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122 struggling with the world

accept any established social order or way of life as our defi nitive and

adequate home.

According to the struggle with the world, the roots of a human being

lie in the future. We live for the future, whether the future is a salvation

that begins in human history but is consummated beyond it or a way of

ordering social life that does justice to our humanity.

Th e struggle with the world has spoken in two voices. One voice is sa-
cred: that of the Semitic salvation religions— Judaism, Christianity, and
Islam. Th e other voice is profane: that of the secular projects of libera-
tion. Th ese projects have included the po liti cal programs of liberalism,
socialism, and democracy as well as the romantic movement, especially
the global pop u lar romantic culture, with its message of the godlike
dignity of ordinary men and women and the unfathomable depth and
reach of their experience.
For the sacred form of the struggle with the world, our eff ort to re-
spond to our mortality, our groundlessness, and our insatiability is
contained within a larger story of transactions between God and man-
kind. Only because of God’s saving work in history can we hope to es-
cape evil and attain a higher and eternal life. History is a signifi cant but
incomplete scene of salvation rather than an epiphenomenal backdrop
to our ascent or to our fall. What begins in history continues beyond
history. A change in the character of our relations to one another forms
a crucial part of our rescue. Th rough such a change, we confi rm our
reception of divine grace and lift ourselves over death, groundlessness,
and insatiability. Th e true meaning and potential of our relations to
one another, however, become manifest only in the interactions between
God and mankind.
God himself is to be represented in the category of personality rather
than as being or as non- person and non- being (although the negative
theology of the mystical tendencies within each of these religions has
forever fl irted with this heretical understanding of his nature). We can
understand our relations to God by analogy to our relations to one an-
other, because both these sets of relations share in the nature of per-
sonal experience.
Th e Semitic religions of revelation and salvation are not three faces
of the same faith. Th ey are diff erent religions. Unlike the other two,