religious revolution now 207and structures. Th e sanctity of the personal never became, in this tradi-
tion, the boundless depth of the individual.
It is the secular voice of the struggle with the world, in the form of
the revolutionary projects of democracy and romanticism, that came
closest to acknowledging that the home of the dialectic of transcen-
dence and immanence lies not in the cosmos but in us, in each of us
individually as well as in all of us collectively, the human race. In the
development of this view, however, the secular version of the struggle
with the world was disoriented by its failure to develop what I have here
called the suppressed orthodoxies about self and structure or self and
others. Th e heresies to which it fell prey— the Hegelian and Sartrean
heresies with respect to the relation between self and structure and the
legalist and romantic heresies with regard to the relation between self
and others— have prevented us from fully expressing the truth about
transcendence and immanence as a truth about us. Th e failure to de-
velop the presuppositions of the struggle with the world into a coherent
and comprehensive view of time, history, and self has contributed fur-
ther to this result.
Th e religion of the future requires a decisive resolution of this am-
bivalence. We should not mistake redescribing the world for changing
it. Th e confusion of redescribing with changing is half of what turns
religion into a lullaby and a deception. Th e other half is the impulse to
deny the irreparable fl aws in human life. Together, the confusion and
the denial have made of religion what it has been, and prevented it from
better guiding our ascent to a greater life.
Th e task is correctly to draw the line between the ineradicable de-
fects in the human condition and the alterable circumstances of soci-
ety. Religion fails us twice when it refuses to accept the facts of our
mortality, our groundlessness, and our insatiability and then fails to
show the way to the overcoming of what we can indeed repair— our
susceptibility to belittlement.
Radicalizing the signifi cance of the struggle with the world
for our ideas and institutions
Despite its im mense authority, fi rst in the register of the salvation reli-
gions and then in the register of democracy and romanticism, the