The Faith of a Heretic

Against Theology

What is theology? Certainly not what Webster’s New International Dictionary says it is when giving one of its meanings as the “critical, historical, and psychological study of religion.” This definition is introduced with the words, “More loosely”; but any definition which would make Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Nietzsche’s Antichrist, and Freud’s Future of an Illusion exercises in theology is not only loose but absurd.

The same dictionary, which is known as “the supreme authority,” defines a theologian as “a person well versed in theology” or a “writer on theology.” This would not only turn Gibbon, Freud, and Nietzsche into theologians; any critic of theology, being a “writer on theology,” would himself be a theologian.

This usage has no basis in the etymology of the word nor in judiciously spoken English, though such thoughtlessness occasionally finds expression in the language. The Unabridged furnishes a motive for this misuse of “theology” by immediately following it up with a quotation from the Encyclopaedia Britannica: “Many speak of theology as a science of religion [instead of “science of God”] because they disbelieve that there is any knowledge of God to be attained.” In other words: some people, believing that theology involves deception and that such great theologians as Aquinas and Calvin were impostors, prefer not to say so outright and instead appropriate such words as “theologian” and “theology” for something else which is respectable.

Some of those who say that every man has an ultimate concern, and that man must have a god, also say that every scientist is a hidden theologian because he is a human being. Since the Second World War, theologians have amassed a whole arsenal of such ploys. To use an ancient name, the stratagem is a form of tu quoque—you are doing it, too. To do justice to its kindly intent, one can call it instead conversion by definition. And to call attention to its occasionally crushing effect on unsuspecting victims, one may christen it the bear’s hug.

All these comfortable ambiguities forestall a critical appraisal of theology, though this is badly needed. To be sure, the early positivists rejected theology as meaningless; but they rejected so much else as no less meaningless that theology was in good company: it was not singled out for criticism and examined closely.

Soon, moreover, it was noted that the early positivists had used “meaningless” in a rather unusual sense: what was “meaningless,” as they employed that term, was really quite “meaningful” in the usual sense of that word, so one cared even less. When it was widely recognized that some of the positivists’ prose was meaningless by their own standards, their initial repudiation of theology came to be considered an amusing episode, no more.

Wittgenstein himself had taken this insight in his stride. In his Tractatus, he had said: “Most of the propositions and questions that have been written about philosophical matters are not false but nonsensical” (62); also, “My propositions elucidate by leading him that understands me to recognize them in the end as nonsensical, after he has climbed through them—on them—beyond them” (188).

After the Second World War some of the heirs of the later Wittgenstein reversed the line of his early followers and tried to rehabilitate theology. Wittgenstein had talked of language games and urged his students to discover the meaning of words by considering how they are actually used in various contexts; so one began to discuss the language of theology in an attempt to see how this or that phrase functions in the discourse of the theologians. Ineffectual criticism gave way to appreciation, and philosophers came to confirm the common notion that theology is eminently respectable. But is it really?

Much depends, of course, on how we define theology. Webster’s main definition is all right, but takes up fifteen lines and then is followed by the loose one that has been discussed. The most complete dictionary of the English language, the twelve-volume Oxford English Dictionary, is brief and to the point when it defines theology as “the study or science which treats of God, His nature & attributes, & His relations with man & the universe.” Further, it defines: “Dogmatic theology, theology as authoritatively held & taught by the church; a scientific statement of Christian dogma. Natural theology, theology based upon reasoning from natural facts apart from revelation.” It also allows that “theology” sometimes means “a particular theological system or theory” and that it may be “applied to pagan or non-Christian systems.” Finally, it lists two obsolete meanings: “Rarely used for Holy Scriptures” and “Metaphysics.”

There are, then, two types of theology: natural and dogmatic. Natural theology purports to tell us about God, his nature and attributes, and his relations with man and the universe, on the basis of reasoning from facts of nature, without relying on revelation. But from the facts of nature one cannot even infer God’s existence, much less his attributes and his relations with man and the universe, still less the qualities which theologians, as we generally use the term, ascribe to him: omniscience and omnipotence, justice and love, perfection and infinity.

From the facts of nature one can infer further facts of nature, but one cannot with any certainty infer anything beyond nature, not even with any probability. At most, one can say that there are some events one is not able to explain by means of any hitherto known facts; and at such points one may possibly elect to postulate some occult entities or forces, pending further research. Past experience indicates that all such invocations are extremely likely to be dated by a new advance in science. Indeed, even as one writer postulates some unknown entity outside of nature, some scientist elsewhere may be able to dispense with it. Moreover, even if it were permissible to infer something supra-scientific from the facts of nature, it is never really the facts of nature that determine what precisely is invoked at that point, but some preconceived ideas mediated by religion. At the crucial point, natural theology falls back on dogmatic theology. It is the teachings of the theologian’s religion, not the facts of nature, that decide whether, where other explanations fail, he should invoke one god or two, or more; a god of love, a god of wrath, or one of each, or several of each, or one who loves some and hates others, or perhaps a god of perfect love who permits, or insists upon, eternal torment.

To be sure, there are those who believe that God’s existence can be proved from facts of nature, notwithstanding Kant’s classical refutations of what he considered the only three basic types of alleged proofs. I shall not discuss these proofs here, having dealt in detail with the five proofs of Aquinas and with Plato’s argument, Kant’s “postulate,” and Pascal’s “wager,” as well as the question whether God’s existence can be proved, in Chapter V of my Critique of Religion and Philosophy.

Most Protestant theologians admit that God’s existence cannot be inferred from facts of nature and that knowledge of “his attributes and his relations with man and the universe” has to be based on faith and revelation. In sum, they repudiate natural theology. Most Catholic theologians believe that God’s existence can be inferred from facts of nature; but they, too, base most of their alleged knowledge of “his attributes and his relations with man and the universe” on faith and revelation.

What people in the twentieth century generally mean when speaking of theology, whether they are Catholics, Protestants, Jews, or agnostics, is what the Oxford English Dictionary calls dogmatic theology and defines as “theology as authoritatively held & taught by the church,” But this definition overlooks that there are many churches, and that each has its own theology—or rather many theologies.

The first point to note about theology, as the term is generally understood, is that it is denominational. Moreover, a theologian does not merely expound the beliefs, particularly those about God, held by his denomination; he also offers a sympathetic exegesis and, in fact if not expressly, a defense. Neither Presbyterian missionaries nor agnostic anthropologists who offer careful expositions of the beliefs of the Navahos would be called Navaho theologians. To be called a theologian, one must be committed to the beliefs about God, or gods, of which one offers an account. By betraying a lack of sympathy, or by evincing hostility, a writer makes clear beyond a doubt that he is not a Navaho theologian or a Christian theologian, even if he should be very “well versed” in Navaho or Christian theology. A man may be well versed in theology without being a theologian; and he may be a theologian without being well versed in theology.

To understand theology, one has to understand commitment to an institution. As a first example of a very educated and intelligent writer whose books cannot be well understood unless we keep in mind that he has committed himself to an institution, consider not a theologian but a Communist: Georg Lukács. Many Western writers, including Thomas Mann and Herbert Read, have hailed him as the most intelligent Marxist critic and historian of ideas, and his erudition is amazing.

In From Shakespeare to Existentialism, I attempted a quick sketch of Lukács. In the present context only three points matter.

First: no dead writer who has not specifically been condemned by the party is safe from being enlisted as a comrade who all but took the final step. Second: Lukács adopts a peculiar language which shows at a glance that one is reading a committed Communist. Third: he continually cites authority to back up what he says. Points are proved by quoting Marx, Engels, Lenin, and, depending on the party line around the time of publication, sometimes, but not always, Stalin.

Confronted with all this, two reactions are possible. One may say: How perceptive and erudite this writer is! How liberal, really! He almost agrees with me! Of course, he puts all his points in rather odd ways; but, being a Communist, he is doing the best he can. Or one can say: If he is so liberal, why does he not draw the consequences? Why does he not come out in the open and say what he thinks? For years he did not have to be a Communist; why, then, did he write as he did? The answer is clear: because of his commitment.

The parallel with many Catholic intellectuals is obvious. They, too, assimilate to Catholic doctrine the most divergent materials and enlist all kinds of writers as searching souls who all but took the final step. They, too, adopt a peculiar language. And they, too, back up their views by constantly quoting authority. And here, too, one may exclaim: How erudite! How liberal! The man almost agrees with me! Of course, he puts his points a little oddly; but, being a Catholic, or a Thomist, he is doing the best he can. Or one can ask why such writers do not draw the consequences and say freely what they think without encumbering every utterance with such an involved ritual.

