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religious revolution now 257

gathers around himself a group of followers and stands in ambivalent

relation to the established powers of the place and time.

A fi nal indirection is to confer on philosophy and theology, even

when reinterpreted and redirected along the lines for which I earlier

argued, a prerogative that they fail to enjoy. What you have in this book

is both a philosophical and a non- theological theological argument.

Such an argument can be no closer to the longings that would be central

to the religion of the future— its vision of the sacred— than philosophy

and theology have ever been to the experience of the holy in a religion.

We cannot overcome the remoteness of such a discourse from the expe-

riences central to an upheaval in our spiritual life simply by wishing to

overcome it. Philosophy and theology are as powerless now as they ever

were to replace religion. Th ey can foreshadow and interpret a path of

spiritual change, but they cannot travel it for us. All they have is ideas.

What they lack is incandescent experience.

Christianity as the religion of the future?

Th e remainder of this book develops a vision responsive to the incite-
ments to religious revolution that I have discussed in these pages. Th is
vision does not rely on the family of beliefs that in the West has long
been seen as the hallmark of all religion but that is in fact associated
chiefl y with the Semitic mono the isms: faith in a transcendent God
who, having created man and the world, continues to intervene in his-
tory. From the perspective of those for whom religion is defi ned by
commitment to such a narrative, the orientation to life for which I
here argue is no religion at all, not even the theoretical element in a
religion.
It nevertheless satisfi es all the criteria that I claimed early in this
book to be characteristic of religion. Th e principle governing these cri-
teria is that religion be defi ned in a fashion that is inclusive enough to
accommodate all the religions of transcendence and the three major
orientations to existence for which they spoke, yet is suffi ciently exclu-
sive to mark out a distinctive part of our experience. In this view, a re-
ligion grounds an approach to existence in a vision of the world, or of
ultimate reality. It responds to the irreparable fl aws in the human