Changing The World

Chapter One WHO IS JESUS CHRIST?

Chapter Two WHAT DO WE MEAN BY GOD?

Chapter Three 'COMMUNITY AS AN ALTERNATIVE TO LAW'

Chapter Four 'THE FIRST COMMUNITY'

Chapter Five 'POLITICAL CORRECTNESS'

Chapter Six THE MILLENNIUM

INTRODUCTION

We have recently witnessed the failure of a determined effort to change the world. The effort was made because the world needed to be changed. Up to a point, the world was changed, but the effort failed ultimately when it stopped, leaving the world in need of greater change.

Karl Marx had correctly perceived that the way we were governed, and the distribution of wealth were flawed. His principle 'From each according to his ability to each according to his need' cannot be flawed. His other principle, that belief in God is irrational in an Age of Reason, is flawed, and it explains why attempts to change the world to agree with his principles have failed.

There has to be authority in any form of civilised society. If we can accept that God is the only Authority we need, we are able to dispense with human authority, and create what appears to be a State of Absolute Freedom, because all forms of human authority, which would otherwise impinge on our freedom, are abandoned. We cannot do this if we do not believe in God, because in that case we cannot dispense with human authority, however intolerable it may become.

Marx's followers were prevented by their principles from accepting Divine Authority. It also seemed irrational to them that authority in human society should rest upon the accident of birth, so they could not accept the authority of a monarchy either. The State had therefore to be the focal point of authority in the world of their vision. The Bolshevik Revolution enabled them to transform Russia into a Marxist State, and the Marxist State, in its experimental stage, attracted the interest of intellectuals all over the world.

While intellectual pride and prejudice prevented many intellectuals from recognising the obvious flaws in the Marxist system, these were only too apparent to many ordinary people, particularly in Italy and Germany, where a different kind of authoritarian socialism emerged as Fascism. The Fascist State turned out to be more efficient than the Marxist State, but it lacked the moral credentials of Marxism, and it has long been abandoned as a credible form of society.

As these political experiments were progressing, more conservative countries concentrated on the further development of the Democratic State. Something of the justice of Marx's 'from each according to his ability to each according to his need' influenced this development, and in many cases the Democratic State became the Welfare State.

The idea that the State, rather than God, should be the focal point of authority is therefore widespread in the civilised world. The idea of State Authority replacing Divine Authority, has materialised in four main varieties - Marxist, Fascist, Democratic and Welfare. As the first two of these varieties have already been proved failures, it is fair to ask whether the remaining two can survive in tomorrow's world.

Despite the efforts of the Marxist State and the Fascist State, the world still needs to be changed. The problems of social justice and a flawed distribution of wealth have not been solved, and it seems increasingly doubtful whether they can be solved by the Democratic State or the Welfare State either. We have to come to terms with the fact that the State is not God. Whatever our theology may be, we have to recognise that God is regarded by the faithful as a Higher Mind or Source of Wisdom. The State cannot be regarded in this way, because it is run by people like ourselves, some of whom are not as wise as we are.

At last, we are coming to terms with this uncomfortable fact. The all-pervasive Marxist philosophy has already destroyed the belief that the aristocracy, or the owners of large private commercial concerns are our 'betters'. This is the Age of the Common Man, and we have no 'betters', but if we can demote the aristocracy and the wealthy, surely we can demote those who have replaced them in the exercise of authority, that is to say the leaders of the Democratic or Welfare State, academics, professional classes, politicians, lawyers, bankers and bureaucrats who exercise authority over us in the Name of the State.

We need to see the State for what it really is, a machine that has been put into the hands of people who use it to exploit other people. If God is ultimately good, the State is ultimately evil. We should no longer think in terms of how justice can be achieved by changing the people in charge of the State, but of how order can be maintained in modern society without intervention by the State in our lives.

How can that be done without reverting to anarchy? The only way is to revert to the Authority of God. Anarchy is a state without authority. If we accept the Authority of God we are not without authority, but before we can accept the Authority of God we have to get our theology right. We have to be quite clear about what we mean by God. The Christian version of the Holy Trinity - Three Persons in One God - has been corrupted by the State's misconception of religion into the secular version of Three Faiths in One God, that is to say Judaism, Christianity and Islam. The State hopes they can be relied upon always to treat one another as bad neighbours, and that they never unite to challenge the authority of the State. So long as these three Faiths behave as the State wants them to behave, atheists, for whom the State is all, will go on insisting that as God cannot be as He seems to be in our divided and muddled theology, He does not exist at all.

Despite the efforts of the State in its many forms, we still live in a world that desperately needs to be changed, but we have to write off politics as a way of changing things for the better. The State concept is fundamentally evil. The State will always consist of people, many of whom will not be as wise as we are, so we should be able to manage our affairs better without their interference. Finding a just solution to the world's problems means finding a theology that is universally acceptable, and which restores the Authority of God as it challenges the inevitable injustice that is found in all forms of human authority.

Undoubtedly Christianity has an important role to play in this universal theology, but the prophetic and mystical aspect of Christianity has to be isolated from the dross of fundamentalism and ecclesiastical authority. The Reality has to be isolated from the ritual. The sacrifice of self to enable Christ to come again is the ultimate duty of the Christian, whatever his place in the ecclesiastical hierarchy, lay or ordained. It therefore follows that, in the coming Kingdom of Christ, the hierarchical differences within the Church will vanish. Christ will have come again. He will be present among the faithful in a new Reality that will make all ritual redundant. The redundancy of ritual will make the redundancy of the priesthood inevitable. We must all learn as Christians that the sacrifice of self amounts to nothing less than the willing acceptance of our own redundancy. It means our redundancy as figures of authority in the realm of both Church and State. To resist redundancy, whether as priests, politicians, bureaucrats, financiers, or lawyers, indeed in every field of human endeavour in which we exercise authority to our own social or material advantage, is to resist the Coming of Christ.

For some years, I have been working on this theory, but its stark truth was brought home to me recently when I learned that I had cancer, probably a terminal condition. My immediate reaction was a decision to use the time still left to me to complete what I regard as a vocation of thinking and writing, so that my thoughts would be, so far as possible, transformed into words, and made available for others to use after my death. In a curious way, I began to see death as the sacrifice I must make. Without it, my thoughts might never be effectively known in the world. Through it, they might change the world.

This serves to remind me that the world cannot be changed without sacrifice. It does not necessarily mean the sacrifice of life itself, although that may be required in my case, but it does mean that we must all be willing to sacrifice our selfish nature, and our selfish determination to hold on to the decaying world of Mammon, comfortable though our social and material state within that world may be. Our fear of the unknown, and the Ego's reluctance to submit to the superior wisdom of God, prevents us from abandoning a way of life, with which civilised man has been familiar for thousands of years, but which has become so unsatisfactory that it is now in need of fundamental change.

This book sets out to show how it can be done. It supplements my book, 'New Age One', finished a year ago, but still unpublished, and a mass of unpublished material, which marks the development of ideas which climax in the belief that human authority of all kinds is challenged by Divine Wisdom, and that it cannot withstand that challenge once it is pressed with sufficient determination. The anarchy that will result from an inevitable collapse of human authority can be averted if we undergo a process of spiritual renewal before it happens, so that our depraved human nature is transformed into the Perfect Nature of Christ, and we not only follow, but, by the Grace of God become, His Example. Simple reason then assures us that the coercive authority of the law, exemplifying the exercise of human authority, will be replaced by the Exemplary Authority of Christ. Order will still be maintained.

Just as cancer will cause my life to collapse, whether I complete my vocation of writing or not, the political, legal and financial conventions of the world are bound to collapse in the relatively near future, whether we have prepared for this by a process of spiritual renewal or not. The collapse of these conventions will happen after my death, so it does not greatly concern me, but I feel that preparing others for the inevitable is part of what I have to do to prepare myself for the inevitability of death. To pass into eternity with a vocation unfulfilled will not assist the peaceful transformation from one form of existence to another which I hope for.

Although I have been a regular worshipper at an Anglican Church for many years, and have made other contacts with Christian Communities, I have always found that my interest in the prophetic causes tension. I see the Second Coming of Christ simply as the transformation of human nature into the Perfect Nature of Christ, and the function of the Church, and every Christian Community, as enabling that transformation to happen, but I have yet to find that agenda of transformation given the priority it deserves. Agendas laid down by Church or Community leaders, which give no priority to the spiritual transformation of man, seem to lack Divine Inspiration, and I feel that I have more important things to do than support them.

Christ will come again in glory to live and reign for ever, but if we regard His Coming as some kind of celestial fireworks display to be put on for our benefit by God. we will wait for Him for ever. The Divine Initiative was taken at Calvary, and the Risen Christ waits for our response when we follow and, by the Grace of God become, His Example. The comfortable routines and rituals of Church life, choir, candles, organ, bells, flowers, fund raising, fetes, P.C.C. and Synod have little to do with the transformation of human nature, although this is the Church's only valid reason for existence.

Instead of waiting for Christ's Second Coming, we should initiate it by rejecting the pattern of this world, and by letting ourselves be transformed by the renewal of our minds (Romans 12 v 2), for we have no other way of preparing ourselves for the indwelling of the Holy Spirit of God, and Christ has no other way of coming to live in us.

So mine is a vision which distinguishes between the authority of the Church and the Will of God. The tension I feel with the ecclesiastical establishment reflects that which existed between Christ and the Scribes and Pharisees. Like the ecclesiastical establishment of today, they allowed human authority to overrule the Authority of God. Human authority in the Church is threatened with redundancy in the coming Kingdom of Christ, when the relationship between the Risen Christ and the Christian laity will be direct, and not mediated through the priesthood. We must all be willing to sacrifice ourselves that Christ may come again, and that sacrifice must be made, not least, by the Bishops and Clergy of the Church. The Exemplary Authority of Christ, when it comes to be exercised, will transcend and replace the coercive authority of the law, just as St. Paul said it would when he visualised the law being transcended by Grace.

'The Law' exemplifies the exercise of human authority. Whether we take it upon ourselves to enforce what we regard as 'God's Law', or whether we make and enforce our own laws, we are exercising our authority and not God's. The redundancy of human authority, which has to precede the establishment of God's Kingdom on earth will have to be achieved by a mixture of the popular rejection of human authority and a willingness on the part of those exercising it to sacrifice that authority.

As this theme of voluntary redundancy will recur throughout this book, I need to say something now to ease the concern of those who must one day face up to it. I have already made the point that, as in the coming Kingdom of Christ, there will be a direct relationship between the Risen Christ and the Christian laity, there will be no continuing need for a priesthood. The ultimate redundancy of the priesthood will be the final outcome of a movement which seeks simultaneously to make all paid work and all human authority redundant. Priests, therefore, are no more threatened by this movement than anyone else who works for a living today. In the perfect society we are working towards, nobody will work for a living. All work will be done voluntarily, and work itself will be made redundant if the Community judges that it does not enhance the quality of Community life.

The importance of the Community will soon become apparent to the reader. The perfect society, which the movement seeks to achieve, cannot be achieved by the recognised method of forming a political party and contesting an election, because the democratic principle, based on the assumption that we all have to be governed somehow, is challenged by the movement. The perfect society, when eventually it emerges as a reality, will be a Moneyless Society in a State of Absolute Freedom. This will be apparent from my book 'New Age One', and you cannot have Absolute Freedom in a governed society. The principles of government cannot therefore be used to bring the perfect society into existence.

This Moneyless Society in a State of Absolute Freedom is also visualised as the practical form of Christ's Kingdom on earth. It stands to reason that, in Christ's Kingdom, the only authority exercised will be the Exemplary Authority of Christ. Whereas human authority coerces us through the Rule of Law, Divine Authority simply leads us by giving us an Example to follow. We are given the freedom to follow or not to follow, but if we choose not to follow, we find ourselves as we are now, as slaves to the law, while if we reject the law without accepting the Exemplary Authority of Christ, we will find ourselves in a state of anarchy.

The movement towards the perfect society can therefore only proceed through the formation of Communities which, although they are compelled to live in our present governed society, try to live by the vision their members have of tomorrow's free society. Community members will pool their resources. All wealth will be owned by the Community. Members will not work for themselves, but for the benefit of the Community. Those who have careers, and particularly well paid careers, will be encouraged to keep them. Their earnings will boost Community funds. The 'unemployed' will be encouraged to work unwaged in the Community, doing all they can to enhance the quality of Community life.

These Communities, living in but apart from the world, will only be needed during the period of transition from the society we know today to the perfect society we look forward to. In this transitional period, many priests will regard participation in Community life as an important part of their priestly duties, although they will continue to serve their parish and receive their stipend, which they will contribute to Community funds. That, of course, is what all other Community members who have a paid career will be doing.

Towards the end of the transitional period, when the Community system has expanded enormously to include a majority of the people living in this country, the availability of paid careers will diminish and eventually dry up as the use of money diminishes and eventually dries up. This is because the creation of paid careers and the use of money will be confined to the shrinking 'governed' part of our society. The Communities will be considerably larger than they were initially, and therefore more influential on national life. A high proportion of Community members will have no paid work, and will therefore spend their time doing unwaged work within the Communities. The work of the Communities will be almost accomplished, because a majority of the people in this country, as Community members, will be living in a Moneyless Society in a State of Absolute Freedom.

At the point of achievement, all paid work and the exercise of all human authority will simultaneously come to an end. Nobody will be deprived of a paid career until the transitional period is over. Within the Communities, people will be reconciled to the redundancy of paid careers. It is what they will have been seeking to achieve. Outside the Communities, there will be a serious shortage of careers, caused mainly by the ability of technology to do our work for us, and the Communities' attraction will be that they offer the solution, which the State cannot offer, to this 'unemployment' problem, Very few of the people still living under the State system will want to go on doing so when the see the nature of the alternative, so the State system will collapse quickly when half of us have opted for the Community system.

In the beginning, the confidence of Community members will be boosted by their faith, just as the confidence of the members of the first Christian Community described in the first few chapters of Acts was boosted. The Christian Faith will take on a new dimension as a contributor to the New Age Faith of tomorrow's world in which all religious differences will be ironed out. Because they will have a positive agenda of changing the world to work towards, that confidence will not be easily lost.

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CHAPTER ONE

WHO IS JESUS CHRIST?