Instead of laboring this point, let us begin with Protestant theology. For the point suggested here is easier to see, and has been noted much more often, in connection with Catholicism, and millions of English-speaking people would readily grant that Catholic writers are vulnerable to such charges; but very few have noticed that Protestant theology is in the same boat.

The choice of a peculiar language and the quoting of authority stare us in the face; and the leading Protestant theologian in the United States, Paul Tillich, counts the Hebrew prophets among the greatest Protestants of all time, assures us that Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche were the most outstanding Protestants of the last hundred years, and considers Picasso’s art deeply Protestant, too.

The point here is not merely that the same three points we have noted among Communists and Catholic intellectuals are found among the Protestants as well. But to prepare for our central criticism, let us explore a few examples in more depth.

Toward the middle of the twentieth century, no Protestant theologian in Germany attracted more attention than Rudolf Bultmann. Long known as an outstanding New Testament scholar, he published an article in 1941 in which he urged that the New Testament must be “demythologized” in order that its central message might reach modern man, unencumbered by the myths of the first century. His article was widely debated, outside Germany, too; more and more of Bultmann’s books were translated into English; and eventually he was invited to give the Gifford Lectures in Scotland and various other lectures in the United States.

Of the many criticisms of his call to demythologize, few, if any, annoyed Bultmann as much as an essay by Karl Jaspers, widely known as one of the two leading German existentialists although he, like Martin Heidegger, repudiates this label. Jaspers’ critique of Bultmann is open to many objections, but it has the great merit of having stung Bultmann into making a staggering admission. (The two essays, together with Jaspers’ reply to Bultmann’s reply and Bultmann’s laconic response to Jaspers’ second essay, are available in English in a paperback, Myth and Christianity.) In his initial reply, Bultmann says of Jaspers: “He is as convinced as I am that a corpse cannot come back to life and rise from his tomb…. What, then, am I to do when as a pastor, preaching or teaching, I must explain texts … ? Or when, as a scientific theologian, I must give guidance to pastors with my interpretation?”

Up to this point, Bultmann had generally referred to “the Easter event,” and students had debated just what, according to Bultmann, had happened at the first Easter. Now Bultmann let the cat out of the bag, not only about one particular belief but about the nature of theology. Here we have an excellent formulation of the dilemma Bultmann shares with Catholic as well as Protestant theologians, and with men like Lukács, too.

The retort to his rhetorical questions need not be the answer he intends. Again one might well say: If you consider false the beliefs in terms of which the institution to which you are committed defines itself, why don’t you draw the consequences and renounce your allegiance to the church, the party, or St. Thomas, as the case may be?

The matter of the Easter event is no isolated instance. Here is another illustration. In the wake of Bultmann’s challenge, there was a great deal of discussion about demythologizing hell. At the German universities the debate raged around such questions as whether the fire in Luke 16 is a physical fire. Surely, this is a relatively trivial question. Even the Nazis were able to devise subtler torments and, for example, made a woman’s hair turn white overnight by falsely telling her that the screams she heard from the next room were those of her son under torture. If there were an omnipotent god, intent on inflicting piteous sufferings on some of his creatures, he could certainly improve on physical fire. The serious question which one would expect the theologians to discuss is how they propose to reconcile eternal torment, no matter how “spiritual,” with divine perfection. Most American Protestant theologians refuse to consider this question: they prefer to talk about the kingdom of God. And German theologians prefer to discuss whether the fire is physical fire. Even when asked outright about the other problem, most theologians manage somehow to change the subject quickly.

Bultmann, asked about eternal torture in a conversation, said that on that subject he agreed with Lessing. He had every right to expect that a younger colleague, no less than a student, would proceed to the nearest library and begin reading through a set of Lessing’s works, in search of the crucial passage. After the first ten volumes, he could safely be expected to give up. Encouraged by my American training, however, I asked: “And what did Lessing say?” The great theologian hesitated, then allowed that Lessing had once said somewhere that if even a single soul were in eternal torment he would certainly refuse to go to heaven. It would seem, then, that Bultmann disbelieves in any form of eternal torment, but he does not make a point of this. In his huge Theology of the New Testament, hell and eternal damnation are simply ignored.

This refusal to let one’s No be a No is one of the central characteristics of theologians no less than of committed Communists. One does not emphasize one’s points of disagreement with tradition or the scriptures; instead, one emphasizes points of agreement and sidesteps embarrassing issues by raising questions of exegesis. As a consequence, the agreement among committed believers is, to a surprisingly large extent, apparent only: they proclaim their allegiance to the same scriptures and traditions, but the very passages that are to one man the superlative expression of his faith are to another a source of embarrassment and an unexampled challenge to his exegetic skill. And two men who love the same sentence are likely to interpret it quite differently.

One need not even run the full gamut of Christian views from the first century to the twentieth, from Presbyterianism to Catholicism and the Greek Orthodox church, from the Armenian church to Christian Science, from superstitious peasants to scholarly professors, to see how little agreement there is among Christians who profess the same beliefs. Billy Graham, Paul Tillich, and Reinhold Niebuhr are all twentieth-century American Protestants; indeed, there are few, if any, other spokesmen of mid-century American Protestantism who are so well known and so influential. Yet Tillich, like Niebuhr, shares few of Graham’s religious beliefs. Now compare what men like Tillich and Niebuhr actually believe and disbelieve with the beliefs of avowed fundamentalists, or of Martin Luther and John Calvin, or of St. Augustine and St. Athanasius, or of St. Paul and St. John the Evangelist: surely, the beliefs and disbeliefs of our two most celebrated Protestant theologians are much closer to mine than they are to those of millions of their fellow Christians, past and present. But, like Bultmann, they say No in ways that sound like Yes.

Catholic theology may seem to be more forthright, but certainly not as forthright as most people suppose. An involuntarily amusing editorial in the Chicago diocesan newspaper, entitled “Yes, Professor, There Is a Hell,” is not unrepresentative. Taking issue with an article that a professor had contributed to “a well-known magazine,” the editorial made a great point of the fact that it “is by no means the position of the Catholic Church” either “that ‘the great mass of mankind’ will be tormented for all eternity” or that “only those who are a part of the Christian communion will find salvation, whereas ‘the rest of mankind [will] suffer eternal torment.’” As it happened, the professor had not said that this was “the position of the Catholic Church.” But be that as it may, the editorial ends: “There is a hell, professor, and the easiest way to find out is by not believing in it, or in God.”

This is a mere editorial, full of misrepresentations, and it would be foolish to saddle the church with it. What is typical about the editorial is the alternation of protestations of liberality with threats. One does not usually find both so close together; but the two strains are almost omnipresent contemporary Catholicism.

On the one hand, scholarship insists that “though a few individual teachers of the Church may have held this, it has never been regarded as a matter of the Church’s teaching”; on the other hand, preaching requires threats and promises, As we listen to the preacher or the missionary, everything appears to be as clear as could be; but under the scholar’s or the critic’s questioning, this surface clarity gives way to endless complications and uncertainties.

St. Thomas Aquinas, who will be considered in due course, was on the whole exceptionally clear; but the Catholic Church is not committed to his views. In his encyclical Aeterni Patris, Pope Leo XIII, in 1879, said: “As far as man is concerned, reason can now hardly rise higher than she rose, borne up in the flight of Thomas; and Faith can hardly gain more helps from reason than those which Thomas gave her.” He cited many previous popes who had spoken similarly of the saint: “Pius V acknowledged that heresies are confounded and exposed and scattered by his doctrine, and that by it the whole world is daily freed from pestilent errors.” And, “The words of Blessed Urban V to the University of Toulouse seem to be most worthy of mention: ‘It is our will, and by the authority of these letters we enjoin you, that you follow the doctrine of Blessed Thomas as true….’” And the encyclical cites “as a crown, the testimony of Innocent VI: ‘His doctrine above all other doctrine, with the one exception of the Holy Scriptures, has … such a truth of opinions, that no one who holds it will ever be found to have strayed from the path of truth….’”

From all this, one might conclude that the pope, speaking ex cathedra on matters of faith and morals, and therefore infallibly, had taught us that we shall not stray from truth if we accept St. Thomas’ view that the blessed in heaven will see the punishments of the damned so that their bliss will be that much greater. Or that one angel can speak to another without letting other angels know what he is saying. One might even suppose that his views on scientific matters are invariably true. But Leo XIII also says, in the same long encyclical: “We, therefore, while we declare that everything wisely said should be received with willing and glad mind, … exhort all of you, Venerable Brothers, with the greatest earnestness to restore the golden wisdom of St. Thomas, and to spend it as far as you can…. We say the wisdom of St. Thomas; for it is not by any means in our mind to set before this age, as a standard, those things which have been inquired into by Scholastic Doctors with too great subtlety; or anything taught by them with too little consideration, not agreeing with the investigations of a later age; or, lastly, anything that is not probable.”

