262 religious revolution nowtranslate the message of the salvation religion into naturalistic terms—
terms that turn away from the scandals of reason (to which I next
return)— there is no place to stop. Th ere is no place to stop short of a
view of the sacred narrative as an allegory of ideas and ideals that could
just as well be stated without such a narrative.
Yet the pretense of the halfway house is that, aft er all the justifi ed
translation has been accomplished, something of the original story re-
mains, something that we cannot treat as merely allegorical and to
which a thoroughly naturalistic discourse fails to do justice. What is
this extra something distinguishing the supposedly decoded religion
from its rationalizing counterpart?
Th e equivocations of the halfway house could never have been re-
hearsed without help from theologians and phi los o phers. Th e canoni-
cal form of this help is the demythologizing pseudotheology of the
twentieth century. Little separates a thoroughly demythologized Chris-
tianity from Feuerbach’s account of the Christian religion as a doc-
trine of the self- construction of humanity that dispenses with a divine
interventionist.
To appreciate why and how believers and non- believers alike should
repudiate the halfh ouse between belief and disbelief as a perversion of
both reason and faith, it is important to distinguish it from a position
with which it may easily be mistaken. If God speaks to mankind through
his prophets, and even through the man- god, his son, the words of his
message must be such that they can be grasped by men and women in
the historical circumstances in which God speaks or appears. Other
people, at other times, will need to reinterpret the message in the light
of the changed circumstance and, in the manner of a classical jurist,
hold the words to the spirit.
However, it is one thing to provide such a contextual interpretation
and another to carry out the allegorical demythologizing of the reli-
gion in the spirit of an unequivocal naturalism. Th at God became in-
carnate in a human body is a belief that was at least as shocking and
idolatrous to a Palestinian Jew two thousand years ago as it is to a sen-
timental half- believer today.
Th ere are two major objections to the halfway house between belief
and disbelief. Either of them is fatal. Together, they condemn the half-
way house as apostasy in the eyes of a believer and as self- deception at
the ser vice of temporizing in the estimation of a non- believer.