Theological ignorance has become a serious problem in today's world, and I am conscious of this because I am aware of my own ignorance before my life was changed dramatically at the age of 52. Until then I had been a nominal Christian, baptised into the Anglican Church and confirmed at the age of 14. The pressure on youth is to attend first to such things as education and career. School curricula do not encourage an in-depth study of theology because other things are considered more important. My experience in later life has convinced me that we desperately need a clear understanding of what theology is all about. The fact that there are so many different churches, faiths and sects, all teaching different theologies, although there is only One God, suggests that we get a flawed theology from many of them. The theological truth is important, and it should be properly taught, bearing in mind that atheism may be as much a mis-representation of the truth as the most outlandish cult religion.

Joining the Royal Navy for war service at the age of 20, I had the not uncommon experience of being put off religion by the hypocrisy of compulsory worship. I remained an occasional churchgoer after the war, but study, marriage, home building, and my career made demands on my time, and the postwar era was a time when, to the relief of all, wartime restrictions were lifted, and we were once more able to play with the toys of technology, particularly cars and television. Since the habit of theological study had not yet begun, my theology was picked up from what went on in Church, from the liturgy, lessons, sermons and hymns. I knew enough to be prejudiced.

My time as a Tax Inspector had been spent working in small towns with easy access to the sea and countryside, but, at the age of 52, I was compelled, much against my will, to work in Central London. This threat to an enjoyable lifestyle brought on a serious attack of depression, which lasted, on an off, for a couple of years. The depression could be controlled by drugs, but I was worried about possible addiction. The cure came eventually through a remarkable spiritual experience, but I found that my newly found faith was more addictive than drugs could ever be. Faith only worked as a cure so long as I kept taking it more and more seriously, and eventually my list of priorities had to change. My faith came first, the home and family next, and my career last. Paradoxically, by seeing my career as unimportant, I discovered how to work efficiently.

Fortunately I then had only six years to go to retirement because my growing interest in theology had convinced me that this is God's World, designed to function under Divine or Natural Law. Consequently the laws we make ourselves, including taxation law, are not as conducive to social harmony as the Divine or Natural Law. The monetary system is something that we have created ourselves, almost in defiance of Divine or Natural Law, because it, and the laws we have made to sustain it, is designed to meet the needs of a selfish and materialistic society. A perfect society would be unselfish and respond to spiritual rather than to material values. It would hold all wealth in common, and have no need to treat every service rendered, and every supply of goods, as requiring a corresponding financial transaction with legal significance.

The Welfare State had been invented by people who had failed to appreciate, because of their theological ignorance, that in a society based on Divine or Natural Law, people regard all wealth as the common property of the Community they are part of. The perfect state is not a Welfare State but a Charity State, which needs no army of bureaucrats, politicians lawyers and financiers to make it function. People who, in today's society waste time and effort, often confrontationally, attending to the political, bureaucratic legal and financial dimension, would have nothing to do in the perfect 'Charity State'. They could devote their time to more creative work for the benefit of the Community. The needs of the disadvantaged would be met without the need for legal or economic coercion, because everyone's response to the world around would be spiritual rather than material. Ideas like this simply do not occur to those lacking a reasonably sound grasp of theology, based not solely on the teaching of one of the many churches faiths and sects, but also on that personal experience of encounter with the Living God that religion is supposed to make possible.

The first Christians obviously did have this first hand experience of personal encounter, but that only comes across to us if we study their theology. They would have realised, as most people do when they have this experience, that God does not only exist outside the human mind. He exists inside our minds as well. That is something we learn best from our own encounter with God, but if we study theology we notice that the experience of interplay between the Divine and the human mind is well attested in sacred writing, and often referred to as the 'indwelling' of God in the human mind. This 'indwelling' guides us, redeems us, helps us to think as God thinks, and makes us wiser.

Recurrences of this experience may alert us to the possibility that God could dwell permanently in someone's mind. What we experience is usually a fleeting experience of enlightenment which comes and goes, but when it has been repeated a few times, and we become conscious of the spiritual peaks and troughs in our lives, we can contrast our attitude at a peak time with our attitude at a trough time, and imagine how different our lives would be if we could enjoy a permanent peak. With God permanently in our minds, the intervals of sin would cease.

When we think along these line, we can easily conjure up our own Myth of God Incarnate, locating it in the life of a particularly holy person we know of. We would not expect that person to be a permanent example of God dwelling in man, but we would know many instances of his behaviour that can be regarded as divine. So, taking that person's life, and taking out the 'troughs', we may have enough material to create our own Myth of God Incarnate. We can produce a story, part fact and part fiction, which portrays this life of God Incarnate in man as an example for others to follow and become.

Our Prototype of the Incarnate God has to be perfect to be convincing, and however clever we may be as writers of fiction, as we modify the life of this wonderful person in order to make him seem perfect, our understanding of what God is really like is so flawed that we cannot produce a perfect story, unless God dwells in our mind all the time we are writing it. In other words, the perfect Myth of God Incarnate has to be written by God about God.

We only need an adequate grasp of theology to realise that God dwells in our minds as well as outside our minds. During the brief periods that He does so, we can think speak, write and act as He would do. It is not therefore unreasonable to suppose that He was able to dwell in the minds of the authors of the Myth of God Incarnate long enough for the Myth to appear as if it were written by God about God.

It is therefore possible for such a Myth to be a perfect account of what a man would be like if God dwelt permanently in his mind. The value of such a Myth is that it would give all of us an Example of how to live, because the perfect life is the kind of life that God would lead if He were one of us. The Myth would have certain characteristics. It would suggest where human society goes wrong when people make their own laws instead of obeying the Divine or Natural Law that already exists. It would demonstrate the kind of freedom we would enjoy if we submitted ourselves willingly to this Divine or Natural Law instead of allowing ourselves to be coerced by man-made laws. It would make the obvious point that as the Divine or Natural Law exists anyway, it is all we need to preserve good order in the human community, and, as it ultimately has to be obeyed anyway, we are foolish to sacrifice our freedom to man-made laws, which do not exist for our benefit, but for the benefit of the people who make and administer them. Above all, it would show that the way that God exercises His authority over us allows more freedom and justice than the way that men exercise their authority over us, and that, by following the Example of the Incarnate God, we can free ourselves from the slavery of human authority.

The Myth would have its prophetic vision of what will happen to human society when people seek and find their freedom by following and becoming the Example of the Incarnate God, and abandon their attempt to create a perfect society by submitting themselves to the whims of their leaders and to the injustices of the laws that these people make. It would recognise that, even though it is to our ultimate advantage to follow and become the Example of the Incarnate God, it is not easy. We soon find that we cannot do it without abandoning our selfish Ego, and that the selfish Ego is the cause of all the trouble in our society. The confrontational side of political life, legal battles, the tension between the 'haves' and the have-nots', crime and war are all by-products of that troublesome human Ego, which must be sacrificed before we can follow and become the Example of the Incarnate God.

So, central to the Myth, there has to be the altar of sacrifice, and in the Myth that already exists under the name of Christianity, that altar takes the form of a Cross. The Incarnate God has to suffer and die in order that man may be redeemed. Then He rises from the dead, and eventually come again in glory to live and reign for ever when the whole human race has learned, with the Grace of God, to follow and become His Example. The reader may have wondered, at times, what this chapter has to do with revealing the Nature of Jesus Christ, but he may now see that it has introduced him to the One Whose Voice will still be be heard, even 2000 years after His death saying, 'Come, follow Me'.

When I worked in small towns, I hardly ever came across any Jews. When I started work in London, most of the people I encountered in my work were Jewish. The prejudices I had acquired from an inadequate theology soon began to surface. Superficially, Christianity seems to be at odds with Judaism. When we go into it more deeply, we realise that there was no such thing as a Christian Church when Christianity began. The 'Church' was Jewish, and Christianity was not challenging the Jews as we know them today, but the inflexible dogma and ritual of a system of faith that had lost touch with the Reality of God. What the early Christians said about the Jews can be said today about some Christian Churches which are so set in the inflexibility of dogma and ritual that they are out of touch with the Reality of the Living God. Such Churches are further from the Living God than many Jews are today. They cannot preach a convincing Gospel because they do not know Jesus Christ.

We have to recover the faith of the first Christians if we are to know Jesus Christ. Like us, they had to live in a world so ignorant of theology that it rejected them. Like us, they knew that they were right and the world was wrong. Like us, they knew that the Authority of God must prevail over human authority, and that no human civilisation which fails to acknowledge the Divine or Natural Law can survive.

Jesus Christ makes the Christian religion unique, but not dominant in a worldly sense, because true Christianity is a religion of freedom. It should not coerce. Christians are meant to give examples of holy living. They are not meant to make laws compelling people to obey God. Christians worship the same God as Jews and Muslims, but they do not need the Jewish Law or Torah, or the Islamic Law or Shar'ia. The important thing they fail to grasp is that, if they follow and become the Example of Christ, they do not need the laws made by Parliament either. We cannot follow the Example of Christ unless we have the Grace of God, and it is a well attested piece of Christian theology that the Law is transcended by Grace. We ought therefore to accept the Jewish and Islamic view that Torah and Shar'ia provide a higher level of justice than our secular law does. Our only challenge to Torah and Shar'ia is that they can be transcended by Grace. Laws lack flexibility, so, if we believe in greater freedom of action, we can best achieve it by following the Example of the Living God rather than by listing and following His Laws.

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CHAPTER TWO

WHAT DO WE MEAN BY GOD?

When we have made the distinction between the historical Jesus, of whom we know so little, and the Incarnate God, of Whom the Christian Faith says so much, we can dismiss the historical Jesus as irrelevant to our understanding of God. Because we know so little about him, we can make all manner of speculative guesses about him, secure in the knowledge that nobody knows enough about him to prove us wrong.

Such guesses have often been made. Those made by people with a strong sense of spirituality, and some understanding of what God would be like if He were incarnate in man, have been helpful to our understanding of God. We can even call them 'inspired guesses'. Others have been less helpful, and even damaging. Often their purpose has been to justify the exercise of human authority. A dynasty's authority could be justified by attempts to show that Jesus was an ancestor.

These attempts are both stupid and clumsy. For example, to identify Mary Magdalene as the woman most likely to have married Jesus, and to have borne children by him, is to ignore the obvious fact that if Jesus married, he is most likely to have married an unknown woman before his ministry began. None of the people he associated with in his first thirty years of life are known to history.

The Christian tradition itself has not concerned itself too much with the historical Jesus. It has tried to portray the Incarnate God, and if we study Christian theology we have no excuse for not knowing what God would be like if He were incarnate in man. When the Profile of God emerges from our study and our prayer, it stands there as the Example we must follow and become. That, essentially, is all there is to Christianity. It is a form of religious belief that should enable us to recognise, to follow and to become the Example of Christ, Who is God Incarnate in man. It all seems so simple until we try to do it. Only then do we discover that we cannot do it unless we can destroy our own selfish nature.

Unfortunately, this tradition is set in the literary context of the New Testament, which places the Incarnate God in a historic setting. Modern critical examination of the text raises serious doubts about the historical authenticity of the story told. The most important event of all in Christian theology is the Resurrection. Yet, the question asked by modern theologians is whether, as a matter of historical fact:-

1. Jesus was brought before the High Priest and Pontius Pilate to face the charges mentioned in the New Testament.

2. The trials proceeded broadly on the basis reported, and Jesus was condemned to be crucified on a Friday at the time of the Feast of the Passover.

3. His body was taken by Joseph of Aramathea to be buried in a sealed tomb, guarded by Roman soldiers, and, by the following Sunday morning, the stone sealing the tomb had been miraculously rolled away, and the body had disappeared.

4. Jesus immediately appeared to several people in the vicinity of the tomb, and made repeated appearances in bodily form to his followers over the next forty days.

Did all of these things actually happen as the New Testament says they did? Or did only some of them happen? If so, which ones? Modern Christians have to admit that few bishops and clergy preach this side of the Gospel with the certainty with which a history teacher would describe contemporary events in the history of ancient Rome, such as the Roman invasion of Britain.

Is not the real problem faced by the Christian Church today associated with the uncertainty of so many of its bishops and clergy, who continue to teach that the events described in the Bible truly were historical events, when those who have done their theological homework no longer believe that they were?

Teaching what one does not personally believe simply puts dogma before truth. It is the ecclesiastical equivalent of political correctness. Truth can be be sacrificed on the altar of political expediency, whether we are thinking of the politics of Church or State. Yet, when we take Resurrection Theology to its logical conclusion, we have to come to terms with a Resurrection Truth that has survived its own sacrifice.

This new Resurrection Theology gives the older and more orthodox Resurrection Theology its modern meaning. For it has buried the historical Jesus, and all the false political claims made about him, to leave us only with the Risen Christ. It must become the survival theology of the modern Church, and, like the Risen Christ Himself it will do more than survive. It will go on to triumph over everything. Our new vision of the Risen Christ now appears in His final glory, absolutely confident that His Message of 'Follow Me' contains the modern Theory of Everything, because it is God's ultimate challenge to the exercise of human authority and human knowledge, and it is a challenge that human authority and human knowledge cannot withstand, for wisdom is not the fruit of academic knowledge, but of the Inspiration of God.

We return from this realistic reflection on the meaning of Easter to the idea that Christianity, in a nutshell, is simply a matter of following and becoming the Example of Christ, because Christ portrays what God would be like if he were incarnate in man. It is not that easy, because the Cross has to become the altar upon which we must make our own sacrifice, and the sacrifice required of us is nothing less than our own selfish Ego. The Ego must be made to relinquish his control of the mind, for only if our minds think with the Mind of God are we able to follow and become the Example of Christ. We have to get used to the fact that everything that we are ever likely to know about God has to be 'all in the mind', for we are dealing with an Infinity and an Eternity which, by its very Nature is beyond our powers of comprehension fully to understand.

Our inability honestly to say anything more persuasive about God than that it is 'all in the mind', may encourage atheists in their atheism. If they want to be pig-headed about it, our inclination should be to let them. We can show the pilgrim the path to follow through life, but we cannot compel him to take it. If he loses his way in spite of our guidance, that has to be his problem and not ours. The only alternative to God's existence as the Source of all Wisdom is His non-existence, in which case there would be no higher authority than man's. Yet the common ground of all religious faith is the conviction that, unaided by God, even our best efforts ultimately get us nowhere. The Wisdom of God is 'all in the mind'. Either we have it or we don't. The only 'proof' of God's existence is to be found in human failure, and political failure, such as that which has recently happened in the Communist world, is human failure on a grand scale, and for the theist, proof on a grand scale.