In a similar spirit, Étienne Gilson, one of the most outstanding Thomists of the twentieth century, says at the outset of The Christian Philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas: “Personally, I do not say of Thomas that he was right, but that he is right.” But this does not prevent him from admitting now and then in passing, without emphasis, that Thomas was not right.

Moreover, many Catholic scholars have argued at length that papal encyclicals are not necessarily infallible. Father Thomas Peguès, for example, has tried to show in an article in Revue Thomiste, which is quoted in Anne Fremantle’s edition of The Papal Encyclicals in Their Historical Context, that their authority is not infallible but “in a sense, sovereign.” While “the solemn definitions ex cathedra … demand an assent without reservation and make a formal act of faith obligatory,” in the case of the encyclicals only “an internal mental assent is demanded.”

There is never a lack of surface clarity; but if one is genuinely perplexed, the apparently neat conceptual distinctions are not always very helpful; and having accused Protestant theologians of a failure to let their No be a No, I see no reason for not bringing the same charge against Catholic theologians.

In an essay on “How to Read the Encyclicals,” in The Church Speaks to the Modern World: The Social Teachings of Leo XIII, Gilson says: “When one of us objects to the pretension avowed by the Popes to state, with full authority, what is true and what is false, or what is right and what is wrong, he is pitting his own personal judgment, not against the personal judgment of another man, but against the whole ordinary teaching of the Catholic Church…. The Church alone represents the point of view of a moral and spiritual authority free from all prejudices.” Clearly, we are being discouraged from saying No to authoritative pronouncements. That, however, does not necessarily mean that everybody has to agree. Where the heretic would say No, the theologian interprets.

“When it seems to us that an encyclical cannot possibly say what it says, the first thing to do is to make a new effort to understand what it does actually say,” says Gilson. And what texts “actually” say is often very different from what they seem to say.

In the first of the three volumes of Five Centuries of Religion, G. G. Coulton, the great historian, relates how “the Catechism of the Council of Trent, drawn up by a papal commission as an unerring guide to priests and their flocks lays it down that unbaptized infants, ‘be their parents Christian or infidel, are born to eternal misery and perdition’ (authorized translation by Professor Donovan, Manchester, 1855, p. 167; Of Baptism, quest. XXX). For the arguments by which the Roman Church of today has persuaded itself that these words mean ‘they will eternally enjoy a state of perfect natural happiness,’ I must refer my readers to my 16th Medieval Study [i.e., Infant Perdition in the Middle Ages], or to the Catholic Encyclopedia, s.v. Limbo” (443). The original Latin words of the Catechism are: sempiternam miseriam et interitum.

In his monograph on Infant Perdition, Coulton, who concerns himself only with Roman Catholic theology and not with theology in general, offers this comment: “It is strange that theologians who juggle thus with language should never suspect the double-edged nature of the tools they are using. The anonymous champion of the Catholic Truth Society thinks that, if I had been more familiar with Catholic ways of thought, I should have seen at once that the ‘eternal misery and destruction’ of the Council of Trent means eternal and perfect natural happiness. But what is to prevent a later and more learned generation of Catholics from discovering that the ‘perfect natural happiness’ of the Catholic Encyclopedia really means eternal misery and destruction? Even in theology, it is fatal when we can no longer trust a man’s word….” (29).

What Coulton takes for a special vice of the Roman Catholic church is really of the essence of theology, as the many illustrations from Protestant theologians in this chapter should show. If I concentrate more than is usually done on the Christian conception of hell, this is because no other aspect of God’s “relations with man and the universe” is anywhere near so important for us. If there is a possibility, perhaps even a probability, that God may consign us or some of our fellow men to eternal misery, it is certainly the very height of irresponsibility to sweep the relevant doctrines under the rug. By seeing, on the other hand, how theologians deal with this most crucial question, we stand an excellent chance of finding out just how much knowledge is available concerning God’s “relations with man and the universe,” and what methods theologians use to obtain such knowledge.

At the end of This Is Catholicism (1959), John Walsh, S.J., reprints an important document which he introduces thus: “All the principal beliefs of Catholicism are summed up in the Profession of Faith which is made by converts on their entrance into the Catholic Church and by all candidates for the priesthood before ordination. It is a fitting conclusion for this book.” Here a great many beliefs are summarized succinctly in less than three pages. The final paragraph begins: “This true Catholic faith, outside of which no one can be saved….” A few pages earlier, in the body of the book, we are also told that “membership in the Catholic Church, the mystical body of Christ, is the solitary means of salvation. Apart from the Church, exclusive of it, independently of it, there exists absolutely no possibility of attaining heaven.” This is the kind of forthright, unequivocal doctrine that at first glance seems to make it utterly unfair to claim that Catholic theologians, like Protestant theologians, disregard Jesus’ commandment, in the Sermon on the Mount, that we should let our Yes be Yes, and our No, No; “anything more than this comes from evil.”

Immediately, however, Father Walsh asks: “Does this signify that all who are not actually members of the Catholic Church will be lost?” and in conformity with contemporary Catholic doctrine he replies: “Certainly not.” This is explained as follows: “When a person … makes an act of perfect contrition, he must simultaneously determine, as we saw, to accomplish everything which he judges necessary to attain salvation. Now since the Catholic Church is, in fact, the sole means of salvation, a non-Catholic’s resolve to do everything needful to gain heaven is, objectively considered, exactly equivalent to a resolve to belong to the Catholic Church. The two resolves automatically merge; one coincides with the other. A non-Catholic is unaware, certainly, of the identity of the two…. He may never have heard of the Catholic Church. Or he may … be quite indifferent to it. Or … he may be quite hostile to it and consequently would indignantly deny that his desire to please God coalesced in any way, shape, or fashion with a desire to join Catholicism. Such subjective misapprehensions on his part would not alter the objective fact, however. A sincere desire for salvation coincides necessarily with a desire to belong to the Catholic Church…. Strange as it may seem, therefore, a non-Catholic who sincerely yearns to do everything necessary for salvation (even when he believes that one of the requisites for salvation is to condemn Catholicism!) (John 16:2) is, all unconsciously, longing to be a Catholic. Now this unconscious longing God recognizes as a substitute for belonging … as the equivalent of real membership.” So the doctrine “still stands: outside the Catholic Church there is no salvation.”

The most crucial criticism of theology ought now to be apparent: theology depends on a double standard. One set of standards is employed for reading and interpreting one’s own tradition and its texts; another, for the texts and traditions of all other. Here, one is committed not only to make sense of everything but to make everything come out superior, profound, and beautiful; there, one is not averse to finding fault and even emphasizing all that is inferior to one’s own tradition.

Protestants are perceptive regarding the faults of Catholicism and not inclined to make allowances for them the way they do for Luther’s faults or Calvin’s, or for those of their own articles of faith—those of the Westminster Confession, for example. Catholics can see plainly what was wrong with all of these, but approach their saints with a very different attitude. Pressed about eternal damnation, Protestant theologians point out that this doctrine impresses on us how important our choices in this life are; asked about the latest Catholic dogma, they do not exert themselves to find a profound meaning in it, but are quick indeed to disown it as sheer superstition. Christians stress the references to divine wrath in the Old Testament while ignoring or interpreting away the references to wrath, relentless judgment, and eternal torment in the New Testament; they point to the references to love in the New Testament, less to those in the Old; and they conclude, as if they had not presupposed it, that the God of the Old Testament is a God of justice, wrath, and vengeance, while the God of the New Testament is a God of love, forgiveness, and mercy. Moreover, one contrasts the realities and mediocre representatives of other traditions with the ideals and the saints of one’s own.

Theology is a comprehensive, rigorous, and systematic attempt to conceal the beam in the scriptures and traditions of one’s own denomination while minutely measuring the mote in the heritages of one’s brothers. Of course, that is not all there is to theology. Theology is also a comprehensive, rigorous, and systematic avoidance, by means of exegesis, of letting one’s Yes be Yes, and one’s No, No: instead of saying No, one discusses other matters, and in a pinch one “interprets” and converts beams into slivers, and slivers into gold. Theology is also a continual attempt to force new wine into old skins. The new wine is not always the best available, and perhaps the old skins aren’t either; but the whole point is to avoid a fair comparison of skins: into one’s own, one stuffs whatever looks good, while one associates the skins of others with an inferior vintage, going back, if necessary, a few centuries to find a really bad year.

Theology is antithetic not only to the Sermon on the Mount but to the most elementary standards of fairness. It involves a deliberate blindness to most points of view other than one’s own, a refusal to see others as they see themselves and to see oneself as one appears to others—a radical insistence on applying different standards to oneself and others.

