beyond wishful thinking 39does not amount to philosophy of religion in any familiar sense, be-
cause the discourse with which it experiments is itself religious, in the
ample sense of the concept of religion that I propose later in this chap-
ter. Insofar as it is theological, it is a kind of antitheology, because it
sees all our ideas of God— as person, as being, or as non- person and
non- being—as incoherent and unusable. It cites the religious revolu-
tions of the past, but only for the purpose of gaining clarity about the
path of a religious revolution in the future. It refers to the world reli-
gions, but only to the extent that they exemplify the three major orien-
tations to life that I consider and criticize.
Th e religion of the future must break with these orientations. Above
all, it must rebel against the ground that they share in common. If it
fi nds more inspiration in one of them than in the others, it must never-
theless learn from the criticism of what it repudiates.
Any religion expressing the turn to transcendence embraces contra-
dictory elements. It will always be found to be closely related to one of
the major approaches to existence that I discuss in the early parts of
this book. If it were equally related to several of them, it would convey
a muddled message. If it rejected the assumptions that are shared by
these three approaches, it would represent something diff erent from
what these religions have in fact been. Each of the higher religions has
nevertheless always also reckoned with aspects of the approaches that it
rejects. Moreover, none of the orientations to life that form the subject
matter of the next three chapters of this book speaks with a single
voice, the voice of a single religion. Each has become an enduring spiri-
tual option, available to any man or woman, anytime and anywhere.
Each has spoken through the apparatus of diff erent doctrines, stated in
distinctive vocabularies.
In the following pages, I explore the internal architecture of these
major spiritual options— overcoming the world, humanizing the world,
and struggling with the world. I do so with the intention of going be-
yond them, not with the aim of making claims about the distinctive
doctrines and singular histories of the par tic u lar religions that have
expressed them. Here, the historical allusions remain ancillary to a
philosophical and theological argument. Th e argument is chiefl y con-
cerned with the choice of a direction. I call this direction the religion of
the future.