Ideally, should the Church set out on a Crusade to persuade the man in the street that potentially the Incarnation includes him? I very much doubt it. Firstly, because there is no possibility of the present-day clergy doing this. They are obsessed with arm-waving, which is but a half-hearted attempt to indulge in the mysticism of Plotinus. And mystics have no idea how to run a civic community. Secondly, because the language of Incarnation is inappropriate in the world today. It would only be sensible to use such language in a society of completely self-effacing people; and nowadays almost everyone, so far from being self-effacing, is obsessively egotistical. Nobody wants to be normal; they want to be themselves, and different. The leaders of the Church had a golden opportunity, from Nicea in 325AD until the atomic bomb in 1945, to preach that the heart of the Gospel was that the Incarnation included us all potentially. And they threw it away, like Bethsaida and Capernaum in the time of Jesus. And it is too late to start talking in that kind of language now.
Jesus did not think much of the prospects of Bethsaida and Capernaum in the Day of Judgement. I think myself that it was an unduly harsh judgement of his, just as I think his opinion of lawyers was unduly harsh. How did it go now? Scribes, lawyers, hypocrites, you whitened sepulchres, you generation of vipers, how will you escape the damnation of hell? It may be that in a population of immortal people, the threat of the loss of immortality may be enough to preserve the coherence of a community, as I suggest in Chapter 35 of “Man’s Relationship with God”. But in this mortal world, you need a decision-making process that commands respect, which means it can be enforced, which means lawyers and a judge to reach any decision, and coercion to enforce it if need be. His opinion of lawyers shows him to have been an independently minded Galilean carpenter, who like the mystics was wholly ignorant of the problems of running a civic community. And unless you want chaos – need I say more?
It is not really credible that the Creator wanted the social development of Man to reach its zenith in the clan system, where decisions were made by the chief, and whose history was that one clan regularly massacred another. There are some virtues in the Rule of Law, even if Jesus did not recognise many of them. The trouble with mysticism is that all coherent thought, and even human character, are burned up in an adoration of the Supreme Being; with the result in the world of affairs, unless they come to their senses, mystics are incoherent.
I think the most the Church should sensibly attempt is to recognise first, that if Jesus thought the Sermon on the Mount was a blue-print for a successful society in this world, he was mistaken. It is a completely unworkable basis for one. If he intended it as a blue-print for those who aspired to be saved and admitted into heaven, it suffered from the defect that it relied on more worldly men to maintain Law and Order, and so enable the elect who were destined for salvation to keep their lily-white hands clean. In other words it was the most contemptible cynicism imaginable. It is not credible that the Creator made a world which could only be kept going by those whom He intended to reject, in order that the elect, who were quite incapable of doing anything so practical as keeping the world going, should get into heaven on their backs, as it were; that the worthy should be rejected, and the layabouts get in.
The Sermon on the Mount is a wonderful dream about another world than this. Being a Jew, Jesus would not readily have admitted that the Romans were performing a valuable, if unimaginative, public service to the Jewish nation. They were maintaining Law and Order, and allowing him to dream. Jesus, after all, told Pilate at his trial that his Kingdom was not of this world. It may be the Sermon on the Mount is the immortal life that some of us try to live alongside our mortal lives. It may permeate the world in which we live and work and have our being, but it does not for one moment replace it. The Church should say so.
Everything in the Gospels points to Jesus thinking his Second Coming would be soon. Nothing in the Gospels suggests he had ever heard of Heraclitus, or that he embraced his rather crude views on Evolution, which were the best available at that time. Jesus would I think have been deeply shocked and disappointed to have been told by God that his Second Coming would be postponed for a minimum of 2000 years, and that a more practical political theory was required, than he, Jesus, was capable of conceiving.