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There was much talk of voter apathy in the 1972 presidential election campaign. Indeed, apathy is all too characteristic of the mood of the ‘70s. Undoubtedly this apathy will not prove to be permanent. New issues and new causes will rouse us again. Yet there is reason to see in the current apathy toward public events a symptom of a longer and a deeper trend.

Apathy is a bad word in our vocabulary. We forget that it was once used by some of our Greek forebears, especially the Stoics, to describe the ideal state or condition of man. To be free from concern about what happens outside one’s sphere of control was, for the Stoic, salvation. That meant that the Stoic strove mightily to become virtuous in himself while cultivating indifference toward external occurrences.

We are heirs of the alternative view that emotional involvement in public events and concern about them are essential to our humanity. But that view arose with the Hebrew prophets who saw Yahweh as stern moral will and omnipotent Lord of history. This is a vision which, for good or ill, we do not share. It was sustained by a story of his mighty acts that no longer fits our apprehension of nature or history. It climaxed in an expectation of final judgment that cannot be identified with our fears of an end brought about by atomic war or environmental collapse.

If history has no Lord, and if we individually do not stand under the moral judgment of a transcendent maker, then does our continued concern for critical openness and historical responsibility make sense? Why worry how we write a chapter in a book that has no end, or at least no end that makes sense of the story leading to it? On the way to universal extinction, why take ourselves so seriously?

When we face these questions we can take some comfort in the great humanists of our century who, without belief in the prophetic God, continued the prophetic witness. Bertrand Russell is one such humanist. Few professing Christians have matched his record of responsible and costly involvement in the events of this century. By word and deed he has quickened the conscience of us all.

But on closer inspection Russell is not so hopeful an example as he seems. We are not asking whether there are heroic prophets who continue the witness to truth and righteousness in our time. We are asking instead whether there is any reason to continue this style of existence when its original grounds are lacking. In answering that question, we find that Russell is of little help. Reflecting on his own intense opposition to Nazism, Russell sought its grounds. Finally, he decided, it must be admitted to be merely a matter of taste.

Russell seems to be in much the same position as many of us liberal Christians. We are living off inherited capital. Those things we care most about seem not to be grounded in our present convictions about reality. We speak of what we "still" believe. We sense that crucial beliefs are slipping from us. We have no will to impose such beliefs on our children, and if we did, we would have no way. With the passing of prophetic theism, prophetic humanism fades too.

There is little mystery about where present religious trends are leading. When men cease to live in terms of meaningful history, they will inevitably revert to more ancient sources of meaning. Perhaps the historical consciousness has never been more than a thin overlay over the mystical and archaic one for most men. Perhaps the image of return describes the deepest longing of the human heart.

Theodore Roszak showed himself to be a brilliant critic of our dominant technological society in The Making of a Counter-Culture. More recently, he has published a book entitled Where the Wasteland Ends: Politics and Transcendence in Postindustrial Society. In it, he is calling for the reaffirmation of God in order to rally the forces of the spirit against the dehumanizing society and mentality that oppress us. But the God he affirms is not the prophetic-Christian one; it is, rather, the archaic one. He condemns Christianity for having opposed such esoteric cults as magic and alchemy. Only through a revival of these mysteries, in his view, can we break out of the bondage to the rational through which we are bound to our repressive society as well.

The personal faith of Richard Rubenstein exemplifies this return to the archaic in a peculiarly lucid way:

"The biblical Lord of history is a redeemer God. He promises that the sorrows of the present age will ultimately be vindicated by the triumph of his kingdom. This view implies that human history has a meaning and a goal -- the coming of God’s kingdom. Unfortunately, nothing in our anthropological, biological, or psychological knowledge of man offers the slightest justification for his belief. . . . Man is the most cunning and predatory of all animals. He hardly seems a fit candidate for citizenship in the divine commonwealth. The Judaeo-Christian belief in the redeemer God is in reality the collective dream of Western man.

There is a conception of God which does not falsify reality and which remains meaningful after the death of the God-who-acts-in-history. It is in fact a very old conception of God with deep roots in both Western and Oriental mysticism. According to this conception, God is spoken of as the Holy Nothingness. . . . He is an indivisible plenum so rich that all existence derives from his very essence.

"Perhaps the best available metaphor for the conception of God as the Holy Nothingness is that God is the ocean and we are the waves. In some sense each wave has its moment in which it is distinguishable as a somewhat separate entity. Nevertheless, no wave is entirely distinct from the ocean which is its substantial ground. The waves are surface manifestations of the ocean." (Richard Rubenstein, Morality and Eros, pp. 185-186; McGraw-Hill Book Co., Inc., 1970.)

It seems that when we deny the Father God as the transcendent creator, lord and judge of history, we find ourselves drawn back to the Mother Goddess who is the undifferentiated totality from which we are distinguished only provisionally and temporarily. She offers us release from all tension, reunion with the One, return to the beginning. But in the absence of hope for a better future, history is meaningless. In the absence of judgment, ethics returns to the social mores from which it arose. In the absence of real individuality, the person loses significance.

What, then, about us? We are drawn by the currents of our time toward this archaic vision. We cannot affirm the traditional transcendent prophetic God. Yet we believe in the importance of history, we live out of some kind of hope, our individuality seems to us real and valuable, and the prophetic passion for justice burns within us. Must we say of all this that it is "still" true, that is, that it is vestigial and doomed to pass away? Or is there an alternative to the Father God of the prophets and the Mother Goddess of the archaic and mystical visions?

There is an alternative, one deeply rooted in our Christian tradition, repeatedly affirmed in the recent past, yet still awaiting a formulation that can effectively grasp and shape the imagination. It is the vision of the incarnate God.

Thomas Altizer has struggled for an adequate formulation of this vision. He had taken as his starting point the kenotic hymn in Phil. 2:5-11. This speaks of Christ as emptying himself to assume human form. For Altizer, this means that the transcendent gives itself up to immanence, that spirit becomes flesh, that is, that God becomes man. Christ is the name for the ensuing movement of the divine within the world.

In this way Altizer affirms the forward movement of history. We are called, not to return to the primordial, but to go forward with Christ to the End.

Altizer points the way for us, but to follow him altogether would be to betray the convictions whose grounding we seek. Altizer insists that the End to which Christ leads differs from the primordial ground. But he is not able to make this difference clear. Like the exponents of archaic religion, he uses images of a Totality that is beyond differentiation. For him, too, ethical, social, and political concerns are displaced from importance in the Christian vision.

Is there a way of understanding the incarnate God that does meet our need? To put the question so baldly is to suggest that we are trying to construct a God to fulfill our wishes rather than openly seeking to know reality as it is. But that is not quite the case. We begin with our commitment to the open and critical spirit, our concern for ourselves as human beings and for our neighbors, our longing for justice in human affairs, and our desire to participate responsibly in history, and we ask, Are all these quite unfounded? Is our concern for these things simply a matter of taste or the product of a wish-fulfilling dream? And the affirmative answer to that question does not ring true. It is hard to believe that these concerns are simply arbitrary or fashioned to fulfill our needs, when they are in tension with the more obvious desires rooted in our organisms. Certainly these concerns are the product of some process that has been working its way through the histories that have fashioned us, and certainly there have been ideas associated with those histories that we can no longer believe. But what of the process itself? Is it simply the function of error? Or can it be that the process that has aroused these concerns in us has its own reality, that our continued sense of the importance of these concerns even when the beliefs that once grounded them have gone is fostered by the continuing functioning of that process, that this process has still more work to do in the world, that it is worthy of our attention and cooperation?

If there is such a process, we should be able to discern it elsewhere as well. And, in fact, we are much inclined to do so. We see it in the hopefulness and zest of children, in the tenderness of lovers, in the courage and zeal of revolutionaries, in the creativity of artists, in the awakening of a mind to truth, in the sensitivity of an effective counselor, in an athlete’s quest of excellence, in the longing for peace with justice for all men. And there are special moments in history to which we turn. There is Socrates drinking the hemlock rather than employ persuasive tricks in place of objective rational argument. There is Gautama receiving enlightenment under the Indian tree and teaching his disciples the way of moderation and compassion. There is Jesus dying on a cross.

We experience a deep unity in all of these. They manifest to us what is most precious and worthy. We feel that it is right and good, not that we should imitate these men, but that we should be responsive as they were responsive. That means that consciously or unconsciously we do discern in this process a direction and a character that we trust, with which we want to be in tune and which it seems appropriate to celebrate.

If we try to specify more exactly what it is that unites these many events and persons, we may best say that it is a movement of transcendence. I do not mean by transcendence something that is outside the events. I mean, rather, a movement within the events beyond what is given by the settled situation toward a wider and a richer future. We must picture these events not as driven by the past but as drawn by and into the creative possibilities of the future. In our own continuing experience we can discern that alongside the many forces that lead us to repetitive and empty gestures, to defense of ourselves against the risk of pain, to managing and distancing others so that they will not break into our security, there is another voice that calls us to openness to the other, to exposure of our settled beliefs to novel facts and ideas, to following new and promising roads even when we cannot know where they will lead, to the free acceptance of responsibility for movements whose ends are wider than our own self-interest. Nikos Kazantzakis, the Greek poet and novelist, once put it this way:

"Blowing through heaven and earth, and in our hearts and the heart of every living thing, is a gigantic breath -- a great Cry -- which we call God. Plant life wished to continue its motionless sleep next to stagnant waters, but the Cry leaped up within it and violently shook its roots: ‘Away, let go of the earth, walk!’ Had the tree been able to think and judge, it would have cried, ‘I don’t want to. What are you urging me to do! You are demanding the impossible!’ But the Cry, without pity, kept shaking its roots and shouting, ‘Away, let go of the earth, walk!’

"It shouted in this way for thousands of eons; and lo! as a result of desire and struggle, life escaped the motionless tree and was liberated.

"Animals appeared -- worms -- making themselves at home in water and mud. ‘We’re just fine here,’ they said. ‘We have peace and security; we’re not budging!’

"But the terrible Cry hammered itself pitilessly into their loins. ‘Leave the mud, stand up, give birth to your betters!’

"‘We don’t want to! We can’t!’

"‘You can’t, but I can. Stand up!’

"And lo! after thousands of eons, man emerged, trembling on his still unsolid legs.

"The human being is a centaur; his equine hoofs are planted in the ground, but his body from breast to head is worked on and tormented by the merciless Cry. He has been fighting, again for thousands of eons, to draw himself, like a sword, out of his animalistic scabbard. He is also fighting -- this is his new struggle -- to draw himself out of his human scabbard. Man calls in despair, ‘Where can I go? I have reached the pinnacle, beyond is the abyss.’ And the Cry answers, ‘I am beyond. Stand up!’" (Nikos Kazantzakis, Report to Greco, pp. 291-292; Simon & Schuster, Inc., 1965.)

Kazantzakis speaks with dramatic power of the terrifyingly insistent Cry. Alfred North Whitehead has written of "the tender elements of the world, which slowly and in quietness operate by love." (Process and Reality, p. 520; The Macmillan Company, 1929.) There is a great difference in mood, but what they speak of is the same. The Cry operates in quietness. Love in its persistence in the face of every rejection is a terrifying force.

This tender Cry, this terrifying Love, to which it is so much more comfortable to shut our ears and hearts, is the God whom we have been trying to heed as liberal Christians. It is not a figment of our imagination or a product of our wishes. It is there to be discerned if we will be attentive and perceptive.

This Cry grounds our concerns for truth and justice, not by assuring that our goals will be attained, but by calling us continually into the renewal of concern. To hear the Cry is to recognize in ourselves the inertia that opposes it. In this way it judges and condemns us.

But the Cry is not primarily judge. The Cry grounds our hope. When we project past trends into the future, we are discouraged. We see that as men continue to struggle for power and unlimited wealth they must inevitably hasten the planet toward catastrophe. But when we discern the working of the Cry, the future opens up again. Past trends need not continue. The Cry works everywhere. In the most surprising quarters we find men moved to transcend their self-serving quest for power and wealth. Where we least expect it, compassion shows itself, men strive disinterestedly for excellence, a vision of peace moves tired hearts to try again. Even out of the clash of hostile forces arises unexpected good.

To respond to the Cry is to move with the deepest rhythm of the universe. It is not the only rhythm. In the short run it is not the most obvious. There is no guarantee of its success. It may not even save humanity from total ruin. All the same, the Cry remains the deepest rhythm. In attunement with that rhythm there can be peace in the midst of confusion and joy in the midst of suffering. There is wholeness and authenticity.

Jesus is the most important figure in world history. Superficially this is attested by the worldwide acceptance of a system of dating in which the supposed year of his birth marks the inauguration of our age. But there are much deeper reasons for this affirmation.

Most history these days is written from a quite secular point of view in which the religious foundation of culture is little Understood or appreciated. Even so, accounts of the events in Europe through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are filled with testimony to the importance of Christian institutions and indirectly of Jesus. As one reads on, the church plays a lesser and lesser role, so that the student of European, and even American, history might suppose that the church had almost disappeared as a significant factor by the nineteenth century.

However, the myopia of these historical accounts is already apparent. In retrospect from the present we must judge that the changes taking place in the nineteenth century among Asian and African peoples were more important than most of the political squabbles in Europe that have dazzled our historians. And if we ask how these changes came about, the most accurate simple answer is that the peoples of Asia and Africa came into contact with that great disturber, Jesus.

We must recognize that it was as disturber and not as savior in some other sense that Jesus played his dominant role in the nineteenth century. There are, of course, Christian churches throughout Asia and Africa that bear witness to other dimensions of his impact as well. But far beyond the walls of these new churches the encounter with Jesus aroused dissatisfaction with a status quo which men had previously regarded as natural or inevitable and to which they had been resigned. In the light of Jesus, the injustice and unacceptability of both the traditional social structures and the new colonialism became apparent. The restlessness and criticism awakened by Jesus gave birth to the great nationalist and socialist revolutions of the twentieth century that have dramatically changed the map of the world and reduced Western Europe to one among half a dozen centers of power. Even in the nineteenth century, unnoticed by our historians Jesus was the most important figure in world history.

That Jesus is the most important figure in world history is more readily acknowledged by thinkers who are accustomed to looking behind social and political changes to the grounds from which they spring. In Eastern Europe a good many Marxist intellectuals today are extremely interested in Christianity, because they recognize that Marxism deals only with a segment of life and requires a wider and a deeper context in the understanding of man. Many of them would recognize that Jesus, rather than Marx, is the center of history. Thoughtful Hindus and Buddhists recognize how much of their contemporary self-understanding has grown out of their encounter and competition with Christianity, especially in India and Japan. The Christian challenge has extricated the fundamental religious impulse in their life from the cultural and traditional patterns in which it was immersed. Even the great enemies of Christianity, such as Friedrich Nietzsche, recognized in Jesus the one adversary worthy of all their efforts.

Some who recognize that the Crucified One towers over all other figures in world history deplore it. But we, as Christians, rejoice, regretting only that his influence is so often corruptly mediated by his followers. When we acknowledge Jesus as the center of our history, we make not only a judgment about the facts but also a confession of evaluation. What has come to us from him is that in terms of which we interpret and evaluate what we receive from other sources as well. That we are self-critical at all, and the particular way in which we criticize ourselves, derives from Jesus.

If this is so, then we must recognize that our relation to Jesus is of utmost importance for us, that to be more nearly what we would be is to perfect that relation. But when we then undertake to perfect that relation, either we do so naïvely and pietistically or we find that we confront difficult questions, many of which had hardly occurred to us.

We cannot improve our relation to Jesus unless we know who he was. For example, if he was a teacher who expounded enduring moral and spiritual laws, then to improve our relation to him would be to believe what he taught and to obey the laws he showed us. If he was a perfect personality embodying the ideal form of humanity to which all aspire, then we should seek to be more like him. If he was one who pointed away from himself to God or to the Kingdom of God, then we should look with him at what he saw. If he was one who denied the importance of the world and all that takes place within it in the name of another world, then we should practice asceticism.

Liberal Christians in the nineteenth century felt the importance of these questions and devoted remarkable scholarly gifts, motivated by deep Christian passion, to finding the answers. Albert Schweitzer has commented that their work and their achievements were unique in human history. To this day no other religious community has criticized its sacred scriptures so ruthlessly, with such a commitment to truth. But the quest failed. Schweitzer himself wrote the obituary. The failure of the quest must warn us as to the extent to which the Jesus to whom we try to relate is likely to be more the product of our fancies than the man who once lived in Galilee.

Less dramatically the quest has been renewed in the twentieth century. New methods of historical inquiry have been forged. Gradually the pendulum swing from theory to theory has become less wild, and a small body of reliable results has emerged. These tell us little of Jesus personality. They do not enable us to explain the sequence of events in his ministry or any development in his thought. They indicate very little concerning what view he may have had of himself or what his motives may have been. But they do allow us to say some things about Jesus’ message and about how he characteristically acted.

Perhaps what we can say with greatest confidence is that he was -- and is -- a disturbing figure. We can be quite sure that he included tax collectors in the community meals that were so central to his life with his disciples. That would be like a Norwegian during the Nazi occupation throwing parties for Quisling and his associates -- only more so, for the common meal meant far more in Jesus’ day than a party could mean in occupied Norway. We can be sure also that he overturned reasonable conceptions of justice, as in the parable of the laborers in the vineyard (Matt. 20:1-16), where those who worked only a few minutes were paid as much as those who worked all day.

