208 religious revolution nowstruggle with the world continues to be understood and practiced
within the setting of ideas and institutions that contradict its teachings.
To acknowledge these contradictions, to confront them, and to over-
come them, through diff erent metaphysical ideas as well as through
proposals for the reconstruction of society, may at fi rst seem to be to
fulfi ll the sacred or profane religion rather than to overturn it. How-
ever, the implications for our beliefs and for our experience, including
our experience of ourselves, are so far- reaching that they create the
basis for a religious revolution. What we set out to fulfi ll, we may end
up by replacing.
In the history of Christianity, and to a lesser extent of Islam and Juda-
ism, the faith has been stated in terms borrowed from Greek philosophy.
However, the categories of Greek metaphysics, centered as they are on the
project of classical ontology, have never seemed adequate to the religion
of the incarnate and crucifi ed God. Th e chasm between the God of the
phi los o phers and the God of Abraham became a commonplace of phil-
osophical commentary. Th at the gap was never bridged, must be credited
not only to discomfort in the use of the sole apparent alternative— an
anthropomorphic conception of God, represented as a person— but also
to the absence of a comprehensive philosophical view in which the
experience of personality would be central rather than peripheral.
Th e troubled and inappropriate marriage of Christian faith to classi-
cal ontology has been followed, in the history of modern thought, by
the preeminent infl uence of what I earlier described and criticized as
the conception of the two regimes: the idea that reality is riven by a di-
vide between two orders of being— one, human; the other, non- human.
Th is doctrine may at fi rst seem to cause less trouble for the assumptions
of the struggle with the world than the view that there is only one re-
gime of reality. It is, however, subversive of the vision at the center of
this approach to existence as well as false to the facts of our situation in
the world.
Th e antagonism of these two sets of ideas— the program of classi-
cal ontology and the doctrine of the two regimes— to the message of
the Semitic monotheisms represents the most salient instance of a
more general problem. Th e problem is the failure to develop ideas that
would make sense of the concerns and commitments shared by the
sacred and profane versions of the struggle with the world. Foremost