52 beyond wishful thinkingtheir history: the demand to touch and to transform, in the light of
their message, every facet of human action. Even in Protestantism a
contrast between a religious and a non- religious part of experience has
been anomalous. It characterized much of Protestant spirituality and
theology in the eigh teenth and nineteenth centuries, and it gained an
aft erlife in the United States, given the predominant po liti cal and
constitutional doctrines, in that country, about the place of religion in
a pluralistic society. However, it was foreign to Luther as well as to Cal-
vin. Much of the most infl uential Protestant theology of the last hun-
dred years has been in rebellion against this bias, characteristic of the
middle period in the history of Protestantism.
Similarly misguided is the view that a separation of the religious and
the non- religious is regularly associated, at least in a Christian context,
with the idea of a Church. For a Christian, the Church is primarily the
community of the faithful, sustained by the presence of divine spirit
and engaged in the transformation of every aspect of human life. It is
o n l y s e c o n d a r i l y a n o r g a n i z a t i o n. Th e validity and the meaning of
the doctrine of the apostolic succession have been a source of division
among Christians almost since the beginnings of Christianity.
It is also important not to mistake the contrast between the religious
and the secular for the distinction between the orders of grace and of
nature, which gained force in the nominalist Christian theology of the
fourteenth and fi ft eenth centuries and has beset Christianity ever since.
Later in this book, in exploring the direction of a religion of the future,
I use the opposing words sacred and profane to mark a contrast diff er-
ent from the contrasts between religious and secular as well as between
grace and nature. Sacred and profane distinguish a vision that sees our
ascent to a higher life as enveloped in a narrative of transactions be-
tween a transcendent God and his human creatures from a vision dis-
pensing with any such story.
Any distinction between a sphere of private life and devotion pene-
trated by religious faith and a remainder of existence on which faith
has no purchase negates a defi ning impulse of the religions of transcen-
dence: not just of those that worship a creative God— Judaism, Christi-
anity, and Islam— but also of Buddhism and Confucianism, and indeed
of all the spiritual orientations that broke with cosmotheism. Th at dis-
tinction is the operational meaning of secularization. What we chiefl y