How is the religion, founded by the Son of God himself no less, likely to fare in the battle here for the hearts and minds of men? Surely that religion, or that philosophy, will win which enables men to reach their full stature as men, and so become whole human beings; irrespective of who began the religion? Only by becoming whole, will men of any culture do much to create a better world. And the world today does not share the Christian view of Jesus. Muslims think he was a deluded prophet; Jews think he was a blasphemous prophet. The secular philosopher ignores him. That is not a good start. Jesus, who was not an original thinker, he spoke as the Spirit told him to speak, chose to base his teaching on the Testament of the Twelve Patriarchs, written about one hundred years before he was born. In this he eschewed resistance to violence. This was wise at the time, with the Romans in power; but is it sensible now? His forty days in the wilderness was nothing like long enough for him to think things out afresh, but only long enough to decide which of the current philosophies to adopt, that he knew about. I think he chose well. But he was not always cautious in his speech; one of the last things he said at his trial before the High Priest was that they would see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of God, coming in clouds and glory. Well, they didn’t see it, and we have not seen it in 2000 years. Maybe he was mistaken, or maybe he was determined to be crucified; but those who heard him appear to have thought the claim insane, because they ceased to treat him with any respect. It is embarrassing for us that he talked so extravagantly. It does not help that Christians to fail to understand this.
The response of the Church has been to indulge in an extravagant adulation of Jesus. Everything he did was perfect; he never made a mistake. When he told the Phoenician woman that she was “a dog”, that was not being abominably rude, it was absolutely right. That was how Jews regarded Gentiles at that time. When he cursed the fig tree, and it withered, that was not a childish outburst of bad-temper; it was absolutely right, because it showed the power of faith. It is almost sickening! If you are human, mistakes, failures, suffering are going to be part of your experience. If they are not, you are not human. You may be a god walking around in human clothes; but whoever you are, you are not human. And part of the teaching of the Church is that Jesus was a Man!
So let us try to begin again. There are two ways for Christianity to do this; the more respectable is to leave the historic Jesus some way behind. St. Paul did; he only mentions him once in all his letters. He preached Christ crucified and resurrected; he preached the incarnation. Recently a Jesuit, in 2011, published a book, in which he said that if Evolution was true, as he believed it was and as he thought most people did, in the sense that stardust had evolved into US, then Jesus was not a second Adam to put right what had gone wrong. Nothing had gone wrong! So far as it went, Evolution had been a triumphant success. I agree. He went on to say, that meant that original sin had no place; there had been no original Adam to commit the original sin. And that meant that the doctrine of the atonement had to go as well. I agree. Finally he said that the Incarnation was planned from the beginning. Again I agree; and fifteen years earlier in my book, Man’s Relationship with God, published in 1996, I urged the reader to put himself into the position of a creator, so far as he could. And on page 225, I said it would be a mistake for you to condemn mankind to a consciousness limited to the mortal world; and on page 226, I said that you, the creator, would have to provide a Redeemer. So yes, the Incarnation was planned from the beginning.