How little he knew of human nature in some ways; or is it more charitable to say he embodied the triumph of hope over experience.
The Church preaches that Christ overcame sin and death once for all upon the cross; which the secular man would say he manifestly did not do. Men still fear death, as children fear to go into the dark. Evil is still rampant not only in the world of affairs, and in every trade and profession, but in religion as well. He may have given some men the power and grace to resist evil, when they meet it in their lives; he may have enabled some men to fear death as little as their beds. But he did not do it for everyone, and it is no good pretending that he did. Probably Christ achieved both less and more, than he is commonly credited with doing; and it is the Church that has been trapped by the messianic prophesies into a completely unrealistic assessment of his achievements.
I accept that creeds and theology are necessary for an historic Church to survive; though Jesus’ promise to return soon may have blinded him to this elementary truth. But both are suspect. Every Sunday clergy and congregation read out from the prayer book what they say they believe. No-one seems to recognize the element of farce in having to open a book to discover what it is one believes. But all clergy do it; I have watched and listened thousands of times. I only remember two exceptions; one was a chaplain at Kings College, Cambridge, the other a curate at Warcop near Appleby. They knew the service by heart, and obviously so. Furthermore it is unlikely that any member of the congregation selected at random will agree with more than a few of the propositions in the creeds. Either his experience will not be wide enough to cover more than one or two; or if it is wide enough, his experience is likely to be different from the creed’s draftsmen’s, 1700 years ago. I expect most people recite the creeds without thinking of their experience; but they might as well be reciting a nursery rhyme. The idea that absolute truth and beauty and the sonorous interrelation of the persons of the Trinity in the Nicean creed sit majestically in some Platonic heaven is fantasy. Truth and beauty have meaning in the imagination, and nowhere else. And it requires a refined telepathy to discover whether your idea of truth and beauty is the same as mine; just as no-one knows if the impact of light on the mind, its colour and vividness, is the same for one person as for another.
One of the rewards of theology too is that it enables someone with only a little religious experience to talk as though he had rather a lot. Theology can be a mask for the charlatan and the impostor, and one meets them everywhere. Both creeds and a theological structure therefore put a premium on insincerity; but it is a necessary premium to pay to maintain a Church with any sort of coherence. With too open an acceptance or insistence that everyone’s beliefs are in fact different from everyone else’s, however true – and you would have not a Church, but a debating society. But there it is; there is the same compromise with evil both inside the Church and outside in any trade or profession. The only scheme that seems to me to avoid this compromise is the one Jesus suggested; namely a return to the theocracy of ancient Israel, and then only for a short time, between his crucifixion and his coming again within the lifetime of some of those present. For better or worse, life was created to be more complicated than Jesus thought; and for us compromise is inevitable, as it was for Agamemnon. My solution is to try to ensure that the Divine inscrutable mystery is a lifelong companion, provided He is willing; then he can share the decisions I agonize over.
As I have said, the only discipline of thought I know of that looks forward realistically to a better world is the philosophy of Natural Science. Whatever you say about Christ’s second coming, the C.of E. does not look forward to it realistically. So from an evolutionary perspective, what was Christ’s ministry all about? We can see very clearly the impact on life once man had replaced the dinosaurs. They were a dead end, and had to be eliminated somehow before man could safely appear. Many of them were small, but some were so vast and terrible that, had man appeared, there would have been no chance of his holding his own. But once out of the way, man was able to appear along with the mammals, and flourish. And with man came thought, tools, language.