religious revolution now 281
po liti cal liberation. However, my topic now is the reformation of Christi-
anity and its relation to the religion of the future. It is in the thought and
art inspired by Christianity that those conceptions, although truncated
and perverted, have achieved their fullest expressions.
Turn now from the main line of Christian orthodoxy to the long-
lasting source of tension and movement within Christianity. We might
call it the axis of heresy, except that it has been one of the sources of the
religion in every period of its history, back to its very origin.
I am not speaking of the counter theology of mysticism, with its idea
of God as non- being and non- person, its philosophical attachment to a
speculative monism, and its attack on all structure and repetition as
idolatrous death to the spirit. Th is element in the history of Christian-
ity, as in the histories of Judaism and Islam, has always bordered on
outright apostasy. In its conception of God, it turns the narrative of
salvation into the allegory of the logos. In its antipathy to full recogni-
tion of the reality of time and of evolving structural distinction in na-
ture, if not of the real of individual personality, it threatens to embrace
the metaphysical program of the overcoming of the world. In its war
against structure and repetition, it foreshadows what I called the Sar-
trean heresy (but might have labeled the heresy of the via negativa,
which it shares with romanticism). What appears to be a campaign
against routine is in fact, as Kierkegaard understood, a campaign against
life, aggravating the estrangement from possession of the present that
already taints the orthodox statements of the faith.
Rather the tendency to which I refer, as the chief source of tension
and radicalization in the history of the religion, is the one that begins
in Paul, continues through Augustine, receives a consummation of sorts
in Luther and Calvin, and is explored comprehensively in the theologies
of Schleiermacher and Barth as well as in the religious practice of latter-
day evangelical Protestantism. It has accompanied the entire history of
Christianity, as the shadow of orthodoxy. It would be strange to call it
an axis of heresy because its found er, Paul, is regarded by many as the
real author of the religion: the religion about the Son of Man, as distin-
guished from the teaching of Jesus of Nazareth. Yet if it is not heresy, it
is the perennial source of schism, given that little time ever passes be-
fore the conventional Christianity of the or ga nized churches is found