religious revolution now 271coming them, make ourselves whole. Our groundlessness denies us
any hope of founding our existence on a secure basis. Our insatiability
condemns us forever to seek the infi nite from the fi nite. Our mortality
renders the search for the ground and for the infi nite urgent and con-
fronts us with the terrifying contrast between our unlimited fecundity
of experience and the fi nality of our annihilation.
Th e second element informing the eff ort to invoke an idea of God is
the appearance, in the midst of our distress, of the hope that our situa-
tion may not be as desperate and perplexing as it seems to be, and that,
in a form that we may be unable to grasp, we will be brought to a greater
life. By changing our conduct as well as our beliefs, we foreshadow that
greater life in our ephemeral, defective existence.
Th ese features of our natural experience create an opening for an idea
of God. In no sense do they justify any par tic u lar version of that idea.
Moreover, they admit of many other descriptions and interpretations
that dispense with any notion of God. Th e problem for the Christian is
not that they fail to select and to support a conception of God or that
they do nothing to redress the inadequacy and incoherence of the three
ideas of God that are available to him. Th e problem is that there is an
infi nite distance between these experiences of radical incompleteness
and of radical hope and the unique claims of revelation and transforma-
tion that distinguish Christianity. A Christian must feel that he has
come face to face with the living God through his confrontation with
the revealed truth. He must envision, on the other side of the darkness
of the world, a human face— someone who can share his concerns and
participate in his life— but who is nevertheless the ground of all being.
It is hardly enough for the Christian to believe that we are not alone
in the cosmos, as, by all the evidence of the senses, we in fact are. It is
essential that the God who is our companion be open to sharing our
life, even to the point of becoming embodied among us, so that we can
more fully share in his life. Th is openness of his to us and of us to him
must be realized through singular events, in par tic u lar times and places.
Th ese events represent an irreversible change in the human condition.
We can never attain such convictions on the strength of the twofold
natural experience that I have described. We can achieve them only
under the force of occurrences so overwhelming in their appeal that
they command our assent and silence our doubts. Th ey must bear