An aspect of Christian faith inadequately taught today, because so many in the Church are uncertain of the true theology of Resurrection, is the belief which all Christians should have in the Second Coming of Christ. Yet once we get our Resurrection Theology straight, we get our Kingdom Theology straight as well, because the Kingdom of God is simply the social consequence of following and becoming the Example of the Risen Christ. As we have seen, we cannot follow and become the Example of Christ without undergoing a spiritual conversion so profound that our selfish Ego is completely destroyed, so let us try to imagine how we will be changed when that happens.

Our thoughts will respond automatically to the Mind of God, since the blockage imposed by the Ego has been removed. We will be wiser than we were, and the proof of our wisdom will be found in our unselfishness. Our concern will always be for the good of the community we are part of and not for our own individual selfish interest. We will be willing to share what we have with others. We will be willing to work for the good of the community whether we are paid for it or not. We will find greater happiness in living unselfish lives than we found when we lived selfish lives. Because we will be happy, we will be an example to others who will want to live as we do. We will have found the right path on our pilgrimage through life, so when we say to others, 'Follow me', the wiser ones will do so because they will see that only we are really getting anywhere in our journey through life.

If Karl Marx was right to say, 'From each according to his ability, to each according to his need', we will be able to demonstrate that, by our way of life, we have found out how to put his theory into practice, which is more than the Marxist State has been able to do. We will start an important controversy about whether political activity will ever be able to create the perfect society. Some of us will say that the Kingdom of God, created by those who are willing and able to follow and become the Example of Christ, is the perfect society, and that, for all our rational thought and scientific knowledge, we have to look to God, rather than to the democratically elected, the academically minded, and the professionally qualified, for the ultimate solution to our problems.

The ancients had to describe this God in the language of mythology because they had not learned the language of science. We should humbly admit that all that we have learned about science has been inspired by God, and that if He has inspired us to think rationally, we must now use rational language to praise Him.

When our faith in God finally disposes us to reject the authority of man, as it is exercised through politics and the law, it follows that we are debarred by our own philosophy from exercising authority coercively. We cannot proclaim that all authority comes from God, and expect to exercise it ourselves, other than by example, as Christ would have done. We have to conclude from this that Britain cannot be a Christian country so long as we accept the principle that our freedom has to be curtailed by the rule of law, and by the financial restraint imposed upon us by the monetary system. If we can abandon the monetary system we can abandon the laws it needs to sustain it, and if we can do that we can dispense with the need to elect politicians to make those laws.

We see that, like 'Holy Russia' we made the mistake of using political methods to enforce the principles of justice. There is obviously more justice in Karl Marx's 'From each according to his ability to each according to his need' than there is in our form of liberalism. Even so, the Marxist State that replaced Russian Christianity produced an even less just society than our own. We have to come to terms with the fact that Marx's principle only becomes workable after a programme of spiritual renewal has reached the level where a nation of individuals voluntarily accepts it. That voluntary acceptance not only allows the principle to work. It also frees the Nation from the shackles of the State. Ironically, we have to go down the road of Thatcherism, rolling back the frontiers of the State, in order to achieve practical Marxism, which only goes to prove the absurdity of taking political sides.

Our search for a political solution has led us into a blind alley, because politics and the law make no attempt to change human nature. They try to impose goodness on us through the coercion of the law, but, as the people who make and administer the laws are not as good as they should be, their enterprise is doomed to failure. Goodness, and the wisdom that goes with it, is coming more and more to be concentrated outside the political, legal, financial, professional and bureaucratic systems, as these systems come to be corrupted by the selfish ambition that drives them. This goodness must always be the focal point of authority in any stable society, so it is inevitable that in the coming New Age of Freedom, people will see that their need to be governed vanishes when they decide to follow and become the Example of Christ.

Those who believe in God should be able to see this without any difficulty, but those occupying a relatively high place in the social hierarchy may not want to see it, because there can be no high places for them in the egalitarian society of God's Kingdom. If they are wise (and occupying a high place in the social hierarchy normally requires some wisdom) they will see that we can only enjoy the fullness of life when we are no longer hampered by the Ego. A bigger problem is posed by an 'underclass' of people who, having lost their faith in God, have made themselves dependent upon the State.

Their problem is that the State cannot go on supporting them. Politicians create the fantasy that it can in order to win votes. This underclass will have to learn that God is more dependable than the politicians and bureaucrats that they now depend upon.

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CHAPTER 3 'COMMUNITY AS AN ALTERNATIVE TO LAW'

Modern Liberals are critical of Islamic law as it is practised, and many Muslims living in Britain are critical of our liberal laws. The criticism on both sides is justified because power is inevitably abused and used selfishly by those who have it. If we choose to live under the law, we automatically sacrifice our freedom to those who make and administer it. Whether the law is justified by the Ballot Box, as believers in democracy believe, or by God, as Islamic fundamentalists believe, neither the Ballot Box nor God can do much about the corruption of the human agencies employed in interpretation and administration.

Different religions interpret the Law of God differently, but the most fundamental Divine Law, acknowledged by all faiths, is the law of love. We must love God and love our neighbour, and arguably everything else we find in Divine Law is an interpretation of that fundamental principle. It is therefore the principle by which any ambiguity in law should be resolved.

This fact is probably more clearly understood by Christians than it is by Jews and Muslims, because the law of love is the only law acknowledged by Christianity. Other more detailed aspects of Divine Law are dismissed as being 'transcended by Grace'. The Sermon on the Mount emphasises the importance of the spirit in which we obey the law. We do not just refrain from murdering people, as the Divine Law requires. We go further and refrain from angry thoughts. In this way, the Laws of God can be obeyed in their entirety if we live in the spirit of the law. We do not even need to read the small print if we live in the spirit of the law, and by the primary law of love.

St. Paul was able to take this principle a step further than the teaching of Jesus, because he came into the picture after Christians had, through their experience of Resurrection, formed their theology of Christ as God Incarnate in man. St. Paul was therefore able to see Jesus as God, and to see that when we live as Jesus lived, we are living as God would live, and obviously God would live by His own laws! So Jesus had the 'Grace of God', that is to say, he thought spoke and behaved exactly as God would have done. We therefore need this 'Grace of God' before we can follow His Example perfectly. If we have this Grace, we cannot avoid obeying the Divine Law automatically. This is much the same thing as obeying the spirit rather than the letter of the law, but this new idea of spiritual transformation, whereby our flawed human nature can be transformed into Christ's Perfect Nature, became an integral part of Christian theology as a result of St. Paul's teaching.

So, while Christian theology takes over the older Jewish theology, it re-interprets the Jewish Torah, reducing it to its basic element of love, and pointing to the Example of Christ, and to the Inspiration of the Holy Spirit, rather than to the small print of the law, for any further interpretation we may need. Obviously our selfish Ego presents a huge obstacle to the inspiration of

the Holy Spirit, and it is quite impossible for us to follow and become the Example of Christ unless we have destroyed the Ego completely. This can only be done 'with the Grace of God'.

It is therefore extremely difficult to live the Christian life, and quite impossible without God's help, so it is not surprising that the secular authorities have created their own laws for us to obey in Christian countries. Yet, if we turn to God, determined to do all that we can to destroy our own selfish Ego, and seeking His Grace to help us finish the job, we should be able to accomplish what would be otherwise impossible, and live in a State of Grace in which we can at last free ourselves from the restrictions imposed upon us by the secular law. When we reflect upon the spiritual barrenness of today's society, dominated as it is by the selfish Egos of people all demanding their own way, we see that we have a long way to go before the perfect society is created by the process of spiritual renewal.

We also see that our secular form of society cannot survive, because the people we trust to run it are all as badly flawed and as spiritually barren, if not more so, as we are ourselves. Can we really trust people like these to make and administer the laws by which we live? Are they not likely to abuse their power and reward themselves out of the taxes and fees they take from us? Those at the top seem to reward themselves pretty well. Are they giving us value for our money?

We see clearly enough that the world needs to be changed from the existing political pattern to a new spiritual patter, but how how are we to begin?

The answer is to be found in the Christian theology of the Incarnate God, but it is more of a challenge than an answer. We can only get rid of the coercive authority of the law by replacing it with the Authority of Christ's Example. If we know our Christian theology, we should be able to see that Example clearly enough. Someone has to make a start by following it. If we want the New Age of Perfect Freedom to come, we cannot expect the Government to start the ball rolling. We are looking for a perfect society that does not have to be governed, and no government can be expected to participate in a programme planned to bring about its demise! The onus of changing the world falls on us, and it has to begin with the destruction of our own Ego. As we cannot achieve this by our own effort, we have to turn to God for help.

What we are ultimately contemplating is an ungoverned society. It is in the tradition of governed societies (even Communist governed societies) to allow social and material advantages to those at the top of the government hierarchy, but as our ungoverned society will have nobody at the top, it will also be an egalitarian society. Everyone will be equal, not because everyone gets paid the same amount of money, but because the concept of money and financial reckoning goes out of the same window as the concept of government. The perfect egalitarian society is one in which everyone works for the community, and not for himself, and no one expects to be paid for his work. All wealth is held in common, and there is no such thing as private property. To the obvious objection that people need the incentive of reward if they are to work, I have to reply that we are contemplating the perfect society in which human nature has been changed by the process of spiritual renewal into the Perfect Nature of Christ. We are contemplating Christ's Kingdom on earth. The material motivation that we expect in today's society will have been replaced by a spiritual motivation.

As we have seen, we cannot expect the government to bring this change about. We cannot even expect a political party to campaign on a manifesto that promises the destruction of all paid jobs, This perfect society has to be achieved outside the realm of politics and law. It has to be achieved by spiritually renewed individuals creating an alternative society within the secular State, which lives, not by the law, but by the Resurrection Faith of the early Christian Church, a faith which still remains uncorrupted by power. The Church was never the same after the conversion of the Roman Emperor Constantine, when the faith became the official faith of the Roman Empire.

We need to create an exemplary community, exemplary in the sense that the only authority recognised in the community will be the authority of example, Christ being the Exemplary Figure, and exemplary also in the sense that a Community following Christ's Example will become an example for society to follow. Because we have grown accustomed to being governed, we may question whether a Community which has no ruling hierarchy can be anything other than an anarchic muddle.

The answer is found in St. Paul's letters. A figure used by him to show how a spiritually inspired Community lives is that of the human body, with its different parts, each of which serves the well-being of the body as a whole. The Christian Community is seen as the Body of Christ, its members all contributing, as they are best able and as God calls them, to the well-being of the Community as a whole. We are all members of the One Body in this Christian Community, and the Mind of God directs the constructive contribution to be made by each member to the Community life. This happens without legal coercion if we have faith. Much effort will be saved by living in this way. When the Community pools its resources of wealth, the financial and legal aspects of transactions between the members are ignored altogether. The larger the Community, the more effort is saved. When the Community grows into nationhood, the saving will be enormous because the entire enterprise of government law and finance becomes redundant.

So long as such a nation has to co-exist with other nations in a materialist secular world, financial and legal requirements will have to be observed in business with other nations, but the ability to ignore these requirements in all internal affairs will either give people more leisure, or enable them to work more productively, as those formerly engaged in matters of law and finance are redeployed in productive industry. As this greater leisure or efficiency provides an example for other nations to follow, the example that began with the individual inspiring a community is now seen to have grown into the example of a community inspiring a nation, and then into the example of a nation inspiring the world.

In practice, the first community will both expand, and inspire the creation of other similar communities, some of which will be in other countries. There is likely to be a world wide undercurrent of spiritual growth, which, like the first Christian Communities growing in the old Roman Empire, will not seem to threaten the political establishment, until the inevitable happens, and the communities become so popular that they represent a majority of the population. Then authority will become exemplary rather than coercive, and the rule of law will end.

When we contemplate changing the world by this method, with the Example of Christ as the focal point of the Community, we come face to face with a serious flaw in today's Church, because we have to consider whether such an enterprise will be Church based. If we are going to do things in the Name of Christ, we can hardly ignore the Church!

Having decided to involve the Church, we are faced with a problem created by the divided Church, and it makes us realise what an appalling mess the Church has made of Christianity. The problem is whether the Community should be based on a geographical area, and supported by all believers, or whether it should be based on a Church congregation. A brief account of my own Parish in a North London suburb will illustrate the problem.

Geographically, the parish is long and narrow, with the result that there are two other Anglican parish churches within a mile radius of the church, in one direction, while the parish boundaries extend more than a mile from the Church in the other. The Anglican Church is a broad Church with many varieties of churchmanship on offer, and this means that London Anglicans are spoilt for choice. If they do not wish to support their own Parish Church, they are likely to have four or five other Anglican churches in a few miles' radius of their home. Quite a number of Anglicans worship outside their parish, but within our parish boundaries we have two congregations of Brethren, a Roman Catholic Church, a Methodist Church and a United Reformed Church. There is a large Jewish population, well served by synagogues and a growing number of Hindus and Muslims, together with other faiths and other Christian sects, who either worship outside the parish or in one anothers' homes. Probably up to 20% of the population is concerned with one form of religious belief or another, and ideally a local Community would be made up of all believers living locally.

The alternative of creating the Community out of the congregation of a particular church runs immediately into the problem that half the congregation probably lives outside the parish, some living 3 miles away. Where there could be over a thousand believers, not all Christian, living in the parish, that is to say up to 20% of the population, the congregation of my church is about a hundred, and spread over this wider geographical area, it would represent less than 1% of the population. Life was so much easier in medieval times when the only place of worship was the Parish Church, and people had no cars!

Forming Communities could remedy this appalling state of affairs, for we have to realise that there ought to be just the one Christian Church, that the schism between Christians and Jews in the 1st Century A.D. ought to be healed, and that we should concentrate more on what Christians, Jews and Muslims, who all believe in the same God, have in common with the other world religions. The motivation of the community should not be the ritual and dogma of a particular religious group, or the authority of an ecclesiastical establishment, but the recognition that something needs to be done to establish the Authority of God over the authority of man, because the solution to our problems is spiritual rather than political. Forming Communities that have this aim may do more to heal religious schism than all the talks that have taken place between religious leaders.

