religious revolution now 263Th e fi rst objection to the halfway house is cognitive. It is dishonest
and self- deluded. Th ere is no real or legitimate halfway house. Th e half-
way house is loss of faith disguised as faith within the bounds of rea-
son. God’s revelation is not self- interpreting because it was given and
received in par tic u lar historical contexts. Th at which is due to the con-
text must be separated, as best the believer can distinguish it, from what
is instinct to the divine message. Nothing, however, can bridge the gulf
between the world as it looks without God’s revelation and his saving
work and the world as it becomes and appears in the light of his cre-
ative presence and redemptive activity.
Th e second objection to the halfway house is practical but not, on
that account, any less powerful than the fi rst objection. Once the work
of demythologizing is accomplished, its doctrinal residue will be found
to be the conventional moral and po liti cal pieties of the age in which it
was practiced. It is, consequently, superfl uous. No one needs such a
translation of the sacred voice into the profane one.
Both the sacred and the profane forms of the struggle with the world
retain the potential to resist established arrangements and ideas. Th ey
could not otherwise have helped inspire the secular programs of de-
mocracy and romanticism that have aroused humanity over the last
two centuries. Although the translation of the sacred voice into the
profane one will seem plausible and persuasive to many, it will be em-
braced with relief only because it has an outcome that they already ap-
prove and await. It will attract no interest and exert no force if it claims
that the redeemer simply prefi gured the teaching of some contempo-
rary moral or po liti cal reformer or anticipated the dogmas of our cul-
ture and the illusions of our age. A shared collective view must be there
on the other side: the standards of good behavior embraced by the
prudent and the worthy, the theoretical universalism, altruism, and
egalitarianism of the po liti cal and moral phi los o phers, devotion to
family and country, respect for the job— everything that the religion of
the crucifi ed God, received without the hemming and hawing of the
halfway house between belief and disbelief, might better be thought to
threaten and contradict.
Once we have set aside the confusions of the halfway house between
belief and disbelief, we can face the chief objection to taking seriously
the sacred voice of the struggle with the world and thus as well the