The Jewish leaders of Jesus’ day could not assimilate such action and such teaching into their understanding of goodness. Neither can we, even though we have the advantage of being able to understand his teaching historically. That is, we can see that the ground of his strange behavior and stories was his conviction that God’s Kingdom was breaking in, that the decision each man made in relation to that Kingdom set aside all other considerations. We, on the other hand, know that world history continued and continues. Hence our judgments can and must be made in the context of this ongoingness rather than in that of the imminence of the end of history.

It might seem, then, that we should just dismiss Jesus as a deluded fanatic. But we can’t. Something happened when he turned the world upside down. Men saw their lives in a new and very disturbing light. It was disturbing because on the one hand it showed them things about themselves that, once having seen, they could not forget, whereas on the other hand there was no adjustment of their lives which could comfortably reconcile them to this new truth. We are still caught in that quandary. For example, when we are told that prostitutes are better than preachers, how do we react? We preachers would like to ridicule the idea, but we cannot. It has a haunting truth that will not let us go. Should we, then, encourage everyone to become a prostitute? Of course not. That would be totally to misunderstand Jesus. It was in repentance that the prostitute showed her superiority. Should we, then, confess the preachers’ sins of pride and hard-heartedness and vested interest in established patterns that become apparent to us as we hear Jesus’ condemnation? Of course, but having confessed. we are not off the hook. We are still enmeshed in the habits of feeling, thought, and action whose bondage we have admitted.

To come to terms with Jesus has been throughout the centuries an immensely disturbing challenge to Christians. We can distinguish four main ways in which we have attempted it.

The Catholic Church rightly saw that the demands of Jesus were unreasonable and inappropriate for the ordinary man who must support a family and carry on the affairs of the world. For him the church taught a stringent but practical morality derived from the Old Testament and Stoicism. The distinctively Christian element in his life came through the sacraments by means of which Christ became redemptively present to him. Those, however, who could not settle for this halfway house, those who wanted to be fully Christian, separated themselves from the world. For them the church institutionalized the religious life. This involved renunciation of sex and property and the control of one’s own life so that he could live in the upside-down world of the gospel.

Through the centuries there has been another, a sectarian, response. It was contemptuous of the Catholic solution. In the sectarian view there can be no halfway Christianity. Every Christian is called to full discipleship to this disturbing Jesus. Each must live out this discipleship in the world with the responsibilities entailed in raising a family. In just that context he must renounce all use of force, turn the other cheek when affronted, and give his last garment to whoever asks for it.

Of course, governments cannot function on such radical principles. And some Christians believed that living in the world required participation in shaping the course of events rather than passive response alone. Luther struggled with this problem, rejecting monasticism with the sectarians but seeking to affirm an ethic of the possible with the Catholics. Luther saw that even the monks and the sectarians who strove for perfection did not attain it, that they were constantly falling under Jesus’ condemnation of the Pharisees for self-deception and self-righteousness. None, he was convinced, could live by Jesus’ teaching. But that excused none from living in continual relation to that teaching. It was Jesus who once and for all made clear that no man is righteous, that no man can save himself, and that we are wholly dependent on grace.

Christians influenced by Romanticism questioned the intense focus on continuing sinfulness of the Lutheran view. They were concerned to emphasize the fulfillment of human potentialities and the possibility of bringing into being a more Christian society. They found in Jesus a high appraisal of man as man, the infinite worth of the individual, and the vision of a society in which God’s will is done on earth. Jesus as companion and helper on our upward journey replaced Jesus the disturber. But Jesus has refused this role. He remains the abrasive teacher who turns all things upside down.

All these responses to Jesus have their saints and heroes. Each has penetrated deeply into the hearts and minds of many Christians and has shaped churches and social institutions that endure to our own time. But none has succeeded finally -- or at least, none has succeeded for us.

We find ourselves again in confrontation with Jesus the disturber, who will not let us rest even in our best responses to him. As we look at him we find ourselves lifted and borne forward by a history in which his spirit, often incognito, has remained the driving force. But we see that even the best embodiments of that spirit, whether churches, schools, or revolutionary movements, are extremely ambiguous. In the direct light of Jesus’ teaching they appear to us as corrupt and corrupting. We find ourselves entangled in the corruption, in the inertia, in the hypocrisy, and in the self-deceit and halfheartedness of life. But unlike Jesus and some of our Christian forebears, we see no way out. No Kingdom is now breaking in to free the world from ambiguity and suffering. We are called to live in this world without pretending to purity of heart, never satisfied, always seeking ways to deal with particular problems, but without the illusion that our efforts will usher in an age when effort will no longer be needed. We must give ourselves unstintingly to causes likely to fail, causes whose success would only open the way to new problems. To respond to Jesus in this way is not to escape the disturbing recognition of the inadequacy of the response. Yet it is to some such response as this that we are called.

Fortunately there is another side to the teaching of Jesus in addition to the insatiable demand. The extremeness of his call is matched by the extremeness of his promise. God forgives without limit and without conditions. He is more ready to give than we are to seek. God’s present action in the world is there to be experienced with joy.

The grounds of Jesus’ promise are the same as the grounds of his demand -- the inbreaking Kingdom of God. Those grounds are not ours today. But just as the demands continue to disturb us even when we do not share their grounds, so also the promises continue to assure us even though we cannot believe them in the form they take in Jesus. We continue to struggle for a goodness that will allow us to approve of ourselves. And that goodness, in the light of Jesus, always eludes us. But just at the point of deepest disgust with ourselves, our pretensions. and our defenses, we find a paradoxical affirmation. We are forgiven, and therefore forgive ourselves. Just when our efforts to forge ahead collapse, we find ourselves borne forward and set upright again.

The upside-downness of the world into which we are thrown by Jesus the disturber turns out also to reverse our misery as well. Just as our greatest successes are turned into failure so also our failure is turned into success. Just as our joy is turned into wretchedness, so also is our wretchedness turned into joy.

The world that Jesus gives us is one we cannot manage or control. The worlds that we understand and organize all collapse at his touch even when they are constructed in his name. That does not free us from the responsibility of constructing such worlds or of forming them in service to him. But when we have accepted the fact that he destroys all that we do even, and especially, when we do it in his name, then we are ready for the joyful surprise that the destruction is blessing and not curse. Jesus the disturber is our friend.

The public schools have been a major center of controversy. It is right and inevitable that this be so. We all pay taxes to support them, and most of us send our children to them to be educated. We cannot or should not be indifferent to how our children are educated.

Today the controversy centers on busing, and this is a special and highly ambiguous form of the deeper controversy as to whether our children should be grouped in schools according to ethnic, cultural, and economic status. That is an important issue. Controversies flare up from time to time also over sex education, the way children are taught to read, the observance of Christian holidays, prayer in the classroom, and the teaching of evolution.

Less frequently the dispute goes into more substantive matters of the content of texts and courses. Here controversy focuses most often on the teaching of history and, especially, of American history. That focus expresses a sound instinct. A major function of our public schools, alongside teaching the three "R’s," has been the Americanizaton of children from diverse backgrounds. The central means of that Americanization is the teaching of American history. How we understand ourselves as Americans is a function of how we read that history. The Birch Society is right, from its point of view, to be concerned about the element of self-criticism that some of our American histories have recently contained. Blacks and Mexicans and Jews and Indians and Orientals are right to be concerned about the way they are pictured or ignored in the story.

One might argue that in the writing of history we should be concerned only for truth -- not for the interests of special groups. But that is to misunderstand history as story. The past is inexhaustibly complex. Even if a group of people should limit themselves to a consideration of the events occurring in a fifteen-minute period in a particular room, and everyone should cooperate for the rest of their lives in seeking to report them accurately, they would touch on only a very small portion of these events in highly selected ways. Their sentences would never exhaust the actuality.

To tell a story is to select, abstract, arrange, and interpret. Hence it involves distortion. The story never corresponds to what it is about. There can be many equally true stories of the same events.

This variety of true stories was brought home to me in grade school. I attended a Canadian school in Japan. There in alternate years we studied Canadian history from a Canadian textbook, British history from a British textbook, and United States history from an American textbook. For the most part they dealt with quite different events, but they were most interesting where they overlapped.

All three dealt with the American Revolution. The Canadian history told of the heroic defense of the Canadians against the brutal efforts of the colonies to the south to force them into disloyalty. It told also of the influx of loyal British subjects who were being persecuted in the rebellious colonies. The British history gave only a paragraph or two to the event. It was portrayed as a side issue to the great wars raging in Europe. The British decided that it was not worth the trouble to suppress the rebellion. I need not tell you of the stories of brilliant exploits against great odds which filled whole chapters of the American history.

All these accounts were true, but of course they all offered highly selected and distorted truths. Each was written from a particular perspective governed by particular interests and questions. Any history must be. Equally every perspective on the past and present is shaped by some reading of the past.

How we have viewed our alternatives in Vietnam has been largely shaped by our perception of American history. For example, if we read American history as the expansion from thirteen weak and disunited colonies to world dominance in service of a mission to spread throughout the world the enlightened American way of democracy, equal opportunity, and prosperity through competition, then we will think that what was above all important in Vietnam was that we not falter because of petty moral scruples but do whatever was necessary to impose our will upon that land. Whereas if we read American history as the struggle to subordinate power to justice and moderate justice by mercy, then we would see in our behavior in Vietnam an appalling failure of our true calling and would long to share in public confession and repentance.

That the struggle about the present is at the same time a struggle over the reading of the past is nothing new. Indeed, it is characteristic of the whole Judeo-Christian tradition. The New Testament provides us with many good illustrations, for example, the question of how to interpret the event of Jesus’ death on the cross. The background for interpretation is given by the Scriptures, that is, by the history of Israel. But how is that history to be read? Christian preaching in the early days consisted to a large degree of retelling that story so as to show that the crucified Jesus was the messiah of Israel. The Jews who rejected Jesus continued to tell it, of course, in another way. To this day a major difference between Jews and Christians is the way each reads Israel’s story. In general, Jews read it in terms of the law, with the prophets playing a secondary role. Christians read it in terms of the prophets, with the law playing a secondary role.

At first, the Christian story was told for Jews. As Christianity grew among the Gentiles, however, it was told and retold to make sense of this unexpected development. In Rom. chs. 9 to 11, we find Paul’s most sustained effort to carry forward the Christian story so as to include and interpret these events. In some of the later New Testament writings, such as Revelation, the persecutions suffered by the Christians at the hands of the Romans were given meaning by a further extension of the story. And in The City of God the greatest of Christian theologians, Augustine, retold the story of the world so as to make sense of the whole history of the Roman Empire that was crumbling around him.

In modern times, however, few have lived by these ancient Christian stories. Beginning in the Renaissance and winning dominance in the Enlightenment was a quite different story in which the civilization of Greece and Rome constituted the focus of interest and the period of Christian triumph in the Middle Ages was deprecated. The tellers of this story gradually gained more confidence in their own time until, in their accounts, classical antiquity faded into the background and the modern world rose to dominance as the bearer of light and progress. These histories could then portray the exploration, conquest, and settlement of the rest of the planet by Europeans together with their growing science and technology and new social and political institutions as the basis of interpreting events and guiding the course of current affairs. Social Darwinism in the writing of history, together with images of the white mans burden and manifest destiny and bringing the Kingdom of God, gave meaning to life in the half century leading up to World War I.

Those histories are to us now just as alien as the Biblical and Augustinian ones. Where does that leave us?

This is an acute question for professional historians and philosophers of history. In general, they have abandoned the effort to write universal history. They content themselves with bits and pieces of specialized inquiry into the past. They try to throw light not on our present existence in general but rather on some limited aspect of it. Nevertheless, they are caught in a dilemma. As long as they deal with meaningful interpretation at all, they are involved with presuppositions which, if examined, will point back toward some implicit view of universal history and the relation of their narrow subjects to it. If they abandon the quest for meaningful interpretation, then they must recognize their own efforts as trivia not worth the attention of serious men.

If professional historians refuse to tell us a story about the human past to illumine the present, we may he sure that others, less fastidious, and less well qualified, will supply the lack. Christian fundamentalists tell the story of man’s creation, fall, and redemption, and point forward to a final judgment. Marxists tell how bourgeois society rises from a feudal past and hears within itself the seeds of its own destruction and of the rise of a communist society. Nietzsche describes the death of God and the coming of the superior man. Charles Reich pictures our time as that of the rise of "Consciousness III" against the background of "Consciousness I" and "Consciousness II." Norman Brown portrays civilization as rising on the basis of repression and now to be overthrown by the liberation of the body. Meanwhile white supremacists, Black Muslims, Latin revolutionists, Palestinian guerrillas, Israelis, and many others are telling their stories with passionate conviction as a basis for present action.

Many of these stories are interesting and enlightening. None of them are wholly false. We are moved by each. But as liberal Christians we distance ourselves critically from all of them. The truth of one too often conflicts with the truth of the others. The factual errors and cruder distortions of interpretations involved in each offend our love of truth, but our criticisms appear as petty and irrelevant to those who live by these stories. They attack us as uncommitted spectators incapable of effective action.

The criticism hurts because it seems true. In comparison with the dedication of Black Muslims and Palestinian guerrillas, our gestures seem frivolous. Apparently we do not believe in anything strongly enough to live and die for it. We sadly watch while those less troubled by questions of objective truth and fairness become the only real actors on the scene.

There is much truth in that picture of ourselves, but it is not the whole truth. Our reaction to the criticism shows that we too implicitly live by a story that calls for action. Otherwise we would be indifferent to the charge. Our recognition of the selective truth and the distortions of these many stories shows that our story is a more inclusive one. Our ability to respond positively to all the other stories shows that ours deals with more fundamental values.

Perhaps if we can uncover and articulate our own inchoate story we can both be more critical of the judgments we pass upon others and more effective as participants in history. Perhaps we can learn to tell that story with conviction, in spite of our acknowledgment that it is too fragmentary and selective.

The story by which we live is correlative with the values we prize. It is the story of the rise of life out of the inanimate, and of consciousness out of the unconscious. It traces the emergence out of the pre-human of the human and of the distinctively human capacities for language, for humor, for worship, for art, and for thought. It recounts the use of these capacities, on the one hand, for destruction and conquest and, on the other, for bringing about order and justice on a broadening scale. It notes the rise of an understanding which assigns worth to the individual and hence to all individuals and thus challenges the absolute right of the group to impose its collective will. The story portrays the emergence of a love of truth for truth’s sake and its struggle against the myths and ideologies by which men justify their self-interested actions. It finds here and there a concern of men for other men that goes beyond the erotic. It presents the development of visions of the future that include all men in a world of peace, justice, and mutual affection.

The story shows, however, all these changes against a background in which in the great course of events might too often triumphs over right. Those who have hold of partial truths often destroy each other for the sake of those truths and the institutions developed to preserve and enlarge the scope of love often become instruments in self-aggrandizement. The struggle that matters most is fought out, not between good people and bad people, but within the heart of each man. Men are capable of endless self-deception, so that the emergence of every ideal becomes an occasion for hypocrisy. Those who pursue truth most vigorously and those who love justice most passionately often become most cynical. Through the story we see our time both as one of vast achievement and potential and as one in which men have lost confidence that the achievement is worthwhile or the potential actualizable.

This story by which we live is a universal one, to be traced in its distinctiveness in every culture. It finds its richest expressions in those two great families of cultures which we call East and West. Our century is one of decisive interpenetration of those two cultures. How that interpenetration occurs will determine the cultural and human possibilities for the next century. Liberal Christians, open to both East and West. have an opportunity for creative leadership in the deepest events of our time. The chapter of the story that we now write can be as great as any.

I have spoken of the history by which the liberal Christian lives without reference to Jesus, but in fact Jesus has dominated all that I have said. We read history as we do because we are the products of a history at whose center he stands. It is a history that is fed by many streams that have not flowed through him, but our openness to those streams and our selective acceptance of their contributions are because of him. That we seek to understand our present through an inclusive story of the past we owe to him.

To realize that Jesus is the center of the history in which we find meaning for our lives now can liberate us from false attempts to prove our devotion to him. We do not have to bring Jesus artificially into our rhetoric or attempt to force our lives into a pattern that we associate with him. We do not need to whip up strong emotions about him or about his crucifixion for our sake. We do not need to employ the language about him that has characterized our tradition. But we do need honestly to recognize that what is most important and precious in our lives we owe to a history of which he is the hinge. The attempt to understand ourselves more fully and more critically will then lead us to seek a clearer understanding of him as well. But in the process we are called, not to put on a special pair of supposedly Christian glasses. but to use our eyes as they are, to call the shots as we see them, to give ourselves to those causes which commend themselves to us under whatever label.

To find the meaning of our lives through Jesus is to be free. We do not have to struggle for that freedom. We need only to recognize and to accept what is true before we seek it. The story by which we live has already set us free.

Thucydides’ history of the Peloponnesian War is one of the great books of all time. In it Athens appears as a tragic hero. Her faults are not concealed from us, and we know from the first the inevitability of her defeat. We even see that there may be more justice in Sparta’s cause. But we side with Athens. The Athenian people embody so much of the spirit we admire -- a spirit of creativity, love of beauty, self-reliance, and, to a degree. democracy. In their midst were some of the great artists and thinkers of all time.

