278 religious revolution nowthe merits of a social order, although they may do so at the cost of a
form of idolatry— the law in the place of the spirit— suppressing the
quest to fi nd and establish structures, of society and thought, that re-
spect and enhance our structure- defying powers.
As a community of faith and an or ga nized religion, Christianity has
struck two thousand years of compromises with a series of social re-
gimes and forms of consciousness. Th ese regimes and forms of con-
sciousness, rather than the largely empty or misguided abstractions of
the moral phi los o phers, have been the chief shapers of moral experience
in all the societies and cultures in which Christianity has exercised a
paramount infl uence. Th e feudal ethic of chivalry and the Victorian
ethic of pious self- restraint and responsibility represent two examples,
among many, of such a transaction between Christian faith and so-
cial order. In each instance, the faith enters into the order, soft ening
its cruelties and raising its sights. In each, however, the order also
enters into the faith, dulling its subversive and transformative power
and committing it to arrangements that confl ict with the tenets of the
religion.
We have no example of the enactment of Christianity in society that
has failed to take the form of such a settlement. Always and every-
where, the settlement has included the ac cep tance of the structures of
class society. It has respected the established assignment of social roles
as a basis for our obligations to one another. It has accepted the present
form of the division of labor and the prevailing social order as the tem-
plate for the discharge our obligations to one another.
Nothing in such compromises, or in their consequences, can be rec-
onciled with the core of the faith: in par tic u lar, with its view of the rela-
tion between spirit and structure and with its vision of the transcend-
ing powers by which the person shares in the life of God. Th e undoing
of these deals— not just of one of them, but of all of them, that is to say,
of the very practice of them— would amount to a momentous change in
the character and presence of the faith. It would turn the antinomian
impulse into a source of prophetic re sis tance rather than of the worldly
prostration that it has too oft en served. Such a Christianity does not
exist, and it has never existed, despite the many occasions in the history
of Christian societies in which the faith has sparked collective move-
ments of enthusiasm and insurrection and despite the counter- models