288 religious revolution nowChristianity, with its affi rmation of our radical dependence on revela-
tion and grace. It maintained the intransigent claim of the faith to off er
the exclusive path to salvation and affi rmed that Christ is the defi nitive
and sole incarnation of the living God. It persisted in the view, charac-
teristic of all historical Christianity, that the overriding good lies be-
yond both biographical and historical time. Our earthly experience
remains irretrievably broken despite the presence, in our minds and
hearts, of sanctifying grace. What we undergo and accomplish on Earth
can at best be a preparation and a prefi guring of a greater change, ac-
complished only aft er our lives on Earth are over. In all these respects,
the religion defi ned by the changes discussed in the preceding pages
would take another course.
Whether a religion remains the same religion or becomes another
one aft er undergoing a radical revision is a question the answer to which
has an irreducible residue of collective choice. Th e religious revolution-
aries may choose or not to cast the changed religion as the continua-
tion, or the re- foundation, of the religion that existed before. Th ey may
or may not succeed in gaining ac cep tance of their view from the com-
munity of believers. Th e analysis of theological propositions is powerless
to prevail against the choice of that community. If the religion remains
a living appeal to experience, it cannot persuasively be confi ned within
a propositional scheme.
Th e religion of Jesus of Nazareth was, as best a scholar today can
hope to discern, a movement led by a holy man and miracle worker
within Judaism. It was directed to his fellow Jews. It held out, in the con-
text of successive constraints and calamities suff ered by the Jews under
Roman rule, the expectation of a Kingdom of God, to be established in
the near future. It taught, by narrative, parable, and precept, a way of life
and a set of attitudes that it presented as intimately related to our hope
of progress on this road to redemption.
Th en, in the hands of Paul and others, the religion of Jesus was turned
into a religion about Jesus. Th e formulas of Hellenistic philosophy were
used to express the Christology of Incarnation and then, later, the mys-
terious dogma of the Trinity. What had been a movement within Juda-
ism began to take the gentiles as its addressees. Th e moral precepts, so
intimately related to an imminent eschatological future, were turned
into a comprehensive vision of how to live, given the indefi nite post-