In seeking to win over the hearts and minds of men and women, the one advantage Christianity has, over other religions, is to proclaim the incarnation was planned from the beginning of time, and includes us, because God seeks man’s friendship. In contrast Muslims believe, I understand, that Allah would demean himself if he sought man’s friendship. Atheists presumably think that it is all self-deception anyway. Yet the Protestant Churches continue in the present dire situation to advocate the worship of the Risen Christ to the exclusion of all else, although in 2000 years this has not improved the way the world is governed. This is not surprising as he wisely washed his hands of the problem. So in practice, the Protestant Churches’ interest in the need to maintain Law and Order is satisfied by making a few unctuous prayers about it. They concern themselves only with the individual. That is not good enough, as most people recognise. How can one pray to the Jesus that the Church venerates, “O God of battles, steel your soldier’s heart”? This high-lights the inability of the Church to offer any response to force or aggression, except submission and suffering, compatible with their Gospel. Neither clergy nor laity recognise that an era of 2000 years has ended, and that a new leadership and camaraderie are required.
Church-goers, and in particular their leaders the clergy, do not understand that it is a perfectly rational view that they have betrayed society, by washing their hands of its welfare. You would have thought that the last War, which we so nearly lost at Dunkirk, in the North African desert, and in the Atlantic, and in which Germany finished off her destruction of Europe, would have reminded the Churches of the need for Order in society. But today that all seems long ago.
To neglect the truth that the incarnation includes us, and with it a duty to administer the world properly, is surely folly, with so much at stake?
The world may not be in a happy state in 2017; but I would have thought it is fairly obvious that religious rivalries ought to be a thing of the past. We are all in danger of being blown to smithereens by an atomic war. In this situation, I do not believe that bigots of any religion have the remotest chance of building a decent, just society. We all have limited knowledge and understanding of any situation we find ourselves in, and are therefore fallible. So I would suggest that it safest to regard anyone who claims to have all the answers with the gravest suspicion, including all those who profess one-precept creeds. And safest to feel our way forward as best we can, recognising the need always to use one’s own judgement; and best of all to have a judgement unfettered by preconceptions. The Almighty is unfettered by preconceptions; and one advantage of an indwelling with Him is that one shares His lack of preconceptions. There is no licence to pursue one’s own ambitions, and a bitter pill to be told they are irrelevant; instead one has the inspiration an indwelling with Him provides.
A man must have some certainties in his life. And I began my book, Man’s Relationship with God, by claiming that reality is spirit, and that the greatest reality in this created world is a communion between two persons, or two souls, adding that any soldier would agree that comradeship is everything. If Heathcliff’s relationship with Catherine was an indwelling, it was one in which Heathcliff destroyed everyone round about himself. But then neither of them acknowledged the reality of God. And this is the danger of trying to find permanence without God; each demands too much of the other. So my attempt to seek an indwelling with another, but within the parameters of the divine indwelling, was surely an honourable aspiration of the human spirit? And Man’s Relationship with God was equally obviously the creation of a system of thought that described, and tried to validate, what I had attempted.
Francis Bacon, an incredibly intelligent if immoral man, described most of our cherished beliefs as idols of the tribe and idols of the market place. In modern language, our most cherished beliefs are part of the prevailing system of thought that our particular society has chosen to adopt. Every society has to adopt some system of thought and belief, to retain any coherence; and there is very little thought in a society outside its prevailing system. If a society tries to be multicultural, and tries to please everyone, it loses its coherence.