It is, no doubt, exceedingly difficult to be completely fair, but theology is founded on a comprehensive, rigorous, and systematic refusal to as much as attempt to be fair. It does not merely occasionally lapse into acceptance of a double standard: theology is based on a devout commitment to a double standard.

This central flaw permeates theology and takes many forms. Let us concentrate on two of the most important.

One word that sums up a great deal of theology is gerrymandering. As I pointed out in my Critique (§ 56), “politicians have no monopoly on dividing districts in an unnatural and unfair way to give one party an advantage over its opponent. Many theologians are masters of this art.”

Instead of giving many brief illustrations from a lot of theologians, let us begin by considering the method of the man who was probably the greatest theologian of all time, St. Thomas Aquinas. That Aquinas carved up Aristotle, citing to his purpose what he could make fit, meets the eye. But it is scarcely less obvious that he also gerrymandered Scripture. The basic method of his imposing Summa Theologica is simple enough, though the amount of Gothic detail is staggering.

A question is asked and first of all answered in a manner that Aquinas considers false. This false answer is then buttressed with a few quotations that would seem to support it. Then a quotation is introduced which apparently conflicts with everything said so far. A tension is created but immediately resolved by Aquinas’ concise Respondeo, or “I reply.” He takes his stand with the immediately preceding quotation, gives his reasons, and then replies, one by one, to the objections raised before he stated his position.

In this manner, every question is answered: Whether God reprobates any man? Whether God can do what he does not? Whether God can do better than what he does? Whether several angels can be at the same time in the same place? Whether the semen in man is produced from surplus food? There is never any hesitation, any slight lack of self-confidence, any suspense of judgment. Thomas knows it all and proves it all—proves it in his own fashion, which amounts to quite the boldest and the most extensive feat of gerrymandering ever undertaken. Proof involves, and frequently consists in, the adducing of quotations—usually from the Old or New Testament, from Aristotle, or from pseudo-Dionysius (a fifth-century Neoplatonist whom Aquinas and his contemporaries mistook for a contemporary of St. Paul and the Blessed Virgin). One of the few things all of these authoritative proof texts have in common is that Thomas was unable to read any of them in the original. But even if he had been a still greater scholar than he was, even if he had been able to read Greek and Hebrew instead of occasionally misconceiving Biblical and Aristotelian passages, and even if he had known that the pseudo-Dionysius had not been converted by St. Paul himself, his method would for all that have been thoroughly unsound.

Unlike historical and philological scholarship in the employ of conscientious efforts at interpretation, the theologian’s method is not designed to uncover the original intent and meaning of the quoted passages. Rather, Thomas chooses what fits, and ignores or reinterprets what does not fit. Some readers fail to realize this because at the beginning of every question he sets up a few straw men whom he can knock down a page later with the aid of rival quotes—if necessary, from the pseudo-Dionysius. This was the greatest theologian of them all.

To be sure, Thomas has to be seen in the context of his time if one wants to arrive at a fair judgment of the man. What appears monstrous in the perspective of a later age is always apt to have been commonplace when it occurred. But the whole point of the present discussion is that Thomas’ method is by no means exceptionally unsound. On the contrary, he is a splendid representative not only of his time but of theology in general. What distinguishes him is not that he was arbitrary. What is exceptional is rather his unflagging patience, his attempt at comprehensive coverage, and his clarity, which shows us at a glance what he is doing. Faithful throughout to the same simple method, he takes up question after question, stamping out his treatment with a stencil, as it were—or, metaphors apart, dictating relentlessly, only stopping occasionally, we are told, to pray.

On major points, the conclusions are predetermined, and Thomas himself makes a point of this. In the Second Part of the Second Part of the Summa Theologica, he insists that we “ought to believe matters of faith, not because of human reasoning, but because of the divine authority.” But he writes theology because “when a man has a will ready to believe, he loves the truth he believes, he thinks out and takes to heart whatever reasons he can find in support thereof.” Only when faith is primary and seeking understanding, only when we are finding reasons for what we already believe, instead of basing our faith on reason, “human reasoning does not exclude the merit of faith, but is a sign of greater merit” (Article 10).

On lesser points, of course, the conclusion is not always predetermined by tradition or authority, and Thomas has some freedom to develop a position of his own. Like most theologians, however, he blurs this distinction, backs up controversial stands, too, with citations of authority, and thus gives the appearance that his system is not only singularly comprehensive and consistent but the gospel truth. In fact, the tightly woven structure is a doubtful asset: if a few key concepts are based on confusions, or if a few basic suppositions are no longer plausible or tenable in view of some advance in knowledge, the whole edifice may topple.

Such criticisms are not heard gladly in the twentieth century, although far more radical estimates of scholasticism were quite common in the nineteenth. F. W. Farrar, D.D., F.R.S., late Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, Archdeacon and Canon of Westminster, and Chaplain in Ordinary to the Queen, said of the Scholastics in his beautifully documented History of Interpretation: Eight Lectures Preached Before the University of Oxford in the Year MDCCCLXXXV:

“Their theology is a science … in which a congeries of doubts is met by a concatenation of baseless assumptions. The result is a dull mythology in which abstractions are defined, not in the gracious atmosphere of Poetry, but in the sterile desert of logical discussion. They were enabled to unite obedience with rationalism, and the Hierarchy successfully disguised intense intolerance under an apparent permission to philosophise at will” (266). “The historic feeling and the critical faculty are entirely in abeyance in their writings…. The neglect of Philology by the Schoolmen was equally fatal. Only one or two of them possessed even a smattering of Hebrew, and the vast majority of them were no less ignorant of Greek. They philosophised and theologised over what they assumed to be the supernatural accuracy of largely vitiated manuscripts of a very imperfect translation; and often with no better aid than heterogeneous glosses from the Fathers, and those not infrequently from poor versions and spurious writings. And as they ‘rack the text and so to speak drag it along by the hair,’ they constantly rely on the most grotesque etymologies. If, as Luther said, ‘the science of theology is nothing else than grammar applied to the words of the Holy Spirit,’ the Schoolmen were indeed ill-prepared” (285 ff.).

Farrar specifically includes Thomas in his strictures. Plainly, some of these faults are much less glaring in modern theology, though they are far from being entirely a matter of the past. For that matter, Thomas’ vast erudition, straightforward clarity, and noble simplicity have rarely been matched. What is encountered again and again in subsequent theologians is his bold air of omniscience and his gerrymandering. In twentieth-century Protestant theology, men like Heidegger have taken the place of Aristotle (hardly an improvement), and Marx (in the thirties) and Freud (in the forties) that of the pseudo-Dionysius. The Bible, however, is gerrymandered as artfully as ever.

Our concern here is not with Scholasticism but with theology. Farrar warms up to Luther as he does not to the Schoolmen, but Luther, too, gerrymandered. How many of those who cheer Luther’s celebrated declaration that he would not recant unless refuted from the Holy Scriptures are aware of what he wrote just a little later in discussing his new translation of the Bible? “You have to judge correctly among all the books and discriminate which are the best. For the Gospel of John and the Epistles of Paul, especially that to the Romans, and the First Epistle of Peter are the real core and marrow of all the books…. The Gospel of John is the sole fine and right main Gospel, far to be preferred and elevated above the other three. The Epistles of Peter and Paul are also far more eminent than the three Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke…. The Epistle of St. James is an epistle of straw, for it has no evangelic manner” (XIV, 105). Luther also said of John that “one might even call him alone an evangelist” (XI, 1462), and he argued that all the moral commandments of the Bible were “ordained solely that man might thus realize his incapacity for good and learn to despair of himself” (XIX, 992*).

Such forthrightness is not characteristic of theology and led Luther into open disagreement with the leading theologian of Lutheranism: “Many have labored and toiled and sweated over the Epistle of St. James when they compared it with St. Paul. Thus Philipp Melanchthon treats of it, too, in his Apologia, but not with real seriousness; for it is a flat contradiction, faith justifies, and faith does not justify. If any man can rhyme that together, I will give him my cap, and he may call me a fool” (XXII, 2077).

The reason theologians gerrymander should be obvious. They set themselves an impossible task that cannot be solved with sound methods: to present to us “the message” of the New Testament, indeed of the whole Bible. But the books of the Christian Bible were written over a period of approximately thirteen centuries by men who did not always agree with each other. Characteristically, Luther, without the benefit of Bible criticism, called a spade a spade and, in effect, admitted openly that he was gerrymandering the Bible and that a Christian teacher could not do otherwise.

Luke introduced his Gospel by remarking that others had written lives of Jesus, but that it seemed good to him to write another version, “that you may know the truth.” Scholars agree that he knew, and used extensively as one of his sources, the Gospel according to Mark. Where he differs with Mark, which is often, he evidently differs deliberately, “that you may know the truth.”

