268 religious revolution nowTh e founding agent was not simply an exemplary human being— a
prophet or a miracle worker; he was God incarnate. Th e decisive events
do not count chiefl y as the enactment of a way of ordering our ideas or
our relations to one another that we can then reproduce, by analogy, in
other contexts. Th ey are themselves the message: the off er of a sacrifi ce,
the sacrifi ce of God in human form, that goes beyond all words. Th ey
are not so much exemplary as they are supposed to be, in and of them-
selves, world- transforming. Th ey initiate another stage or level of God’s
saving presence in the world, not through the logic of example, extended
by ana log y, but t hrough t he direct action of God, maintained t hrough
the continuing presence of the Holy Spirit and the sacramental life
of the Church. Doctrine, codifi ed in the magisterium of the Church, is
not the source and inspiration of the faith, but only its retrospective
and refl ected expression in belief.
Th ere is a vast and immea sur able distance between these claims and
the idea of exemplary individuals and events in history. Nothing can
bridge this gap. Th e existence of natural and historical counterparts to
the scandal of particularity fails to diminish its power to perplex and to
disturb.
Th e third scandal of reason is the scandal of divine existence. It con-
cerns the inadequacy and incoherence of the ideas of God that are
available to the Christian as to the Jew or the Muslim. Of each of the
candidates for the idea of God, we must say that either it is not intelli-
gible or that it becomes intelligible only by losing its ability to perform
the function that is assigned to it by the faith.
Th e idea of God as person is suggested by the narrative of salvation.
In Christianity, it is made indispensable by the Incarnation. What no
believer can grasp is how God can be both a person and a being radically
transcendent over the world and therefore incomparable to any part of
our fi nite existence.
Th e Christian theologian may respond to this dilemma by one or
another variant of a doctrine of analogy. By the terms of such a doc-
trine, we can understand the transactions between God and humanity
by analogy to the dealings among people. Th e reciprocal engagement
of mankind and God in turn gives a deeper meaning to our experience
of personality and of personal encounter and elicits a hope greater than
any hope of moral and social improvement.