226 religious revolution nowTh e position of half- belief reckons with this fi rst scandal of reason
by denying that any such interruption of the workings of nature has
ever taken place. Christ, for example, may be deemed to represent a
concentrated form of spiritual energy, goodness, and hope. We are not
to understand that he was actually God incarnate, except insofar as
God is a way of describing the incompleteness of the world or the ulti-
mate ground of our own concerns. Th e teachings related to the Incar-
nation, such as the doctrine of his virginal birth, are therefore to be
read as meta phorical expressions of our powers of disruption and tran-
scendence. Are we not all called to reinvent ourselves?
A second scandal of reason is the contradiction between the univer-
sality of the message delivered by the religion and the particularity of
the plot: the narrative of divine intervention and redemption, marked
by proper names and momentous dates. Th e message is a vision of the
world and an imperative of existence with implications for all human-
ity, even if it distinguishes (as Judaism does) a special role for a part of
the human race. Why should God have chosen to enter into a covenant
with the Jews, or to be embodied as a recalcitrant zealot in a peripheral
province of the Roman Empire, or to convey a unique message to an
Arabian merchant? And why should all these claims of election be sus-
piciously concentrated in a corner of the globe, other than because of
the indistinguishable infl uence of the earlier ones on the later ones?
And how can the universality of the message not be jeopardized by its
alleged privileged connection to events that took place in par tic u lar
places and times, to the detriment of the parts of mankind that, born
far away, can invoke no such close and original connection to the sa-
cred plot? To the claim that the message must be revealed somewhere
and at some time and be transmitted by par tic u lar messengers, the
simple answer is that it can be revealed and conveyed in ways that are
immediately designed to counteract the signifi cance of the par tic u lar
setting. Th at, however, is not what happened, not even in the Christian-
ity of Paul. Th e stigmata of the par tic u lar were all too evident. Th e at-
tempt to erase them, if carried far enough, threatens to leave nothing
but an indistinct and innocuous appeal.
Th e position of half- belief responds to this second scandal of reason
by discounting, one by one, all the particulars, as if one would improve
a wilting fl ower by discarding its burnished petals until nothing had