One incident in the story struck me with peculiar painfulness when I first read the book many years ago and has remained in my memory. It is the story of Mytilene. Mytilene was a member of the confederacy of free cities that Athens gradually transformed into an empire. As in many such cities the common people were sympathetic to Athens, whereas the oligarchy resented Athens and preferred an alliance with Sparta. Under the rule of the oligarchy Mytilene revolted against Athens, counting on Spartan aid. The Spartan fleet, however, was slow in coming, whereas the Athenians came promptly. To defend themselves the Mytileneans armed the common people, who then insisted on making terms with the Athenians. The city surrendered on the single condition that before it was punished the case would be heard by the citizens of Athens. The Athenians were furious that in a time of war a member of the confederacy would turn against them. They voted to kill all the men of the city and to sell the women and children into slavery.

I am glad to say that this story has a relatively happy ending. The people of Athens repented of their decision. The next day they reassembled and reversed themselves. They dispatched fast ships which arrived just in time to stay the slaughter. Only the leaders were executed.

When I first read the story, what struck me with painful force was the fact that the great and free people of Periclean Athens could publicly and collectively decide on so cruel and unjust a punishment. On rereading the story recently, I was more struck by the fact that they changed their minds.

What has happened to me in the intervening years is that I have participated in the widespread American experience of the loss of innocence. Twenty-five years ago, although I might verbally have denied it, I inwardly felt that I was part of a nation incapable of cruelty of such dimensions. Of course I knew that the United States had done some morally questionable things, but I viewed all of them as secondary to a fundamentally virtuous history. I wanted the United States to become more fully involved in world affairs on the assumption that it would exercise its power basically for justice and peace and the economic development of other peoples. I could not understand how the Athenian people, so like us in many ways, could have been capable of such egregious cruelty.

But the past two decades have forced us to re-view our history. We must see it through the eyes of Indians and blacks and Orientals and Mexicans, and it is transformed into a story of greed and exploitation, racism and nationalism, all papered over with a transparently hypocritical rhetoric.

We could come to terms emotionally with this new picture of our distant past if we could see our recent experience in a different light. But alas. In recent times, we have given our support to dictatorships in Greece and Portugal and Brazil and have opposed creative reform in Guatemala, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and in Chile. And above all, there has been our destructive involvement in Vietnam.

We might like to claim that the American people are not responsible for the crimes in Vietnam. By a substantial majority we wanted to get out and leave Vietnam to the Vietnamese. But alas this position was not taken on moral grounds. Once the pressure of the draft was removed, the resistance to the war on college campuses eroded. Once the American casualty list declined, the level of protest against the destruction of Vietnamese lives dropped drastically. Most Americans would have liked to win the war regardless of the moral considerations involved. It was only when we saw that we could not win that we favored extrication. By a considerable majority we supported Nixon’s thoroughly amoral policies.

Many of us, when we realize how deeply we are implicated in the raw use of power to achieve immoral ends, react with anger. We will not tolerate this. We have a democracy in which we can make our voices heard. We organize to change our national policy.

So we tried for many years to stop this vicious and seemingly endless war in Southeast Asia. But we failed. We made headway in one place, only to find that we had lost ground in another.

Furthermore, we found our efforts caught up in a web of ambiguities. To achieve political success we simplified the issues to the point of falsification. We pretended that there were easier solutions than in fact existed. We portrayed those who disagreed with us as fools or as wicked conspirators. We belittled the element of betrayal of allies that would be involved in extricating ourselves. We employed means that involved the violation of laws, and we resented those who pointed out the moral questionableness of such means and were shocked when our efforts backfired against our cause. Our motives were a tangle of concern for the Vietnamese and for our own self-image as righteous people. The net result of all our efforts was that in place of our infantry killing Vietnamese one by one, our nation automated battlefields and instituted mass bombing.

Involved in such abortive efforts, we become more frustrated. From time to time we find new channels by which to vent our anger in constructive, if still ambiguous, ways; but on the whole we find ourselves instead on the verge of despair. In the face of a reality that matters deeply to us, and with full recognition of its horrible moral evil, we find ourselves impotent, and we cannot even take satisfaction in the purity of our own motives and acts. To understand ourselves in relation to such a history is deeply disillusioning.

If we cannot find meaning in history, where shall we turn? One possibility is to take a larger, evolutionary view. Perhaps in the play of seemingly meaningless forces can be discerned a meaning on the larger scale that is invisible in current events.

The most powerful contemporary vision of such a meaning is that of Teilhard de Chardin. In the total history of life on our planet he saw our time as the beginning of a great convergence of all men into a new and ultimate redemptive unity of mutual enrichment. Even in the totalitarian collectivisms of the ‘30s and the great war of the ‘40s he was able to discern movement toward what he called the Omega. Certainly it is the case that over the eons we can discern a growth and progress that is not apparent when we judge instead in terms of recent historical epochs. If we can derive no meaning for our lives from our involvement in the immediate events of history, perhaps we can endow them with significance as a part of an overarching movement toward a distant consummation.

There are two problems with this, First, in spite of all Teilhard’s careful qualifications, the Christian must fear that when the eye is set on so distant a horizon, it will be too easy to neglect the urgent cry of the neighbor for food and justice. The evolutionary scale of millions of years threatens to diminish the importance of the cup of cold water to the thirsty man.

Second, many of us can no longer have confidence in an evolutionary future. Teilhard, in his last years, wrestled with the problem of mans new technical power of self-destruction. But he convinced himself that man would not use it. Now, however, we realize that to destroy ourselves we need only continue in the way we are already going.

I heard a simple story once about a tiny island covered with grass. Sailors stopped there for water and noticed that there were no animals. How perfect, they thought, for rabbits; so they released a few, planning to come back later for fresh meat. When they returned a few years later, however, they found the island littered with the corpses of rabbits. They had multiplied unchecked in that rabbit paradise until, abruptly, they exhausted the food. Then they starved. We now are too much like those rabbits cheerfully multiplying our numbers and our consumption with abundant resources. Only, unlike rabbits. we can foresee the danger. But if we do, then the distant horizon is no longer reassuring. It is imminent historical actions that will determine whether there can be any long-term future at all. Omega may beckon, but it will not save us. So we are thrown back into the cycle of activism and frustration and despair.

If, then, we are to find meaning, we seem to be driven back to the smaller sphere of our family, our friends, and our inner lives. In small groups, kindness and mutual concern sometimes prevail over raw power and here and now we can find satisfaction in exploring the mysteries of the psyche and in opening ourselves to each other. If history is driven by inexorable forces, and if we can have no confidence in an ultimate consummation of the evolutionary process, then must we not seek meaning here?

The problem is that we cannot shut ourselves off from the currents of history even in our sensitivity and meditation groups or in our families. Our efforts to escape history are an expression of our historical situation. And that changing situation breaks in upon our lives inevitably and continuously. If history is amoral arid meaningless, then, in the end, so is every aspect of our lives.

What. then, shall we do? When we seek the meaning of our lives in participation in history, we are driven to despair. But when we seek to overcome this despair by expanding the scale to that of evolution or contracting it to intimate relations we find ourselves thrown back upon history.

We have two choices. The first is to root out of our very beings all sense of meaning and morality. This sense is not easily exorcised, for it is the product of three thousand years of Judeo-Christian history. But we cannot live in despair, and for a hundred years many sensitive Westerners have been coming to terms with the possibility of a history and a personal life without morality and without meaning. To the question, "Does it matter?" they have learned to say. "No."

They have learned to see history as a field of power struggle in which moral ideals are in fact only weapons in the hands of the antagonists. Those with power always use their power to exploit the powerless, and they always will. They believe that to accept man and his world is to accept this man and this world. To moralize about it is only to create misery in yourself and others. There is much that is attractive in this view.

Richard Rubenstein, the rabbi who wrote the book After Auschwitz, has argued that after the horrors perpetrated against the European Jews under Hitler it is no longer possible to believe in the Judeo-Christian God, for to believe in God is to believe that Auschwitz too has meaning. In that book and in some of his other utterances there was an understandable bitterness against Christians and Christianity. But when Rubenstein rejected belief in God he moved toward an amoral view of history. Once the Jews were driven out of Israel by the Romans, he now believes, Auschwitz became inevitable. Events are governed by inexorable historical forces, not by morality. Hence it is pointless to accuse and to excuse. For the Christian, at least, this nonjudgmental Rubenstein is easier to take than the accusing prophet.

William Golding, author of Lord of the Flies, tells the story in The Inheritors of the meeting of Cro-Magnon with Neanderthal man. The story is told from the point of view of the more primitive, less aggressive, Neanderthal man. It is a horrible but all too plausible account of his destruction. It is a parable of what has always happened in history when a more advanced people encounter a less advanced and, usually, less warlike one. Perhaps we can have more compassion for our ancestors for their treatment of Africans and Indians if we realize that this is part of a universal pattern rather than an expression of peculiar viciousness on their part.

Perhaps. in the reading of the past, an amoral view has much to commend it. But our reading of the past will carry over into our reading of the present and undercut our passion for justice and our hope that men can even now rise above raw power in their treatment of one another. Perhaps we can come to terms with the exploitations of the past, but should we complacently stand aside as the sacred mountain of the Navajos is strip-mined and the ecology of their region destroyed in order to produce more electricity to meet the insatiable demands of us Californians? Should we simply accept as inevitable the continued slaughter of the primitive Indians of the Amazon because they are felt to be a nuisance by the new developers and builders of roads?

There are tough-minded people who have learned to accept the exploitation and genocide that are occurring in our time without flinching and without moral judgment. These too they see as products of the inexorable forces of history.

Albert Camus thought in this way at one point in his life. He had a German friend with whom he talked about what this viewpoint implied. The friend went on to become a Nazi. Camus found deep within himself that he did not, could not, believe that this amoral view of life was the last word. Toward the end of World War II he wrote his friend as follows:

"For a long time we both thought that this world had no ultimate meaning . . . . still think so in a way. But I came to different conclusions from the ones you used to talk about, which, for so many years now, you have been trying to introduce into history. I tell myself now that if I had really followed your reasoning, I ought to approve what you are doing. . . .

"You never believed in the meaning of this world, and you therefore deduced the idea that everything was equivalent and that good and evil could be defined according to one’s wishes. . . . You concluded that . . . the only pursuit for the individual was the adventure of power and his only morality, the realism of conquests. And, to tell the truth, I, believing I thought as you did, saw no valid argument to answer you except a fierce love of justice which, after all, seemed to me as unreasonable as the most sudden passion. . . .

" . . . From the same principle we derived quite different codes. . . . You chose injustice and sided with the gods. . . .

"I, on the contrary, chose justice in order to remain faithful to the world. I continue to believe that this world has no ultimate meaning. But I know that something in it has a meaning and that is man, because he is the only creature to insist on having one. . . With your scornful smile you will ask me: what do you mean by saving man? And with all my being I shout to you that I mean not mutilating him and yet giving a chance to the justice that man alone can conceive." (Albert Camus, Resistance, Rebellion, and Death, tr. by Justin O’Brien [Alfred A. Knopf. Inc., 1961], pp. 27f.)

Camus could not root out of his being the sense of meaning and morality, however narrowly he was forced to circumscribe the former. Like him, in spite of ourselves, we find meaning in a moral response to history. Camus cried out that it does matter what happens. However frustrated we become, however strongly despair threatens, we are not finally allowed to believe that it does not matter. Instead, we must learn to see that everything matters.

Everything matters -- there is no rest for us. There will always be new claims upon our attention, new demands for help, as long as we live. To cease to recognize those claims is to be inwardly dead.

Because everything matters, we are forever denied self-satisfaction. We must face the endless perversity of our motives and the inevitable ambiguity of all our actions.

But because everything matters, we can endure without rest and without self-satisfaction. We matter as individuals. Our every hope and fear, our angry and generous feelings, our little gestures for good and ill -- all are important. We are people of worth. To realize that in the depths of our beings is to know the blessing and affirmation of God.

At the time that I went to Hawaii, I decided to read James Michener’s book on those islands. The dominant figure in the whole book is Abner Hale. He is undoubtedly a caricature of one side of the early missionary spirit, but he is, from the point of view of the story, a successful caricature. He embodies the spirit of traditional New England Calvinism in all its ambiguity. On the one hand he is devoted, dedicated. wholly self-sacrificial, utterly courageous in serving God as he understands the service of God. He is immensely successful in changing the character of a people. We cannot but admire him and resent the brutality of the captain who destroys his powers. On the other hand he is narrow, rigid, and intolerant, and from our point of view a racist, a bigot, and a fanatic. We do not like him.

Michener places as a foil to Hale the figure of John Whipple. Whipple too is a devoted Christian who conies to Hawaii with Hale as a medical missionary, but for Whipple faith is intertwined with common sense, openness to the values of other cultures, and a scientific understanding of his world. His tolerant spirit causes him to leave the mission, although he continues to place his medical knowledge at the service of others. We would like Whipple. But we should notice two things about him. First, he makes no comparable impact to that of Hale. Second, when he leaves the mission he enters business, and to success in business he gives something of the same ruthless devotion that Hale gives to the service of God.

Whipple represents for us the liberal Christian, genial and attractive, but lacking in commitment and power. His liberalism is the watering down of the substance of his faith which stems from historic Christianity.

The image I have chosen for the title of this chapter is an all too obvious one for church people in these times. Consider the crossroads at which we stand as liberal Christians in terms of decisiveness of commitment on the one hand and openness on the other.

We liberals have come down the road from historic Christianity progressively using up the capital of our heritage and doing little to replenish it. We have come more and more to mirror our culture, or certain strands within it, rather than to speak to it an effective word of judgment or healing. We do well to recognize that the liberal Christians of Germany became in the ‘30s the German Christians who could hail Hitler as a new savior.

At the crossroads we can choose the way to the theological right. In the years after World War I, Karl Barth, recognizing the bankruptcy of liberal Christianity, pioneered that road. He showed that the turn to the right theologically could support courageous movements to the left in the political and social spheres. When Hitler came to power it was Barth’s followers in Germany who constituted themselves as the Confessing Church and continued to speak and act with courage in the face of the Nazi tyranny and the apostasy of so many other Christians.

Today some of our children, whom we have fed pablum in our liberal churches, are finding new life in evangelical and Pentecostal movements. Most of us cannot take these quite seriously, since they are so out of touch with the broader cultural and intellectual currents of our century. But as Barth has shown us, the turn to the right need not be naïve. It may be chosen out of the deep and informed conviction that in the chaos of our times we must recover our roots and a transcendent focus of shared commitment.

Even so, despite the power and value of what can be found on the road to the right, for many of us it is too late. We are committed to openness to the truth that comes from multiple traditions and new discoveries in the present and the future. We cannot reaffirm one tradition against the others. However valuable the symbols and memories of the Christian heritage, they can no longer encompass the whole to which we must be open. The road to the right involves a going back, in however sophisticated a form, and we are committed to going forward, open to all truth and value from whatever source it comes to us.

Hence we are more attracted to the road to the left than that to the theological right. That, too. is a well-traveled road. But the record of its travelers is not entirely inspiring. They begin with a commitment to openness wherever it may lead. But commitment to openness as such does not provide a place to stand, a place from which to evaluate the many claimants for our attention and belief. Hence the road to the left leads to one of two ends. One may adopt the academic stance of openness to all and commitment to none. We professors especially, in our zeal to be open and fair, may present to our students a cafeteria of options, each with its strengths and weaknesses, while committing ourselves to none and growing gradually jaded by the whole affair. Alternately, openness may lead to the full acceptance of some vital and persuasive movement or vision, an acceptance that en-grafts one into a new history but ends the openness to which he was first committed. For decades liberal Christian churches have supplied the universities with uncommitted intellectuals and each new social and cultural movement with many of its most dedicated followers. This is not a shameful record, but it shows that the road to the left holds little promise for the future.

The image of the crossroads. unlike that of a fork in the road, suggests that there is a third way we can go. Straight ahead. But whereas the roads to the right and the left are easy to make out and have well-known destinations, the road ahead is more like a goat path up a steep mountain. Only a few Christian thinkers have explored that trail, and their reports are conflicting. We do not know whether at the top we may reach a new plateau for travel or only more rugged cliffs. Even so, I am convinced that as liberal Christians we are called to scale the slope ahead.

We cannot do this if our liberal openness and our Christian commitment continue to be in tension with each other. Openness can be sustained only where it is grounded in a faith that justifies and requires it. But we can affirm Christian faith wholeheartedly today only insofar as it opens us to all truth and value. Openness and faith must be brought for us into a new relation of mutual support.

To sustain openness we need to say to every claimant on our appreciation and loyalty both yes and no. Unless we say yes, we will not be open to its truth and value. Unless we say no, our openness to that one claimant will close us to others. In other words, openness can be sustained only as we see all things as partial and fragmentary embodiments of a truth and goodness that they do not exhaust, so that when they claim for themselves completeness or finality, they deceive.

It is particularly important that we recognize this about ourselves individually, and about every community to which we belong. Openness requires continual self-criticism and continual social criticism especially of those movements with which we identify ourselves most closely.

In saying what is required in order that openness be sustained, I have been describing the prophetic principle, so close to the heart of our Judeo-Christian tradition, The prophets denounced their own people, not because they were worse than their neighbors, but because they failed to recognize the "more" that they were called to be. They denounced the rites and ceremonies of their times, not because they were evil, but because their observance made people complacent in the face of social injustices. Jesus denounced the Pharisees, not because they were the worst people of their time, but because they were the best, and just for that reason most likely to be closed to the new possibilities he proclaimed.