The new Resurrection Theology outlined in the previous chapter may also play its part in uniting the faithful. The dogmatic differences which divide the Churches, and which divide Christianity from other faiths, would melt into insignificance against a new Resurrection Theology that no Church has yet dared to preach.

It has to begin with the recognition that the early Christian Community, which existed before the Gospels were written, may have had a Resurrection Theology which differed from the accounts given in the New Testament. This suggestion is based on two important considerations.

One is that each of the four Gospels gives a slightly different account of what happened on the day of Resurrection, and that, although the Gospels imply that the Risen Christ made His appearances over a period of forty days, and then 'ascended into heaven', St. Paul claims that the Risen Christ appeared to him in his conversion, which occurred more than forty days after the Resurrection. This early Resurrection Theology would be closer to the theology of St. Paul than to the theology of the Gospels, which were written many years after St. Paul's letters. A Resurrection appearance could have been a dream, a spiritual experience, or a vision such as St. Paul had, and not the kind of bodily appearance described in the Gospels.

The other has to do with more recent experiences of dreams and visions and with experiences of the Holy Spirit in the modern charismatic movement. There have been several cases where young girls, about the age of puberty, who have been nurtured on Roman Catholicism, have seen visions which have been associated with the Virgin Mary. The most famous of these was Bernadette of Lourdes. They have been taken seriously by the Church as genuine spiritual experiences, after careful investigation. During the first world war, British troops fighting at Mons saw angels. These things cannot be rationally explained, but they do happen. When we think about it, the Presence of God can only be experienced in the mind. If it can influence our thoughts and produce the 'fruits of the spirit' in a charismatic church or turn us into prophets, it can also give us visions which we take to be real.

Resurrection appearances, as they were experienced by the first Christians, could have been of this nature. These first Christians were not the people who wrote the Gospels. Some modern theologians regard the Gospels as well crafted pieces of literature which do not set out to give a true historical account of what happened, but which seek rather to make a theological statement.

The important point here is that the first Christians were as convinced of the Reality of the Resurrection as Bernadette was that she had seen her lady in the grotto.

The pre-resurrection Jesus had lived at a crucial time in Jewish history. The Jewish theology of his day had developed out of Jewish experience, and a significant feature of this had been the Babylonian exile nearly 600 years earlier. This experience led Jews to have greater faith in the Authority of God than they had in the authority of men. For much of the previous 600 years, human authority had been the authority exercised over them by their overlords, because theirs had been a vassal state of a powerful empire. It would therefore have been more natural for a Jew to regard human authority as corrupt than it would have been for a Roman who was obviously proud of Roman authority. Taken to its logical conclusion, Jewish theology, like the Christian theology it gave rise to, was dismissive of any idea that man could achieve much unless he was aided by God.

Pious Jews wanted to be free of Roman rule in order to create their own theocracy. Many felt that God would assist their efforts to overthrow Roman rule by political, or even revolutionary, activity. This freedom movement culminated in the failed Jewish revolt of A.D. 66/70, and Jesus, as a pious Jew, was probably involved in it, although he probably taught that the aim of the Jews would best be realised by spiritual rather than by political activity.

Hindsight has shown that the Jews were foolish to revolt. They may have achieved their aims by avoiding political action and concentrating on spiritual renewal, but the political action they took was disastrous. As the Christian Faith lays great emphasis on seeking first the Kingdom of God, it is arguable that the 'Resurrection appearances' of Jesus were intended to emphasise even more strongly to the early Christian Community the folly of seeking political achievement when it conflicts with the Holy Will of God. It was important that they should dissociate themselves from a developing revolutionary movement that would fail.

The Resurrection appearances would have convinced these early followers of Jesus that his philosophy of seeking a spiritual solution rather than a political solution was also the philosophy of God. Herein lies the ultimate wisdom, so might not this Jesus have been the Son of God or God Incarnate in man? Inspired thoughts developed out of Resurrection appearances, and later attributed to the indwelling of the Holy Spirit were hard to distinguish from the pre-resurrection teaching of Jesus. As memories of what Jesus actually said and did faded, they would have been refreshed by Divine inspiration. The earlier Resurrection appearances had seemed vital to the development of the Christian Faith, so when the Gospels came to be written, with the hindsight of the failed Jewish revolt, they mixed historical truth with inspired thought to show the world how God would think, speak and act if He were human. Their message is important for us today, because it means that we can eventually form the perfect society simply by creating communities of people who follow and become Christs's Example. Given the Grace of God, nothing could be simpler.

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CHAPTER 4 'THE FIRST COMMUNITY'

If Christianity is essentially a matter of following and becoming the Example of Christ, it follows that this can best be done in communities where the members are not coerced into obedience by the hierarchy, but are given the Example of Christ, which can be perceived in other members of the Community, as well as in prayer and Scripture reading, to follow and become. As this becomes the way of life of the Community, it enables the living Example of Christ to emerge within the Community and to take the place of a leader or a hierarchical structure. The Example of Christ will then grow within the Community, so that the Community itself becomes an Example for others to follow. Other Communities will spring up in imitation of the first Community.

The Community system therefore has an enormous potential for growth if the first Community is successful, for it will not only expand but seed itself elsewhere. It is likely to be more effective and harmonious than the secular community of today's society, where so much effort is wasted in the confrontational side of party politics and the rule of law, and in our cumbersome financial and bureaucratic arrangements. The Christian Communities, holding all things in common, will be egalitarian, but, assuming they can make the same intelligent use of technology as secular society does, they will, by ignoring the political, legal and financial side of life, be able to use their members' efforts more economically. Their people will be working for the community rather than for themselves, and because all things will be held in common, the needs of the poor and disadvantaged will be met without the cumbersome machinery of a bureaucratic Welfare State.

If people in the Community work as hard as people do in the secular world, the uniform standard of living in the Community will be higher than the average standard of living in the secular community. It will therefore be to the material advantage of all whose material status puts them in the middle or lower half of the hierarchical pile of our society to join the Christian Community. Those at the top of the pile may lose something of their social and material standing, but, in material terms, they will still have enough, and the enormous spiritual uplift they will get from joining the Community will compensate them for their social and economic loss.

It is therefore possible to visualise an irreversible growth in Communities once the first Community has been successfully established. Members of these Communities will put their trust in God. This growth will be matched by an irreversible decline in the number of people who are still content to live in the secular community of the State where they have to put their trust in politicians, lawyers, bureaucrats and financiers. If we project this irreversible trend forwards to its logical conclusion, the Christian Communities will eventually merge into one massive Community which will be the whole world. At some point in the process, the first Nation to be wholly converted into a Christian Community will emerge, having to survive in the secular world just as the first Community had to survive in what had once been a secular Nation. The secular nature of other nations will then be challenged, not only by the Example of the first Christian Nation, but also by the growing number of Communities seeded within their own borders.

The purpose of this chapter is to consider this first modern Christian Community in the light of earlier Christian Communities and its relationship with the rest of the Nation and the rest of the world. The ideal location for such a Community would be an island where the entire population could participate in the experiment of Community living. A small self-governing island, like one of the Channel Islands would be the perfect location, but one can visualise a Hebridean island or even the Isle of Wight making its own unilateral declaration of independence from secular rule. The Community could also be located in a Community House, as monastic communities are located, and it could even survive in a city, suburb or small town, where there is a deep bond of Christian fellowship between members living in their own homes. The Iona Community, which has a Hebridean island focus, but whose Members Associates and Friends are dispersed all over the world, springs to mind as an example of a Christian Community which lacks a specific location, but nevertheless exists in spirit.

The next chapter will continue with the Community theme, reflecting on the practical consequences of further growth, leading to the creation of the first Community Nation, and to the inevitable final conclusion, when the whole world becomes the Kingdom of God.

This first modern Christian Community is obviously not the first Christian Community. We can read about that in Acts 2 and in Acts 4. The first Christian Community was a commune where all members voluntarily contributed all they had, so that it could be held by the Community for the benefit of all of its members. It was a popular experiment which attracted large numbers of people to the Christian way of life. It is possible that the entire body of Christians lived in this Community in the first days of Christianity, when their numbers were only a few thousand, and that it was the base from which the first Christian missionaries operated. The communal way of life has always been followed by some Christians, but their Communities have usually been monastic and celibate.

Because the first Christian Community was not celibate, it resembles more closely my perception of what the first modern Christian Community will be like. The missionary Gospel, preached by the first Christians, and still preached by Christians today, invites us to find the solution to all of our problems by following and becoming the Example of Christ. It is a Gospel which we believe will change the world, but the first Christians to preach it did not have our understanding of what the world is like. They did not know that America, Australia, southern Africa, northern Europe and much of eastern Asia existed, and they knew nothing of the people who lived there. Moreover, they were the underdogs, a strange new sect despised by their fellow Jews, living in a vassal state of the Roman Empire. Modern Christians, by contrast, are able to recall the time when their nations led the world.

We are only too well aware of the world's finite limits, and we should know what the business of changing the world into Christ's Kingdom entails. The first Christians could not possibly have known this, but yet they believed that it could and would be done. As we can visualise what the world will be like when it has been changed into Christ's Kingdom, the first modern Christian Community must reflect that vision if it is to become an Example for the world to follow..

For example, the perfect world cannot be a celibate society. If it was, the human race would cease to exist in a hundred years. Our Community cannot therefore be celibate. On the other hand, we know that there is a serious risk of the world becoming over-populated. Our Community must be seen to be doing something about that through partial celibacy or birth control, and by adopting a more robust acceptance of death as an ultimate cure for illness. Political correctness, obsession with a free National Health Service, and a lack of faith in eternal life have combined to destroy the more robust attitude we once had.

This robust attitude was present in the first Christians, whose faith in the Resurrection was both the means by which the world would be changed, and their assurance of eternal life. They were able to see that the most positive statement they could make to endorse their faith was their own martyrdom. That intensely spiritual and unselfish side of our nature has been gravely damaged by our politically correct obsession with a free National Health Service which ignores the quality of human life but endows all human life with a false sanctity.

Unlike the members of the first Christian Community, we live at a time when the presumption that human society must have a strong leader - an absolute monarch or a dictator - has been successfully challenged by the Liberal Establishment, which has persuaded us that governments must be 'democratically elected'. Ours is a post-monarchic, post-dictatorial, and post-imperial world. The received wisdom of today is that the common man everywhere must be allowed to choose how he is to be governed.

That may be the received wisdom of today, but the signs are that it will not be tomorrow's received wisdom. If the common man really is responsible and sophisticated enough to choose his own government, then he must be responsible and sophisticated enough to choose whether to be governed at all. He ought to be sophisticated enough to see that the party system of politics does not offer him a free choice of how he should be governed. Professional politicians have seen to it that the party system restricts the voters' freedom of choice to the two or three professional candidates selected by the political parties. It is conceivable that all of these candidates are more concerned with their own interests as professional politicians than they are with the interests of the electorate they represent. Voting for a professional politician may not be in the voter's best interest. Democracy, as we experience it in practice, does not live up to our expectation that it allows us to choose our own government. It would not matter whether our leaders are democratically elected, if they are unselfish and efficient, and being democratically elected does not make them so. Nevertheless, modern democracy has been an important step towards the freedom of the common man, even though the time has come for him to realise that he should be taking the next step.

This will require him to submit to the Authority of God in order to escape from the coercive authority of his fellow men, and he will be happy to do it if he believes that his fellow men at the top of the hierarchical structure are exploiting him through the laws they impose upon him, but which are for their benefit and not his. Once the common man can see that absolute freedom is almost within his grasp, and that the Christian Community is his means of achieving it, he will willingly sacrifice his troublesome Ego on the altar of the Cross in order to join the Community. Once these Communities begin, they are likely to be as popular as the first Christian Community proved to be, and, starting from a broader base than that of the first Christian Community, they are likely to make more rapid progress. They alone can offer the freedom we all seek, because it is a freedom that will always elude us so long as we are willing to submit to the coercion of human authority.

It would be irrational to suppose that this perfect society can be achieved through the democratic system. Instead of creating a party that advocates a change to this life of greater freedom, we have to oppose the democratic system itself. Governments speak glibly about law and order because they cannot create order by any means other than the law. Governments govern by making laws, and no law can be made which compels people to be free. The ultimate freedom we seek can only be found in the spiritual transcendence of the law. The Ship of State has entered harbour, and we must disembark to continue our pilgrimage towards the State of Absolute Freedom in independent communities.

We can only be free when others stop coercing us through military strength, violence, economic power and the rule of law. Unlike the members of the first Christian Community, we live in a world whose dimensions we know. We know who these other people are, and where they live, and we can weigh up the possibility of converting them to the faith, which enables us to see a vision of the Incarnate God, and, by the Grace of God, to follow and become His Example. We can weigh up the possibilities of getting them to see as clearly as we have seen, the direction in which the spiritual path of pilgrimage is taking us. We can weigh up whether we can convince them, as we are convinced, that this is the only way forward to the perfect society.

When others believe as firmly as I do that the world can be changed by changing human nature, they will see that the Example we must live up to in our lives is one in which we love God with all our hearts, all our minds and all our strength, and in which we love our neighbours as ourselves. Then our neighbours have nothing to fear from us, and if they follow our example, we have nothing to fear from them. We must have the faith to believe that, when the Example of Christ is again seen to be living in our world, more and more people will follow Him, and more and more people will be transformed into His Likeness. The Example will be multiplied, and there will be many Christs to follow, until eventually we are all transformed into His Likeness.

We must begin by not imposing our will on others, but by offering ourselves as an example for them to follow within the Community, so that we convert the Community itself into an Example of Christ, and establish once and for all the principle of exercising authority by example rather than by coercion. Our new theology of freedom will recognise that the wisdom of man, the political animal, is insufficient to allow him to live in a State of Absolute Freedom. Only the Wisdom of God, discovered through our spirituality, enables us to do that.

The first modern Christian Community must establish itself within the secular world we live in today. Its members will have the uncomfortable feeling of knowing what the world should be like, of knowing that it is their task to change the world into the pattern of their vision, and of nevertheless having to live in the world as it is. Forbidden the use of coercion to bring this change about, they will have to act by gentle persuasion. The law of the land will not be recognised within the Community, whose members will hold all things in common and live according to the Spirit which transcends the law. The law of the land will still have to be recognised outside the Community, but no great virtue will be attached to obeying it, because it is so badly flawed and because it is unjust. The Community's task is not to uphold the law, but to persuade people that a better way of living is to be found when the law is transcended by Grace.

