religious revolution now 233Th ere are two principal and contrasting ways in which religion has
been related to politics in the history of the salvation religions. Call
them the religion of the law and the religion of the heart. Between these
two extremes stand many intermediate arrangements, composed of
pieces of each of them. Th ese hybrid solutions also fail to guide us to-
ward a way of joining the po liti cal to the personal— a re orientation of
society and of the self— responsive to the concerns motivating the reli-
gion of the future.
Th e religion of the law connects the personal to the po liti cal by the
shortcut of legalism. Th e most important feature of our relation to God
is that we obey him. We signify our obedience by conforming to his
law. His law requires a complete reor ga ni za tion of social life according
to its dictates. Th e living God gives way to the unyielding formulas of
the law. Th e severity of the law may be felt to be less fearsome than the
need to deal with a God whose demands no law can contain. Better to
be a slave of the sacred law than to be Jacob struggling with the angel.
When the power of the state backs up the enforcement of the law, the
religion of the law takes the form of theocratic legalism as it did, for ex-
ample, at moments in the history of ancient Judaism, Hinayana Bud-
dhism, Islam, and Mormonism.
Th e theologians of the religion of the law oft en argue that an out-
ward conformity to the law is insuffi cient to salvation; that its formulas
are only the setting necessary to a conversion of the soul, manifest in
the way we treat other people; and that obedience to the law is the fi rst
and most decisive move by which, as communities, not just as individ-
uals, we respond to God’s saving work in history. Nevertheless, the re-
ligion of the law commits us to the Hegelian heresy in its view of the
relation of self to structure: the false idea that there is a defi nitive form
of life able to do justice to the embodied spirit. At the same time, the
religion of the law carries the heresy of legalism into our relations to
other people: as if we could achieve salvation by conforming to rule and
ritual in our dealings with them, even if we cannot love them: that is to
say, if we cannot imagine and accept them both for their own sake and
as confi rmation of our possession to ourselves.
An individual who has surrendered to the formulas of the religion of
the law and taken them as a guarantee of salvation has ceased to realize
in his own experience the dialectic of transcendence and immanence.