The prophetic principle thus grounds the openness we need. But can we affirm it? It is intimately bound up with a picture of a transcendent Lord of history that does not fit with our contemporary vision. The criticism it demands destroys that picture and every other picture of God. Against every theism it protests so as to produce a new atheism. But against every atheism, too, it must protest. Today as much as ever we can and must believe that truth and goodness stand beyond every personal and historical embodiment. In the name of that truth and goodness we can and must be critical of the best that we have and think so as to be open to that which we cannot yet have and think. That criticism and that openness are part of what it means to believe in God as faithful Christians in our time.

But there is another difficulty about this liberal Christian life. It is exhilarating, but it is also exhausting. Constant self-criticism alone cannot constitute our existence. None of us is strong enough for that.

Reinhold Niebuhr once said that the function of preaching is to afflict the comfortable and to comfort the afflicted. To afflict the comfortable is rather easy. I am afflicted again each time I pick up a newspaper, not just because of the suffering and injustice it reports, but also because of my sense of deep complicity in it. The prophetic principle is at work in me, and in our worship together it needs to be renewed and sharpened lest its edge be dulled. But t cannot endure to live only in that tension and guilt. What word can we say to comfort the afflicted? That is much harder.

We used to say. "While we were yet sinners, Christ died for us," and God so loved us "that he gave his only begotten Son." Luther and Calvin insisted that salvation is a wholly free gift, so that men should have no anxiety about meriting it. I for one believe that there is a strange truth in all that. But the rhetoric is not ours. It is our task together to find ways to mediate comfort to one another in our several and continuing afflictions. We need each other most of all here. To find the way of supporting and sustaining each other in the midst of our openness arid self -- criticism without glibness and sentimentality -- that is not easy. But we can do it, for the truth and goodness that judge us comfort us as well.

During the academic year 1972-1973 I have served as theologian-in-residence at the Church of the Crossroads in Honolulu. This congregation was founded fifty years ago as a liberal interracial church, conscious of the need for Christians to he open to the religious traditions of Asia. Because of its openness to fresh winds and currents, it has had a stormy history, experiencing in intensified form the passions and hopes that have flowed through liberal Protestantism generally. That has meant in recent years continuing interest in East Asia, active involvement with the counter-culture, opposition to the Vietnam war including giving sanctuary to deserters, and sponsorship of human potential programs. It has also meant an inner struggle with the ideas of secular Christianity, the church as mission, the death of God, and worship as celebration.

This book owes both its title and its content to the opportunity to work in this context. Most of these chapters are adapted from sermons preached here. Although the more obvious homiletical touches have been removed, along with most local references, the discerning reader will perceive traces of the sermonic origin. One of these traces is the relative autonomy of the chapters. Whereas in writing a book one usually builds explicitly upon the early chapters as he proceeds, a sermon must stand on its own feet and, in terms of its particular topic, communicate the gospel. The sermonic form remains in that each chapter ends on a note of grace, and there is very little explicit transition between chapters or reference from one chapter to another. Also, I have left untouched the extensive use of the first person plural pronoun.

I have tried in these chapters to share as a liberal Christian with other liberal Christians an understanding of where we are and where we are called to go. I am convinced that liberal Christianity has little future unless it can articulate its stance to itself in such a way as to differentiate itself from the activist, mystical. and psychological movements toward which it gravitates from time to time. Theologically it cannot exist as a watered-down form of conservative Christianity. if we liberal Christians are unable to state the authentic Christian gospel meaningfully and relevantly in our own terms, there is little value in our survival. Unless it is the Christian gospel that makes us liberal, and not simply an erosion of faith, we are not in any serious sense liberal Christians. I am personally troubled by the extent to which we have lost our centeredness in the gospel, but I remain quite sure that the gospel requires of us that we be liberal.

My particular perspective within liberal Christianity has been shaped by years of living with the philosophical vision of Alfred North Whitehead. The understanding of grace, which is the single most pervasive theme of these chapters, is derived from him, although the word is not his and he might have been surprised by this use of his thought.

This book is dedicated with gratitude and admiration to the Church of the Crossroads in honor of its fifty years of pioneering Christian service. May it dare to continue making mistakes when that is the price of blazing new trails!

J.B.C., JR.

Honolulu

This book has at no point claimed completeness. Not only are the stages of preaxial development treated only formally and the axial cultures of China and Persia wholly omitted, but also developments in Greece and Palestine have been dealt with schematically in such a way as to ignore other modes of existence which took shape within them. Hence, no special apology is appropriate for the omission of one or another particular movement

However, the avowed principle of selection and emphasis has been interest in Christian existence, and this has been presented quite simply as an outgrowth of prophetic existence. I do not apologize for this arrangement of the material, and I hope that in part the presentation in terms of structures of existence lends justification to this embattled view. Nevertheless, the view is an embattled one. The close affinities of Christianity to contemporary Hellenistic alternatives compel us to consider the extent to which it should be understood against this background instead of that of the earlier Hebrew prophetism and its peculiar consequences in Israel. Even the term " spiritual existence points directly to such affinities with Hellenism.

Although the Hellenistic alternatives to Christianity are highly varied, they tend to be distinguishable from Socratic existence by traits which in their full-blown form constitute Gnosticism. Gnosticism is here understood as that movement of the later Hellenistic world which sought salvation from the whole cosmos regarded as, in principle, an alien and evil power. It is to be distinguished, thereby, both from Socratic and from prophetic existence. To grasp what is entailed in this definition, it must be understood that the cosmos includes the human body and even the human soul as a whole.

I am in no position to enter into the historical debate as to the relative importance of the several sources of Gnosticism, but I must attempt to place it in reference to the schematism of this book. In confronting this task, one is faced first by the exceedingly extensive use of mythical material by the Gnostics. In spite of this, Gnosticism must be recognized as an axial phenomenon. That is, it reflects the shift of the seat of existence to consciousness and the consequent objectification of the mythical products of the unconscious. However, in this case, unlike those of Socratic and prophetic existence, men experienced themselves as thrust out of preaxial existence by partly unwelcome forces, concretely the cultural imperialism of the Hellenistic empires, which drew men toward Socratic existence.

In its own origins, Socratic existence presupposed the prior victory of Homeric existence over the mythical powers, but in its spread through Syria, Egypt, and Mesopotamia, this precondition did not obtain. Cultural intermixture plus Persian influence had brought these regions to the brink of axial existence, and some universalization and systematization of myth preceded Hellenization, providing the possibility for taking the myths seriously also from the Hellenic point of view. In this situation, alongside the possibility of rejecting the mythical lay the other possibility of seeking in it meanings intelligible to the rational consciousness, and structuring and elaborating the mythical material so as to give expression to these meanings. Thus the form of Gnostic self-expression can be understood as a consequence of the direct impact of Socratic existence on highly civilized peoples prepared for the axial revolution, but not yet freed from the dominant power of the mythical.

More important than the mythological form of Gnostic expression, however, was the content expressed. This can be interpreted in the same way. From the beginning of civilization, men experienced an inner estrangement between their rational consciousness and the psyche as a whole. This estrangement gained expression in myth and was thereby contained. The shift of the seat of existence to the rational consciousness, however, created an alienation of the self from the unconscious psychic life as a whole. Thus the sense of alienation was an inevitable element in all axial existence.

Where the transition from preaxial to axial existence occurred not by internal cultural development but by the impact of a foreign proselytizing culture, the sense of alienation was greatly intensified. The Socratic world into which Egyptian or Syrian man was called by Hellenization was indeed an alien and resented world. From this world there was no return to simply mythical existence, but myths and other ancient traditions could yet be made to yield an expression of the hostility felt toward it. The sense of alienation both from the unconscious and from the world of Socratic reason created a consciousness of self or spirit as something wholly other to all the rest of the psychic life.

According to this theory, Gnosticism was primarily the product of the less completely Hellenized peoples of the Hellenistic world for whom, nevertheless, Hellenization was the agency by which they were carried across the axial threshold. Among those who experienced the impact of Hellenization in this way were also those inhabitants of Greece and Israel who had earlier participated, but fragmentarily, in the dominant cultures of these peoples. To appraise the total role of Gnosticism, however, it is important to see that the sense of alienation which received such pure expression in Gnosticism played its independent part also in the dominant axial cultures of Greece and Palestine, where it was initially contained as a subdominant element in a larger synthesis. Only in this way can we understand both the parallel developments in these cultures and the readiness with which fusion sometimes occurred.

In Greece, Homeric men undertook to domesticate the alien powers within an aesthetically ordered world. In Israel, prophetic man attempted a moral ordering of the whole of life in response to his apprehension of the divine will. Neither attempt was entirely successful. Within both traditions the sense of alien and even hostile powers made itself felt. In Greece, this was in terms of an always limiting and sometimes oppressive fate and of the struggle to master the Dionysian spirit. In Israel, the pull toward disobedience required a doctrine of a tempter, and the injustices of life confronted man with an insoluble problem of evil. This meant in both Greece and Israel that man could not be entirely at home in the world, that there existed between himself and his world an element of tension. Nevertheless, for Homeric man the understanding of the world as cosmos, as intelligible order, remained fundamental, and for prophetic man the tempter was radically subordinated to the Creator-Lawgiver.

The flowering and transformation of Greek culture in Socrates continued the dominance of the sense of order but heightened the implicit tension. Man identified himself with one factor within reflective consciousness. This factor was still perceived as in harmony with the cosmos as a whole, but this harmony with ultimate cosmic reality must be contrasted with its frequent opposition to such inferior aspects of the cosmos as the physical and the emotional life of the soul. In Stoicism, the contradiction between reason and all else in the body and soul was carried to an extreme point, and although reason still claimed kinship with nature and cosmos, most of what we regard as "natural" was ruthlessly suppressed.

Similarly, in some forms of Jewish apocalypticism, the tension between the felt injustice of history and faith in the God who was Creator and Lord of history reached an extreme pitch. All that was factually given to man in this life was dissociated from the work of the Creator-God, except as signs and portents of a total transformation to come in which faith would at last be vindicated.

From one point of view, it was not a great step from the Stoic hostility toward the irrational to Gnostic condemnation of the world as a whole. Yet it was just that kind of step which I have called the crossing of a threshold. It was the accentuation of one element in a given synthesis to that point at which the old synthesis collapsed and a new one was formed around a new center. When this step was taken, the aesthetic and rational order fundamental to Greek existence was abandoned. Hence, the center of existence could no longer be reason. Instead, it had to be identified with "spirit"! At this point, a movement growing out of the inner development of Greek existence could be receptive to and even merge with the Gnosticism that had essentially bypassed this development.

The relation of Jewish apocalypticism to Gnosticism was similar, although not identical. Despite the world-denying emphasis of apocalypticism, Jewish apocalypticism never rejected the Torah. Hence, the movement from apocalypticism to the Gnostic rejection of law was more abrupt than that from Stoicism. The choice between Judaism, even in its most apocalyptic forms, and Gnosticism remained clear-cut. It was directly from apocalyptic Judaism that Christianity arose, rather than from Gnosticism. Nevertheless, the significant affinities are also apparent.

It is because of the close parallel with Christian existence, especially in the understanding of selfhood, that it is not possible to omit this brief discussion of Gnosticism from this book. Christian existence has been described as spiritual existence fulfilled in love, and the rise of spiritual existence has been identified with that of Christian existence. Yet we find that, independently of Christianity, "spiritual existences" was the self-definition of the Gnostic as well. Furthermore, the meaning of "spirit" in the two cases was similar. For both it referred to the self or the "I" as the center that transcended all such other elements in the psyche as reason and will. In both cases there was a close correlation between this transcending human spirit and the God who transcended the world.

Nevertheless, there was a profound difference between spirit in Gnosticism and in Christianity, such that by the definition of "spiritual existence" in this book, the Gnostic did not participate in it. This difference can be explained in terms of responsibility. The Gnostic as "spirit" transcended all other elements in his psychic life in the sense that he differentiated himself from them and distanced them. He experienced some power in respect to them in the sense that he might either repress them or gratify their several inclinations. But he accepted no responsibility for them. Their evil character was none of his doing, and if they entrapped him or gained mastery over him, that was the work of forces alien to himself.

Similarly, Gnostic "spirit" was self-transcendent in the sense that it knew itself as such, but it took no responsibility for itself. It understood itself as a supernatural entity caught or implanted in the natural psyche. In its own being it was simply good. Whatever responsibility the Gnostic may in fact have felt for the state of his "spirit," his self-understanding allowed no explication in such terms, and to a considerable degree the implications of this lack of responsibility for what one’s self was was consistently developed in theory and practice.

Whether the Gnostic understanding of the relation of the "spirit" to other elements in the psyche resulted from or was projected onto the understanding of God’s relation to the created world, the close correlation and mutual reinforcement is apparent. God transcended the world in the sense that he was outside the world and other than the world. God even had some power with respect to what transpired within the world. Nevertheless, he had no responsibility for the world. It was something wholly alien to him. His only kinship lay with men, insofar as men were " spirits."

Having indicated both the close parallel between Gnostic and Christian existence and also the difference, I can explain why the account of this threshold crossing was omitted from the body of the book. The fundamental reason is that it appears to have been abortive. Gnosticism did succeed in extricating the self from its identification with reason and will, and in this respect it went beyond Socratic and prophetic existence. But it did so in such a way as not to incorporate or fulfill Socratic and prophetic existence but so as to negate them. What would have occurred had Hellenistic man not received in Christianity the possibility of transcending the limits of Socratic and prophetic existence without their negation, one can only conjecture. But in fact the Christian alternative did appear and was victorious.

Even if Gnosticism in its distinction from Christianity is recognized as finally abortive, the critic might argue that the rise of Christian existence as such presupposes Gnosticism. In this case, a chapter on Gnostic existence should be placed between those on prophetic and Christian existence. My reasons for rejecting this should now be clear. The world-rejecting elements in Christianity are adequately explained by Jewish apocalypticism, and this, despite its enmity toward the present world, stopped short of and opposed the dissolution of moral order. Christianity continued and even heightened the apocalyptic sense of estrangement of the self from the given historical situation, but it heightened also the sense of total responsibility for the soul. It acknowledged its kinship with Gnosticism by employing some of its terminology, but it correctly recognized in Gnosticism not its parent but its most dangerous enemy.

At the beginning of this book, the questions of the distinctiveness of Christianity and its finality were distinguished. It was argued that the former should be treated in some abstraction from the latter before the latter could be appropriately considered. Hence, in most of the book different forms of existence have been presented with only incidental attention to comparative evaluations. In this concluding chapter, however, it is appropriate to reflect on the Christian claim that Christianity is not only distinctive but also in an important sense final.

The Christian perspective from which this book is written has been apparent throughout in the selection and organization of the material. Nevertheless, the descriptions of the several structures of existence aim at a degree of objectivity in the sense that their relative accuracy should be subject to evaluation also from other perspectives. When the question of evaluation is raised, and "finality" is chiefly an evaluative category, the dominance of the perspective increases. Hence, in this chapter I must speak more explicitly as a Christian concerned with the intelligibility and credibility of the Christian claim to finality. This does not mean that I am made confident of this claim through some suprarational act of faith. The Christian claim is a problematical one to me, as it is to many Christians, and the years of reflection that lie behind the present formulation might, so far as I am consciously aware, have led to much more relativistic conclusions. But the concern for this claim rather than some other is determined by a Christian perspective, and the persuasiveness of the arguments which convince me that it has some measure of validity depends in part on that perspective.

We must consider, first, for what the Christian claims finality. The answer is Jesus Christ. Furthermore, the Christian may make this claim on grounds that this book has not touched; for example, on the grounds that in Jesus and only in him God became man. Discussion of that kind of claim cannot be undertaken here. The claim may also be made, however, in terms of the work of Christ, and this work may be considered historically. The previous chapters have prepared the way for reconsideration of this form of claim.

If we consider the work of Christ as being that mode of life which came into being under his historical impact, we are likely to think first of Christian love as that which the Christian would offer as the distinctive fruit of Christianity. This would invite us to base the claim for the finality of Jesus Christ on the claim that Christian love transcends all other forms of love and cannot itself be surpassed. The preceding chapter points toward this kind of argumentation, and it has its value and importance.

Nevertheless, this kind of argument is exceedingly circular and hence relativistic. The Christian’s ideal of love is formed by Jesus Christ, and measured by this ideal, most other ideals seem inadequate. But there are many who doubt the possibility of actualizing this kind of love and point to the self-deceit so often involved on the part of those who claim to do so. There are many also who hold that other ideals of love are intrinsically more noble and beautiful. There are still others who see other characteristics such as justice, self-fulfillment, or truthfulness as of greater worth than love. What is supremely valued is a function of the perspective from which it is valued. What the Christian supremely values is, in truth, supremely valuable only if there is something final about the perspective from which he values it. Hence, the question of valuation is finally directed to these perspectives or structures of existence.

Furthermore, even when the Christian ideal of love is taken as normative, it is impossible to say that Christian love is "higher" than Buddhist love. The Christian himself can conceive no ideal of love higher than that of the Boddhisattva who renounces his own final blessedness for the sake of the world. Viewed simply in itself, there is little to distinguish Buddhist compassion from Christian love. The difference between them is a function of the different structures of existence in which they are found. Buddhist love differs from Christian love in that the Buddhist lover is not a self and, consequently, makes no distinction between lover and beloved, whereas Christian love is that of a self for other selves. Evaluation as between these cannot be on the basis that one or another structure of existence leads to a nobler form of love. Rather, these structures of existence themselves must be evaluated. If the claim that Jesus Christ is final is to be vindicated in terms of his work, then the structure of existence brought into being by him must be shown to be final in some humanly decisive way.

