religious revolution now 279of social life and personal piety in which (thanks to monasticism and
evangelism) the history of Christianity has been prodigal.
Th e fundamental issue at stake in this confl ict between religious
faith and social compromise is the extent of our hope to live in the
world as who we really are and discover ourselves to be rather than as
placeholders in a system of social classes and roles. If triumph over
the experience of susceptibility to belittlement is, together with the
overcoming of estrangement from life in the present, a major incite-
ment to new religious revolution, then Christianity can vie to be the
religion sought by that revolution only if it puts an end to this history
of compromise and replaces it by another idea of politics. What such
an idea might be I describe, in profane voice, in the next chapter of this
book.
Just as Christianity has been compromised by society, it has also
been compromised by philosophy. From very early in the transition
from the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, Christianity was wedded to
Greek philosophy and to the philosophical tradition that descends
from the ancient Greeks. Th e marriage of Christian faith to Greek phi-
losophy is not an accidental or peripheral feature of Christianity. Once
Christianity had ceased to be the original teaching of Jesus of Naza-
reth, it took up with the Johannine and Hellenistic philosophy of the
logos. Philosophy informed the orthodox view of the central mysteries
of the Incarnation and the Trinity, as established by the early councils
that set the path of orthodoxy. It guided the teachings of the most infl u-
ential exponents of theological orthodoxy. Today we continue to have
no clear purchase on what the Christian faith, purged of its translation
into the categories of Greek philosophy, would be like.
Th e problem that this reckoning with Greek philosophy presents for
Christianity is not confi ned to Platonism and to the Platonic demotion
of the reality of time and of the signifi cance of history. Th e problem lies,
rather, in the more fundamental assertion of the superior reality and
value of impersonal being over personality and personal encounter.
What runs through the philosophical tradition that set its mark on
Christianity, as it did on modern science, is the project of classical on-
tology: the eff ort to ground our understanding of the world in a basic
and lasting structure. Such is the same view that we discover in the
meta- scientifi c conception according to which the standard model of