270 religious revolution nowstory fades away, at the instigation of an impersonal idea of God, into a
spiritual allegory that the residue of historical fact underlying it is un-
able to support.
Th ere remains a third idea of God bidding for supremacy: God as non-
person and as non- being: a God who is the ground of being because he is
radical negation. Such is the idea of God that has always been attractive
to mystics within Christianity as well as within Judaism and Islam. It
is less a conception of God than it is a confession of our inability, as
believers, to achieve any such conception. It borders on heresy: fi rst, be-
cause it implies that the story of creation and of salvation, expressed as it
is in the language of personal experience and encounter, must be given a
meaning far from its literal signifi cance, and, second, because the power-
lessness of reason to parallel at least part of the faith in revelation leaves
the message of salvation as an empty vessel that we can fi ll with what ever
we will, as if the presentiment of our impending annihilation in a world
that we are unable to comprehend could be displaced by the anticipation
of a last- minute, unaccountable rescue.
Th e inadequacy or incoherence of each of these available ideas of
God poses a fundamental threat to the faith. It places the believer’s will
to believe at odds with his understanding. It inverts the ontological ar-
gument for the existence of God, undermining grounds for belief in a
(non) being who is not even thinkable. In natural science, we may fi nd
reason to believe in variations of reality that overstep the limits of our
perceptual experience. However, we take our intellectual and spiritual
lives in our hands when we fabricate an abstraction of which our own
reasoning is unable to make sense.
We can nevertheless give the failings of these three ideas of God a
naturalistic interpretation: one that goes some distance toward repro-
ducing in a human- centered discourse a theocentric vision. Here as be-
fore, however, a chasm remains between this naturalistic understanding
and faith in the living God. Th e compromises of the halfway house fail
to overcome the divide. In such a naturalistic view, the idea of God rep-
resents a compressed and combined account of two distinct elements in
our experience of life.
Th e fi rst element informing our eff ort to conceive an idea of God is
the recognition of our incompleteness. Th e irreparable defects in the
human condition are such that we cannot overcome them and, by over-