234 religious revolution nowHe has put what he imagines to be obedience to God in the place of the
structure- defying and structure- transcending activities that would en-
able him to increase his share in the divine life or to rise to a greater
existence. If willful self- exclusion from communion with God is (ac-
cording to an old idea of Christian theology) hell, then the religion of
the law mistakes a kind of damnation— the damnation of surrender to
its formulas— for being saved.
Th us, the religion of the law unites the personal and the po liti cal, but
only in a form that is antagonistic to the aims providing grounds for
religious revolution today. It forms part of what such a revolution must
oppose.
Th e religion of the heart has at its center direct engagement of the
individual soul and of the community of the elect with God. Its en-
abling premise is the privatization of the religious sublime. Its demands
upon the state and upon the institutional order of the broader society
are minimal: that they not interfere with the pursuit of salvation by the
individual as well as by the community of believers. If the institutional
regime meets this modest standard, it may merit passive ac cep tance. If
it actively contributes to this result, by creating the conditions for reli-
gious toleration and more generally for individual piety on the basis of
self- reliance, it deserves, according to the religion of the heart, to be
actively supported.
Such support for the established institutions need not be based on
the premise that they form an intrinsic and necessary part of any
scheme of religious, po liti cal, and economic freedom: of economic and
po liti cal freedom as enhancements of religious freedom as well as goods
in their own right. It can be founded, instead, on the negative princi-
ple that any known alternative to the present arrangements would
undermine freedom. Such is the practical liberalism of the religious
individualist.
Th e personal and the po liti cal are here connected only negatively.
Th e cumulative transformation of society remains marginal to the plan
of salvation. Th e chief part of that plan is to be implemented later, in a
life aft er death. Th e individual is to win his share in eternal life (if he is
not predestined to be saved or damned) by individual faith and piety,
responsive to divine grace. He is to win it if possible against the back-
ground of an institutional order that sustains his quest for personal