124 struggling with the worldthe truth of the narratives of God’s saving work that are central to the
sacred version of the struggle with the world. Th is halfway house be-
tween belief and disbelief most oft en takes the form of an eff ort to inter-
pret those narratives as allegories of truths that can be stated in secular
moral and po liti cal terms. Th e stories about God’s saving intervention
in the world that he created and about his encounters with humanity in
the course of these interventions are to be “demythologized.” If the
outcome of demythologizing is a repre sen ta tion that could just as well
be stated without benefi t of faith in a transcendent God or in his sal-
vifi c intervention, the demythologizing exercise has gone well beyond
the halfway mark between belief and disbelief. So it ordinarily does: the
allegorical translation stands in place of an atheism or an agnosticism
that refuses to acknowledge the mea sure of its disbelief.
Th e fi rst and most fundamental objection to the halfway house is
that it elides a consequential diff erence. It does so under the infl uence
of a will to believe. Each of the three approaches to existence that I here
consider requires a commitment of existence in a par tic u lar direction.
Th e grounds for such a commitment are always inadequate to the sig-
nifi cance of the commitment. Th is disproportion is one of the charac-
teristics of what we commonly call, and have reason to call, religion.
Th is imbalance between the choice of a direction and our ability to
justify this choice has, in each such orientation to life, a distinct char-
acter. It diff ers, as well, in the sacred and the profane varieties of the
struggle with the world.
In the Semitic mono the isms, the disproportion between the com-
mitment and its grounds takes its most extreme form. Th ere we double,
and then double again, our bets by placing our faith in the hope of res-
cue from above: in the interaction between human striving and divine
grace. Th e imbalance between the commitment that is exacted from us
and the apparent grounds for making the commitment is less extreme,
if nevertheless daunting, in the overcoming and the humanization of
the world as well as in the profane form of the struggle with the world.
Th e halfway house between belief and disbelief— the allegorical or
meta phorical shrinking of faith in the narrative of divine intervention—
may seem to diminish the disproportion by demanding of us nothing
that we cannot justify by the standards of secular reason. However, it
does so only by emptying faith of its distinctive force and content, and