I think the answer is that Jesus preached that the kingdom of heaven had come; whereas the prophets only preached that it would come; and the difference necessarily cost him his life. In the Protestant West this has been interpreted to mean that there is an obligation from time to time actually to do something; when Guderian’s tanks are rumbling along the road outside, it is not enough to be reading the devotions of Thomas a Kempis or Bernard of Clairvaux. There is a duty to scrounge a Piat mortar from somewhere, because that is what was likely to be available, and take a pot-shot at the leading tank. More generally and realistically, there was a duty to fight and win the cataclysmic War with Nazi Germany, with its slave-labour, death-camps and gas-chambers; and if this meant sacrificial casualties among air-crews to flatten German towns, so be it. This at least kept the Luftwaffe at home, and facilitated military victory on other battle-fronts. If the Luftwaffe had been able to deploy its strength in Russia, Russia might have gone down. The price was terrific, but it had to be paid. The supreme betrayal would have been not to fight. Conduct matters; not mysticism.
Alas within a generation a cynical contempt for the sacrifices of the war-years, and a self-hatred of everything English in some people, enabled a militant secularism to raise its head, which now threatens to destroy everything that makes England worth while. So I too decided to go my own way, and begin the journey to make sense of it all. And the first lesson I learned was that “love” does not solve all problems; it may equally well be the road to ruin. This led ultimately to the construction of my Theory of Consciousness, which is as good a way as any for reconciling the various mental disciplines necessary to keep society going.
Or could I be wrong? Wrong in thinking that Jesus was just the person who “saved” us from the darkness of the past, and set our spirits free. Perhaps he was God, the Creator himself, come back to experience his creation, and find out how grateful mankind was for its existence and for countless other mercies as well; only with this necessity that his natural birth made him forget his true identity. And only in agony and bloody sweat could he once again remember whom he truly was. If so, then the day of judgement will be an awful reality. If there is a Deity, there must come a time when we are faced by omnipotent power, constrained by no rules of which we have any knowledge. Even with the Christian God, there is no guarantee that mercy would continue. He must in the end always reject imperfection.
Clausewitz aimed for perfection. A prolific writer, in his treatise On War, which he never finished, and of which he only revised the first Chapters, he sought to write a book which would last. Not like the textbook Marshall Jomini wrote on tactics and strategy, full of practical common sense, which might soon be out of date; but a book which would give the reader an understanding of the nature of War, so that if he were caught up in war he would find himself in familiar surroundings.