The first thing to grasp about the God-World-I Triangle is that Jesus only dealt with the God-I side of the Triangle. Even his exhortation that a man should love his neighbour as himself is part of the God-I side. His injunction to forgive seventy times seven times may be what the soul longs for in its relationship with God, and in regard to real friends; but it is a hopeless basis for running any sort of society, whether just or unjust. You can always hope to give a man one chance, if the offence is such as to allow it; on rare occasions two; once in a blue moon three. But never more, unless you are careless whether your society disintegrates. And many offenders must be punished severely on their first offence; for instance, those running a protection racket. Having spent all my professional life in Law and Order, I can say with a certain authority that the Church’s views on maintaining a decent, just society are infantile. In a sense this is hardly surprising. Jesus washed his hands of the problem, as indeed he had to for political reasons, by saying, “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s”. And the Church in its determination to find everything it needs in the teaching of Jesus, is reluctant to admit that it finds nothing useful about running a society. Nor was Jesus well versed in history. In his vitriolic condemnation of the Pharisees, he was apparently unaware that the rebellion of the Maccabees kept Israel a monotheistic country and therefore gave him an audience to talk to, and was incidentally entirely the inspiration of the Pharisees. Jesus’ view of World Events must have been formed by his reading Samuel, Kings, Chronicles, where you get rather a one-sided view of the realities of power politics.
The second thing to grasp about the God-World-I Triangle is that Confucius in his Analects is absolutely right that Man’s harmonious relationship with the community is governed by tradition. Harmony on the motorway is only possible if everyone drives with good-manners. And you cannot legislate for good-manners; you can only practice them. You get a harmonious community, when everyone behaves as society expects them to behave. When some people refuse to behave properly, and seek to ride rough-shod over other people, you have to make laws to govern that part of everyday conduct; but it is an undesirable development. The public Acts of Parliament that the Victorians passed occupy slim volumes. And they were usually well drafted. Nowadays, yearly Acts of Parliament occupy three fat volumes, as well as four volumes of Statutory Instruments; and usually they are badly drafted. This is not civilisation. It is barbarian madness. Some politicians have boasted that they have abolished “Deference”, as though they had done something clever. They had done something exceedingly foolish. They had simply opened the door for the barbarians to surge through. Everyone, from the highest in the land to the most miserable and lowest, wants to be treated with a little deference: to be treated as if he or she were a human being.
Actually the only thing Confucius deals with in his Analects is the relationship of the citizen with the state. He only considers the World-I side of the Triangle. The Chinese had no belief in God at that time, so naturally Confucius does not deal with the God-I side of the Triangle. And Chapter 9 of my copy of the Analects begins, “The Master seldom spoke of...fate or humanity”. So evidently Confucius did not concern himself much with World events either. Since he concentrated entirely on the World-I side of the Triangle, it is not surprising that he got it absolutely right. Yet even he was criticised by the Legalists, who said that not everyone was capable to living up to his standards, so that the Ruler had to legislate for crime, because some people only understood the language of fear!
In the Bible the books that could be said to deal with larger issues are Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and in the Apocrypha the book of Ecclesiasticus. Jesus in his teaching never referred to these books, as far as I can remember. Islam on the other hand linked religious belief with the running of the community from the start; and Islamic political thought developed or evolved, during the centuries of conquest following the prophet’s death. However, I understand it stopped evolving in about 1250 AD, and is there still. So Islam does concern itself with the World-I side of the triangle; but whether one wants to live in a medieval world is a matter of taste.