Christian existence has been presented as a unity. But just as there are many modes of existence in which Buddhist, Homeric, Socratic, and prophetic existence have been embodied, so also there have been many modes of existence in which Christian existence has been embodied. Contemporary Christian existence is far removed from that of the Middle Ages, and both are far removed from that of the primitive church. Further, in the primitive church, in the Middle Ages, and today, there is great diversity of modes of Christian existence. In addition, especially in the modern world, there are many who do not call themselves Christians who participate in Christian existence, and, of course, there have always been many who have called themselves Christians who have not participated in it. The claim for the finality of Christian existence is not a claim that any mode of its embodiment now or in the past is final.

Christian existence is spiritual existence fulfilled in love. Since the claim of the finality of Christ has been translated into the claim of the finality of that structure of existence he brought into being, our systematic attention must now be turned to the relation of spiritual existence to other structures of existence. Since not only Christianity but also every other structure of existence is distinctive, this comparison should ultimately entail an individual discussion of the relation of spiritual existence to every other structure of existence. However, this is impractical. Instead, we will consider the Christian claim under three heads. First, in what sense is spiritual existence final within that historical development in which it emerged and came into dominance? Second, in what sense is spiritual existence final with respect to Socratic existence? Third, in what sense is spiritual existence final with respect to Buddhist existence?

Spiritual existence developed out of personal existence (the structure of prophetic existence) , which in turn had arisen out of preaxial structures of existence. The questions that demand consideration in claiming finality within this development are the relation of spiritual to personal existence and the possibility of transcending spiritual existence. In limiting serious consideration to these two questions, the superiority of axial existence in general to preaxial existence in general is assumed. Such an assumption would be impossible if superiority were understood in moral terms, even if the standards of morality employed were those given to the Christian. Such preaxial people as the Hopi appear to have achieved a general level of morality in their communities seldom equaled in Christian civilizations. Equally, the superiority of the axial over the preaxial cannot be understood in psychological terms. On the whole, there is probably less emotional illness among more primitive people. Most individuals in simpler societies are better adjusted to those societies and to their roles within them. Maturity, as defined within the culture, is more easily and more widely attained in preaxial communities than in axial ones. Nevertheless, the movement toward rationality, individuality, and freedom is of such attractive force and leads to so great an expansion of power over self and world as to be virtually irreversible.

Of all the questions to be dealt with in this chapter, that of the relation of spiritual to personal existence has been most fully treated in earlier chapters. Spiritual existence was presented as a further development within and of personal existence. The emergence of a center of existence transcending reason and passion, and responsible for decision and action, constituted the unique structure of personal existence. In spiritual existence, this center remained as the will, but it was objectified as one element within the whole psyche and was thereby transcended by a new center that took responsibility also for the will. In this way, spiritual existence took another step along the line away from preaxial existence, incorporating and preserving personal existence in a more inclusive synthesis.

This claim that in spiritual existence personal existence was fulfilled and transformed arises directly out of the descriptions offered in previous chapters, and so far it supports the Christian claim for the finality of Jesus Christ. Yet the continued existence of Judaism is a standing challenge to it. Paul already wrestled with the implicit refutation of his message present in Israel’s rejection of Jesus, and for us, too, this constitutes no less acute a theological problem. If indeed Christian existence offers to the Jew the fulfillment through transformation of his own existence, how can it be that millions of Jews have lived among Christians for nineteen centuries, unshaken in the conviction that Christianity represents a distortion of Israel’s faith rather than its fulfillment?

An adequate discussion of this topic is out of the question here. However, three points can be mentioned. First, during most of Christian history the church has had its greatest numerical success among preaxial peoples. This is readily understandable. The masses of people in the Hellenistic world, although profoundly affected by the axial revolution, remained primarily in the stage of preaxial civilization. Their world was still essentially mythical. The rapid assimilation of these people meant that the life, worship, and thought of the church were colored by preaxial, mythical elements. The situation was not improved by the vast influx of pagans following the Constantinian establishment of the church or by the mass conversions of the Germanic peoples. The church existed through these centuries as an unstable mixture of preaxial and Christian elements, while Judaism retained, to a far greater degree, the purity of its axial existence. Although we may judge that the essential reality which the church always recognized as its norm offered to the Jew a possibility unrealized in his mode of axial existence, we must recognize that he had much justification in seeing Christianity as a corruption of a truth preserved more purely in Judaism.

Second, the treatment of Jews by Christians has consistently, scandalously, and notoriously confronted the Jew with the most unchristian embodiments of spiritual existence. One would like to see the recent and most terrible abominations as simply the product of Hitler’s paganism, but this is impossible. Hitler’s extermination of millions of Jews is only the climax of a long series of pogroms in which the church has all too often been the chief instigator. One cannot read European history through Jewish eyes without the profoundest shame and a powerful impulse to dissociate oneself forever from the name Christian. Small wonder that the Jew has regarded his own tradition and life as superior.

Third, the classical and official formulations of Christian belief constitute an intellectual obstacle of no mean proportions. The doctrine of Jesus’ "deity," however it may be explained by sophisticated theologians, necessarily affronts Jews and appears as a repudiation rather than a fulfillment of their understanding of God.

If the failure of Judaism to perceive in Christian existence its own transcendence and fulfillment is due to such causes as these, then we may look to the future with interest and hope. Now in the national state of Israel, the Jews can reflect on the essence of their own tradition and of Christianity free from the unchristian pressures of a supposedly Christian majority. In these circumstances, they may come to a quite new appraisal of Jesus and of the existence brought into being by him. Also, if the acceptance of the finality of Jesus is dissociated from the acceptance of particular dogmas about him, the obstacles to a full appropriation of Jesus and of spiritual existence would be still further diminished. We should not expect a mass conversion of Jews to Christian churches, but rather an inner transformation of Judaism itself. Perhaps in this way Paul’s prophecy will find its fulfillment.

To a great extent this inner transformation has already occurred at the level of the individual. Partly by the subtle influence of a partly Christian civilization and partly by processes of inner development analogous to that in which Christianity itself arose, Western Jews, at least, have already to a large extent entered into spiritual existence. Nevertheless, thus far the transformation of those beliefs and practices which constitute Judaism as a religion has been seriously inhibited by the rejection of Jesus.

If spiritual existence fulfilled and transcended personal existence, we must now ask whether it, in its turn, has been or will be fulfilled and transcended by some other structure of existence. The claim of the finality of spiritual existence implies that no such further development has occurred or is to be expected. Yet such a claim, unless it is carefully restricted, implies both a prescience we do not have and a contradiction of Christian hope. Certainly, we do not wish to say that nothing better is possible than the existence we now know! All Christian images of resurrection and of new life beyond the grave point to something qualitatively new and other. In Jesus himself we see actualized a possibility in crucial respects quite beyond that which we now find realized in ourselves. (The omission from this book of explicit discussion of the structure of Jesus’ existence leaves this statement unexplained and unsupported. I hope to treat this subject in a later book.)

In the light of all this, what can it mean to say that spiritual existence is unsurpassable? To explain this we must distinguish two modes of analyzing existence. One mode is that primarily employed in this book in which attention has been focused on the intrapsychic structure, and especially on the center from which the occasion of human experience is organized and unified. The other mode attends to the relations of one occasion of experience with other realities, that is, the ways in which other occasions of experience enter into and give content to a new occasion. In this relational mode, distinctions would be made according to the distinctive roles played by one s own past, one’s body, other persons, and God. These two modes of analysis cannot be entirely separated, and this latter mode has played some role in this book, for example, in the analysis of personal individuality through time. However, most of the questions raised by this mode of analysis have been neglected, and in particular the way in which God is present to and in occasions of experience has been omitted from the discussion. Precisely the relationship to God is the decisive category for understanding the distinctiveness of Jesus’ own existence or "person" as well as the possibilities of a new reality in the future. In this mode, we can hope for something quite different from anything we now know.

But in the former mode, where intrapsychic structures of existence are in view, spiritual existence cannot be transcended. We have seen how in personal existence a psychic center arose transcending reason and emotion, and how in spiritual existence a new center emerged transcending also that of personal existence, which is now preserved as will. One might suppose that we could then, in a similar way, posit a transcendence of spirit, and so on indefinitely. But this is not the case. Spirit is defined as self-transcending self. It is the nature of spirit to transcend itself in the sense of objectifying itself and assuming responsibility for itself. Hence, this indefinite transcendence of spirit is also and already spirit. In this direction, there is no possibility of further development, only of refinement and increasing understanding of the reality already given.

In terms of the relational categories that have been omitted from this book, this limited statement of the unsurpassability of spiritual existence can be combined with a much stronger claim for the finality of Jesus Christ. The new possibilities for interrelationship among men, and especially of relationship with God, for which we may hope, are already foreshadowed and embodied in him. To move forward across new thresholds will not require some new impulse -- only the fuller realization of what has already been given to us in him.

The fulfillment and transcendence by spiritual existence of personal existence, and the unsurpassability of spiritual existence in that line of development in which it arose, go far toward explaining the Christian judgment of the finality of the historical work of Jesus Christ. But the claim goes farther than that. It implies that spiritual existence is related to other structures of axial existence in a similar way. That would mean that spiritual existence is able to fulfill and transcend these other structures of existence as well. This claim will be examined in relation to Socratic and to Buddhist existence.

At first glance, the historical evidence for the Christian claim in relation to Greek existence appears impressive. (Although there are a few differences, the following three paragraphs are substantially identical with my material on pp. 133-134 of The Finality of Chris:, ed. by Dow Kirkpatrick. Copyright © 1966 by Abingdon Press.) The great original success of Christianity was among persons who were heirs of Greek civilization. Furthermore, on the whole, the Greeks carried with them into their new Christian faith a continuing positive appreciation of their Greek heritage. They experienced Christianity as its consummation as well as its correction.

Against this rather obvious reading of history, two important objections can be raised, and some indication must be given as to how they can be countered. First, it is possible to view the Christianity of the Hellenistic world as more fundamentally a product of that world than a result of the impact of the Jewish Jesus. In this case, the victory of Christianity is simply another step in the evolution or devolution of the religious life of Greek civilization. According to this view, the Christianization of the Hellenistic civilization represents an absorption of Judeo-Christian elements into that civilization, but not a transformation or completion by a fundamentally new element introduced from without. My response to this is that despite the immense influence of Hellenistic culture on Christianity, the fundamental institutional, liturgical, and ethical patterns that won out in the struggle within the church are better understood in terms of their Hebraic background than in terms of their Hellenistic background. More important, the canonization of the Old and New Testaments represented the victory of the Hebraic side of the struggle and ensured that, progressively, its peculiar thrust would play a larger rather than a smaller role in the general self-understanding of Christendom.

Second, one may well argue against my view, that although the Hebraic development as consummated in Jesus won out over the decadent Hellenism of the first and second centuries, this tells us nothing of its relationship to the healthy Hellenism of the axial period. From this point of view, it may be claimed that the mentality embodied in the great philosophers is more comprehensively adequate and offers a more final resting place for the human mind than anything that has come out of Israel.

In our day, when the university and the psychological clinic seem to be dividing between them the historic functions of the church, this claim must be given the most serious consideration. Does not Christianity as much as any position live or die according to the validity of its truth claims? Must not these truth claims, like all other truth claims, be judged at the court of reason? Does not every attempt to escape this court of last appeal depend on ideas of authority or revelation or intuition, which can function responsibly only when they in turn are rationally tested? Is it not exceedingly dangerous to claim that some decisions or some areas of life are or should be free from the control of reason? Does not the appeal to reason bring men closer together, whereas every other appeal -- to emotion or to willful decision -- drive them apart? Is not unity in our day a matter of extreme importance?

My own answer to all these questions is affirmative. Insofar as this affirmative answer constitutes the adoption of the Socratic standpoint, I plead guilty to being a Socratic. If being a Christian means the acceptance on "faith " of beliefs that have not been subjected to critical reflection, then it is Christianity which can and should be subsumed within a Socratic synthesis. That would mean that the content of Christian belief would be critically evaluated and much of it accepted from a standpoint which lay outside of it, the standpoint of reason. Just this was the program of much nineteenth-century idealism, which was thereby in intention Socratic.

The Christian counterclaim, that it is in the last analysis Christianity which absorbs the Socratic achievement, depends on the view that although beliefs are important, the issue is finally at a still deeper level. In this book, it is formulated in terms of the structures of existence. The claim is that spiritual existence can fulfill and transform Socratic existence in a way in which Socratic existence cannot fulfill and transform itself or Christian existence. The basis of this claim can first be shown in the comparison of the two structures of existence. Socratic man identifies himself with his reason, which he recognizes as one element within his psyche. Spiritual existence is constituted by the emergence of an "I" that transcends reason and passion and will as well as itself. To incorporate such an "I" is impossible without ceasing to identify oneself with one’s reason, whereas the reason of Socratic man can be incorporated into spiritual existence.

The claim that spiritual existence fulfills and transcends Socratic existence, however, must mean more than that Socratic reason can be incorporated into Christian existence. It must mean also that there is something about Socratic existence which calls for this expansion into a larger whole with a changed center.

Greek existence came into being through an act of aesthetic distancing of nature and the gods, which freed the Greek to become aware of the formal properties of the world. Reason came into importance in dealing with these forms, and even when it was turned upon itself and upon the soul as a whole, it had no other kind of categories by which to think than those which were achieved by this psychic act of distancing. Primitive Christianity did not of itself provide the requisite categories, but the self-transcending self of Christian existence knew itself and the psyche as something other than the sensuously experienced world. When it absorbed, as in Augustine, the Socratic passion for knowledge, it was able to achieve a language and a quality of self-knowledge inaccessible within Socratic existence itself.

A similar limitation can be seen in Socrates’ immensely impressive ethical achievement. Because of the essential character of Socratic existence, the identification of the self with active reason, Socrates could not attribute to the self a responsibility for the evil which a man enacted. Since the self is reason, it is necessarily good. If evil transpires, this can only mean that the self is overpowered by an alien force, and reason cannot be responsible for its own defeat. Socrates’ own life and thought point to an inchoate awareness of a responsibility that could not be expressed in these terms, but just here lay a threshold that could only be crossed by some structural change. This structural change was offered by Christianity, which in this way also fulfilled the fundamental direction of the Socratic development.

With respect to the thesis that spiritual existence is the fulfillment and transcendence of Socratic existence, a qualification is necessary. The incorporation of Socratic reason within Christianity introduced an element that holds also the possibility of the destruction of spiritual existence. This is not because the prizing of reason or its high development as such threatens the self-transcending self of spiritual existence. But insofar as the perpetuation of this self-transcending self depends on beliefs of any sort, it is vulnerable. The history of Christian theology can be read as the attempt to employ and develop reason, on the one hand, and so to direct and restrict it, on the other, as to preserve the possibility of Christian existence. Such restrictions have always been wrong, and today are quite out of the question. The possibility that the use of reason by spiritual man will destroy the beliefs with which Christian existence is most closely associated and on which it seems ultimately to depend must be accepted. Where this occurs, however, there is no simple return to Socratic existence. The self-knowledge gleaned during the Christian era has left too large a legacy to allow for this. Partly for this reason, the great traditions of India offer themselves to the Western mind as powerfully attractive alternatives to the structures of existence that arose in Israel and Greece.

Both historically and systematically, the relation of spiritual existence to Indian existence is radically different from its relation to either personal or Socratic existence. In the case of both personal and Socratic existence, consciousness, selfhood, and the power of the soul to transcend and to act upon its world were prized. Spiritual existence carried farther in the same direction a development already affirmed and far advanced. Thus we can speak of fulfillment as well as transcendence or transformation of existing structures. But the Indian sages of the axial period had opposed this whole line of psychic development. To them it was essential either to establish the self beyond the differentiated world, which included the flow of psychic experience, or to annihilate selfhood altogether. Spiritual existence is not the fulfillment of this effort. Nor can the Christian recognize in extinction of his self-transcending selfhood the fulfillment of his existence. Finally, it is impossible to conceive a third structure in which both spiritual selfhood and the extinction of self could be subsumed in some higher synthesis. Buddhism, as the culminating achievement of India, lies side by side with Christianity as an alternative mode of human realization. It stands as the ultimate challenge and limit to the Christian claim to finality.

Nevertheless, there are judgments that can be made between the two. These are not systematic judgments and, from the point of view of the Buddhist for whom the events of history are meaningless, they are without importance. But from the point of view of one who lives in history and by his understanding of history, the judgments must be made. These are judgments about the relative capacity of Buddhist and spiritual existence to survive in the ever smaller world in which we live. These judgments do not unambiguously favor either Buddhism or Christianity.

At the level of belief, Buddhism today has much advantage. Socratic reason, in its modern scientific form, has rendered the Buddhist doctrines of no-self and no-God more plausible to many modern men than opposed Christian convictions. Whereas Christianity is in these crucial respects in a crisis of belief, Buddhism in its axial form feels secure. If present trends continue unabated, Christian belief must disappear, and if, as I believe, spiritual existence cannot indefinitely survive the loss of such beliefs, spiritual existence also is doomed. In that case, we should be grateful that the world is offered the Buddhist alternative to Western nihilism.

