is how they thought in those days; but it is not how we think today. And when in a Reconciliation of Science and War I spoke of Christianity being about spirit possession, I meant something subtly different from the sort one is supposed to be able to exorcise. To try to imitate Jesus’ methods would simply be an example of trying to make the plans of bygone heroes fit new situations; and that is the road to catastrophe. If spiritual healing can take place at all, it must be an intensely personal affair. So I can see little point in trying to recover a true portrait of the historical Jesus. No doubt it is of considerable interest to Christians, and fascinating to Biblical scholars; but it is not of practical utility. It has historical interest only. Indeed to drive the point home, were the historical Jesus able to return to our world in some miraculous way, he would probably be completely disorientated, and have little to say to any of us. He was a Jew, wholly immersed in the provincial society of his day, and no doubt astute within it. It would be years before he found his feet in our world today, and probably never be at home in it. So he would not have much to say to us.
What he did was to set our spirits free. But that does not mean he could have foreseen how we would use that freedom. When Bach walked the 200 miles to Lubeck to listen to Buxtehude, his genius was fired so that he became the greatest composer of organ music there has ever been. But when Bach left to return to Arnstadt, probably Buxtehude only felt he had lost a promising pupil and a husband for his unattractive daughter. Similarly when Major-General Fuller wrote his memorandum ‘Strategic Paralysis as the object of the Decisive Attack’ in May 1918, I do not suppose he imagined he had provided the blueprint for General Guderian to round up the British Expeditionary Force in May 1940.