religious revolution now 285change. It is only one of the radical changes that Christianity would
have to undergo if it were to bid for the role of religion of the future.
Th e second element in the long- standing rebellion within
Christianity— the idea of our unlimited dependence on God— would
need more than reinterpretation and revision. It would need to be re-
placed. Surprisingly, the required replacement comes from the center
of orthodoxy.
Th e idea of our limitless dependence on God is incompatible with
the vision of any faith that wants men and women to become more hu-
man by becoming more godlike. It is not that it dissuades us from striv-
ing. On the contrary, as Weber and other sociologists of religion ar-
gued, the anguish of uncertainty about our own salvation can drive us
into frantic action in the hope that our bustling will signal to us that we
are among the elect.
Nevertheless, the view that this radical dependence on an inscrutable
if loving God is the most decisive feature of the human condition di-
minishes the signifi cance of our power to transcend and reshape con-
text and, through such transcendence, to increase our share in some of
the attributes of divinity. It cannot serve a religious revolution that takes
as one of its points of departure the enhancement of life. It leaves us de-
fenseless against the experience of estrangement from the present.
We must, indeed, cease to deny death, groundlessness, and insatiabil-
ity. We must place uncomfortable truths in the place of lullabies, dis-
pensing with consolation as a poor substitute for our ascent to a greater
life. Th is re orientation arouses us from a diminished existence of rou-
tine and compromise. It opens the way to our ascent. Th e terror attend-
ing both the experience of unqualifi ed dependence and the wait for our
mysterious salvation undermines the ideas, and discourages the emo-
tions, that such an undertaking requires.
At the heart of Christian orthodoxy, we can fi nd the beginnings of
beliefs that we would need to put in the place of the sense of radical
dependence. We can fi nd them not at the periphery of the faith but in
the main line of the Christian theologians who from Athanasius (the
chief author of the Nicene Creed) to Th omas Aquinas (the most infl u-
ential arbiter of Christian theological correctness for centuries) and
beyond have marked out the path of Christian orthodoxy. Th is idea is
most oft en developed in the setting of the theology of Incarnation.