If Jesus’ mind was like ours, it must have been the same for him. He too must have gained in confidence with success. Once he had set out on his Ministry, his Vocation was behind him. He could not possibly doubt it once he had begun; so he became more and more confident about it. Until, that is, he was on the cross, and it was all over. Then he was free to doubt; and how ghastly it must have been hour after hour in the blazing sun, until Nature was kind for once, and tradition says there was an eclipse. Doubting one’s career is mild in comparison. If Jesus was the Messiah or Redeemer, his mind must have worked in the same way as ours; otherwise we could not possibly follow his example.
So what was it he achieved? Leaving Jewish thought behind, and expressing it in the idiom of contemporary thought, what was it he achieved? A scientist’s view of Christ’s Ministry would be that he had performed the one essential act necessary for man’s evolution to proceed. Most species go down a cul-de-sac, and from then on it is impossible for them to develop into a higher form of life. The Dinosaurs could never have developed into man, however long Nature had allowed them! And today, ants and bees could never evolve into a higher form of life; yet their social life is wonderfully complex, more so than any creature’s except ours. It must be a limited social life; not many jokes in the ant world. I like to think that bees derive some happiness from their incessant labour; perhaps bumping into the odd fairy in a cowslip as Shakespeare poetically suggested. But still not many jokes. So too among the Pharisees and Sadducees of the Gospels, not many jokes recorded. One of the few flashes of humour in the Gospels was in the answers of the blind man who washed in the pool of Siloam to recover his sight. When questioning persisted, he had the courage to ask his questioners if they too wanted to become disciples? They did not have the grace to laugh at themselves, or concede they had lost that exchange. They were abusive. What a narrow, grim, limited world, it must have been. And how Jesus must have longed to free mankind from it?
What then was this essential act? He freed man’s spirit, and with it his imagination, so that he was no longer content with the world around him. He opened up the possibility of almost limitless development of the human spirit. And the attraction of scientific thought is that it would never have allowed man’s spiritual evolution to end with the Saviour nailed to a cross, which was probably official theology’s worst mistake. It would have insisted that man’s spiritual evolution would continue till completion.
With man’s spirit freed, as he grew in maturity, he wanted to build a better world. At first it was a cloistered world. The stolid Roman lack of imagination no longer satisfied him. The Romans did lack imagination; for example, they never discovered how to harness a cart-horse properly; their collars pressed on the horse’s windpipe, and restricted the amount of work the horse could do. In the hundreds of years in which they built their huge engineering works, they never discovered they were using horses inefficiently. What a limited imagination! It is strange that Greece, for all her brilliance, never made much headway with empirical science; great strides in some parts of mathematics, but little in science. Rome made none at all. Their genius seems to have been confined to discipline, law, administration: not enough for the human soul. So to begin with Man’s spiritual freedom was within a cloistered imagination, working out the path to heaven and the correct relationship of man to God. The Church used the psalmist’s word – Salvation. It was the only thing that mattered till the Empire crashed. Then it was a question of survival.
In the Middle Ages, it was still a cloistered imagination, but Church and State went hand in hand. Yet not cloistered only; the soaring buttresses and towers of the cathedrals must have seemed like castles in heaven to those who built them and worshipped in them. Buildings never to be repeated. Plenty of imagination there! However in the end the dream faltered; and political science and natural science took its place. It is remarkable how modern and how moderate were the political views of the Marquis of Montrose, who raised Scotland for the King in the Civil War; and how little they differed from those of the Parliamentarians in the earlier years.