However, I am not myself persuaded of the inevitability of this outcome. The assumption that underlies and comes to expression in this book is that although the Buddhist goal of annihilating selfhood is a possible one, the self hood that the Buddhist annihilates is also real and quite capable of rich development. If we are confronted with the two possibilities of being self-transcending selves or overcoming self-hood, then we cannot suppose that scientific knowledge decisively opposes the conception of selfhood. Similarly, it is my conviction that our scientific knowledge of the world can best be fitted with our human self-awareness and with the witness of aesthetic and religious experience in a comprehensive synthesis that points to the reality of God. In this conviction, I am heavily indebted to Whitehead, and I have written about the understanding of God that is involved in A Christian Natural Theology. Thus my own beliefs allow for and support spiritual existence, and I could not hold these beliefs if I did not find them to have great persuasive power. If they or similar beliefs do have such power, then spiritual existence is not doomed to extinction. The present advantage of Buddhism at the level of beliefs may be temporary.

The second element in a judgment of survival power is more favorable to spiritual existence. It is now inevitable that the technological results of modern science will spread throughout the world. This spread adds greatly to the prestige of science itself, and this, too, is certain to become a universal factor. But modern science is essentially Western, and that means that the context for its rise and development was the incorporation of Socratic reason into Christian existence. The history of science is intertwined with a philosophy that even more clearly witnesses to this context. Entry into the modern world cannot be simply the acceptance of technology but must also involve acceptance of aspects of that structure of existence which has nurtured it. The modernization all Eastern nations want is inescapably also Westernization, and Westernization involves, to some degree, the emergence of the responsible "I."

The question mark that is placed beside Christianity has to do with its capacity to survive the consequences of autonomous reason. The question mark that is placed beside Buddhism has to do with its capacity to survive in a world in which the cultural forces will work so strongly to produce the personal or spiritual selfhood which it negates. The answer to this question is objectively no dearer than the other. Yet I must record my judgment that in a world destined to Westernization in all outward ways, the Westernization of the soul is almost inevitable.

It may be, of course, that this Westernization will occur in radically post-Christian terms. Perhaps the structure of spiritual existence is already being superseded among us by other structures to which the sense of the "loss of self" witnesses, but which do not seem to lead to the serenity of Buddhist selflessness. Seidenberg paints a depressing picture of that " posthistoric man," (Roderick Seidenberg, Posthistoric Man [Beacon Press, Inc., 1957]

The original edition was published in 1950 by the University of North Carolina Press.) into which he says we are evolving. But I am not convinced that this must be. We have far from exhausted the possibilities of self-transcending selfhood, and in our infinitely complex society, there are forces at work extending and enriching this selfhood as well as forces which are undermining it or seeking escape from it. The outcome is unsettled. This situation in which the destiny of man hangs in the balance is the ultimate call for new modes of Christian existence.

In the last chapter, Christian existence was defined as spiritual existence that expresses itself in love. Spiritual existence was then explained as a structure of radical self-transcendence, and its power for both good and evil was emphasized. Yet no explanation was given as to what that love is by virtue of which the peculiar ideal of Christianity is embodied and fulfilled. Is Christian love to be understood as identical with a universal human phenomenon that is in turn continuous with the affection animals show for one another and for men? Or is Christian love something discontinuous from all other forms of love such that a distinct word is needed? In either case, why does love play so central a role for Christian existence, whereas other forms of existence can be more or less adequately treated without special reference to it? To answer these questions, it will be necessary to discuss what is meant by love in the very broadest sense, and then to compare the form love took in the several axial cultures.

In an extremely loose sense, it can be said that every entity loves itself and other entities. That is, every entity is something for itself as subject and perceives the world from this perspective. Everything is appraised in terms of its capacity to contribute to the richness of this momentary experience, which is prized for its own sake. At the same time, every entity has some concern for the future, that is, for other entities still to come; and in its self-actualization, it so constitutes itself as to contribute to that future. In this very general sense, the Whiteheadian philosophy (by which I am so greatly influenced) affirms "self-love" and "other-love" of every entity whatsoever.

Such an ontological context is useful for the understanding of love, but it is better to use the term "love" for something much more limited. Ordinarily, we first apply the word at the level of the animal world. We describe especially sexual attraction and the concern of mother animals for their young as love, and occasionally we observe among animals additional relations to which we spontaneously apply the word "love." We say, for example, that a dog loves its master. But for the most part, the relations in question appear to be instinctive, that is, determined by organic structures other than the animal soul.

The whole presentation in this book has emphasized continuities -- also the continuity between animal and human existence. Such continuity exists also between animal and human love. There are noninstinctive elements in animal love, and there are instinctive elements in human love. But among men, love is importantly a function of the autonomous activity of the psyche. The extensive importance of this noninstinctive love in human beings emerged very gradually through human development. Nevertheless, a threshold was crossed, and human love must be understood on its own terms.

When we limit our attention to human, noninstinctive love, we still have before us an exceedingly complex phenomenon. Much noninstinctive love is unconsciously determined. Needs and desires unknown to our conscious minds control the direction and form of our affection and desire. This is especially clear in the whole area of sexual attraction, in which conscious interests seem to be overwhelmingly governed by unconscious needs. A man who identifies himself with his consciousness often perceives his sexual passions as an alien force with which he must come to terms, rather than as fully part of his very self. When we realize how large a role our sexuality plays in the whole of our lives, the importance of the unconscious element in human love is impressive. Nevertheless, although unconsciously controlled love is of great power in all human life, the love that emerged into importance in the axial period was an activity of consciousness.

Before the several forms of conscious love can be treated, a methodological problem must be considered. If we were comparing sexual attraction in the several cultures, there would be a biological and instinctual common factor that would enable us to display the variety of expressions as expressions of one thing. But love in this noninstinctual, conscious sense has no such common factor. Also, there is not some one word in each language self-evidently equivalent with "love," such that we could study its applications in each case and thus succeed in our comparison. Instead, the decision as to what our question is must be made first in much more general terms, and only then can we institute a comparison.

In what follows, then, I shall mean by "love" any mode of relating to an object as a positive intrinsic value, (I am here opposing intrinsic value to instrumental value. That is, in love one relates to something for its own sake and not only as an instrument to some further goal. That one so relates does not exclude the possibility that the value is a product of the love rather than its independent condition.) in which conscious psychic activity is decisively involved. By "object" here I do not mean a mere thing in contrast to a person, but rather an intentional or epistemological object, which can be either personal or impersonal. In the relation of love, the separation of the lover and the beloved may be overcome, but when no such separation initially exists, it is not appropriate to speak of love. Love requires some distinction between the subject and the object. Even in the case of self-love this is true. The newborn infant is completely selfish from the point of view of an adult, but it does not love itself. To love oneself requires some notion of oneself as one among the entities of the world, singled out for special concern. It becomes possible only when there is some measure of self-awareness, that is, only when the self becomes an object to itself.

On the basis of this understanding of love as positive valuation of an object, we can distinguish four types of love among the Greeks. There was, first, desire. This was attending to the object as that which provided satisfactions to the subject. Its goal was possession. The object of such love might be inanimate things, or it might be something abstract, such as prestige, success, or power. It might, of course, be an object, the possession of which yielded sexual pleasure.

Second, there was adoration. Rather than seeking to possess an object because of the pleasure or satisfaction it yielded to the subject, the subject surrendered itself to the object. Such surrender might afford a certain kind of pleasure, but in this case the pleasure came from being possessed rather than from possessing. Such adoration might be directed toward another person or toward deity or even toward an abstraction.

Desire and adoration as such are universal. Among primitive peoples, they were largely or entirely functions of instinctive or unconscious psychic needs. Instinctive and unconscious elements continued prominent among axial peoples, but these forms of love could also contain a large element of autonomous conscious activity. A third type of love, aesthetic admiration, was more distinctively Greek and reflected the triumph of consciousness more clearly.

In aesthetic admiration, there was no attempt either to gain possession of the object for the subject or to surrender the subject to the possession of the object. Rather, the subject remained subject and the object remained object. The subject was open to the perfection of form in the object and enjoyed it as such, without either desire or adoration. The distance of the aesthetic experience was maintained. Such a relation was possible not only toward objects of art but also toward human beings, in terms either of their physical beauty or of their excellence of character and action.

Fourth, there was friendship. This differed from the others in that it could only be between human beings and must involve mutuality. Furthermore, because it was directed toward another individual it could involve the desire for his good, and in its truest forms it had to do so. However, in other respects, friendship was not independent in its nature from other forms of love. A friendship might be based either on the respective desires of the friends, as each brought satisfaction to the other, or on admiration of the excellence of one another’s character and action.

Self-love was not a category of Greek experience and reflection alongside other forms of love. This was because Greek thought took for granted that each man wanted the good for himself. The question was not whether this was or was not an acceptable motivation for action, but rather what constituted the good and how it was to be obtained. Even in Aristotle’s discussion of friendship, where he made very clear that one could and should wish other men well quite apart from the advantage that accrued to the well-wisher, he also affirmed that there might be limits to this well-wishing since, of course, every man, above all, wishes himself well. Furthermore, the entire discussion of friendship is found in the context of an analysis of how man achieves happiness. The reason for having friends, even where friendship included disinterested well-wishing, was that it was a part of the good life in which alone man found his happiness.

There were those among the Greeks who saw in love of all these kinds a threat to happiness. Concern for an object, whether that be desire for possession, aesthetic appreciation, or even a will for its benefit, placed a person at the mercy of forces he could not control. It subjected him to the pain of loss and disappointment. Hence, in later Greek thought, apathy, which included the absence of love in all these senses, was a much approved state of mind.

At one level, this constitutes a point of contact with Indian thought. There one might well argue that freedom from love was very much the goal. This is true, if love is understood in any of the senses outlined above. Indeed, the profound psychological analyses of the Indians went farther than this.

The Indian was conscious of his own seat of existence in a way largely lacking among the Greeks. Hence, he knew that it was possible to attach himself to this seat in its particularity and individuality, and to attempt to maintain and enhance his separate selfhood. This self-love might constitute a subtler and more dangerous obstacle to the attainment of release than even attachment to other things and persons. It could be prevented only by the realization that the seat of existence is not the true self.

On the other hand, at least in some of its Buddhist forms, Indian thought attained a very exalted conception of love. This love is both so important and so difficult for the Western mind to understand that we must pause briefly to reflect on it.

We have seen earlier that the Buddhist both dissolved the structuring of the world, which is caused by concepts, and overcame the unification of successive occasions of human experience, which is the product of self-identification with past and future. All that remained were discrete and ever-perishing congeries of elements.

However, later Buddhism carried its negation even farther. Primitive Buddhism sought to extinguish desire, and thus also suffering, through the denial of any eminent reality and through the analysis of reality into a flux of elements. But the status of these ever-perishing elements was itself problematic. Primitive Buddhism had already denied their substantiality and permanence, but the Madhyamika school denied also their reality, thus completing the metaphysical dissolution of reality. This dissolution paved the way for the reinstitution of Reality in the sense of an intuitively and mystically apprehended undifferentiated unity. (In this discussion of later Buddhism, especially the Madhyamika school, I have been chiefly influenced by Thomas Altizer, Oriental Mysticism and Biblical Eschatology [The Westminster Press, 1961] , pp. 132 ff.)

The denial of reality applied to the human occasions of experience as well. Thus the goal of life became not merely the overcoming of projection of human meanings on the world and of identity with past and future, but, more radically, an overcoming of all distinction and all differentiation. The total emptying of consciousness necessary to such an attainment would seem to the Westerner to lead to total indifference to the phenomenal world. Surprisingly, it did not. In Mahayana Buddhism, alongside the quest for release arose the ideal of compassion supremely symbolized in the Boddhisattva, who renounced Nirvana itself for the sake of bringing enlightenment to an ignorant world.

Compassion was the opposite of desire. Desire was the longing of some subject for some attainment or possession for itself. It presupposed, therefore, a differentiated world. Insofar as one realized the unity in the voidness of all things, desire was impossible and was replaced by total openness to all things and undifferentiated goodwill.

Strictly speaking, ideal compassion was not conceived as a form of love according to the definition of love in this chapter, for in it there was ultimately no distinction of subject and object of love. Nevertheless, its normal description and practice presuppose such a distinction. The Boddhisattva loved all things, and thus the subject-object structure appeared. But since there is finally no Boddhisattva "self," and since all things are equally himself, the dualism was overcome.

In describing the place of love in Greek and Indian existence, it has been possible to omit reference to man’s love for God. For the Greeks, the gods might be aesthetically admired or even adored, and for Aristotle the contemplation of God was the highest good. But the ‘love of God remained one of many aspects of the excellent life. For India, the holy power could take personal form, and believing adoration or loving devotion toward the deity was widely practiced. Nevertheless, bhakti was but one of several ways in which man could or should relate himself to Brahman or to one of the Buddhas in some later forms of Buddhism. For the Hebrews, in contrast, the love of God was the central form of love and the determining principle of all life.

Love of God was the acknowledgment of what he was in his incommensurate superiority in relation to man. Because God was understood primarily as will, the acknowledgment of what he was was primarily obedience. The love that was commanded as the sum of the law was obedient love, the willing conformity of life to his will.

It is extremely difficult to say whether prophetic man loved God for God’s sake or for his own sake. Often the expected motivation was desire for one’s own advantage, and obedience was required because of God’s power to reward and punish. Nevertheless, this would be a very one-sided view of the situation. Prophetic man was not first committed to calculating self-interest and then persuaded that he could achieve his interests best by obedience to God. Obedience to God was right because God was who he was, because of what he had done for Israel in the past, and because of his loving-kindness to Israel. Obedience was all the more right, because God was a just God who dealt with men mercifully, yet according to their deserts. Since what was right and what was advantageous were identical, the issue of their relation rarely arose clearly. Yet it did arise, and when this happened, the Hebrew knew that he must serve God even at personal cost and apart from expectation of reward.

That this question could arise at all points to a distinctive aspect of Hebrew love. Among the Greeks and even among the Indians, that the ultimate reference of concern is oneself was not in question. But where the I-Thou relation was clearly present, this question did arise. There were two persons involved, the human and the divine, and man recognized that love could be directed toward either. A person might be concerned only for himself and interested in the other only as means to his own ends, or he might actually be concerned about the other to such a point as to be willing to sacrifice his own ends. Thus, there arose a distinction of immense importance between love of the other and love of self.

The other was initially and primarily God, and in this relation, the love of the other must take ultimate precedence. However, the love of God as person transformed also man’s relation to his fellowman. In preaxial culture, this relation had been one of solidarity governed by principles of give and take. It had always included elements of spontaneous affection and generosity. But in that context, the question of the right balance of concern for self and concern for the neighbor did not arise. Even among the Greeks, we have seen, concern for the neighbor was treated within the context of presupposed primary concern for self. Despite highly developed individuality, and the capacity to distance himself as one individual among others, man’s natural self-centeredness as such did not come into question. This could occur only where the other as person could demand personal devotion, even at the cost of personal satisfaction -- and that happened only in Israel. Once it had happened in relation to God, the question of the right relation between man and man arose in a quite new way. Self-centeredness was no longer simply given. The deeper reality of all things was to be found in God’s perception of the world, and in that perception, each person was only one among others. Hence, the genuinely appropriate relation to one’s neighbor and to oneself was the same. One should love one’s neighbor as oneself.

The demand for equal love of neighbor expressed the situation of personal existence before the personal God. The love that was demanded was a matter both of motivation and of outward action. A person must seek the good of the neighbor for the neighbor’s sake, just as he sought his own good for his own sake. Nevertheless, the demand was addressed to the person as will and was a demand for that which the will could fulfill. Hence, it was not to be interpreted as a challenge to the natural and inevitable self-centeredness of man’s feelings. If a man willfully sought his own benefit at the expense of his neighbor, he was guilty of violating the commandment of love. But whether, when he acted justly, he was really concerned for the neighbor’s good, rather than for his own righteousness, was hardly a serious consideration.

Prophetic man transcended himself in that he could see himself as one object of love alongside others. But the impartial love required of him must be a love of which he was capable in the free exercise of his will. In Christianity, this limitation was broken through. The same commandments of love of God and love of neighbor remained. But the meaning was transformed. Love was understood as a motive, a state of feeling giving rise to willing and to acting. Thus, what was commanded or required came into conflict for the first time with man’s natural self-centeredness of feeling. Even if he went far beyond all reasonable demands of self-sacrifice in favor of the neighbor, even if he gave all his goods to feed the poor, he must recognize that this might not express the requisite attitude or inner state. But then, the love that was required was no longer under the control of the will. In the last chapter, the connection of the radical demand for love with the primacy of grace and the sense of original sin was discussed. The remainder of this chapter is devoted to a discussion of the reason for the necessity of this love for the fulfillment of spiritual existence.

Love has importance in every tradition. Especially in Israel, it is clear, love to God and fellowman was central to the law as a whole. Nevertheless, that which was commanded in these laws could be almost equally well expressed by the commands of obedience and justice. Only in Christianity did love as something transcending such obedience and justice become in itself the fulfillment of all that was required. This means not only that the love involved was something new, but also that the need for such love was now unlimited.

Each of us perceives the whole of reality from his own limited standpoint and evaluates it in terms of its contribution to himself. At the same time, he feels spontaneous concern for others, independently of their contribution to his own welfare. He can and does experience admiration, devotion, affection, and sympathy. It is not helpful at this level to ask whether this spontaneous love of the other constitutes altruism in contrast to self-interest. When a person acts on behalf of someone who has won his sympathy, the welfare of the other person has become his interest -- it is a new self-interest altered by the genuine concern for the welfare of the other. Self-interest and altruism merge unproblematically.

