60 beyond wishful thinkingtransformation. Th e world resists the prophecy. Th is re sis tance tests
the truth of the faith. It is an always ambiguous test, but a test
nevertheless.
Th e trusting side of faith has to do with the consequences of this
cognitive exorbitance for our relations to other people, including our
dealings with God, when we represent him in the mode of personal
being. Because the actions undertaken in the light of religious ideas
concern matters of ultimate signifi cance, but at the same time are be-
reft of adequate grounds for belief, they amount to an adventure. In this
adventure we become relatively more vulnerable to others; in one sense
or another, we are forced to lift our shields. To put ourselves in other
people’s hands on account of our beliefs, or in the hands of God when
our relations with him are represented by analogy to our relations with
other people, and to do so in a way that must seem reckless by the stan-
dards of our worldly calculations, is one of the marks of faith.
Th e risking and the trusting sides of faith are inseparable. Th e ele-
ment of trust shows that the risk is never just about a conjecture, how-
ever grand, concerning our place in the world: it reveals its meaning
in its implications for our connections with other people. Th e element
of risk shows that what we make of such connections remains entan-
gled in our understanding of the limits to our existence and to our
insight.
To see religion as the mode of experience defi ned by these three attri-
butes is to understand why we suff er a perpetual temptation to treat
many other forms of practice and of thought— philosophy, art, and
politics— as substitutes for religion. It is also, however, to grasp why
they are unable to perform this surrogate role without violence to them
and to us.
Philosophy may deal with the penumbra of what lies beyond our
achieved knowledge. It may wrestle with the insoluble contradictions
that arise when we try to overstep the bounds of sense and of under-
standing. Nevertheless, when it abandons or dilutes the requirement of
reasoned justifi cation, it loses direction as well as force.
Art may conjure up the fl aws in our condition, and promise a happi-
ness lying beyond them, through some resolution that we can achieve
right now despite them. When it tries to reproduce the link between a