Goethe’s view was that no-one, not even the unique and majestic spirit of Jesus, could fully manifest the Creator in this world, or what amounts to the same thing – could contain within himself the full character of the Creator. And Goethe was usually right. Mohammed would certainly have agreed. He saw with perfect clarity that Jesus had nothing useful to say about running a community; and was of the opinion that the revelation of Jesus was incomplete, and that he, Mohammed, should add to it. From the very beginning Islam held that the Caliphate should be essentially a religious community. The early Fathers of the Church, and the Popes after them, had six centuries to consider the relationship between Church and State; but they were so idle they never considered it. Probably the first Christian Pope to consider it was Hildebrand, in the 11th century, whose answer was to claim, not that he was the inspiration of secular authorities in his day, but that in the name of Christ he was their Master! This was so false and so arrogant, that it led to untold evils in the following centuries. But nature abhors a vacuum, and Mohammed filled it, to the consternation of Christendom until the present day.
When you consider on the one hand, how Jesus washed his hands of the problems of running a community with the remark, “Render unto Caesar...”, which I regard as a very clever remark when he was in a very tight corner, it is obvious that Jesus had nothing significant to say about running a community. And when you consider on the other hand, how the Creator must have watched hunter-gatherers slowly growing into tribal societies over many hundreds of thousands of years, and how He must have wanted them to evolve into bigger communities, and finally into the seamless garment of civilisation, the disparity between them is there for everyone to see. Yet no-one of my acquaintance dare agree that the Gospel Jesus preached during his life in this world is incomplete. Still less dare anyone suggest how running a society could be married to the vision Jesus gave us of the relationship of God to Man. Nor when I introduce church-goers to my Religion Rewritten are they the slightest bit interested.
My vision was that ideally the relationship between man and woman, and possibly between a few men as well, should be the same type of intimacy or indwelling that is supposed to exist between God and the soul. This would mean that Salvation would have to embrace, not just God and the soul, but marriage and society as well. Furthermore there would be no conflict in one’s mind or conscience between loyalty to God and to society. This involves invoking the Divine creativeness of course; and so needs His consent and co-operation. And though success will only involve a small fraction of the community; it would set the tone for the remainder of the community. So even if relations with most other men were only a pale imitation of this indwelling, the same creativeness is here too. And what is a community, except the thoughts and loves of all its members, and their relationships with each other? What is an army, except the comradeship and discipline of all its members, welded into a coherent fighting force? In this way God can be enabled to make His spirit the leaven of society, and so help create its structure. The ethos or culture of a society will be formed or moulded by the spirit within, and not by a discipline imposed from without. It will dispense with insanities, like the multi-cultural society, which is a man-made shibboleth, and where no-one in the subcultures owes any loyalty to society as a whole. This is all set out in my books Religion Rewritten; but without exception church-goers prefer to repeat that Jesus told us everything that was necessary, despite its being glaringly obvious that he did not.