Christ set out on his Ministry, convinced that his vocation was to be the Messiah. At the time many people would have said he had fulfilled the messianic prophesies successfully. Apart from the charge of blasphemy, no-one accused him of wrongdoing, or sin in the vulgar sense. He had never used his extraordinary power other than to do good. And tradition says he was raised from the dead, which, if true, would seem to be the stamp of Divine approval. But 2000 years later, we have the advantage of being able to view his life and achievements in an historical perspective. And we can see that his Gospel is manifestly not striking a chord with the man in the street today; so much so that many people are saying that his Church is in its death-throes. It is not that the man in the street rejects the Gospel; he does not even understand it. So it is right to ask at least what has gone wrong; whether it was the original gospel that was flawed, in such a way that it could not adapt to changing conditions, or Church leaders who cannot preach the original Gospel in language intelligible to the ordinary man? Even the prophets modified their prophesies to meet the conditions of their age; the message was the same, but they were not plagiarists. There is great risk in repeating what Jesus said and did endlessly, because science, which is God’s gift to man as Jesus was, has proved to a degree of probability that most people accept that everything in creation evolves.
In Jesus’ day probably the idea of the permanence of substance was part of the air one breathed; no-one dared suggest a letter of the Law be changed. But modern physics has dispensed with substance; with the result that Plato’s philosophy and the Church’s theology, which thanks to Augustine was based on Plato or Neo-Platonism, are now seen to be flawed. And permanence has been modified by evolution. So can the Gospel remain unaffected?
Jesus was assisted by the prophetic tradition that led the Jews to expect a Messiah. We do not expect a Messiah nowadays; and if someone came along claiming to be one, he would be a figure of fun. Not so with Jesus; the Jews were expecting him, or someone very like him. So they listened to him. Now in fulfilling his vocation, Jesus could modify that tradition, but not reject it. He could accept the title of King; not of the House of David, because he claimed to be greater than David or Solomon, and yet confound the prophesies of a warrior-king. He could adopt the idea of the suffering servant, and reject the idea of the Gentiles paying homage to Israel, which features so largely in most of the prophets. But he could not abandon the idea that the Messiah would put everything right. John the Baptist said that the man who came after him would have a winnowing fan in his hand, and separate the good from the bad. The idea that the Messiah would only take mankind on the next step of his evolutionary progress would have been blasphemy to any Jew. It is not so to us; indeed to the man in the street, who has absorbed science without understanding it, this is common sense.
We have no prophetic tradition today. So what have we got to look forward to? The Church copes with the stark reality that our Messiah has not put everything right in two ways. Firstly, by telling the congregation every Sunday they are all miserable sinners, as hopelessly sunk in sin this week as they were last, so how can they possibly expect the kingdom of heaven to descend, and it is all their fault. Secondly, by claiming to look forward to the day of judgement, when the sheep will be separated from the goats. No preparations are being made for this coming in clouds and glory (except by the Jehovah’s Witnesses); so it is a theoretical rather than a practical expectation. In the absence of any discipline of thought that looks to the future, it is hard to see what other excuses the clergy could advance for the kingdom of heaven being in such poor shape; unless of course they were to blame themselves. In the 19th century, liberal democracy and the search for justice seemed for a time to offer hope for the future; but this was dealt a shattering blow by the First World War. In the 20th Century, the good intentions and pious hopes of the inter-war years were utterly shattered by the Second World War, in which military thought reached the very highest intellectual level.