Because it has to be a challenge to the exercise of human authority, not only in the secular State but sometimes also in the ecclesiastical establishment (remember Christ's attitude towards the Pharisees), this first modern Christian Community could have a hard time. Because it will be opposed to all vested interests, it will be fiercely resisted by them, but those who enjoy a challenge will enjoy being part of it. They will see themselves as playing a crucial role in establishing Christ's Kingdom on earth.

A major difference between the first Christian Community and this first modern Christian Community can be explained by the gap of roughly 2000 years which separates the two. The first Community came into being within living memory of the Resurrection. Some of its members had been Jesus' companions. They knew what happened at the Resurrection, but they could not possibly know how Christ's Kingdom would come in a world which still remained largely undiscovered. Yet they knew that Christ's Kingdom would come.

Members of the first modern Christian Community will have a clearer understanding of how Christ's Kingdom will be established in the world, because it will be their vocation to establish it, but, unlike the members of the first Christian Community, they will not have a clear understanding of what happened at the Resurrection. Yet they will still believe in it.

Theology, over the past two hundred years or so, has tried hard to recover some idea of the historical Jesus, and many today believe that there is a substantial difference between the historical Jesus, of whom so little is known, and the Christ of the Gospels, or the Myth of God Incarnate, of Whom so much is known. They are uncertain whether the Resurrection happened literally as the New Testament claims it happened, or whether it is an essential part of a cleverly constructed and divinely inspired Myth, the final outcome of which will be the establishment of Christ's Kingdom on earth. Some members of the first Christian Community knew precisely what happened at the Resurrection, but they could not begin to answer the question of how and when Christ's Kingdom would come in the end. Yet, like the members of the first modern Christian Community, they accepted the inter-dependence of the two vital elements of Christianity - the Resurrection and the Kingdom. Members of the first modern Christian Community, with their clearer view of what Christ's Second Coming really means, have to accept the Resurrection in faith, just as the first Christians had to accept the Second Coming in faith.

Members of the first modern Christian Community will have the faith, born out of experience, to believe that human nature can be changed into the Perfect Nature of Christ. They will not see the conversion of the world as an impossible task. They will see the transformation of human nature as an ongoing process, leading always to the expansion of their Christian Community and to the seeding of new ones. The success of these Communities, and the recognition that they offer modern man the freedom he seeks, will speak for itself. There will be streams of converts. Once the process has started, it will be irreversible and unstoppable, even though it will demand sacrifice. But as the sacrifice demanded is only that of the human Ego, something that is more of a nuisance to us than it is worth, most of us will be glad to make it. Ironically, the final satisfaction we can give to the Ego is to assure him that, by his sacrifice, he can change the world. The sooner he makes that sacrifice, the sooner the Kingdom of God will come.

The secular world we live in is beset by apparently insoluble social, economic and political problems because of man's folly. The leaders of the world have led us into deep trouble, and there is no political or economic solution to the problems they have created. The solution has to be spiritual. It demands a change in human nature, not least in the nature of our our leaders, but, above all it demands a change in our own human nature, because that has to happen before we can begin to see what is wrong with the world. To change the world is an urgent problem, because it is questionable whether the world can survive if the change in human nature does not begin instantly. 'Summit conferences' of world leaders will go on generating more heat than light, and leave us with rhetoric rather than results, so long as these world leaders fail to see that it is their own Ego, their own selfishness, that is ultimately challenged. Urging others to identify with the poor cuts no ice at all. World leaders have to set the world an example, and identify with the poor themselves. If they cannot do that, they should step down and let those who can take over.

But can we realistically expect that to happen? It would be wonderful if it happened, but, because it is so unlikely, we have to embark on the alternative of forming Christian Communities which can challenge world leadership and win, while avoiding the dogmatism that would discourage those who humbly follow other faiths from joining us.

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CHAPTER 5 'POLITICAL CORRECTNESS'

For the past century or more there has been a forceful movement, largely atheist but attracting many Christians and Jews, which has sought to replace the authority of God with the authority of man. It has been most successful in those highly civilised countries where the dominant religion had been Christianity.

The front runners in this movement have followed the left hand path of politics. Most Communist regimes have been officially atheist, but since Communist ideology owes much to Karl Marx's 'From each according to his ability, to each according to his need', a principle reflecting the experience of the first Christian community, Communism has been attractive to many Christians, as well as to many Jews who, like Karl Marx himself, failed to discover the spirituality of Judaism. These Christians and Jews have been willing to compromise with atheism in order to achieve politically what they see as the object of their faith.

Today, they are having to come to terms with the ignominious collapse of political Communism. Marx's principle may be sound enough as a spiritual principle, flawed though it may be as a political principle, but putting it into practice by spiritual rather than political means demands a high level of spirituality, and parting company with, or reforming, one's atheist allies. They have to acknowledge that the first Christian community succeeded, where the first Communist State failed, because the success of communal living, holding all wealth in common, depends on the unselfish attitude of all engaged in the enterprise, including the leadership.

If the enterprise began with the spiritual renewal of those taking part, that it to say, if they were all 'filled with the Holy Spirit' so that their naturally corrupt human nature had been transformed into the Perfect Nature of Christ, they would all have wanted to live in a State of Grace and been willing to abandon the concept of private property, so that all wealth would become located in the Community itself, rather than in its individual members. All work would then then have been done unselfishly for the Community's benefit, without the expectation of individual reward. As leading members of Marxist States have rewarded themselves more highly than anyone else, contravening a basic principle of Marxism and Christianity, these Marxist States were bound to fail.

Unless we have been spiritually renewed, we think selfishly of our own individual rights and rewards, and ignore our responsibilities and duties, whatever our political motivation may be. The Marxist State has failed because political Marxism has failed to overcome this selfish motivation. It has contented itself with getting a fairer deal for the previously exploited working class, with the result that everyone wants to be a favoured member of the privileged working class or Communist Party in a Communist State. The many non- members become the new underprivileged, and they are as many and as marginalised as ever. The Marxist State is therefore not an egalitarian society, in the sense that the first Christian Community became one, when it abandoned the concept of private property, creating no new privileged class in the process.

Since a Christian Community needs both leaders and scavengers, all workers should see their work as a vocation and all should earn the same living. Disabled and elderly members of the Community deserve the same living, although their contribution may be minimal. Christianity, like true Marxism, must not discriminate against those whose ability to serve the Community is limited. As the world's Marxist States have proved, political Marxism ignores this basic Marxist principle because its introduction has never been preceded by a programme of spiritual renewal. In the worldly Marxist State, workers are rewarded according to the output of their work, and those in charge expect the highest reward. Marxist principles contravene the demands of Marxist leaders.

It will be evident that no Marxist State could ever have come into existence if its opponents had taken the Christian Faith seriously. Those who saw that political Communism was flawed did not oppose it as Christians, but as politicians with different ideologies, none of which took much account of God. Some were Fascists, some were Capitalists, and some were Liberal Democrats or Conservatives. The tragedy is that believing Christians and Jews allowed themselves to be divided by politics. There were Christian Democrats, Christian Socialists and so on. Christians did not close ranks against political development, and they did not ally themselves with Jews, or with the followers of other faiths whose numbers grew when Britain became a multi-racial society. Consequently, we have now reached the point where all political leaders, and not only those of the Left, expect us to see the solution of man's problems as being in their hands and not in God's.

God has been marginalised in our society because of political activity, and although there are practising Christians and Jews in every party, giving a softer edge to political confrontation, they put their politics before their faith. One of the clear aims of Thatcherism was to roll back the frontiers of the State, and when we see the modern State enshrine the authority of man and marginalise the Authority of God, we see something profoundly Christian in Thatcherism. It is the only political ideology which, when taken to its limit, marginalises politicians, and one can see why Lady Thatcher was so unpopular with the political establishment.

The Christian world has been particularly vulnerable to the political marginalisation of God, because Christianity, unlike Judaism and Islam, does not advocate a Divine Law. The fundamental difference between Christianity and its Jewish roots comes from the Christian perception of Jesus Christ as God Incarnate in man. We have been given a clear picture of how God would behave if He were a man, so we have been given an example of Godly living to follow. We do not need God's Law to guide us if we have God's Example to follow. Christians recognise that it is an impossibly difficult task for them to follow the Example of God all the way if they have not been given the Grace of God. As following the Example of God is ultimately the same as obeying the Laws of God, they recognise that following the Laws of God all the way is an impossibly difficult task for Jews and Muslims also, when they do not have the Grace of God. That is why God's Law becomes secondary to God's Grace in Christian theology. If we have the Grace of God, that is to say if the Spirit of God dwells in us, we should be able to follow and become the Example of Christ, in which case we can manage without any Law. That is the high point of Christian spirituality, but Christians should recognise that other systems of belief have their high points of spirituality too, and that these high points are the places where the followers of all faiths can meet one another in the Presence of God.

Ironically, the Christian Church has never grasped the importance of rubbishing the law. Since there is no Christian Law, the Church upholds the laws created by 'democratically elected' governments, which have replaced Moses as lawgiver. When we take Christianity seriously we must recognise that, while the law which God gave to Moses can be transcended by Grace, it cannot be transcended by man-made laws. A solution to many of today's problems can be found by replacing the coercive authority of the law with Christ's Exemplary Authority.

The first Christians, and notably St. Paul, saw that the ancient laws given by Moses had been updated and modified by Pharisees and Rabbis who added their human gloss. This human gloss could be removed by regarding Mosaic Law as transcended by God's indwelling Spirit. Secular law, made up almost entirely of human gloss, should be seen by today's Christians as less just than the Jewish Torah and the Islamic Shar'ia. Its validity in a Christian country needs to be challenged. Political correctness, believing the legal and political establishment always to be right, confronts the belief that only God is always right.

Before we began to use the Ballot Box to validate political authority, authority was vested in the Crown, and the Crown's authority was validated by the assumption of Divine Right. It cannot be proved that God authorises Royal authority any more than it can be proved that Ballot Boxes are endowed with Divine Wisdom, but it seems more reasonable to believe in the Divine Right of Kings than in the Divine Wisdom of the Ballot Box. Belief in the Divine Right of Kings helps Kings to observe justice, because they cannot reasonably claim a Divine Right to govern unless they exercise it in a way which bears some resemblance to their subjects' expectation of God. Not to govern in this way raises the question of the validity of Divine Right. Using this analogy, when politicians' behaviour no longer lives up to what we expect from God, we must abandon any belief we may have held in the validity of the Ballot Box. We then realise that democracy has never made a claim to Divine approval and that political correctness has so marginalised God that it sees Him as a democratic irrelevance.

This raises the serious question of whether God approves of what democracy has become in the modern State. Is not our faith in the 'democracy' of party politics simply the outcome of political brainwashing? It is a serious question because the administration of justice in a democracy is through the law, and it can only be justice if the law is just. We can accept that God makes just law, but where is the evidence that Ballot Boxes have the same ability? Can laws, which owe their content to the result of elections ever be just? One might answer this by saying, 'Only when God influences the result of an election', but once we have accepted in principle that lawmaking requires the Wisdom of God, we should be able to devise something simpler than what we have if our lives are to be ruled by wisdom.

Is democracy, in today's practical context of party politics, the correct principle for us to live by? How many voters know the people whose names appear on the list of candidates well enough to assess their wisdom? Do not the majority of voters ignore the names of the candidates altogether and let themselves be influenced by their opinion of the party they represent? Would they not vote for a fool if he stood for the party they favour? Could that explain the folly of the law?

Christianity recognises that, whereas there obviously is a Divine or Natural Law, it does not have to be spelt out in pages of small print if it can be observed in the Spirit. Political correctness is a mirror image of this. The secular law does, in fact, exist in many thousands of pages of small print, but when we identify with the principles of democracy, we can save ourselves the trouble of reading the small print by keeping to the spirit of current political thought. The essence of political correctness may be be identified with the current political ethic, and not with its Christian credentials.

Political correctness affects nations which have absorbed Christian principles into the political system while abandoning their faith in God. Marxism is the classical example of this. Although Jewish, Karl Marx was profoundly influenced by Christian thought in his youth. The account in the Acts of the Apostles of the first Christian Community holding all things in common inspired his, 'From each according to his ability, to each according to his need', but it became a principle for him and not a statement of faith in God. When he lost his faith in God it became a principle that had to be achieved by political method. The collapse of Marxism as a credible political system shows what happens when Christian principles are divorced from a faith in God.

All politicians in a Christian society have heard of the Sermon on the Mount, where Jesus seeks to turn the secular principles of the materialist world upside down in order to set the downtrodden free. They have heard the Magnificat which speaks of putting down the mighty from their seat and exalting the humble and meek, and they know something of the Jewish foundations of Christianity, the Ten Commandments, the role of Moses as lawgiver, and the wisdom of Solomon. Being lawmakers themselves, they may be happier with Moses than with St. Paul's idea that the law is transcended by the Spirit. The cornerstone of Christian belief, that if we can follow and, by the Grace of God become, the Example of Christ, we can do without both law and government must be distasteful for them. That is why they like to think of their politically correct ideas as being within the Judeo-Christian tradition, whatever that may mean. If they understand the Christian tradition, they would know it has no room for political correctness. The story of Christ's temptations in the wilderness tells us that He was tempted to take the political rather than the spiritual path to His Kingdom on earth, and that He resisted the temptation. Therefore, so should we.

Marxism, inspired by the Christian experiment in communal living, promised to be the most successful of all political ideologies, but pursuing it along the political rather than the spiritual path ensured its ultimate failure. When we reflect on that, we ought to recognise that no political attempt to solve the problems of humanity is ever likely to succeed. To follow the spiritual path involves us in spiritual redemption, and when we abandon our resolve to live by 'Christian principles', or the 'Judeo-Christian tradition' in favour of Divine Grace which enables us to live by the Christian Faith itself - quite a different thing - we begin to see reason in the words of the Agnus Dei, 'O Lamb of God, Redeemer of the world, grant us your peace'. That peace which passes understanding only comes to us through redemption, when the cravings of our silly selfish Ego are stilled by the pacifying influence of the indwelling Holy Spirit of God.

