religious revolution now 277stitute for a system of sacred law: it is a philosophical speculation with
no uncontroversial content and no intimate connection with the core
of the faith. Th e commitment to par tic u lar requirements and prohibi-
tions, such as those regarding the sanctity of life from the time of con-
ception or the indissolubility of the sacramental bond of marriage, are
far from presenting a comprehensive view of the form that our life in
society should take. Th e social doctrine of the Church, as exemplifi ed
by the encyclicals of the Roman pontiff s or by the social gospel of the
Reformed Churches, off ers no reliable model of social or ga ni za tion. It
has regularly veered between a defense of social and economic rights,
bereft of the institutional machinery that would ensure their eff ective
exercise, and an institutional blueprint, like the communitarian corpo-
ratism of the papal encyclicals of the interwar period in the twentieth
century, that has been soon discredited and abandoned.
Th e antinomian element in Christianity, so close to the wellsprings
of the faith, remains, however, a strength rather than a weakness. Anti-
nomianism is intimately related to the conception of the person as situ-
ated and embodied spirit, transcendent over the institutional and con-
ceptual frameworks that shape him and incapable of being wholly
defi ned by his circumstance. For this reason, the antinomian impulse
forms part of the path by which the Christian may seek to widen his
share in the life of God. It safeguards the faith against the Hegelian
heresy: the quest for a defi nitive structure of life and thought that is
capable of accommodating all the experience that we have reason to
value. It keeps us from using our appeal to such a structure as an ex-
cuse to avoid self- transformation. It gives practical consequence to the
awareness of our radical incompleteness and of the permanent open-
ness of historical experience to subversive insight and transformation.
It helps account for the immea sur able infl uence of Christianity on the
secular projects of liberation, po liti cal and personal, that have changed
the world over the last few centuries.
Antinomianism nevertheless comes at a price. Just as the absence of
a system of sacred law serving as a template for the or ga ni za tion of so-
ciety protects the religion against the temptation to embrace a par tic u-
lar blueprint of social order, so too it denies the religion a ready- made
foil by which to judge and challenge the existing secular institutions.
Th e halakhah and the sharia supply a gold standard by which to assess