Matthew, too, knew and used Mark’s Gospel, and his disagreements with Mark are also manifold and obviously deliberate. In Christian Beginnings, an exemplary study of the New Testament in the light of modern criticism, head and shoulders above most similar efforts, Morton Scott Enslin argues very plausibly, though this is still a minority view, that Luke also knew and used the Gospel according to Matthew. If so, the disagreements between these two evangelists would also be deliberate.

In any case, the striking disagreements of the fourth Gospel with the first three are not only a commonplace of modern scholarship but were noted by Luther already. And that James and Paul did not agree need not be gathered either from a careful comparison of both writers or from our Luther quotation: the Book of Acts in the New Testament gives a detailed account of some of these disagreements.

If Thomas gerrymandered the Bible, this was not his innovation, nor merely a personal shortcoming. Some of the evangelists as well as Paul had treated the Old Testament in similar fashion, and the rabbis had preceded them.

As Farrar says, discussing the approach to Scripture which was formalized by Hillel, the Pharisee: “It means the isolation of phrases, the misapplication of parallel passages, the false emphasizing of accidental words, the total neglect of the context…. It is just as prominent, and quite as mischievous, in Hilary and Augustine, in Albert and Aquinas, in Gerhard and Calovius, as in Hillel or Ishmael” (22). Thomas, of course, lacked whatever feeling for the Hebrew Scriptures Hillel had, and “a large part of his method consists in the ingenious juxtaposition of passages of which the verbal similarity depends only upon the Vulgate [the Latin Bible]. From these imaginary identities of expression, by a method which seems to have survived from the days of Hillel, he deduces systems extremely ingenious but utterly without foundation” (271). “But while the scriptural exegesis of the Schoolmen was injured by all these causes, the worst plague-spot of it was the assumption that every part of Scripture admitted of a multiplex intelligentia…. A favourite illustration of this supposed fourfold sense was the word ‘Jerusalem,’ which might stand for a city, for a faithful soul, for the Church militant, or for the Church triumphant. Another was the word ‘water,’ which literally means an element; tropo-logically may stand for sorrow, or wisdom, or heresies, or prosperity; allegorically may refer to baptism, nations, or grace; anagogically to eternal happiness. Thomas Aquinas tells us that ‘Let there be light’ may mean historically an act of creation; allegorically, ‘Let Christ be love’; anagogically, ‘May we be led by Christ to glory’; and, tropologically, ‘May we be mentally illumined by Christ’” (294 f.).

From the rabbis I should like to give an example not found in Farrar. In New Testament times, the Pharisees believed in the resurrection of the dead, while the Sadducees did not. Far from admitting, as almost all modern scholars do, that this belief had developed in Judaism only after the Babylonian exile, the Pharisees claimed that it had been taught by Moses and could also be deduced from all sorts of Scriptural verses in which the untrained eye would never find any such implication. According to the Babylonian Talmud (Sanhedrin 90b), “The Sadducees asked Rabban Gamaliel: How can you prove that God will bring the dead back to life? He replied: From the Torah, the Prophets, and the Scriptures [i.e., the third division of the Hebrew Bible, comprising, e.g., Psalms, Job, Song of Songs]. But they did not accept this. From the Torah: The Lord said to Moses: Behold you are about to sleep with your fathers and will rise [Deuteronomy 31:16]. They replied to him: But perhaps we should read [as the Revised Standard Version does and any ordinary reader would: Behold you are about to sleep with your fathers;] then this people will rise and play the harlot after the strange gods of the land.” From the Song of Songs he cited: “Like the best of wine that goes down smoothly for my lover and makes the lips of the sleepers [here interpreted as the dead] murmur” (7:9).

According to Sifre on Deuteronomy (132a), “Rabbi Simai said: There is no passage [in the Hebrew Bible] in which the resurrection of the dead is not hinted; only we lack the power to interpret.”

According to all three Synoptic Gospels, Jesus offered a comparable proof to the Sadducees who questioned him: “As for the dead being raised, have you not read in the book of Moses, in the passage about the bush, how God said to him: I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob [Exodus 3:6]. He is not God of the dead but of the living; you are quite wrong” (Mark 12:26 f.; cf. Matthew 22:31 f. and Luke 20:37 f.).

When the Catholic church “interprets” the meaning of “eternal misery and perdition,” or when Father Walsh explains how the church does not contradict itself when it claims on the one hand that “outside the Catholic Church there is no salvation,” and on the other hand that this certainly does not mean that “all who are not actually members of the Catholic Church will be lost,” or when Thomas uses Scripture to prove his doctrines, or when Bultmann tells us about “the message of the New Testament”—they are all far closer in spirit and method to the rabbis of the first centuries A.D. than they are to modern philosophy since Bacon and Descartes, to modern science, or to the spirit of a liberal arts education. But while hardly anybody today would think of holding up the ancient rabbis as examples of sound method, many intellectuals since the Second World War consider theology once again the queen of sciences, and Thomas the prince of theologians. With the last claim I have no quarrel, but the assumption that theology closely resembles philosophy, or that liberal education can be revitalized by bringing theologians into a great university, is based on insufficient reflection on the nature of theology and its methods.

It was unfortunate that Paul referred to the Torah, the Five Books of Moses, as “the Law,” seeing how much there is in those five books that is not “law”; and it is doubly unfortunate that so many readers of the New Testament have come to think of Judaism as the religion of “the Law.” For the same reason it is misleading that occasionally a rabbi is called “a lawyer” in the Gospels. In the context of our present discussion, however, this last misnomer points to an important insight. The rabbis and St. Thomas, Bultmann and Father Walsh, and legions of other theologians are really closer to lawyers than they are to either philosophers or scientists.

Indeed, they resemble lawyers in two ways. In the first place, they accept books and traditions as data that it is not up to them to criticize. They can only hope to make the best of these books and traditions by selecting the most propitious passages and precedents; and where the law seems to them harsh, inhuman, or dated, all they can do is have recourse to exegesis.

Secondly, many theologians accept the morality that in many countries governs the conduct of the counsel for the defense. Ingenuity and skillful appeals to the emotions are considered perfectly legitimate; so are attempts to ignore all inconvenient evidence, as long as one can get away with it, and the refusal to engage in inquiries that are at all likely to discredit the predetermined conclusion: that the client is innocent. If all else fails, one tries to saddle one’s opponent with the burden of disproof; and as a last resort one is content with a reasonable doubt that after all the doctrines that one has defended might be true.

With this second model—that of the counsel for the defense—I have dealt critically in the section on “Religion at the Bar” (§ 34) in my Critique. At bottom, the objection to both models is the same. In the law, special conditions obtain that are not duplicated in theology; and it is only these special conditions that can justify such behavior. In the case of the first model, some of these special conditions were still present to some extent in the first centuries, and even in the time of St. Thomas: one constantly had to pit one’s skill and ingenuity, one’s proof texts and interpretations, against keen competitors. If there was not quite a war of all against all, there were at the very least the schools of Hillel and Shammai, or the Dominicans and the Franciscans; and it was understood that, to prevail in argument, one had to develop a supreme forensic skill. There was almost constant debate and a war of interpretations and reputations.

With some exaggeration, one might liken the milieu of those days to the jungle, and the seminaries of today to a zoo. The theological animals are still addicted to some of the ancient procedures; but they do not have to fight any more, and one is not even supposed to tease them. They are contemplated with respect, even awe; but they live in a world by themselves in which their ancient habits are no longer functional but mere curiosities.

To bring out the arbitrariness of theological method, consider how a group of students might be given the following exercise: construct on the basis of the same body of scriptures half a dozen different theologies—Catholic, Lutheran, Presbyterian, Anglican, Greek Orthodox, and Unitarian, for example. The task could be made still more complex and fill a whole year’s course: for each of these six denominations, construct two different theologies by using any two of the following interpretations—Neoplatonic, Aristotelian, Kantian, romantic, liberal, or existentialist. This might make some people aware of the utter arbitrariness of the procedures used by theologians, for the most part without any self-consciousness. It might also keep pious men from writing and talking as if the sole alternative to what they had to offer was some sort of crude, insensitive materialism. It would thus deprive theology of one of its foundations: the loaded alternative.

Emphatically, theology does not closely resemble either a science or philosophy. The model of the law is far more illuminating. So is another model that may well be more than merely a model: literary criticism. Outsiders often assume that theologians either have, or claim to have, some special direct insight into the nature and attributes of God. In fact, the theologians deal with problems that are posed by texts. The texts may differ with the denomination. Typically, they comprise either the Bible alone, or the Bible together with certain formulations devised at church councils, or the Bible along with some creeds. Other traditional statements may be included, too. But generally the secondary material, including even the texts hammered out at the church councils, represents attempts to meet problems created by the primary texts, those of the Bible.

