Let religion not be the practice of attempting to fulfill genuine needs with promissory notes
Religion is the recognition of a need to reconcile irreconcilable opposites, and the attempt to do so. This practice is the necessary result of a fallen world.
If Christ is not fully one of us, whoever else he is, let us have nothing to do with him. If he is not fully one of us, let him reign on his distant throne. If he is not fully one of us, then we have simply pedestalized him, as Alan Watts says, and he is of no use to us. He is the boss’s son, and for all his vaunted righteousness was always guaranteed success and a special status, whence he judges the rest of us. He holds out the promise of salvation but in no way gives it.
It is of little use if he is not a sinner as we are. If he was simply treated as if he were a sinner, he still is not one of us. (Yet, how can he be a sinner? This also is intolerable. So we have a mystery, one of the irreconcilable opposites I speak of. Or is this instead an out and out contradiction?)
If he is one of us, then the theosis in its most fundamental sense has already taken place even if it is not complete. This is what we need, not a promise of union with God.
If he is not fully one of us, then he was just a god out slumming.
Man is that creature that needs union with God.
With theology one demands the impossible