religious revolution now 267mon to all the salvation religions. It is aggravated in those— Christianity
and Islam— that deny any special long- term part in the work of salva-
tion to a segment of humanity by opposition to other segments.
Once again, we can go a long distance in providing a wholly secular
account and defense of this attribution of a universal meaning to a sin-
gular plot. Th e narrative of salvation is or ga nized around the points of
infl ection and rupture at which God breaks into human history and
brings new tidings and new chances for experience to the human race.
Th e personalities active at these turning points— the incarnate God
and those whose lives he begins to touch in ever- wider concentric
circles— are the authors of a new way of living and seeing. Th e events
have a meaning that outreaches their immediate context.
We can understand this power of par tic u lar people and events to
bear a universal message of salvation as the limiting case of a phenom-
enon pervasive in the historical experience of humanity. Th e revolu-
tionaries, in our religious and aesthetic experience as in our po liti cal
and economic life, are the ones who reimagine or remake some part of
the established structure of thought or society and who off er us new
conceptions of ourselves. Th e events have an exemplary signifi cance;
they open a path that other people, in other places and times, can fol-
low. Th at they are situated and expressed in the language of that situa-
tion helps give them a force that no ungrounded string of abstractions
could possess. Th ey stand as concentrated statements of our power to
reshape the institutional and conceptual presuppositions of life.
Th e tension between the context- bound plot and the context-
transcending message has its ultimate basis in the dialectic of our
natures as context- bound and context- transcending individuals. Th is
confl ict ceases to be an embarrassment, and becomes an opportunity,
when it turns into an occasion for exemplary initiatives inaugurating
new orders of thought or society.
Th e narrative of salvation, in Christianity, as in its sister religions, is
not, however, simply about the creation of new regimes of thought and
social life: new methods or new institutions. It does not concern simply
the discontinuous character of structural change in our secular life of
thought or cooperation. It speaks to the irruption of a force originating
from beyond history— the inner life of the triune God— into historical
time.