In Genesis it is said, “Is anything too hard for the Lord?” (18:14); and Jesus says more than once that “all things are possible with God” (e.g., Mark 10:27). He also says that not a sparrow “will fall to the ground without your Father’s will” (Matthew 10:29). Verses like these lead to discussions of divine omniscience and omnipotence, predestination and free will. The literature on damnation, original sin, and grace took shape in the same way—as the interpretation of texts.

Traditional theology resembles the so-called “new” criticism: it treats the text as an autonomous world, illuminating a word or a passage from other words and passages in the same book. “Modern” theology prides itself on imitating nineteenth-century literary criticism, which heavily stressed history and the authors’ biographies. Not knowing who the authors were, one postulated authors not only for the various books of the Bible but even for their alleged sources and then tried to reconstruct the mentalities of these supposed authors—something good literary critics did not do, say, in the case of Homer. “Post-modern” theologians follow the lead of the new critics, who, in turn, closely resemble the old theologians.

It may seem that theologians differ sharply from literary critics because they do not write as critics of the texts but, on the contrary, accept the texts as true in some important sense. Clearly, theologians are not like those literary critics who are out to get the author. Rather, they resemble that majority of good literary critics who are not really critics at all but rather interpreters. They are not like men writing on controversial modern authors but like “critics” dealing reverently with a poet who inspires awe—the Dantisti, for example. Here we have a universe of discourse in which “true” and “false” no longer have a place—unless they should be applied to interpretations. But even interpretations are not usually called true or false—rather, traditional or novel, profound or daring, and perhaps heretical.

It may be objected that the theologian, unlike the writer on Dante, believes that his statements about God and hell are true; that they are not only good interpretations of the texts but also accurate descriptions of reality. Surely, that is an important difference; but even when this additional assumption is made explicitly, it does not necessarily change the procedure or even the atmosphere. Whether you said at an international congress of Dantisti, “But I think Dante is despicable,” or whether you said at a meeting of theologians, “I think the Bible is a terrible book,” the reaction would probably be very similar in both cases: “Go to hell!” Only some—not all—of the theologians would mean this literally.

The additional assumption that the text is true in some important sense remains in the background and is rarely clarified very much. The typical theologian believes in the truth of Scripture, but not that everything Scripture says plainly (or seems to say plainly) is true. His respect for, and love of, the text are clearer than his conception of its truth; and when he does theology, the problems posed by the text are in the foreground, while the question of reference beyond the text, to “reality,” is more often than not out of focus and just a little dim.

There is, however, one crucial difference between theology and literary criticism. It is often exceedingly difficult to give a responsible account of Homer’s or Sophocles’ views, or of Plato’s or Heraclitus’. But the task most theologians set themselves is more nearly comparable to an effort to interpret “the message of the Greeks” in a single treatise: if they must offer a single message, they simply have to gerrymander; and it stands to reason that different theologians will come up with different messages. If they were determined to be fair and to employ the methods used by conscientious historians and philologists, they would have to admit that there is no single message; that there are many different views; and that an honest and careful interpreter must often be unsure even about the views of Paul, Matthew, or Luke—not to speak of Jesus. So much for gerrymandering.

The other major fault of theology is also understandable as the result of a quixotic task. The theologians have a way of redefining terms in rather odd ways and then engaging in something best called double-speak: their utterances are designed to communicate contradictory views to different listeners and readers.

In spite of the similarity of the terms, no insinuation is intended that double-speak is a sort of double-talk. There is some double-talk in theology, too—and, for that matter, in philosophy and literary criticism—but the two are recognizably different. To show this, let us begin with Kafka’s parody of theological double-talk, which he entitled, “Of Parables [Von den Gleichnissen]”:

Many complain that the words of the sages are always also mere parables, inapplicable in daily life, which is all we have got. When the sage says, “Go beyond!” he does not mean that one should proceed to the other side, which one might be able to bring off if only the result were worth the effort; he means some legendary beyond, something we do not know, something he himself cannot designate more closely, something, then, that cannot be of any help to us here. All these parables really only want to say that the Incomprehensible is incomprehensible; and that we knew. But the objects of our daily exertions are quite a different matter.

Then someone said: “Why do you resist? If only you followed the parables, you yourselves would have become parables by now, and then you would be rid of your daily exertions.”

Another said: “I bet that this, too, is a parable.”

The first said: “You have won.”

The second said: “But unfortunately only in the parable.”

The first said: “No, in reality; in the parable you have lost.”

This wonderful sketch deals with one aspect of the theologians’ recourse to “analogy” and “symbol.” With this aspect I have tried to deal in Chapter VI of my Critique. Poetic parables are not necessarily in the least objectionable, but discourse that is ostensibly designed to elucidate them scientifically, while in fact its clarity is of the surface only, and on analysis it turns out to approximate double-talk, is quite a different matter.

In double-talk, the question is whether any meaning remains; the epithet is justified when a passage lacks any coherent meaning. In double-speak, there is a clear meaning; but there is also a second meaning that contradicts the first. This epithet applies when a passage is designed to communicate one message to one group and a contradictory message to another group.

Some instances of this have already been noted, but the rationale of this procedure has probably been stated best by Tillich in his Dynamics of Faith. In a little over one hundred pages, he redefines such terms as faith and heresy, atheism and revelation. It turns out that the man who accepts the ancient beliefs of Christendom, the Apostles’ Creed, or Luther’s articles of faith may well be lacking faith, while the man who doubts all these beliefs but is sufficiently concerned to lie awake nights worrying about it is a paragon of faith. “Atheism, consequently, can only mean the attempt to remove any ultimate concern—to remain unconcerned about the meaning of one’s existence. Indifference toward the ultimate question is the only imaginable form of atheism” (45 f.). Other forms of atheism, not at all hard to imagine, are defined out of existence; and it turns out that millions of theists may really be atheists, while such avowed atheists as Freud and Nietzsche aren’t atheists at all.

It becomes clear that when Tillich preaches, writes, or lectures, he is not saying what those who don’t know his definitions think he says. If a large percentage of his audience is misled and thinks he means what he in fact does not mean, is this unintentional on Tillich’s part? Apparently not. Taken literally, Tillich considers the Christian myths untenable; but “the natural stage of literalism is that in which the mythical and the literal are indistinguishable,” and this is characteristic of “the primitive period of individuals and groups…. This stage has a full right of its own and should not be disturbed, either in individuals or in groups, up to the moment when man’s questioning mind breaks the natural acceptance of the mythological versions as literal.” When that point is reached, one can “replace the unbroken by the broken myth,” saying frankly that what was so far believed literally is, so understood, absurd—but capable of reinterpretation. Yet many people “prefer the repression of their questions to the uncertainty which appears with the breaking of the myth. They are forced into the second stage of literalism, the conscious one, which is aware of the questions but represses them, half consciously, half unconsciously…. This stage is still justifiable, if the questioning power is very weak and can easily be answered. It is unjustifiable if a mature mind is broken in its personal center by political or psychological methods, split in his unity, and hurt in his integrity” (52 f.).

It is clear that Tillich stands unalterably opposed not only to the Inquisition and to any physical coercion but also to authoritarian methods that harm people’s mental health without touching their bodies. No man must be forced to believe. But Tillich considers it all right to let people believe things that are plainly false—things they would not believe unless the churches made them believe at an early age, before “man’s questioning mind” discovers difficulties. And even when that point is reached, it is all right, according to the passage cited, to put the believer’s mind at ease by reconfirming him in his false literal beliefs, “if the questioning power is very weak and can easily be answered.”

One can picture the theologian’s problem as he is confronted with a doubter: should the young man be initiated into the inner circle of the broken myth, or is his questioning power weak and does he belong in the second stage of literalism? It all depends on whether he “can easily be answered.” If the theologian were a bit crude, he would throw an argument for God’s existence at his questioner, or possibly the wager of Pascal, or an appeal to miracles. If the questioner accepted that, this would be proof that his questioning power was weak and that the second stage of literalism was just right for him. But if the young man saw through the answer given him, then one might pat him on the back, congratulate him on his acumen, and let him graduate into the inner circle.

Tillich, however, does not favor the crude method of confronting men with arguments that he himself considers bad. Instead he redefines the crucial terms and cultivates a kind of double-speak. Literalists thus feel reconfirmed in their beliefs and are pleased that so erudite a man should share their faith, while the initiated realize that Tillich finds the beliefs shared by most of the famous Christians of the past and by millions of Christians in the present utterly untenable; and some unbelievers conclude that unbelief is no reason for renouncing Christianity. The central point was most perfectly stated by St. Paul when he concluded his attempt to explain his method to the Corinthians by saying succinctly: “I have become all things to all men, that I might by all means save some” (I.9:22).