Insofar, however, as the self objectifies itself as one self among others, its relations with other selves cease to be simply and naïvely spontaneous. Among axial peoples, there was judgment about proper and ideal relations with others, and this created critical self-consciousness about one’s immediate impulses and feelings. But as long as the basic self-centeredness of feeling was taken for granted, man’s primary attention could be directed away from himself toward others and toward his relations to them. Natural self-centeredness and spontaneous concern for others remained.

However, in spiritual existence, man objectified and experienced responsibility for his basic self-centeredness of feeling. He judged this against the norm of genuine love of God and neighbor and found it corrupt and corrupting. Furthermore, the transcendence of the spirit over itself meant that man was not simply bound to the primacy of self-regard. Yet the judgment against self-centeredness and the awareness of self-transcendence did not lessen the power of self-centeredness. Instead, they heightened it and transformed it from a mere fact into sin. A self-centeredness that was simply given and that attended to the things of its world became a self-preoccupation that cut off the possibility of healthy openness to others. The self could manipulate all a man’s relations with other selves, even his feelings about them and their feelings about him, for his own sake, and it could do so consciously and willfully.

This self-preoccupation is spiritual pride. This word is not to be narrowly understood. In its narrow use, "pride" may be juxtaposed to modesty or humility as two modes of personal bearing. Or pride may be understood as having a high opinion of oneself and one’s abilities. In these senses, pride is a limited and manageable problem and even has much to commend it. Self-centeredness in the self-conscious man can manifest itself in these ways, or in self-aggrandizement at the expense of others. But it can equally well, and perhaps more insidiously, manifest itself in self-pity, self-condemnation, and fearfulness. These are all alike forms of self-preoccupation.

It is no wonder that the radical self-transcendence that leads to self-preoccupation is sometimes regarded as a sickness. It does disrupt and distort the spontaneous and healthy relations possible to those who live unselfconsciously. What is required if this sickness is to be escaped at the level of spirit is a genuine concern for the other that is free from self-regard. That is, the vicious circle of self-preoccupation is broken only when a person loves others without regard to the effect of that love on himself. That means that he loves others without regard to the fact that only by such love can he break out of his self-enclosedness. But every effort to love, in order to break out of the misery of self-preoccupation, is also an expression of the self-preoccupation and is condemned to intensify it.

Love is, therefore, on the one hand, the only salvation of the spiritual man and, on the other hand, unattainable by his own efforts. The spiritual man can only love when he is freed from the necessity to love, that is, when he knows himself already loved in his self-preoccupation. Only if man finds that he is already accepted in his sin and sickness, can he accept his own self-preoccupation as it is; and only then can his psychic economy be opened toward others, to accept them as they are -- not in order to save himself, but because he doesn’t need to save himself. We love only because we are first loved. In this way, and only in this way, can the spiritual man genuinely and purely love.

This discussion of love has illustrated the greater extremes of both evil and good that appear at the level of spirit. On the one hand lies the corruption of spontaneous feeling by self-preoccupation or pride. On the other hand lies the possibility of Christian love -- a love that uniquely transcends self-centeredness in a genuine concern for the other, untainted by concern for its consequences for the lover.

No Christian should lay claim to any simple embodiment of such love. In the totality of his relations to any person, he must recognize a great complexity of feeling -- instinctual, unconscious, and self-seeking. Nevertheless, the whole can be, and often is, redeemed by the presence of an element of genuine concern for the other as a person.

One peculiarity of Christian love is its independence of the merits of the one who is loved. So long as the self-centeredness of human interest in the world was unquestioned, love as motive had to be evoked by some property of the object loved or by some property unconsciously projected on it. Men could love only what presented itself to them as lovable. When love was commanded, as in Israel, it could no longer be a matter of love as motive. The effective motive of obedience to such a command was the desire to be righteous rather than the concern for the other as another.

But for the Christian, love is the possibility of openness to the other as another and concern for him as such. It is made possible by the gift of an undeserved love, and hence it cannot seek a deserving object for its expression. The possibility of its occurrence consists in a freedom from the sickness of self-preoccupation, and, hence, the prior relation of the other to the self cannot be relevant.

In Christian love, we are free from bondage to ourselves without ceasing to be the self-transcending selves of spiritual existence. Lover and loved retain their full personal, responsible autonomy. Love imposes no demand on the one loved; it seeks, rather, his freedom. There is no merging of self and other, as in the love of desire and adoration.

Christian love saves spiritual man from the sickness of self-preoccupation, but this does not imply that it leads to euphoria. Openness to the other is openness to his sin and suffering as well as to his joy, and that means that love brings pain. At a certain level, love greatly increases the suffering of the lover. There has always been in the world a vast amount of human suffering, and to love one’s fellowmen means that this suffering must constantly be a part of one’s own experience. But this suffering does not destroy the sufferer as does the suffering of self-preoccupation. Instead, if he does not flinch from it, but rather continues to love, his capacity for love increases, and his suffering can be accompanied by a deeper peace and joy.

Here we touch on a part of the innermost mystery of Christian existence, the many-faceted truth that only he who loses his soul can find it. It is a truth that all of us find repeatedly confirmed in our own existence, and in which, yet, we have only the most fragmentary participation.

In all axial men, the seat of existence is located in the rational consciousness. But in India from this organizing center the thinker had sought a "self" beyond it. In so doing, he had attempted to overcome that structure of existence given to him as an axial man. Gautama had rejected this quest for a transcendent self, and he purified the reflective consciousness from the last traces of mythical influence. This, he believed, also broke the power of the bond that held the successive moments of experience together in the unity we have called the soul. In the process, therefore, reason was vigorously active, but the goal of this activity was a final passivity of the reflective consciousness toward what is given in the unreflective consciousness. Homeric man distanced the world aesthetically and projected into that distance both the numinous powers and his own motives and emotions. Insofar as he was conscious of himself, it was of himself as he appeared in the public world. Socrates identified himself with his reason, now understood as active conscious thought based on what is given by the unreflective consciousness and tested against it. The resultant bifurcation of the soul passed through the reflective consciousness itself, recognizing the emotions as part of that consciousness but regarding them as alien to the self. Prophetic man accepted responsibility for the outcome of the conflict of forces within his soul, thereby identifying himself with a center transcending reason and passion alike.

It is now time to turn directly to that subject which is the controlling interest of the entire book. What is Christianity, and specifically, what is the structure of Christian existence in relation to all these other structures of existence?

Christian existence arose out of prophetic existence in much the same way that Socratic existence arose out of Homeric existence. (See the Appendix for a discussion of the alternate view that Gnosticism is the parent of Christianity.) Socratic existence could not have arisen apart from the prior distancing of the world and the discovery of the forms it embodies. Similarly, Christian existence could not have arisen apart from that responsibility for one’s acts before God that constituted personal existence. But despite this parallelism, there were great differences in the course of development in Greece and Palestine.

In postexilic Judaism, prophetic existence was widely and firmly established. By the time of Jesus, the Jewish people as a whole were formed by this type of axial existence. This does not mean, however, that they continued, unaltered, the experience or the beliefs of the prophets. In this book, "Homeric existence has meant that structure of existence which was nurtured in Greece under the influence of the Homeric writings. Similarly, "prophetic existence means that structure of existence which arose in Israel as a result of the prophetic movement. Israel appropriated the prophetic message and entered into prophetic existence without abandoning its cultic traditions or overcoming the archaic elements in its law.

The institution through which prophetic existence was effectively transmitted from generation to generation was the synagogue. The rabbis who taught in the synagogues held varied opinions on many matters, but when we view them as a whole in their relation to non-Jewish developments and to heretical movements (such as Gnosticism) , we are impressed by their unity. The clearest embodiment of that general orientation which dominated the synagogues is to be found in the Pharisees. The Gospels themselves selected Pharisaism as the representative form of Judaism in relation to which what was new in Jesus could be most clearly seen. Unfortunately, this use of Pharisaism in the Gospels has led to a pejorative connotation that is wholly unjustified. The role of Pharisaism in relation to Christianity is properly seen only when it is recognized that despite its marked divergence from the prophets, especially in its understanding of the law, it was, in Jesus’ day, the finest flowering of prophetic existence and the worthiest alternative to Christianity.

In this chapter, Pharisaism is chosen to represent the determinative form taken by prophetic existence in Jesus’ day. Jesus’ message is presented over against Pharisaic Judaism rather than directly in relation to the prophets themselves. In part, it should be understood as a renewal of the distinctively prophetic element within the Pharisaic synthesis. But this is true only in part, for the result transcended not only the particular form of prophetic existence embodied in Pharisaism, but also the prophets themselves.

This selection of Pharisaism expresses the belief not only that Pharisaism represented the normative expression of the mainstream of prophetic Judaism, but also that Jesus’ message formed itself primarily in relation to Pharisaism out of a different configuration of elements in this mainstream. Much the same could be said of the Essene communities, who in some respects resembled and differed from the Pharisees in the same way as Jesus. In other respects, the Hellenization of Judaism in the diaspora led to developments parallel to Christianity. Indeed, the possibility of crossing a threshold like that crossed by Christianity has been a permanent characteristic of Judaism, even apart from Christian influence. If my interest were to demonstrate the uniqueness of the several elements in Jesus’ message and Christian experience, it would be essential to make comparison with all forms of Judaism. However, my interest lies in the actual and effective emergence of a new structure of existence, and as a matter of historical fact, this occurred only by the total impact of Jesus’ transformation of Jewish teaching combined with his resurrection appearances. The initial and decisive impact was made chiefly on those whose beliefs had previously been most fully articulated by the Pharisees.

In previous chapters, the structures of existence have been discussed with little attention to the relation between those through whom the new structures received their shape and those who later participated in them. This does not mean that there were no differences. Certainly, there were great differences between the creators of the Homeric epics and the Greek tragedians. Similarly, whereas Socrates cannot be understood apart from his daemon, this was not mentioned, because nothing comparable played a role in Socratic existence generally. The several expressions of prophetic existence differed from the prophetic message itself, and the structure of the existence of the prophets themselves included a relation to God in which prophetic existence generally did not participate. This difference was neglected in the previous chapter, but we must return to it below in attempting to understand Jesus’ relation to his heritage.

When we come to the rise of Christian existence, we cannot continue to neglect the question of the difference in the structure of existence of those responsible for its emergence and of those who followed. Jesus and the Easter experiences of the community were the occasion for crossing the new threshold. But there were special features in Jesus’ relation to God and in the experience of the Holy Spirit in the early church that, while essential to the original transition into Christian existence, are not typically present in that existence. The distinction here is fundamentally of the same order as the other distinctions mentioned, but it has played a much larger role in Christian self-understanding than have the parallel distinctions elsewhere.

In recognition of this situation, this chapter is divided into two main sections treating, respectively, the message of Jesus and the primitive Christian experience of the postresurrection church. This would allow also for discussion of the structures of existence of Jesus and of the primitive Christian, conscious of the indwelling presence of the divine Spirit, in their distinctiveness from that of later believers.

However, such discussions would carry us too far in the direction of Christology and pneumatology, subjects which require extensive treatment in their own right and would distract us here from our central concern. Hence, they are dealt with only to that degree which is necessary for the understanding of the rise of normal Christian existence; and in the explicit treatment of structures of existence at the end of the chapter, only that structure of existence in which Christians generally have shared is considered.

Pharisaism combined an intense ethical consciousness with a future hope. In this combination, it was essentially faithful to its prophetic heritage. Yet, both in its ethical consciousness and in its hope, it lacked one feature characteristic of the prophets themselves. The prophets had known God as present, living, acting reality, but for the Jews of the postexilic period, God was silent and remote. The acts of God were in the past or, hopefully, in the future. As long as God was experienced in his remoteness, nothing else was possible.

The central and decisive fact in the appearance of Jesus was the renewal of the sense of the present immediacy of God. Such a statement hardly does full justice to the remarkable character of this occurrence, since by the use of the term "renewal" it suggests something of a return to an earlier condition. If this were all that were involved, such a renewal might well have been a common occurrence in postexilic Judaism. I suggest that it was not a common occurrence precisely because of the success of the prophetic faith. Some explanation of this point is needed.

Mythical man lived in a universe of sacred meanings and powers. This sacred power was bound up with the unconscious and with its products in consciousness. The shift of the seat of existence from the unconscious to the conscious estranged the self from the sacred power, and the triumph of the rational consciousness over the mythical broke also the power of the sacred. Therefore, the freedom of axial man was also the possibility of freedom from deity. This freedom is to be found among both the Indians and the Greeks. In both cases, in freeing man from the power of myth, the axial development freed him also from the experience of living in relation to presently active divine powers, which took initiative in their dealings with men.

Among the Hebrews, however, the axial development retained the context of the divine-human relation. Here the mythical was ethicized and personalized. At the point of the transition toward this ethicizing and personalizing, the power of the sacred remained overwhelmingly present. But when by this act the sacred power was rationalized, it was also distanced. That is, when men had learned to understand God as a person and his will as a body of moral teaching, they continued to recognize his supreme importance for human life, but his actual present effectiveness became a matter of belief rather than of immediate apprehension.

Thus the centering of existence in consciousness, even in the Hebrew development, pushed the sacred power to the fringes of awareness. The belief that God acted became a part of the conscious, conceptual structure, but the action itself stood outside the sphere of conscious experience and was looked on as past and future rather than present. There seemed to be no way of recovering the vital immediacy of the relation to God, except by a return to the mythical existence of the preaxial state, a return to which Judaism was strictly opposed.

In terms of the nature of the axial transformation, the widespread estrangement from the divine is readily intelligible. Among the Indians and Greeks alike, there were attempts to transcend consciousness or to destroy it so as to recover a primeval condition of unity with the divine. Alternately, Aristotle pointed to the possibility of contemplation of a deity known through inference. But within the context of fully conscious existence, the divine as immediately experienced seemed to be almost necessarily pushed aside.

Yet in Jesus, the full responsible personhood of Hebrew axial man was combined, without loss, with an existence that found its content in the fully personal God. Jesus knew this God as he was taught to know him by the traditions of Israel. But Jesus’ knowledge had an immediacy that transcended the authority of these traditions and enabled him to stand in judgment on them. He knew God as the presently active reality that had incomparably greater reality than the world of creaturely things. He lived and spoke out of the immediacy of this reality. Of course, the experiential immediacy of God to Jesus in no way meant that he was not also formed by the history and traditions of Israel.

Jesus’ proclamation of the immediacy of God took the form of the proclamation of the imminence of his Kingdom, which meant the apocalyptic end. This was no accident. For him, no less than for the apocalyptic emphasis within Judaism, there was a total hiatus between what God was and the actual condition of his world. Hence, the nearness of God could only mean that this world could not stand before him.

Yet it is not enough to think of Jesus as an apocalyptic preacher, however true this may be, for his apocalypticism was quite distinct from that of mainstream Judaism. For the latter, the conviction of the apocalyptic end belonged with the experience of God’s absence and remoteness. It was because one believed that God must vindicate the righteous that one knew that the transformation must come. But for Jesus, the apocalyptic message stemmed from the awareness of God’s nearness. Hence, the Kingdom was at hand, and, indeed, at hand in such a way as to be already effectively operative in the moment. The difficulty of unraveling the elements of futuristic and realized eschatology in the message of Jesus stems from the fact that, far more basic for him than any conceptual scheme of the sequence of events, was the fact of God’s present reality to him and for him. That present reality meant that God was effectively active in that now. It meant also that the world as it was constituted in that now was already on the point of dissolution.

Just as Jesus accepted the apocalyptic elements in Judaism, so also he accepted other aspects of contemporary Jewish doctrine and ethical concern. But to these, too, he gave a formulation quite distinct from that of Pharisaism.

In principle, some of the prophetic utterances point to a total ethicizing of the understanding of God’s will. But in fact this did not occur among the Jews. Rather, the taboo system was taken up into the understanding of the will of God. There it was, to some degree, ethicized in its particulars, but it remained incompletely rationalized. Obedience to any item of the law was in itself an ethical act, and in this sense, the relation of the individual to God was ethicized. Interpretation and application could do much to rationalize the arbitrary features of the legal code, but as long as this code was fixed as the past word of God, and as long as God was understood to have spoken in the past rather than in the present, complete rationalization could not occur. Thus the Pharisees, despite their highly developed ethical self-consciousness, and despite the fact that their rabbis were able to point to love of God and man as the sum of the law, remained bound to prerational requirements in the name of ethics. This bred among them also an elaborate casuistry as they attempted to derive intelligible and practical guidance from rules that reflected an archaic, mythical mentality.

Jesus’ renewal of the prophetic consciousness of God in the context of fully responsible personhood broke through the limits of the old law. The distinction between ethical principles, on the one hand, and ancient taboos and cultic rules, on the other, may have been tentatively and provisionally made by some Pharisees, but in Jesus it took on unequivocal and uncompromising character. Jesus resembled the Pharisees through and through in his understanding that man owed to God perfect obedience. But he renewed and completed radically and decisively the prophetic revolution by freeing the understanding of God’s will from the archaic elements with which it had been entangled.

Jesus’ transformation of his Jewish heritage went far beyond this. That love of God and neighbor were the chief among the requirements of God had long been known. Yet the understanding of the meaning of these requirements had always been bound up with the practice of the whole law. The law of love was the most important among the laws, and in announcing it as such Jesus added nothing new. But Pharisaic Judaism, while recognizing the supreme importance of love, had not reinterpreted the whole relation of God and man in terms of love. Rather, it had interpreted the commandment of love in the context of the law, and this had led to hedging the application of the law about with numerous qualifications. Here, too, Jesus crossed a threshold and thus transformed the meaning of the materials that he took with him across the threshold. For him, love demanded an unselfseeking openness to the need of the neighbor, and this neighbor was any man who was in need. No traditional law that interfered with the immediate and responsible expression of that love could be allowed to stand.