When we have been redeemed, we have been turned upside down. There is the story in the Gospels of the blind man healed by Jesus who saw everything upside down when he first received his sight. The story is symbolic of what happens when we see our first vision of Christ. His world is an upside down world, and that is how it seems to us at first. Only when we begin to live in it do we recognise that the material world we have left is upside down. Seeing the world as upside down, we see the flaws in political correctness, and recognise that we must become examples of spiritual correctness if we are to put the world right.

Politicians, for all the lip service they pay to egalitarianism, are like the pigs in Orwell's 'Animal Farm'. They believe in equality, provided that some (themselves of course) are more equal than others. The Christian redemption of the world must begin with the future leaders of the world following the Example of Christ and becoming the servants of all. The Christian circle cannot be squared to create corners of authority and advantage for the leadership. The Church went wrong when it created its own corruptible hierarchy of authority, and it is not surprising that the secular authorities in Christian countries followed the Church's example by creating the very 'principalities and powers' that the Christian Faith has to destroy before the Kingdom of Christ can be established on earth.

Whatever form political authority takes , the end result of following a particular ideology is always the exploitation of ordinary people by the exponents of that ideology. The purpose of government is to create and preserve a stable society under the rule of law, and it ultimately fails when politics and the law are used to enrich those engaged in them. Human nature being what it is, politics and the law always are used as a source of enrichment by those engaged in them. This self-seeking enrichment breaches the fundamental Christian principle that the last shall be first and the first shall be last, and ignores Christ's symbolic act of washing His disciples' feet. Those in authority who ignore God bring the judgement of God upon themselves.

So it is that the unstable upside down world of political correctness is ultimately challenged by the Example of Christ. Ordinary people who are conditioned by political correctness only need to be a little more sophisticated than they are now to recognise that if they can follow, and, by the Grace of God become, the Example of Christ, they can free themselves from the coercion of the law, and need not be governed at all. The people of Eastern Europe have already challenged their politicians in this way. The challenge began in Poland, when a Polish Pope gave his people their understanding of Divine Grace.

The political correctness of Communist Eastern Europe cannot be replaced permanently by the political correctness of Liberal or Capitalist Western Europe. The replacement has to be spiritual, because the political correctness of Western Europe cannot survive the intense spiritual pressure that has to come. The Federal Europe urged on us by the political, legal and financial establishment, because it will be of advantage to them, rather than to us, is a perfect example of political correctness. The Federal Ballot Box, with large constituencies robbing small communities of a voice in government, will remove the last traces of real democracy from 'democratic' government. More privileges will be created for a larger establishment at the cost of everyone outside the establishment. When the people of Western Europe see what has been done to them in the name of political correctness, they will respond by challenging political correctness in the Name of God.

When the flaws of political correctness have been exposed, as the flaws of political Communism have been exposed, there will be no alternative political ideology to turn to. Marxism was the political alternative to the failed systems of Capitalism and Liberalism, so these systems can never be a political alternative to the failed system of Marxism. We can wander throughout eternity in the confused maze of political correctness and never find our freedom. Yet freedom is always there and always available in the fresh air of spirituality.

There was a time when the 'political correctness' of the Church was a target for cynics. Human authority, in all its forms, in all its weakness and in all its absurdity, has always been the cynics' target, and it always will be. Communism fell because the cynics kept scoring, and the political correctness of Liberal Democracy's alliance with Capitalism will fall in the same way.

Political correctness is a system of ethics which make no sacrificial demands on those who follow it. That is what most distinguishes it from Christianity. Without making sacrificial demands, no system is able to change the world. Indeed, political correctness is opposed to change. Its object is to uphold the authority of the current ruling class. Critical though it may be of yesterday's ethics, it is even more critical of the ethic of change. By regarding itself as modern, it fails to recognise that, in a changing world, it is already on the verge of redundancy.

It is today's secular version of yesterday's hypocritical religious piety, which did so much to weaken the authority of the Church, and in much the same way, it will weaken and ultimately destroy the authority of the State. Avoiding sacrifice, it has become too comfortable an ethic for survival. It cannot therefore succeed in its object of preserving decaying institutions in a rapidly changing world.

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CHAPTER 6 THE MILLENNIUM

Enough reason has been given already to question the stability of the society in which we live. What Christianity preaches about our flawed human nature, or original sin, and the path of redemption we must follow through self-sacrifice, is amply illustrated by the lives of those at the top of the social, political and economic hierarchies. They are all sinners, reluctant to follow the path of redemption, and their authority is diminished by it.

This path of redemption is open to all. If it is rejected by those in authority, it may not be rejected by ordinary people whose authority would be enhanced by following it. This path of redemption is therefore the key to authority in tomorrow's world, because it is the means of transferring authority from the leaders to the people. Our hierarchies are unstable, because their authority is unsustainable in the long term.

This instability would be the logical reason for any imminent collapse of authority. Coincidence with the millennium does not give the millennium significance, but it already has significance for many of us. It has only to coincide with the need for fundamental change in the pattern of society, to act as the catalyst for change.

The millennium, despite its obvious Christian origin, (A.D.1 is supposed to be the year in which Christ was born - it has no other significance) carries little significance in itself. The attempt to arrive at the date of Christ's birth was made some six centuries after the event, and, as modern theologians realise, the New Testament is not a particularly reliable account of the life of the historical Jesus. There is no material other than the New Testament and the Christian tradition from which to calculate the date of Christ's birth. Modern theologians believe that calculations based on the Nativity Stories suggest that B.C.4, rather than A.D.1, was intended as the date of Christ's birth. The true millennium could be 1996/1997.

The first Christians were certain that their theology of Resurrection enabled them to know how Christ thinks eternally. They regarded their inspired thoughts as coming from their Risen Lord, so they allowed these inspired thoughts to restore their fading memories of the historical Jesus. That is why the Gospels contain matter which, from a historian's point of view, is not historical at all. We now believe that they were written some forty years after Jesus' death, and we can expect the material in them to owe as much to Divine Inspiration as it owes to the memory of historical events. As the Nativity stories probably have no historical origin, we cannot expect to deduce the date of Christ's birth from them. If we were looking today for the origin of Christianity, we would not be looking for the birth of Jesus, but for the origin of the theology of the Incarnate God. It could have happened in A.D.1., but it could have happened earlier if Jesus was not the originator. If he was, it could not have happened until he was old enough to understand theology.

Christ's birthday has less significance for the faithful today than it has had at any time in history, and we have to get used to thinking, not in terms of the historical Jesus, of whom virtually nothing is known, but of the Christian Myth of the Incarnate God, which did not necessarily begin with Jesus' birth, but which is the foundation of Christianity. The theological importance of the millennium can therefore be dismissed, but in doing so we begin to use Christian theology in a different and more rational way.

Before expanding on this idea, I would like to make an interesting point regarding the millennium. Until Darwin published his 'Origin of Species' in the mid nineteenth century, most educated people read their Bibles literally as historical documents. This interest in Biblical history inspired many theological attempts to discover the historical Jesus from the scriptural material available, and to present him to the world in a more rational way than the Gospels do. These attempt were reviewed systematically by Albert Schweitzer in his 'Quest of the historical Jesus' published towards the end of the century, and his conclusion that the historical Jesus is an enigma we can never solve has caused modern theologians to distinguish, as I certainly do, between the historical Jesus, of whom virtually nothing can be known, and the Incarnate God of the Gospels, upon Whom Christian theology rests.

An earlier consequence of reading scripture literally had been an attempt to deduce from the evidence of the Old Testament, the year in which the six days of creation occurred. This was confidently regarded as B.C. 4004, and, until that date could be challenged on the basis of scientific evidence, Darwin being the main contributor, it was accepted by the educated, and initially by Darwin himself.

Modern theologians have no hesitation in accepting the Genesis story as myth, and many of them see the Gospels as documents which owe more to divinely inspired myth than they do to historical fact. They were written long after Jesus died, not by uneducated peasants, like the Jesus and the disciples they portray, but by people with a literary and theological grounding. It was not beyond their ability to work out for themselves, that reading the Genesis Myth literally gives B.C.4004 as the date of creation. It would have been natural for them, as they constructed the Myth of the Incarnate God, the Second Adam, to adopt as the date of His birth the 4000th anniversary of creation, and the birth of the first Adam. Because our tradition has erroneously taken the date of Jesus' birth as A.D.1, rather B.C.4, we have not previously noticed that the date traditionally given to the Myth of Creation, and the Myth of Adam (B.C.4004) is exactly 4000 years prior to the date which the Nativity stories sought to give to the birth of the Incarnate God.

For those who see historical significance in these myths, this means that the year 1997 commemorates not only the 2000th anniversary of the birth of Jesus, but also the 6000th anniversary of Creation and the birth of Adam. It has more theological significance than what we have come to regard as the millennium.

Having made this point, let me try to explain the rational theology which emerges when we are willing to accept myth in Scripture. It gives new insights into traditional Judaism and Christianity, and questions the traditions in a way likely to reconcile the faiths.

The Mosaic Law is represented as given to the Jews when they first emerged as a nation. The nation then went on to flourish under David, to be divided after Solomon, to lose 10 of its 12 tribes after the division, and to have the last two of its tribes carried off into captivity in Babylon. Like all ancient people, the Jews originally saw God as a national God. He brought victory over those whose Gods were less powerful, but this theology could not explain the collapse of the Jewish nation. The experience of Babylon taught the Jews that the Real God only supports a human agenda that coincides with His. Mosaic Law owes more to Jewish reflection on the aftermath of Babylon than it does to supposed events on Mount Sinai a whole millennium earlier. Modern theologians, whether Christian or Jewish, are likely to regard the Sinai story as a myth. There is no more historical evidence to support the Biblical stories associated with people like Moses and Abraham than there is to support the Biblical stories associated with Jesus. What we read in the Old Testament owes more to post-Babylonian reflection than it does to pre-Babylonian history. We lack documentary evidence of a written Bible, in any language, comparable to what we can read today in translation, in existence before the 4th Century B.C. The argument that the Old Testament, as we know it, was written with the benefit of hindsight, after the Babylonian exile cannot be challenged.

Post-Babylonian experience helped to convince the Jews of the weakness of human authority. Their status as a vassal nation for all the six hundred years between the Babylonian exile and the origin of Christianity meant that the ultimate human authority exercised over the Jews was Gentile. It is easy to use theology to compare human authority unfavourably with Divine Authority, when one cannot exercise authority oneself. The Jews rightly thought, some 2000 years ago, that Divine Rule was preferable to Roman Rule, and rightly expected Divine support for an attempt to establish Divine rule, but their theology was still not advanced enough to recognise that Divine support is only given to a movement that seeks to replace human authority by Divine Authority. It is likely to withheld from a movement that simply seeks to replace Roman authority by Jewish authority. While there would have been a common feeling among pious Jews that Roman authority has to give way to Divine Authority, only a minority, those with an advanced theology, recognised that the political overthrow of Roman rule was not God's intention. There was no need for Roman rule to be replaced by Jewish rule, because Jewish rule would only be another form of human authority, and God seeks people who accept His Authority without expecting to exercise it.

The minority of Jews who could see this emerged as the first Christians, and, to make their point to a world so much less sophisticated than our own, they had to resort, as all religions before them had done, to mythology.. By creating the Profile of God Incarnate as the Example for everyone to follow and become, they provided a theological alternative to the coercion of human authority. All authority in the new Christian tradition would be exemplary, God being the Example, and His nature would be apparent from the Profile of the Incarnate God revealed in the Christian Myth. Most modern Christian will recognise that this is not quite what today's Church teaches, but it does seem to be what the Christian Faith set out from its very beginning to achieve, and modern Christian should examine the teaching of their Church in the light of what is being revealed by modern theology. The object of Christianity can be described very briefly as giving us God's Example to follow and become. Becoming God's Example is much the same thing as becoming God, and we cannot do that without the Grace of God. The enormous difficulty of becoming a true Christian cannot ever be minimised, but that does not mean that we should give up trying and seeking God's Grace to enable us to succeed. When we become true Christians we see the triviality of the dogma and ritual which divides us, compared with the Reality that unites us.

The majority of pious Jews did not become Christian. They were all identified to some extent with the political movement to overthrow Roman rule, which ended disastrously in the crushing of the revolt, the destruction of the Temple and the dispersal of the Jews. The date of the disaster - A.D.70 - is significant for Christian theology, because the Gospels have been traditionally preached as if they were historical documents, written immediately after the Resurrection, and therefore some time before A.D. 70. Jesus was regarded as having prophesied the fall of the Temple. To suggest that the Gospels are not only more influenced by post-resurrection inspiration than by history, but also that they were written after A.D. 70 with the wisdom of hindsight is to contradict the traditional teaching of the Church, but perhaps the time has come for Christians to challenge this. By taking this modern and enlightened view of the origins of Christianity, we can rapidly reach the conclusion that the Gospel writers knew that the Kingdom of God would never be achieved by political action, because that had been tried and it had failed. Moreover, we can see the reason for the split in Judaism which gave birth to the Christian Faith. It was all a matter of loyalty to human authority. The Jews who became Christian had not supported the Jewish revolt. They were not forgiven.

The Gospel story of Jesus' temptations in the wilderness emphasises the anti-political nature of true Christianity, and that is something of utmost importance to Christians today. Their very existence should be a challenge to the authority of the State. They should use the theology of the Incarnate God to emphasise that the Kingdom of God will not be established on earth so long as we allow ourselves to be governed by human authority. Authority in a Christian society should be exemplary, Christ being the Example to follow. It should not be exercised coercively under the law.

The first Christians were nothing if not charismatic, and like today's charismatics, they knew from an inner conviction that they had a sound theology. Charismatic theology can be dangerous when people are carried away by the idea that they have been inspired by the Holy Spirit when they have not been. There is plenty of evidence of that in today's odd sects. Time is the ultimate test of authenticity because demonic inspiration has no lasting power. The fact that Christianity has survived for 2000 years convinces us of its spiritual authenticity, and provides a yardstick to judge the authenticity of spiritual inspiration today. There has to be unselfishness, charity and humility. The genuinely inspired do not want to exercise authority over others. They do not want to make money. They would rather serve and give. Jesus, according to the Gospels, washed His disciples' feet. That is the attitude which authenticates.

