So if we have to continue the Evolution which he fulfilled, then we are free to adapt the religion of Jesus to the modern world, without any disloyalty or presumption towards the God who created everything. Indeed we not only may, we must do it; we must reinterpret the Gospel in the light of modern knowledge, modern thought patterns and modern problems. King Alfred’s moment of deathless glory was to forgive his enemies after he had defeated them in battle, and not before he had defeated them. But you need first a vision of a society, where such forgiveness and reconciliation are worthwhile; and the creation of such a vision is the entire object of my books published on this website Religion Rewritten, particularly my Religious View of Nature & the Universe.
In the past, of course, the Church turned its back on the modern knowledge of the age. It was a Christian bishop who burned one third of the library at Alexandria, one of the wonders of the ancient world, because it was “pagan learning”. The great Popes vied with the Holy Roman Emperor as to who was to be the supreme power in Europe, rather than concern themselves with the adequacy of their religion. In time the Church became the barbarian, with the introduction of the Inquisition to suppress heresy, leading to the wars of religion of the 15th and 17th centuries. And the price the Church is paying now is that most people regard it as irrelevant to life’s spiritual problems. Is it too late for us to redeem the Church’s failure?
The advantage of the God-World-I Triangle symbolism is firstly that it enables ordinary people to see the Church’s failure in true perspective. And if it helps them to do something about it, so much the better!
I have never criticised Jesus for tackling only the God-I side of the Triangle. I have always said that to do more was beyond him, or anyone else in his position. Jung regarded Jesus as Western Man’s greatest realization of the symbol of the self: in other words the person above all whom we should seek to imitate. That does not mean that I agree with everything he did or said; nor does it mean that I think an adequate imitation of him is a creeping in the Master’s footprints. But rather in a life lived in a spirit like his, and in which we are able to claim, and indeed must claim, the same freedom of judgement and discretion to face the problems of today, that he claimed in order to face the problems of his day.
The added advantage of the God-World-I Triangle symbolism is that it makes it easier for all of us to recognise and identify the particular problem that any one of us is being asked himself to solve.