202 religious revolution nowfeature of human life while regarding our mortality, our groundless-
ness, and our insatiability as irreparable defects of the human condi-
tion would itself be enough to suggest that what is required is more
than revision. If such an insistence were to be accompanied by settling
the ambivalence of the religions of the past in favor of changing the
world rather than escaping it, by the light of a message about the recon-
struction of both self and society, the revolutionary character of the
task would become unmistakable.
Yet what is revision and what replacement, what revival and what
overturning, becomes clear, in the history of consciousness even more
than in the history of institutions, only in retrospect. With their con-
suming interest in the distinction between orthodoxy and heresy, and
their reliance on authoritative revelation, expressed in a scriptural
canon, the salvation religions may seem to be, of all world religions of
the ancient Near East, the least prone to such a hesitation between re-
vising and overcoming. Nevertheless, before being established as a dis-
tinct religion, Christianity may have been seen by many of its earliest
converts, and even by its found er, as a continuation and fulfi llment of
Judaism.
Any change in our orientation to the world that draws on our most
fundamental experiences and aspirations is bound to resonate within
the established religions at the same time that it develops outside their
confi nes. However, those who, like me, are without faith in a narrative
of the saving intervention accomplished by a transcendent God in his-
tory have no alternative but to work beyond the boundaries of these
religions. As more men and women come to recognize the evils and
deceptions of the halfway house between belief and disbelief, the de-
coding of religious doctrine as secular humanism, they will fi nd them-
selves forced in the same direction. If having abandoned the halfway
house they also repudiate the conventional secular humanism and rec-
ognize the need for a re orientation that cannot be contained within the
limits of what is common to the religious revolutions of the past, they
will arrive at the position from which the argument of this book
begins.Th e struggle with the world deserves the revolutionary infl uence that it
has won. It deserves this infl uence because its view of who we are and