The theological virtuoso far transcends double-speak and triple-speak to speak to each man’s need. But double-speak at least is required: to seem to agree with tradition while also being up-to-date, or, as suggested previously, to say No in such a way that those who would resent No, or be troubled by it, hear Yes.

A rare reader will remark that any such account of Tillich is misleading because Tillich says publicly—in his Dynamics of Faith, for example—that he considers the central Christian articles of faith untenable, if they are taken literally: clearly, then, if anybody is deceived, that is not Tillich’s fault. But the reader arguing that way is almost certainly one of the initiated. Bright students studying religion and philosophy at leading universities are generally quite unsure where Tillich stands, and they rarely find unaided that Tillich says what those defending him occasionally claim he says so plainly.

The point is not that some theologians, like Shakespeare and many others, offer more to the discerning reader than to the less thoughtful. Rather, they say A to the one, and not-A to the other, confirming one in his childhood beliefs while informing the other that, of course, no thoughtful person can share such primitive fancies. But unlike politicians who make statements in Harlem that they contradict in Virginia, theologians cultivate the art of double-speak.

What is unusual about Tillich’s little book is that it is so short and relatively simple and explains the rationale of methods used by other theologians, too. Here is a brief work of some stature that exemplifies some of the central problems theologians face and some of the devices they employ to cope with them.

Some of the other charges made here can be illustrated from this book, too; for example, gerrymandering one’s own religion to make it attractive while presenting other religions in a less favorable light. “Every type of faith has the tendency to elevate its concrete symbols to absolute validity. The criterion of the truth of faith, therefore, is that it implies an element of self-negation. That symbol is most adequate which expresses not only the ultimate but also its own lack of ultimacy. Christianity expresses itself in such a symbol in contrast to all other religions, namely, in the Cross of Christ” (97). Jesus’ death on the cross is apparently to Tillich a reminder that Jesus was not really God—if he had been, he would not have died—but a symbol of God. The crucifix “expresses not only the ultimate but also its own lack of ultimacy.” But instead of conceding that Christianity went further than many another religion, and especially Judaism, in mistaking a symbol for the ultimate and a human being for God, Tillich gives Christianity the benefit of his daring reinterpretation; and instead of admitting that Calvin no less than Aquinas would have favored burning him for so heretical a piece of exegesis, he proclaims that Christianity (with the benefit of his interpretation) is superior “to all other religions.”

Two questions present themselves. First, could Tillich be unaware of the vast difference between his own views and those of the Reformers, not to speak of Catholics? At times, he frankly admits fundamental disagreements, but at other times regard for history and facts simply evaporates, and on the next page (98) we are told: “Doctrinal formulations did not divide the churches in the Reformation period.” As if Luther did not dispute over doctrines first with papal representatives later with Zwingli; and as if the splintering of Protestantism had not been precipitated by doctrinal differences over the sacraments.

The second question is whether other religions, given the benefit of equally daring exegeses, not to speak of such a thoroughgoing disregard for inconvenient facts, might not be formidable rivals for the faith the theologian champions. But other religions are gerrymandered in opposite fashion. And even Tillich, who has more feeling for the Hebrew Bible and for Judaism than most Christian theologians, suggests that in Judaism God “can be approached only by those who obey the law” (65). One thinks of the Book of Jonah, of ever so much of the Old Testament, and of dozens of famous quotations from rabbinic literature—and would be stunned if one had never read theology before.

The last two quotations—about Judaism and the churches in the Reformation period—are passing remarks, and it might seem captious to attach much weight to them. In fact, however, the point at stake here undermines a crucial portion of Dynamics of Faith and, indeed, Tillich’s—and not only his—theology.

If one rejects the traditional beliefs of Christianity and claims that “man’s ultimate concern must be expressed symbolically, because symbolic language alone is able to express the ultimate” (41), the question arises whether one is still a Christian. When we interpret Christianity symbolically, we should recall that other religions can be interpreted symbolically, too. As we saw in the chapter on “The Quest for Honesty,” the pagan theologians of the Hellenistic and the early Christian Era were profuse in their symbolic exegeses of their own traditions. There would then seem to be no need to reject—possibly even no excuse for rejecting—any religion as untrue: truth might well be out of the picture.

If so, Christian theology would have finally reached the position which in antiquity it attacked: that an educated man should not be exclusive and intolerant in matters of religious truth; that he should not consider his religion right and other religions wrong; and that he should consider different religions mutually compatible. But at that point our modern Christian theologians pull back from the consequences of their own position to insist that, after all, Christianity is superior to “all other religions.”

Tillich’s attempt to substantiate this last point fails for the reasons already indicated. But to see precisely how it fails, we must consider his three short pages on “The Truth of Faith and Its Criteria,” from which we have already quoted. Tillich answers his own question how one can “speak of the truth of faith” by claiming that there are two criteria, one subjective and one objective. “From the subjective side one must say that faith is true if it adequately expresses an ultimate concern.”

The subjective criterion alone would lead to relativism, as Tillich realizes. Indeed, judged “from the subjective side,” the faith of Communists would seem to be truer than the faith of most Lutherans and other Protestants: “‘Adequacy’ of expression means the power of expressing an ultimate concern in such a way that it creates reply, action, communication. Symbols which are able to do this are alive.” During the Second World War, though not since the end of the war, the Nazi faith, too, would have been truer than the Protestant faith. “Symbols which for a certain period, or in a certain place, expressed truth of faith for a certain group … have lost their truth, and it is an open question whether dead symbols can be revived.” Subjectively, “the criterion of the truth of faith is whether or not it is alive.”

Tillich loathed Nazism from the beginning, and did not consider it true even when it was very much alive and created “reply, action, communication.” But to show that it was not true, or that communism is not true, or that Christianity is superior to other religions, Tillich depends entirely on his second, objective criterion. His initial formulation—“faith is true if its content is the really ultimate”—is not as clear as one might wish; but as soon as Tillich discusses this criterion he makes it clear that he wants to rule out “idolatrous” faith, and that Protestant Christianity, too, “is open to idolatrous distortions…. Every type of faith has the tendency to elevate its concrete symbols to absolute validity.” Then the three sentences cited at the beginning of this section follow.

By the second, objective criterion, too, communism and Nazism might well be truer than Protestantism and Catholicism. German, Russian, and Chinese soldiers who died eagerly for their faith did not, for the most part, mistake the swastika, or hammer and sickle, or Hitler, or Stalin, or Mao, for “the ultimate.” They did not elevate such symbols “to absolute validity”; they realized their “lack of ultimacy”; and they probably would have been hard put to say what, ultimately, they were killing and dying for. Tillich’s criteria do not allow him to find even Nazism and communism untrue; much less do they permit him to find Christianity superior to other religions.

The Hebrew prophets, the Buddha, and Lao-tze resisted “the tendency to elevate … symbols to absolute validity” much more successfully than the New Testament writers, the church fathers, or Luther. Indeed, Luther insisted against Zwingli that the sacramental bread and wine were not symbols of Christ’s flesh and blood but really Christ’s flesh and blood; and this doctrine became one of the distinctive marks of Lutheranism.

Tillich does not merely gerrymander incidentally; he depends utterly on gerrymandering and the double standard to escape from a pervasive relativism that would relegate Christianity to being nothing more than one of many faiths that are patently false as usually understood but capable of impressive interpretations, if only one has a little ingenuity. This would scarcely be worth mentioning if it were merely Tillich’s personal predicament. It is part of the point of this chapter that it is not.

Millions of Christians today believe, in effect, that in the first-century controversy between the Jews and the early Christians the Jews were right. Like the Jews, they believe that the early Christians were wrong when they claimed that on the third day Jesus rose from the dead, supped with some of his disciples at Emmaus, and said: “See my hands and my feet, that it is I myself; handle me, and see; for a spirit has not flesh and bones as you see that I have” (Luke 24:39). They flatly disagree, though they do not make a point of this, with Paul’s emphatic dictum, which follows upon Paul’s elaborate recital of the evidence for Jesus’ resurrection: “If Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain. We are even found to be misrepresenting God, because we testified of God that he raised Christ…. If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile” (I Corinthians 15).

The Christian who believes, in Bultmann’s words, that Jesus did not “come back to life and rise from his tomb” rejects the very belief in terms of which Christianity defined itself vis-à-vis Judaism. If he holds that this false belief is nevertheless a particularly edifying symbol, and thus tries to shift religious controversies to the plain of literary criticism, he goes against the grain of his religion and takes the side of those whom the authors of his Scriptures and the architects of all the major Christian churches, from the Greek and Latin fathers down to the Reformers, fought with all their might.

