282 religious revolution nowwanting by its standards. It therefore appears at the gate with the dou-
ble face of orthodoxy and heresy.
Two large themes persist throughout the evolution of the religious
thinking of these schismatics. Th e fi rst theme is the priority of faith
over reason: we cannot reason ourselves to salvation. We must be taken
by storm; we must fi nd ourselves, under the burdens of mortality, ground-
lessness, and insatiability, confronted with an assault of the divine on
our natural experience.
Th e second theme is our radical dependence on the living and active
God: our inability to lift ourselves up and to cure ourselves, by our own
devices, of the wounds of death, darkness, and longing for the absolute.
As the fi rst theme is described by the formula of faith over reason, the
second theme is represented as grace over works. Its psychological hall-
mark, however, is pure terror, followed by the discovery of a source of
inexplicable and unjustifi ed salvation.
Th e terror results from awareness of our haplessness, not simply
with regard to the forces of nature, as was true of the religions that pre-
ceded the past wave of religious revolution, but with respect to the ir-
reparable defects in the human condition, to which all the religions
resulting from those revolutions respond. From this radical vulnerabil-
ity, we can be rescued, if we are rescued at all, by a power external to
nature and to all being. We call this power God.
Th e inscrutable character of his being, attested by the incoherence or
inadequacy of all the available conceptions of his nature, imparts, how-
ever, to this rescue a character that remains for the believer as frighten-
ing as it may be joyful. It is gratuitous: it bears no correspondence to
our merits. It is unfathomable: we have no hope of penetrating the
sources of its bestowal. Who will be saved? What will it be like? What
relation will our aft erlife bear to the earthly life to which we are nor-
mally so attached and the approaching annihilation of which appears
to us as absolute evil? Th us, the terror accompanying the experience of
haplessness carries over to the expectation of the rescue, the waiting
period, in which we spend our lives.
Consider what resources and impediments this running insurgency
within the religion and this major infl uence on its development off er
for the religious change discussed earlier in this chapter and the remain-
der of this book.