religious revolution now 287in the personal and po liti cal direction that I next explore in this
book.
So much the new Christian would share with the profane revolu-
tionary. What distinguishes his position, to use the language of Aqui-
nas’s Corpus Christi sermon, is his conviction that men can become
gods only because God fi rst became man. It is also his belief that the
transformation, which begins in historical time, continues beyond his-
torical time, in a life whose nature is hidden to us but that we can nev-
ertheless foreshadow in our earthly existence.
If the Christian ceases to believe in the divinity of Christ and to
credit the promise of eternal life, inseparable from the self if not from
the body, if he views Christ as simply a visionary teacher and exem-
plary agent, inspired by the closeness of his access to the divine, and if
he dismisses the expectancy of resurrection as no more than a meta-
phor for our survival in the collective work of humanity, he has taken
refuge in the halfway house between belief and disbelief. He has re-
duced his faith to an embroidering of beliefs that gain nothing from the
allegorical surplus that he appends to it. His religion then becomes an
evasion and declines into irrelevance.
If, however, he holds the line at this point, he continues to convey in
a sacred voice a message irreducible to the profane version of the reli-
gion of the future. He claims to see (to use Karl Rahner’s distinction)
beyond the lesser hope of a change of life to the greater hope of life
forever. He has renounced the claim of exclusive access to salvation
without accepting the limits of a secular humanism. He has replaced
the idea of our radical dependence on God with a view of our diviniza-
tion, according to which we can become at once more human and more
godlike without mistaking ourselves for God. Th is religion would be a
religion distinct from the Godless version of the religion of the future
that I explore in the rest of this book. But would it be Christianity?No theoretical analysis can determine whether the religion resulting
from these revisions would remain Christianity. It would, at the very
least, amount to a radical reformation of Christianity, diff erent in char-
acter, intention, and eff ect from the Protestant Reformation. Protes-
tantism represented, among other things, a moment in the deepening
of the Pauline and Augustinian tradition or counter tradition within