The irony is that the rational theology that enables us to see that the millennium has no theological significance also enables us to see Christian theology as the ultimate challenge to the validity of human government and the coercion of man-made laws. It enables us to see, not only that the political way leads to a dead end, but also how near we are to it. It shows us that the way to avoid that dead end is to use the exemplary authority of Christ as a substitute for legal authority. Doing that will change the world. Because this rational theology shows us that the world needs to be changed and how it can be done, at about the time of the millennium, the millennium may have the most profound effect. For once this rational theology is understood by all, nothing can prevent the arrival of the New Age.

The idea that all things will begin anew when the first spiritually inspired Community comes into existence and expands, first into a theocratic State, and then into a theocratic World sits comfortably with all religious belief, and when the Community is seen as modelled on the Incarnate God it can be seen to be the true expression of Christianity. When it circumvents the authority of the Church, and by doing so provides the followers of other faiths with an example of how they can circumvent the authority of their religious hierarchies, it can be the means of uniting all faiths into One Ultimate Theology that will revolutionise the way in which the world is governed. To the scientist looking for answers, it can be the Theory of Everything.

The prophecy of Nostradamus associates the 'end of the world', or as I would prefer it, the end of the 'principalities and powers of this world', or the end of the exercise of human authority, with July 1999. Like the coming millennium, it focusses our attention on this enlightened Christian theology, which must become a direct challenge to the political and legal system itself. Nostradamus' prophecy, like the millennium could be a catalyst for change, and be self-fulfilling. If enough people share my view that the time is ripe for us to challenge the validity of our economic, political and legal system, because authority exercised by coercion must give way to authority exercised by example, the 'end of the world' in the sense of the demise of human authority could happen when Nostradamus said it would.

When the collapse of Communism happened in Eastern Europe, it happened very quickly. There was little evidence to suggest terminal collapse was imminent in 1980, and there is probably as much evidence of terminal collapse in Western democracy today. Our political, legal, professional and financial establishments have lost the public respect they once had, which suggests that they are already in a state of terminal decline.

So, if the coming millennium concentrates the mind on the instability of the democratic State, because the Ballot Box and paper money, both symbols of man's invented authority over his fellow men, can no longer be regarded as having the same Authority as God has, it will hasten the demise of the democratic State, and what remains of the 'principalities and powers of this world'. Charismatic religion - it does not have to be purely Christian, and could be a synthesis between Christianity and other faiths - will make more of us aware of the Wisdom of God, and of the folly underlying the tokens of human authority, such as the Ballot Box, the Monetary System and the Rule of Law. One can confidently predict the emergence of a powerful New Age movement that will successfully challenge all political, financial and legal authority in the immediate future. Whether it will reach its climax by the end of the year 2000, or whether that will take a little longer cannot be foretold, but we can be sure that the world will be changed beyond recognition quite early in the next millennium, if not at its very beginning. That must be our hope, because to trust in human, rather than in Divine authority in the next millennium would be disastrous.

Although the millennium is a contrived occasion, it concentrates the mind on the feasibility of change. What has recently happened in Eastern Europe and what is wrong with things here become linked with thoughts that we are inextricably caught up in a process of world change organised by a Power greater than man's. What are we to do about it? The more we reflect upon it, the more we realise, if we are wise, that, as the change is for our ultimate benefit, and we can do nothing to prevent it, our best plan is to sit back and enjoy it.

Not so long ago, we thought man had all the answers. Democracy was a popular form of government, a step towards our ultimate freedom, but most of us now recognise that, in practice, it only allows us to choose between professional politicians already selected as candidates by political parties over which we have no control. True democracy would involve ordinary people more in decision making, but could it work in practice? If we are sophisticated enough to handle the freedom of self-government, we must try to achieve it by progressively reducing the intrusion of government into our lives, and by working towards a system in which we will no longer need to be governed at all.

That necessarily involves us in a programme of spiritual renewal because it places greater responsibility on us as individuals to love our neighbours, and it teaches us that theology can solve problems that politics cannot solve. The true follower of Christ follows his vocation for the joy of it, while those involved in the world of politics, law and finance expect their financial reward, which they take at our expense.

The view maintained throughout this book is that we need an objective theology, which is not distorted by dogmatism and religious prejudice. Atheism has been man's natural response to bad theology, and it can only be challenged by a good objective theology which is able to 'put down the mighty from their seat and exalt the humble and meek' for that is what people today want. They have had enough of the political, legal and financial coercion, which can never help the Common Man to achieve his freedom. We need to learn all there is to be known about the 'God Whose service is perfect freedom', and that is an appropriate millennial reflection.

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CHAPTER 7 CONCLUSIONS

The coming millennium has no significance except as a catalyst that will accelerate a change that is long overdue. Nobody in Britain today enthuses over the present government. We may soon have a different government, but it will not necessarily be a better one, and if we are not all that well governed when the millennium comes, we may lose confidence in the entire political establishment. Then, hopefully, the Church will wake up to the fact that there is more to Christianity than providing people with a place to go to on Sundays, because there is every chance that when Christianity offers an alternative to the failed system of democratic government, the offer will be accepted.

Although we are half way through the Decade of Evangelism the Church is so busy contemplating its own navel, and agonising over whether priests should be male female or homosexual, that it has missed the relevance of the Gospels to the coming Kingdom of God, and has failed to recognise that this is the time to make it happen. The need for change, combined with the catalytic effect of the millennium, could, with a little help from the Church, change the whole world.

Things are moving rapidly in Europe, and there is a determined political effort to create a Federal Europe with a single currency by the year 2000. It would be better to be in less of a hurry, but the millennium is having a catalytic effect on these negotiations too. Yet experience of European politics is enough to make cynics of us all. European politicians have never served the people of Europe well. If anything can go wrong with the present negotiations, we can be sure it will. European politicians are taking a huge risk. Although few people in Europe know what their politicians are up to, they expect it to be for their benefit because that is what the politicians tell them. If the final result turns out not to benefit the people of Europe, but only the political, legal, financial and bureaucratic establishment, the people of Europe would not hesitate to accept any offer, including the Church's, of a workable alternative to democratic government.

Political instability affects not only Europe, but the whole world. The democratic system does not work well anywhere, except perhaps in South Africa where it is so new that people like Mandela, de Klerk and Archbishop Tutu have not yet been corrupted by it. The collapse of the 'principalities and powers of this world', which theology insists will happen before the Kingdom of God can be established on earth is likely to happen in the immediate future. Something very like it has happened already in much of the Communist world, and the popular movement which rejected democratic communism can also reject democratic liberalism. .

I took an interest, just before I retired, in the question of whether laws, which depend on the whims of 'democratically elected' politicians, can be just. My career as a Tax Inspector had focussed my attention on the injustice of taxation law, which I put down to the way the law is made and administered, and it enabled me to distinguish between the administration of law and the administration of justice.

After agonising about this for some time, I was suddenly struck by St. Paul's idea that the law is transcended by the Spirit, and I saw at once that his idea could be applied to taxation law. I retired in 1980, convinced that I had devoted my working life to a vain endeavour to make a failed system work. Taxation law simply cannot be made just, and this applies to all Statute Law which originates in the minds of our very human and very fallible politicians. The Welfare State, enshrined in law, was never capable of making a just redistribution of resources to the needy, and the sooner it can be replaced by a Charity State, responding not to the Law but to the Spirit, the better it will be for all of us. Before that can happen, human nature has to be changed into the Perfect nature of Christ, so the ultimate solution is theological rather than political. Democracy, probably the most enlightened of all political systems, has reached the end of its useful life. That conviction has dominated my thinking since I retired from work in 1980.

The main benefit of a bureaucratic career is to have an adequate pension on retirement at the age of 60. Retirement is only enjoyable if it is not allowed to become a time of idleness. The happiest retired people find voluntary jobs. While I regard the study of theology and writing about it as my most important voluntary job, the others I have done have taught me an important lesson. A paid job has to be done the way the employer wants it done, but voluntary workers have no employer and no career to protect. They can do the job the way they want to. If that is unacceptable, the person being helped has to find another voluntary worker, and the voluntary worker finds something else to do. Bossy people soon learn that it does not pay to be bossy, and voluntary workers end up doing the work they do best.

The thinking man sees in this a practical kind of theology. It helps him visualise a society in which all work is done voluntarily. All the bossy people, and we do find them in bureaucracy, politics, finance and law, will find it difficult to get any help at all, and will have to reform themselves before they can lead a normal life. The workers, no longer forced to work for a living, will end up doing the work they are best at. The community will then decide how much of the work that nobody wants is sufficiently unimportant to be made redundant, and how much can be done mechanically. As the community will be one where all wealth is held in common, and everyone works for the common good, there should be no shortage of volunteers to do unpopular work that cannot be avoided. This reflects the image of the first Christian Community described in Acts 2 and in Acts 4, from which the very first Christian missions were sent out.

This first Christian Community inspired monastic communities which pool their resources and where every member works unselfishly for the common good and not for his own individual livelihood. It is the blueprint of the ultimate human society which prefers to make a theological statement rather than a political one. While democratic government may be the most civilised of political forms, it cannot produce the perfect society, because the perfect society is one that makes a theological rather than a political statement.

The change the world needs has to be made by Communities that exist as a theological statement because their members are able to show, by their own example, that people can be wholly unselfish, that they can abandon the concept of private property and pool their resources, and that they can work voluntarily without expectation of reward for the good of the Community and not just for their own livelihood, provided that they have been spiritually renewed. That theological statement will be more effective than any amount of preaching by a Church that still seeks to preserve its authority over us. It is what the Church needs to preach in this Decade of Evangelism.

When community members are seen to work voluntarily without payment, not to need money because all goods become free when all wealth is common property, and not to need coercion by 'the authorities' because the law has been transcended by the Spirit, they are making the same theological statement that the New Testament makes. This is because the Christ of the Gospels is not an historical figure, a preacher or a set of principles, but a theological statement. That, at least, is how modern theologians are beginning to see Him, and it is how the Gospel needs to be preached in the modern world

We have to grasp once and for all that the perfect society is the practical outcome of this theological statement. The whole world has to live the life of the Incarnate God of the Christian Gospels. This practical exercise in the Divine or Natural Law cannot be accomplished through the Ballot Box, even when the Natural Law Party puts up its candidates. For what can a ruling Natural Law Party do but make laws which are unnatural? The perfect society has to begin with the rejection of democratic government, not because it is democratic, but because it is a form of government. Then comes the creation of Communities, which reject the concept of private property, which question the validity of financial transactions, and the validity of the law, but which have to coexist with a society, which still clings to the tradition of government, in order to show that society how it should live.

Theology is ultimately important for all of us, but we must get our theology right and stop the drift towards being governed by Christian principles. Christ did not give us laws and principles. He gave us Himself. He is God. He is Law. He is Principle. He has made the most profound theological statement that has ever been made in His words, 'Follow Me'. By freeing us from the ultimate tyrant, our own selfishness, He leads us into the ultimate State of Absolute Freedom.

If we are up to date with modern Christian theology, and many of us may not be because it is not adequately preached even in this Decade of Evangelism, we will be asking how the historical Jesus could have thought, spoken and acted as he is reported to have done in the Gospels. The Gospels often report his unspoken thoughts. How can anyone but the thinker know what these were? The Gospels could only have included his unspoken thoughts if he himself had written them. That is a crucial theological point, because we are beginning to discover that, in a sense, He did.

If we understand the theology of the Resurrection, we can see how Jesus wrote the Gospels. The Christian Faith rests on our belief in a Living Christ. The first Christians knew this. In the power of the Holy Spirit, He could enter their minds. Today's charismatic movement is recapturing that vital element of Christian theology. The plain fact is that the Gospels do not describe the life of the historical Jesus at all. They deliberately ignore over 95% of his life, and concentrate on those features of eternal life which are relevant to the Incarnation of God in man. They confuse His Thoughts before the Resurrection with His Thoughts after the Resurrection. Post-resurrection reflection has determined how the pre-resurrection life of the Incarnate God should be reported. The Gospels are not a biography or a historical account. They are a theological statement made by God.

The fact that so much of Jesus' life went unreported is vital to what we make of the Gospels, because it proves that the writers did not think that the historical Jesus was important enough to write about. Through a prophetic spiritual experience, which gave access to post-resurrection thought as well as to pre-resurrection words and deeds, they found the Incarnate God, and used the Gospels to tell us what they had found. One could say that their minds and their hands were used by the Risen Christ to tell His own story

The rest of the Christian story is about how the Church has handled the Message. Strictly speaking, the Incarnate God does not need a priesthood to 'bring Him down to earth', as it were. The doctrine of the Holy Spirit allows Him absolute freedom of action. He will use His own channels to reach the faithful, if they are not provided adequately by the Church. The Church should help us with our faith, but if, instead of helping us it confuses us, it can be by-passed. That is why there have been so many reforming movements, and why the Church is so divided. We have a choice of channels, all of which have some validity, and that prevents any Church or sect from making a valid claim to exclusive rights. We can even get to God on our own if we have the humility to let His Holy Spirit over-rule our selfish Ego.

However we get to God, we cannot permanently isolate ourselves from the believing Community, which is the true Christian Church. If the Incarnate God of Christianity is Almighty, it follows that the Incarnate God of the Christian Community is Almighty too. That is why the account of the first Christian Community, which we read in the first five chapters of the Acts of the Apostles, and which inspired Karl Marx with his idea 'From each according to his ability, to each according to his need' is so important. Karl Marx turned the account into a political principle. That is not how it was meant to be used. Just as the Incarnate God of the Gospels is a theological statement, so the Christian Community, made possible because they were 'all filled with the Holy Spirit' is an even more profound theological statement. It tells us that God can be Incarnate in all of us, and that one day He will be. We will know when it happens, because we will find ourselves living the way they lived in the first Christian Community.

There will be no law to coerce us because we will not need one, so there will be no government to make laws. Because we will hold all things in common, there will be no financial accounting between us. We will discover for the first time that money is worth no more than the paper it is written on. None of this makes pleasant reading for the rich and powerful, or for those who enjoy exercising their authority over us, but fortunately they are in the minority, and they will all come to terms with the change in the end, because none of us are beyond redemption. They will even get to like the way things are done in the perfect society where all are free, and all wealth is held in common.

This is a crucial time in the history of human civilisation. Democratic government, where the entire adult population is allowed to vote, only came into existence this century It is the nearest we have ever been to a State of Absolute Freedom, but we cannot go further in our quest for freedom simply by making governments more democratic. Future progress will take us down a different road where we have to get government off our backs, and that can only be done by creating autonomous self-governing communities within the democratic state.

