In Man’s Relationship with God, I utterly repudiate this point of view. If Christ was God and Man, then every Tom, Dick and Harry has this potential too, even if he seldom bothers to take up the offer. And my book is an account, and avowedly an account, of my attempt to put this into practice, despite all my mistakes in doing so. To emphasise this, Man’s Relationship with God ends with a prayer; firstly man’s prayer to God, secondly rather boldly God’s answer to man. In this I am careful to say that a man only shares God’s nature in acts of right conduct. He shares God’s nature “briefly”.
My two books, a Reconciliation with Science and War and a Religious View of Nature & the Universe, are a rationalization afterwards of what I attempted. I think it was Athanasius who first coined the phrase that “God became man in a manger, that Man might become God”, although it is usually attributed to Augustine. But to my mind this was the message of the prophet Joel, which Jesus saw it as his vocation to put into practice; and it simply does not matter (from this point of view) whether he came down from heaven, or whether he was sufficiently inspired to achieve union with the Inscrutable Mystery who created the Universe, when most people fail. This, I firmly believe, was Jesus’ message to us too, the night before he died; though I have to admit that this is hardly C.of E. doctrine.
Of course this is a spiritual world. Everyone has to live by faith. When you go to the butcher, the baker, or the candle-stick maker, you must believe he is not going to swindle you. Everything necessary to keep society going, depends on confidence, even if charity is the supreme virtue. And though I think “making money the measure of all things” is about the most debased spiritual concept there is, it is a spiritual concept. Money is commercial credit; it is worth what people think it is worth. And when people do not think it is worth much, you have hyper-inflation as they had it in Germany in 1923. And somehow Schacht, the banking magician, was able to restore their confidence in the new Deutschmark. Secular life depends on confidence; though I would be among the first to admit that confidence by itself is not enough to enable us to follow “the Way”, or the good life. You need much more.
William James in his Ingersoll Lecture, on “Human Immortality”, says that we men must learn to transmit something of the “radiance of eternity” (to quote Shelley). And that requires much more than confidence. It means imitating Jesus.
And Jesus saved the world by giving anyone with any character the courage to follow his example, as well as teaching us that the divine love extends to the outcast and the forlorn. And that, as Cranmer says, is an “inestimable benefit”.