But were Jesus's ethics meant for us or just for the Son of God? Early on the Church gave up on ethics when it gave up on works, with Paul's epistles. All we have to do is trust in Jesus's saintliness to be saved. Once we're saved, Christ lives inside us and guides us to live well. But morality as a means to bringing about a positive end is too secular for Christianity. Faith in Jesus's sacrificial death is supposedly the only way to salvation from original sin, according to Western Christianity.

And Jesus's ethics themselves seem far from practicable. All secular progress that depends on competition and money would cease if everyone started to behave like Jesus. The point of acting like Jesus was that the world was about to end or that God was about to reveal himself, judge humanity, and thus terminate our godless reign. When that didn't happen as expected, Jesus's ethics seemed to go out the window.