The understanding of love was transformed also in another respect. For both Jesus and the Pharisees, love was a matter both of action and of inner intention. Yet the relation between these altered in Jesus. For the Pharisees, the commands of God included the demand for purity of motive and purpose as well as righteousness of action. But these commands, like those which we could distinguish as ethical and ritual, lay side by side. Jesus attached a radical priority to the inner state. Since love was no longer to be expressed by obedience to many principles, it had to be a matter of the heart. Even righteous acts were worthless in God’s sight if they were not motivated by love.

This leads to another striking point of contrast between Jesus and the Pharisees. The Pharisees lived in a more or less stable world ruled by God but from which God was somewhat remote. In this context, they had to discover the will of God for each new problem as it arose. This they did by application of the old law. In each case, the law must be so interpreted as to designate some possible course of action as right. Hence, what was demanded must be a practical act within the power of man to effect.

Jesus lived in a world that had no permanence and to which God was very near. In such a world, the question of what was to be done was not settled by the capacities of man or the probable consequences for society. What was demanded was determined by what God was and the meaning of what God was for human life.

As long as the ethical demand was assumed to lie fully within the power of man to obey, it could deal only with behavior rather than with motives. To command that motives be pure was to command the impossible. But this did not matter to Jesus. In the white heat generated by the nearness of God, intentions also must and could be pure.

The possibility of such purity belonged with the understanding of God’s grace. Alongside the absolute radicalization and interiorization of the ethical demand stood the radicalization of trust in God. What a person asked of God confidently, he received. God was far more eager to give than man was open to accept. Indeed, God in his love was already and especially seeking the sinner.

At this point, too, the Pharisaic ethical consciousness was radically transcended. The Pharisee knew that God’s justice was tempered with mercy. God would forgive the penitent if he turned to righteousness. But mercy should operate within the context of justice. The conditions for salvation were established by God, and man had to adapt himself to them.

For Jesus, on the other hand, the whole radical demand of God on men was placed in the context of God’s love. Men were not to think of objective conditions that they must try to meet, but of the active initiative of God coming to them and offering them the Kingdom. God sought out the sinner while he was sinner. Jesus asked, in the first place, only openness or receptivity. Such openness and receptivity, he found more frequently among those who knew themselves as sinners than among the outwardly righteous members of society. Hence, the whole hierarchy of evaluations based upon law and obedience was overturned as the initiative was seen to be in the hands of the loving Father rather than with the ethical striving of man.

The difference can also be stated in terms of freedom. For the Pharisee, the individual man was free to do or not to do what God required of him. For Jesus, the individual man was free to be or not to be what God wanted him to be. Of course, for the Pharisee and Jesus alike, what one was and what one did were inseparable. But whereas for the Pharisee one was what one did, for Jesus one acted in terms of what one was. The freedom to be what one willed to be was a far greater freedom, and hence also a far greater burden, than the freedom to do what one wanted to do.

The resurrection appearances of Jesus created a community of intense excitement and expectancy. In part, they directed this community back to the sayings and deeds of Jesus in which he had given expression to his own existence. But more directly, they constituted for the community the powerful evidence that the old aeon was truly broken and that God had drawn near. The community came into existence in a rejoicing over the resurrection as given reality and in expectation of its imminent universalization. In the excitement of this faith, the effective presence of God was vividly known.

Despite the similarity of the belief and experience of the early Christians with that of Jesus himself, there was also an important difference. For Jesus, the belief in the imminence of the Kingdom was a function of the experiential knowledge of the immediacy of God. He encouraged his hearers to enter into an interpersonal relation with God in perfect trust. For the early Christians, on the other hand, it was what God had done in Jesus’ resurrection that opened them to God in confident expectation of what God would do. Almost as a by-product of this belief, they found themselves open to the present work of God in their lives. This present work was experienced more as an empowering presence than as a Thou who was heard and addressed.

This new relation to God found expression in a new terminology. Jesus had spoken very little of the divine Spirit. Like the great prophets of the eighth century, he may have avoided this language quite consciously. In that earlier period, the Spirit of God had been associated with ecstatic possession. When the Spirit came upon a person, he lost his individual conscious center; he became a passive and non-responsible instrument for God to speak or act through. Where the prophet thought of himself as an individual addressed by God, who then communicated the divine message to his people, he eschewed the idea of Spirit possession. He was involved in a relationship as person with the personal God.

But in the life of the primitive Christian community, the Spirit played a central role. Men experienced themselves as under the influence of divine power that acted in and through their total psyche. God was known as empowering presence at least as clearly as he was known as Heavenly Father. So important was this experience in the self-understanding of the Christian community, that we can use it as a basis for understanding the peculiarity of that existence generally.

Our first question must be to what extent the recurrence of the phenomenon of the Spirit implies a return to archaic patterns of religion. To some degree and in some instances, it must have meant just that and has meant that again and again in Christian history in revivals of the pneumatic emphasis. Speaking in tongues, ecstatic prophesying, and other phenomena seem to have occurred that involve surrender of the conscious center of personality to forces which operate from or through the unconscious.

Furthermore, this is not simply to be deplored. The magnificent attainments of the axial period and the resulting transformations of the structures of human existence command our admiration and deserve our gratitude. Yet we must not hide from ourselves the extremely precarious character of that achievement. Since consciousness is, in fact, so small a part of the total psychic life, its struggle to wrest control and determine the meanings by which life is to be lived is always a struggle against immense odds. The attainment of rational and ethical existence in Greece and Israel required also a great suppression or repression of psychic forces. The unconscious was controlled but not itself transformed or even understood. Axial existence requires a continual psychic effort and discipline that is extremely demanding and often inhibits the spontaneities of mutual affection and acceptance.

In the eschatological Christian community, the sense that the structures of communal and individual existence which had governed the past were now already at an end may well have relaxed the guard of consciousness against the powers of the unconscious. When this happened, there was a sense of release and refreshment, the possibility of feeling whole and at peace. There was also a release of paranormal powers leading to extraordinary results that were highly prized.

The revival of the archaic experience of the divine Spirit involved the danger that the personal reality -- of man and the understanding of God as personal would be destroyed. The I -- Thou relation to God characteristic of Israel might be replaced by an I-it relation in which, as Buber has taught us, the "I" also loses its personal character. In such an I-it relation, the "I" could be either God or man. When the Holy Spirit was seen as initiating agent, man might appear as a passive instrument. When man assumed the role of actor, he might try to manipulate the Spirit as an impersonal force.

Despite the dangers of reversion to archaic existence given with the new prominence of the experience of the Spirit, such reversion was rejected by the mainstream of Christianity. The church attained an understanding of the work of the Holy Spirit in which the Hebrew axial achievement was affirmed and carried farther. Paul interpreted the indwelling, empowering, and transforming Spirit as personal Spirit interacting with human personal spirit. Furthermore, he saw the essential and characteristic fruit of the presence of the Holy Spirit not in ecstatic phenomena but in a transformation of the quality of the reflective consciousness itself. He saw in the Spirit a pervasive power working continually within the Christian to produce peace, joy, patience, humility, and love.

Although the personal character of the I -- Thou relation between man and God was thus preserved, what resulted in the Christian experience of the Holy Spirit was not what is usually meant by the I -- Thou relation, for that relation suggests overagainstness, confrontation, speech, and response. The relation of the primitive Christian believer to the Spirit was far more intimate than that. There was no imagery of spatial separation or of demand and obedience. There was, rather, the imagery of two spiritual realities, each fully responsible for itself and self-identical, nevertheless mutually indwelling each other.

Whether this personal presence indwelling the believer was thought of as the Spirit or as Christ or as God in some other form does not really matter. To us the conceptual problem is acutely posed. But as we attempt to understand the character of Christian existence in the primitive community, the decisive point is that the personal God was known as inwardly present without loss of the sense of responsible personhood. Indeed, God was known as inwardly present in such a way as to enhance and accentuate the sense of personhood.

In the preceding paragraphs, the term "spirit" has been used repeatedly to refer to the human spirit. It has been used without precise definition and in a way that hardly distinguishes it from my use of person. This nontechnical use of spirit is also characteristic of the New Testament. The Christian community did not have the philosopher’s concern for terminological precision, and even Paul uses his major anthropological terms in ways that are often interchangeable. "Spirit" can mean the self, the soul, attitude, or will. Probably all its meanings reflect uses that are independent of the prophetic understanding of man.

Nevertheless, this term is here selected to designate the new element in Christian existence. This use of the term receives general support from the New Testament, and is also in accord with one of the meanings widely given to it in contemporary usage. In what follows, spirit refers to the radically self-transcending character of human existence that emerged in the Christian community. In this sense, spiritual existence is a further development of personal existence.

In the last chapter, personhood was defined in terms of the individual’s acceptance of responsibility for himself and his awareness of his inwardness. As personhood emerged in Israel, it formed itself in a way that we find natural to designate by human will.(This term is needed here and below to distinguish the seat of personal existence from that of spiritual existence. As indicated in note in an earlier note, it is an appropriate designation of this seat only when it has been transcended, for "will" suggests at least the possibility of its distinction from the self or "I".) Hebrew man knew himself as one who confronted a choice and was responsible for his voluntary decision. In deciding on the course of action, he was deciding on what he was to be. To us it is surprising that a term more clearly equivalent to our idea of the will is not far more prominent in the Hebrew scriptures. Perhaps the more encompassing concept of "heart" tended to be understood centrally as what we would call "will." In any case, we can largely understand prophetic man in terms of two factors: the total physical, social, and historical context in which he lived and his personal will as that by which he transcended that context and determined the form his life would take within it.

For the primitive Christian community, a new dimension appeared. Attention was focused to a much greater degree on the psychic state as such rather than only on outward action. This psychic state took on great importance both because, as prophetic Judaism already knew, God looked on the heart, and also because the inner man was the seat of the presence and activity of God’s Spirit. Outward behavior was understood to flow forth from the heart and to reflect its total state. Also, Christian belief or faith, unlike Pharisaic obedience, was initially a matter of an inner state rather than of observable conduct.

This attention to the inwardness of man greatly complicated the understanding of personal responsibility as focused in the will. As long as responsibility was primarily for voluntary actions, man must be seen as able, in a quite simple and direct sense, to do what he ought. But when actions were seen in terms of motives and attention was directed toward the motive rather than to the act, such an uncomplicated understanding of responsibility led to immense difficulties. Perhaps Jesus’ own understanding retained this straightforward sense of the possibility of obedience, but certainly in the experience of the Christian community it could not endure. On the one hand, man ought to have a pure heart, to act only from love of God and neighbor. On the other hand, he found all sorts of resistances in himself to such action. He wanted to overcome these resistances, yet they remained. Were they then elements alien to himself for which he had no responsibility? One could not quite say that, for they were too intimately a part of the self, even affecting the willing itself. There seemed to be a power of sin in man s life that was not simply subject to his will and yet was bound up with that will. If man was to become genuinely righteous and not merely to conform his outward action to approved patterns, he must be aided from outside his own resources. Indeed, he was wholly dependent on the divine initiative.

One might suppose that the sense of dependence on the divine initiative would lead to a reduced sense of personal responsibility. But this did not occur. The Christian experienced himself as radically responsible for himself beyond the point of his actual apparent ability to choose. Here is the seat of the rationally perplexing but existentially powerful understanding of original sin, a notion almost wholly lacking in Judaism but pervasively effective in Christianity, even where its verbalization is repudiated. Somehow, the Christian knew himself as responsible for choosing to be the kind of self he was, even when he found that his desire to change himself into another kind of self was ineffectual. Hence, he must shift his efforts from a direct struggle to alter himself to the attempt to become open to the work of the divine Spirit that could do within him something which he could not do in and for himself. Even here he knew that his very opening of himself toward God depended on God’s initiative and that this opening, in its turn, was very fragmentary indeed.

The Christian had to accept a responsibility for his existence as a whole in a way that separated him from Judaism. This meant that he must understand himself as transcending his will in the sense of his power of choice among practicable alternatives in a given situation. He was responsible not only for his choice but also for the motive of his choosing. He was responsible for being the kind of self who could not will to choose to have the motive he should.

In principle, we can press this responsibility ad infinitum. At whatever level we ask the question about what we are, we also must acknowledge our responsibility for being that. We cannot simply accept what we are as the given context within which our responsibility operates. If I find that I am not a loving person, I must acknowledge my responsibility for not being a loving person; and if I find that I cannot even will to become a loving person, I must acknowledge responsibility for that failure of my will. I cannot identify myself with some one aspect of my total psyche, some one force within it. If with the Jew I identify myself with the will, then I know myself as responsible for that self-identification and hence as transcending it. Even more, if with many of the Greeks I identify myself with reason, I know that I am responsible for that choice and hence transcend the reason with which I have identified myself.

Of course, this sort of analysis is not present in the New Testament texts. They expressed only a relatively early stage of the development of this self-conscious self-transcendence. Attention was focused away from the self, its acts and self-consciousness, toward the work of God in Jesus Christ and in the Holy Spirit and toward the consummation so soon to come. The practical problems of organizing life in the present were dealt with only as the needs were insistent.

Although the emphasis thus far has been placed on responsibility, in the New Testament the work of the Spirit is known much more as freedom. Man was free from the law, because he could live immediately from the grace that was the Spirit. He did not need to struggle to obey imposed principles of conduct, because his heart was changed. Those principles were now either set aside as irrelevant or accepted as the spontaneous expression of the new heart that he found within himself as the work of the Spirit. Man was free from his own past, because the Spirit placed him on a new level of existence in which that past had no power over him. Man was free from the oppressive powers of this world, the structures within the context of which he had understood his existence, because he now lived in terms of a reality that radically transcended and relativized them. He knew Christian existence, therefore, as joy rather than as burden.

In the New Testament, we see a stage of development in which the primacy of the Holy Spirit was so great in the understanding of Christian existence that there was simply no place for using the gifts of the Spirit wrongly. That one should use the freedom granted by the Spirit for immorality was unintelligible, although, of course, even then it occurred. The New Testament had not yet reached the understanding of spiritual sins.

The church, however, came rapidly enough to recognize that the existence of man as spirit was by no means an insurance of virtue. It introduced man to a new level of sin as well as to new possibilities of self-sacrificial love. Spiritual existence has brought into human history depths of both good and evil that are impossible in any other context. The finest achievements of man and his most hideous crimes are alike spiritual acts.

That the emergence of spiritual existence is the emergence of enhanced possibilities for both good and evil is nothing new. The same could be said for personal existence and, indeed, for axial existence in general, or of civilized existence, or, before that, of human existence as such. This means, however, that we cannot simply identify prophetic existence with personal existence or Christian existence with spiritual existence. Prophetic existence is personal existence that exercises its personal responsibility in trust and obedience. Christian existence is spiritual existence that exercises its new freedom in love. The nature of this love and the way it fulfills spiritual existence are the chief topics of the next chapter.

Personal existence is that structure of existence realized in prophetic Judaism, and spiritual existence is the new structure that emerged in the primitive Christian community. In concluding this chapter, a direct description of this structure is needed.

In personal existence, a center emerged in the conscious psyche that transcended such impersonal forces as passion and reason, which were operative therein, and experienced responsibility for their mutual relations. From the perspective of spiritual existence, this center can be identified with the will.

In spiritual existence, a new level of transcendence appeared. The self became responsible for the choice of the center from which it organized itself and not only for what it chose from a given center. If it chose to identify itself as will and to accept the bondage to moral obligation that was therein entailed, it could do so. But it need not do so, and it should not do so. If it did do so, it was responsible for this choice as well as for the further choices that it made as will.

If it is difficult to conceptualize the structure of personal existence, the difficulty is compounded when we come to spiritual existence. Here we must think of a reflective consciousness in which the seat of existence is capable of changing. Furthermore, we must think of this changing center as itself responsible for this changing, and thus transcendent of the locus from which it organizes the whole. Finally, we must conceive this transcendent center as capable of retaining its transcendent identity and of refusing to identify itself with any other aspect of the psyche. Obviously, as long as we derive our images from visual sources, such a concept is impossible. Yet, it fits the facts of experience as expressed in much Christian literature and can be confirmed by many in their own self-understanding.

The spiritual structure of existence resulted from an intensification and radicalization of that responsibility for oneself which is the mark also of personal existence. If a person accepts responsibility for his action and recognizes that this requires his control over his emotions and thought, then by that act he becomes an "I" that transcends his emotions and thought. The emergence of that "I" marks the advent of personal existence. But the personal "I" cannot be responsible for what it cannot control. It cannot be responsible for the occurrence of particular emotions, only for channeling them into righteous action. It cannot be responsible for the limits of its own capacity. It cannot be responsible for itself as it is given to itself. Thus, the "I" of personal existence transcends every other element in the reflective consciousness, but it does not transcend itself.

The message of Jesus, on the one hand, and the experience of the Holy Spirit, on the other, broke through this last barrier to total responsibility. The essential demand of God has to do precisely with those dimensions of selfhood which the personal "I" cannot control. To accept those demands and to accept responsibility to live in terms of them is to accept radical responsibility for oneself, and that is, at the same time, to transcend one’s self. That means that the new spiritual "I" is responsible both for what it is and for what it is not, both for what lies in its power and for what lies beyond its power. For the spiritual " I" need not remain itself but can, instead, always transcend itself. Thus, spiritual existence is radically self-transcending existence.