We have not previously got round to this way of thinking because, up to now, democracy has been seen as the way to achieve greater freedom. As it cannot offer us a greater freedom than we already have, and only the Community can do that, the Community will become a popular movement because its goal of greater freedom is what we all seek. The Community's theological statement will be, 'We are the Example of Christ. Ours is the Way the Truth and the Life. Follow us and become as we are. It is the only way to achieve perfect freedom.'

I have had a vision of something that will change the world, once it gets started, and it only needs one man to start it by conforming exactly to the pattern of the Incarnate God, and by creating a Community around himself, in which the only authority is His example, and which others then follow and become. Then the Example of the One becomes the Example of the Community, the Example of the Community becomes the Example of the Nation, and the Example of the Nation becomes the Example that changes the World.

The reader may be sceptical of my vision. If he is a Christian, he may be persuaded by the Example of Christ that changing the world is not easy. It cannot be done without sacrifice. He may want to ask me what sacrifice I am making. It is a fair question, and I am troubled by it. If I am so certain what needs to be done, then why haven't I sold all my possessions, given the proceeds to the poor, and then gone on to follow and become the Example of Christ myself? To do that is to make a sacrifice. Perhaps it is the sacrifice I should make.

On deeper reflection, I am inclined to think that, if my conversion had come earlier in life, and if my possessions were large enough for me to make a significant contribution to the needs of the poor, I might have gone down that road. It has taken me many years since my conversion, at the age of 54, to work out this prophetic vision in a coherent way. Only now, at the age of 75, and knowing that I have cancer, do I realise that the sacrifice I may have to make is that of life itself, because I do not have the time to make any other form of sacrifice.

We cannot make light of the theology of sacrifice. Before those who follow can become the Example of Christ, they have to make a complete sacrifice of the human Ego. The Cross exists as the altar of sacrifice. To follow Christ is to nail the Ego to the Cross. This involves us in the abandonment of all selfish interests, and in the total sacrifice of the human will to God, so that we become indwelt by the Holy Spirit of God, Who then directs all of our thoughts. Yet this total sacrifice is ultimately something to be happy about. We cannot live truly fulfilled lives without making it, and these fulfilled lives are an opening into eternity, because the Holy Spirit dwelling in us is immortal. By accepting His indwelling, we enter into His immortality.

This hope of immortality enables me to live with cancer, even though it may mean that I must use what remains of my life to complete my vocation to write, rather pursue a more selfish agenda.

I could end this quest for the perfect society with the question of whether we are mad to believe in God, or whether we would be mad not to believe in God. We cannot use scientific method to answer that question, because all who believe in God accept that His qualities are spiritual rather than material. That being so, they cannot be scientifically examined. Nevertheless the evidence upon which the answer rests is building up empirically. Does faith contribute to wisdom? If God does not exist, we must always submit to uninspired human authority. and particularly to the authority of atheists guided only by their own very human impulses. Are we likely to profit from allowing this to happen? There is growing evidence that we are not, but will it go on growing until it ultimately convinces us all that we have to find and follow the Divine alternative to human authority?

The tragedy is that, so long as we just allow the evidence to build up empirically, people are going to suffer because they have chosen the wrong answer. Reason dictates that the wrong answer leads to madness, and the sooner we know the right answer the better.

The good news is that we will get the right answer eventually. Meanwhile, we would probably be wise to reflect upon the fact that, during this present century, we have allowed ourselves to be governed by people whose faith in God has been diminishing all the time. A generation that knew Hitler and Stalin, and knows the kind of people who are always trying to acquire some kind of authority for their own personal gain, know what it is like to have to submit to purely human authority, and they know how much that authority has been and can be abused. We would be foolish to ignore the evidence we already have, and, if we conclude from it that we would be mad not to believe in God, we must start now to change the world, and aim to get the job finished before too many are made to suffer for their sins.

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EPILOGUE

An objective theology is important, because without it we cannot know the meaning of things. To be a credible atheist, one has first to be a credible theologian, for only a fool would deny the existence of something he is unable to define.

As some of the ritual and dogma associated with religion is difficult to defend in an age of reason, we need those who are quite certain that God exists to go through the whole corpus of religious belief with a fine toothcomb, and comb out all that offends the rational mind. Not everything would be combed out. We would be left with a conception of God that stands up to rational argument. What has been combed out has to be re-examined before it can be discarded. For the most part it will be myth which cannot be interpreted literally. It needs to be re-interpreted in the light of reason and modern science, because it was produced for people who knew nothing of our scientific method and rational way of thinking. Modern man would rather be presented with meaning than with myth.

The Infinity of God continually comes through as an important feature of ancient perception. Describing the Infinite in finite terms is a problem we, with all our scientific knowledge and rational thinking, have yet to solve. We need patience with the way ancients expressed themselves before we can transpose their thoughts about God into today's more rational language.

Let me give an example. It will take some time, because it is an important one. The Temple in Jerusalem still stood intact when Jesus was alive. People were still working on it. Just before the crucifixion, Jesus is reported to have said that if the Temple were destroyed, he would rebuild it in three days, and the statement, misquoted, was used against him in evidence at his trial.

Christian tradition interprets this saying as referring to the Resurrection. The true Temple is God Incarnate in man. Destroy that, and within three days, the Resurrection will create the new Temple, which is the Christian Faith centred on the Risen Christ. Would this tradition re-phrased in more rational language, be more convincing?

According to tradition, the statement about the Temple was a prophecy both of the Resurrection and of the destruction of the Temple 40 years later. Tradition regards the trial narrative as a historical record.

Modern theologians question this. Many argue that the Gospels were written after the destruction of the Temple, and that there is no historical record of the crucifixion. What probably happened was that primitive Christianity, already in existence before the Temple was destroyed, began as a Jewish sect which regarded the Temple, made with human hands, and the associated ritual, as an obstacle to true religion. The embryonic Christian faith would survive the destruction of the Temple, and be strengthened by it, and that is what happened.

The Gospels had something more important to convey than the literal history of Jesus. The Incarnate God pointed the way to absolute freedom.

His Way was an escape from the coercion of a religion based on laws imposed by the priesthood, and upheld by the Temple cult. Ultimately it would be an escape from the secular authority of Rome. When the Gospels were written, memories of the historical Jesus were becoming less reliable, needing to be reinforced by inspiration. We understand the Christian objective better if we understand the historical background in which it took form. That is more helpful than reading the New Testament as if it were history.

Belief in the concept of God Incarnate in man was, by now, a well established feature of the emerging Christian Faith, and logical conclusions had to be drawn from this belief. The stories of the Nativity and Resurrection were part of a device used by the inspired authors of the Myth of the Incarnate God to handle the very real problem that God must exist always, both before and after His Incarnation.

Belief in the Resurrection would have been reinforced in the early Christian Community by the remarkable spiritual experiences of the first Christians. The idea of spiritual experience is something that many of today's Christians, caught up in the charismatic movement, understand very well. The first Christians 'knew' that the Resurrection had happened because spiritual experience convinced them that they had 'seen' the Risen Christ. This Risen Christ was the Jesus that some of them had met in human life. Their fading memories of the historical Jesus were made good by post-Resurrection spiritual experience. The story that finally emerged as the Gospels owes more to inspiration than to historical fact.

The conclusions the first Christian reached about the Nature of God were a Divine Revelation, or a new theology. They mattered more than historical fact. Facts taught orally about Jesus diverged more from reality as time passed by. Early Christian belief that faith should be focussed, not on the Temple, but on the Risen Christ received its Divine Approval when the Temple was destroyed. The Gospels that emerged aim to tell us what God would have thought, said and done had He been standing in Jesus' shoes. We cannot be sure that He was not standing in Jesus' shoes, and that the Gospels are not historically correct in many respects, but once we grasp the possibility that the stories come less from historical records than from divine Inspiration, the question of whether the Gospels portray history or myth becomes unimportant. We should read the Gospels as God's Story, and take it to be true even if, historically or literally, it may not be.

When the theological concept of God Incarnate becomes the focal point of a Community, the Community becomes sufficiently obedient to His Will to hold all things in common. This happened in the Community described in Acts 2 and 4, and can be repeated today. Authority in such a Community is given by Example and not by coercion, and we can imagine the Community symbolically in terms of concentric circles with Christ at the centre. He transmits Authority by His Example to the inner circle, which follows and becomes His Example, so that it is transmitted to the next circle, and so on outward to the outer circle which defines the limits of the Community. We can visualise these circles spreading ever outward as the Community grows to become a whole nation and finally the whole world, as the Authority of God progressively replaces the authority of man, which is exercised through fiscal pressure and the coercion of the law. We can also think of these circles as not only expanding but also being copied, with our world becoming a place of many circles which eventually coalesce to become one.

These circles are not human artefacts. They are spiritual, symbolic, and imaginary. The circle appeals to our rational minds, because all points on the circumference are equidistant from the centre, but the same symbolic effect can be achieved, replacing the circles with squares, with Christ located where the diagonals cross. With this vision in mind, let us return, where we began, to the Temple.

One of the most important scrolls discovered at Qumran was the Temple Scroll. Some scholars regard it as a lost book of the Bible. The Temple was of immense importance to the religion of the ancient Jews. It was to be constructed to God's Plan, but nowhere in the preserved writings of the Bible does the Plan exist. The Temple Scroll contains the Plan, but its given dimensions are so huge that human hands could not build it. It could not be built in Jerusalem, because its area corresponds to that of the city itself.

When we reflect on this, in the light of Jesus' reported claim to be able to rebuild it in three days, we realise that the Temple of the Scroll was meant to be symbolic rather than real. It was proposed as a square building with inner and outer courts, and with the Presence of God, the Holy of Holies, at the diagonal centre, but no significant distinction can be drawn between the symbolism of concentric squares with God at the centre, and that of concentric circles with Christ at the centre.

The Qumran documents, and other finds in the area where they were discovered, leave the impression that there was a Qumran Community whose members, like the first Christians, were inspired by God to live, holding all things in common. This Community, so far as we know, was Jewish rather than Christian. The evidence suggests that they saw the Temple Scroll as significant, but did they see it as symbolic of how a Community inspired by God would live? As the Temple area was roughly that of Jerusalem perhaps they did, imaginatively superimposing the spiritual Temple on Jerusalem to show how authority should be exercised in Jerusalem, by God acting from within the centre, providing an Example to be followed by the inner court, which becomes the Example of God, transmitted outwards to envelop the whole City of God.

It is as if there are two real planes of existence, the material plane on which Jerusalem exists, and the higher spiritual plane where the Temple symbolically co-exists. My vision of the ultimate Christian Community of the entire world, seen as concentric circles with Christ at the centre, symbolically co-exists with the material world, but on the higher spiritual plane. These co-existing planes are consistent with our concept of heaven and earth, and with the theology that what will be accomplished on earth's material plane has been accomplished already on heaven's spiritual plane. It is why we pray, 'Thy Kingdom come, Thy Will be done on earth as it is in heaven', and it suggests that prophecy is a perception of this heavenly accomplishment.

If this began as the theology of a pre-Christian Jewish sect, we can see its ultimate importance for the world, given the Jews' belief that they were the chosen people of God. They visualised God's direct rule of Jerusalem replacing not only priestly rule coming from a temple built (and later to be destroyed) by human hands, but also secular rule coming from Rome. Only by making the New Jerusalem an Example for the rest of the world to follow can the Jews fulfil their role as God's Chosen People. Symbolically, Jerusalem then becomes the Temple at which the world worships. Christianity, when symbolised by concentric circles, with Christ at the centre, spreading ever outwards until the outer circle is the world itself, is an alternative way of achieving the same result - the establishment of God's Kingdom on earth.

When we see, by interpreting the message of the Temple, and of the Resurrection, in modern language, that the purpose of both Judaism and Christianity is to establish the Kingdom of God on earth, it must concern us that these two faiths are not working together, in harmony with Islam, to achieve this end. As Christians, we must realise that the Christian Church is the means to an end, and not an end in itself. Atheism, the product of an inadequate theology, has been rational man's understandable reaction to worship that has been allowed to become an end in itself, as different strands of Judaism, Christianity and Islam vie with one another for the support of the faithful and put their own form of theology before the Reality of God.

Have we, as Christians, built our churches and cathedrals in imitation of the Temple instead of building ourselves in imitation of Christ? Is not the Incarnate God, not built with human hands, the Temple at which we should be worshipping? Is not the true Church (and the true Temple of Judaism) the Community of the Faithful, with the Presence of God at the centre, giving His Example to those in the Inner Court. who have been given the Grace to follow and become His Example, passing it on forever outward until the Spirit of God is Incarnate in us all, and all live in a Community which holds all things in common?

This is a rational modern interpretation of the symbolism of Grace and Authority coming from within. How we solve the world's problems depends ultimately on whether we allow ourselves to be governed by the laws of men, imposed upon us from without, in which case we will never enjoy absolute freedom, or whether we allow ourselves to be governed by the Holy Spirit of God dwelling within, in which case we are given the authority that enables us to challenge the validity of human authority and man-made laws without risking anarchy. We cannot change from a political form of government to a spiritual form without changing the world, but first of all we must change ourselves. The Holy Spirit is reluctant to dwell in those who fail humbly to confess their sins, and ask for Grace Guidance and Forgiveness.

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Changing The World

Introduction

Chapter One WHO IS JESUS CHRIST?

Chapter Two WHAT DO WE MEAN BY GOD?

Chapter Three 'COMMUNITY AS AN ALTERNATIVE TO LAW'

Chapter Four 'THE FIRST COMMUNITY'

Chapter Five 'POLITICAL CORRECTNESS'

Chapter Six THE MILLENNIUM

Chapter Seven CONCLUSIONS

Epilogue

INTRODUCTION

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CHAPTER ONE

WHO IS JESUS CHRIST?

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CHAPTER TWO

WHAT DO WE MEAN BY GOD?

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CHAPTER 3

'COMMUNITY AS AN ALTERNATIVE TO LAW'

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CHAPTER 4

'THE FIRST COMMUNITY'

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CHAPTER 5

'POLITICAL CORRECTNESS'

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CHAPTER 6

THE MILLENNIUM

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CHAPTER 7

CONCLUSIONS

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EPILOGUE

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