religious revolution now 261open to a broad range of experience and allow itself to be corrected in
the light of experience.When we ask ourselves whether the religion of the future can speak in
a sacred voice and accomplish its aims within one of the salvation reli-
gions, we must confront a confusion as well as an inhibition. Th e con-
fusion results from lack of both courage and clarity in addressing the
diffi culty ever- larger numbers of people experience in bringing them-
selves to believe in narratives of God’s saving intervention in human
and natural history. Th ey want to believe, and deliver themselves to the
sentimental will to believe. Th ey believe as much as they can. Th ey wel-
come what ever minimalist reinterpretation of their faith may enable
them to continue to believe, with the least possible disturbance of their
everyday realism.
Such a reinterpretation will pretend to represent a halfway house
between belief and disbelief. It will translate the story of God’s saving
work and of his transactions with humanity into a series of secular
ideas about our lives and our dealings with one another. Nothing of-
fensive to reason will remain in the faith, once its narratives have been
reinterpreted as an allegory of our secular commitments and aspira-
tions. Th e believer nevertheless insists that the reduced or sanitized
faith is more than a compendium of the secular pieties comprising the
text of the reductive translation.
Jesus Christ, for example, was not literally God incarnate. Neither,
however, was he just a man like you and me; he was a concentrated em-
bodiment of divine energy. What, however, is divine energy? It is the
activity of spirit that we fi nd in our experience of transcendence and
that we rediscover at work in evolving nature. It is nonsensical to suppose
that we will be resurrected from the dead as the fl esh and blood individu-
als that we are, settling once again into our organisms, once decayed but
now reconstituted. However, death cannot be the end. An indescrib-
able sequel awaits us. And so forth.
Th e hallmark of the halfway house between belief and disbelief is the
attempt to escape the incredible without settling for an overtly secular
humanism. Th e working assumption of this attempt is the belief that
we can dispense with the fabulous without ceasing to be believers in an
adjusted, less unreasonable sense. Th e problem is that once we begin to