If He was content for Christ to be deluded about the nature of his manhood, will He not be ready to allow us to be deluded too? And the transfiguration? Was God playing with those present? Allowing them to dream? Or was it reality? And the resurrection; was that an illusion? Why should we believe the evidence of our own eyes, if God is not a god of truth, but one who allows the imagination to fantasize too much? But if Christ was immortal in every sense, then one should follow him through thick and thin.
But to go back a little in the argument; if he deliberately chose death on the cross, then we are not guilty of it. Annas and Ciaphas are; Pilate is guilty of weakness in the face of mob violence. But no-one else is guilty. Or did Jesus say to himself that we are all so evil, that he had no choice but the cross? Then we are only guilty of being part of creation! Which means, no-one is guilty. Instead we needed to evolve, if my original hypothesis was wrong.
If Christ had to die, because we are all evil, then it makes more sense to regard his death as a necessary part of evolution, which is just about the message that Grunwald’s picture of the crucifixion conveys. In the picture, God the Father stands by the cross with a smug smile on his face; and he points to the cross with a crooked finger as though to show his indifference or even contempt for the agony of Christ. On a more humane view, Christ came into a world of darkness as the everlasting light; in rather the same way as Man replaced the ghastly world of Dinosaurs with the wonderful world of thought, of language, and of tools. What a tremendous leap forward that was; but it was not enough.
Viewed in evolutionary terms, Christ’s condemnation of the cities of Bethsaida and Capernaum was unreal, in the sense that they had no real choice: only a choice which creation dictated could be decided only one way. In evolutionary perspective, Adam and Eve is the most delightful story; but we know from countless fossil remains how old the earth is, and that man has evolved from primitive species and primitive man, to his present sophistication. There was no FALL, save insofar as every man has his own fall. Arcadia is a myth; and if the Garden of Eden exists, it is in front of us, and not behind us. Christ was ignorant of all this, because he was ignorant of science. But we are not ignorant of it; and it would be the most shameful intellectual dishonesty to forget that star-dust evolved into us, and to bury our hearts and minds once more in the myths of antiquity. No doubt Jesus was the light of eternity; and the world since he lived has been an utterly different place from the darkness and superstition that preceded it. But plainly his light is not enough; we have had two world wars, and are beginning another, and Jesus’ pacifism in today’s world is madness. It would deliver us into an unspeakable slavery, which we only escaped in 1940 by the skin of our teeth. No sensible person could expect such a narrow escape again. He may be the way, the truth, and the life. But he did not lead us the whole way; and was modest enough to admit that his followers would achieve greater things than he did. So what is the next step?
In the legend of Arthur, Sir Percival fails to ask the all-important question, “Who serves the Grail?” To which the answer is, “We all do”. His failure is said in the story to lead to all the dissension and warfare between men. In modern idiom, an indwelling with God is not enough for community life. You need a comradeship between men as well. Every soldier knows that courage in battle stems from loyalty to one’s comrades: whether he has been involved in battle or not. It does not stem from fear of authority or the desire to be a hero. At a superficial level, an indwelling between men is the very fabric of society, manifesting itself as honest dealing between man and man. What about the relationship of man to God?
Surely the next step is to link an indwelling between people to an indwelling with the Divine? And this is something which in my experience does not exist at the moment. There may be a lot of talk about it; but I expect there was a lot of talk about the indwelling spirit of God in Jeremiah’s day, and yet not very much of it in evidence. My attempt to recreate the same relationship may have been inept; but surely I was at least on the right lines? At any rate in my opinion some such synthesis is the next step forward; and of course it will be different for everybody.