Once you believe that God created the world and Man through the process of the evolution of Nature, it becomes rather more difficult than in the past to decide what Jesus saved us from. It was easy enough so long as people believed the Adam and Eve story; Adam let the side down, and Jesus came as the second Adam to put everything right, as a disturbed Cardinal Newman said. But if you believe that star-dust evolved into us, if you believe in Evolution to that extent, Adam and Eve have to be relegated to the children’s world of fairy stories; and you must admit that Evolution has been a triumphant success so far. It could so easily have come to an end with bacterial life, but it didn’t; life went on to evolve into mammals and Man. So it is much easier for us to think of Jesus taking us along the next step in Evolution’s progress, than of his saving us from the fate of Evolution coming to a full-stop. He introduced the idea of an Incarnation into the world, first in himself, and next in anyone who believed in him. The idea had been around for a long time; in Jeremiah and Ezekiel we read of the spirit of God coming alive in men, in their hearts and in their lives. But Jesus gave the idea flesh and blood; and this is perhaps the best excuse for his using the gruesome symbolism of the corn and wine gods of antiquity, that to believe in him we must eat his flesh and drink his blood. We must not simply try to follow him, in a nature un-regenerated by any incarnation, because we would inevitably fail. We could say he saved us from a world without hope; but that is really to use a double-negative. Much better to express what he achieved in positive language. Actually it is the Church that has tried to bring Evolution to a halt, by telling us all for 2000 years that Jesus saved us from our sins, and atoned for us. In so doing it tried to bring Evolution to a halt, in one sublime moment of the son of God nailed to a cross. And in doing so, you could say, with some justification, it became responsible for all the Christian persecutions, and all the Wars of Religion that have taken place since Jesus died.
The Liturgy of the Prayer Book and the wording of the new Common Worship amply confirm this view. In the Prayer Book, the general confession of sins, which the worshippers are expected to repeat week after week, makes it clear that they are as hopelessly sunk in sin this week as they were last; no progress of any kind has been made, despite all their promises and good intentions. If ever there was a counsel of despair, this is it. Common Worship similarly prescribes that only authorized prayers of penitence should be used; and these perpetuate the same counsel of despair. The only exception is that the Collect for Easter Day expects the worshippers one day to reign with Christ; but how people steeped in sin could possibly be fit to reign over anybody is not anywhere explained. You could say that the Church has defaulted on its mission of enabling men to become whole. To an outsider this would appear strange, as the whole tenor of the Last Discourses in John’s Gospel is that his disciples should carry on, from where he left off. And they could hardly do this, unless they displayed his courage and initiative. This is confirmed by his prophecy that in time their achievements would far exceed his, (see John Ch14 v12). This is today’s experience, particularly in War, and in Science: that the achievements of the disciple frequently leave those of the master far behind. But the difficulty is to have the original thought and to put it into practice, the exploitation of the idea is then open to anybody thrilled by the original thought. The miracle is that Jesus had the perception to see this, when Greek culture was dying and Roman culture was limited to war, law and administration.
Another way of expressing the Church’s abrogation of its duty to enable men to become whole, is to say it encouraged men to hide behind the sacrifice of Jesus; to say he atoned for their sins, that Jesus did all that was necessary, and they could shuffle out of any responsibility for putting the world to rights, because they were unworthy to take part in such a noble venture. Any excuse for being a coward is better than none, and saying that Jesus did it all makes it sound almost virtuous.