284 religious revolution nowconfi rmation in my experience of having come to a more vibrant state
of being, not just in a promised future but right now.
If I am honest about the sources and character of my experience, I
must acknowledge that I would likely have held diff erent beliefs had I
been born to diff erent parents in a diff erent time and place. Th e exclu-
siveness of the truth that I came to embrace matters less to me than its
proximity and its power. If you ask me how it compares to the truth
entertained by rival religions, I do not know. All I can do is to study
them from the outside, to read about them in books, and to fi nd out
about them by hearsay, at a second remove. I cannot have of them the
inner knowledge that I have of my own faith, unless another set of cir-
cumstantial infl uences and compelling encounters were to carry me in
the direction of those other faiths.
What is sacrifi ced in this view of faith is its claim to exclusivity. It is
not sacrifi ced because the believer replaces it with an ecumenical ideal
based on the quest for a common religion standing behind the discrete
world religions. (Th e sole element of truth in such a quest is the exis-
tence of a minimal shared core among the religions and philosophies
representative of the three major approaches to life.) It is sacrifi ced be-
cause, in this account, the intensity of belief and the transformative ef-
fi cacy of the faith thus embraced do nothing to validate belief in the
exclusive truth of the faith. On the contrary, they cast doubt on the
claim to exclusivity. For we know that a similar experience of compel-
ling connection and transformative belief can happen, and has hap-
pened, by the countless millions, in the spiritual history of mankind, to
believers in clashing faiths.
Th e claim to exclusive truth about God and the path to salvation is,
however, intimately related to transcendent mono the ism in all its ver-
sions, and, in par tic u lar, to the three Near Eastern religions of salva-
tion. It is qualifi ed, not abolished, only in Judaism: God’s covenant
with the Jews and his intervention in their history leave open the ques-
tion of the status of the faiths of the gentiles, especially of those faiths—
Christianity and Islam— that in addition to being themselves transcen-
dent mono the isms are tied, by their history and their message, to the
religion of the Jews.
Th e decisive weakening or outright relinquishing of the claim to
exclusivity is thus no mere adjustment to the religion. It is a radical