This is not the only objection to this post-Christian stratagem. To an even moderately sophisticated and well-read person it should come as no surprise that any religion at all has its hidden as well as its obvious beauties, and that a resourceful interpreter can come up with sapphires where there seemed to be nothing but mud. The trouble with most such interpreters is that they overlook, and that they lead their audiences to overlook, that other religions and denominations can play the same game. And they allow the believer to say Yes while evading any No.

While these faults are deeply ingrained in theology, it is by no means impossible for a religious person to avoid them. When the Hebrew prophets interpreted their religious heritage, they were not conformists who discovered subtle ways in which they could agree, or seem to agree, with the religion of their day. Nor did they show how the cult was justifiable with a little dexterity. Far from it.

Let those who like inspiring interpretations be no less forthright in telling us precisely where they stand on immortality, the sacraments, and hell; on the virgin birth and resurrection; on the incarnation and the miracles; on John’s theology, and Paul’s, and James’; on Augustine and Aquinas, Luther, Calvin, and the various creeds. And on: “Resist not evil.” And: “Let him who would sue you in court for your coat have your cloak, too.” And: “No one comes to the Father but through Me.”

That would clearly be the end of theology. The theologians pay a price for perpetuating a mass movement; they are not content, as the prophets were, with a small remnant. If each spoke out boldly and unequivocally, no mass movement would be left. It would become apparent that there are almost as many different views as preachers, that such phrases as “the message of the New Testament” and “the Biblical view” and “the Christian answer” are hollow, and that the temporal and spatial continuity of Christendom depends on ambiguity.

The preacher who insists on being forthright loses at least half his audience: at best, he has the choice which portion he would like to keep. If he wants to have a congregation that does not consist solely of intellectuals, he has to speak in a manner that makes sense at what Tillich calls “the natural stage of literalism … in which the mythical and the literal are indistinguishable”; and he must also keep the confidence of those who have reached “the second stage of literalism, the conscious one, which is aware of the questions but represses them”; nor must he antagonize those who despise literalism.

To understand theology, one has to recognize that pastors and priests, as well as the theologians who train them, work in an environment that is quite different from the universities in which philosophers and scientists pursue their work. The preacher has dissimilar responsibilities and is subjected to different pressures. To put it crudely, he lacks tenure and academic freedom: if he alienates half of his congregation, he is likely to be out of a job.

Suppose he spurns economic considerations and gives little or no thought to his own welfare; suppose he either has no family or utterly subordinates their future and security to his conception of his duties: he still has a responsibility to the congregation as a whole and not just to those who share his ideas. He is not like a lecturer who speaks once a week in an adult education program to those who happen to be interested in his subject. Nor is it his job to disseminate information and to promote critical thinking. His audience, unlike that of a philosophy or science professor, expects to be fortified against the inroads of new information and critical thinking. Those who are most traditional in their beliefs would withdraw their confidence if he said clearly that he disbelieves what they believe, but they need him most. The highly educated are more likely to turn elsewhere when they are in trouble, especially if their religion is extremely liberal or altogether non-theistic: they may go to doctors, psychoanalysts, or social workers, for example. Those, on the other hand, who take many ancient beliefs literally need their pastor.

One only has to put oneself in the preacher’s place to understand how his predicament quite naturally leads him to resort to the devices we have discussed. There, but for the lack of God’s grace, go I.

Theology, of course, is not religion; and a great deal of religion is emphatically anti-theological. At the very least, large parts of the Sermon on the Mount are anti-theological, not only those alluded to earlier in this chapter. Parts of the New Testament seem to say that what ultimately matters is our conduct and not our beliefs, and least of all theology. But the claim that this is the message of the New Testament, however dear to many liberals, can be backed up only by gerrymandering.

If only implicitly, the teachings of the Hebrew prophets are much more consistently and radically anti-theological. “I hate, I despise your feasts, and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies…. But let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an everflowing stream.” These words of Amos state one of the central themes of the prophetic books. Isaiah says similarly: “When you come to appear before me, who requires of you this trampling of my courts? Bring no more vain offerings; incense is an abomination to me. Cease to do evil, learn to do good; seek justice, correct oppression; defend the fatherless; plead for the widow.” And Micah: “What does the Lord require of you but to do justice and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.”

In the Prophets and in parts of the New Testament—though certainly only in parts—love, justice, and humility appear to be all that is asked of man, and questions of belief entirely peripheral, while precise formulations about God, “his attributes, and his relations with man and the universe” are altogether out of the picture. Perhaps the Book of Jonah goes furthest: here the wicked men of Nineveh are forgiven everything because they are sincerely sorry; they are pagans and they need not even be converted or acknowledge any new beliefs whatever.

The Buddha brushed aside all theological and metaphysical queries as “questions that tend not toward edification” and proclaimed that all we need to know to live good lives and find salvation are four simple truths about suffering; its cause in human ignorance, desire, and attachment; its cessation when detachment is achieved; and the kind of life that leads to the cessation of desire. Around the same time, about 500 B.C., Confucius, in China, disparaged questions about the supernatural and taught men to concentrate on this life and their relations to other human beings.

In the Confucian Analects we are told that “the Master would not discuss … supernatural beings” (VII: 20) and discouraged concern with men’s “duty to the spirits” (XI: 11). The other great sage of China, Lao-tze, went even further in disparaging speculations, doctrines, and pretensions to knowledge. With a whimsical humor he extolled the virtues of a simple life.

An attack on theology, therefore, should not be taken as necessarily involving an attack on religion. Religion can be, and often has been, untheological or even anti-theological.

Whether Christianity can ever dispense with theology is another matter. Christianity has always emphasized beliefs that must seem foolish to the uninitiated—a point already made in the oldest part of the New Testament, the Epistles of Paul. Shorn of these beliefs, Christianity ceases to be Christianity and becomes some kind of Reform Judaism or Unitarianism. Christianity defined itself less as a way of life than as a faith which, right from the beginning, involved assent to various propositions. Disputes over these beliefs and their correct interpretation led to the establishment of different churches and denominations. Confronted with so many theologies, a Christian faces a variety of possibilities.

First, he can try to ignore this abundance, refuse to give himself any account of the meaning of his beliefs, and repeat the hallowed articles of faith without caring how they are interpreted. This leaves open the question to which church he belongs and goes. If he goes to the nearest one, or to the one that other people of his social status generally attend, while turning a deaf ear to his minister’s interpretations of Christian belief, he is likely to be a pillar of society; but he could hardly be said to take his Christianity seriously. It was against nominal Christians of this sort that Kierkegaard wrote his life long. Though Kierkegaard is popular today, he is enlisted, much against his express will, as an apologist, and people overlook the fact that the kind of Christianity Kierkegaard attacked is precisely the kind of “religion” whose revival in the middle of the twentieth century we are asked to note with hope.

Secondly, a Christian can acquaint himself with more than one theology and then choose a denomination that makes sense to him, that he finds congenial, that says more or less in Christian terms what he believes in any case. And if the theologians of this church do not carve exactly what he wants out of the Gospels and Epistles, he may attempt some small adjustments of his own.

One might suppose that this is what most Christians do; but in fact the vast majority even of educated Christians fall into the first class and not into this one. Few Presbyterian college students or college graduates know what the Westminster Confession is; fewer have read it; hardly any have compared it with the basic documents of other denominations.

The present critique of theology would be grossly misleading if it gave the reader the impression that theology is generally very much more than window dressing. Theology moves no mountains; it rarely moves people: it is something most people put up with, something they do not take seriously, something good manners require one to respect—and not to think about.

How little people think about theology, how much it is a mere epiphenomenon of organized religion, has been shown in some detail by Richard Niebuhr in The Social Sources of Denominationalism. As long as Protestant denominations have existed, social status rather than theology seems to have decided in most cases to what church a family belonged—and “doctrines and practice change with the mutations of social structure, not vice versa” (21). This analysis by a man who is often called a theologian is influenced by Marxism—the book first appeared in 1929—and gives a picture that is just a little too extreme in emphasizing economic factors while reducing ideologies to ineffective superstructures. But what matters in the present context is not the precise percentage of unthinking Christians who, while they resent all critical reflections on theology, cannot be bothered to inform themselves about beliefs that they claim to think may seriously affect our posthumous careers. Statistics offer a welcome escape from self-reflection.

In the end, a Christian may choose to reject theology—for some of the reasons given here, and for others besides. But in that case he gives up Christianity, though in some laudatory senses of the word he may be a better Christian than some theologians. In that way, many Buddhists, Jews, Confucianists, and atheists are also better Christians than most Christians.

After all, Christianity is inescapably a theological religion, and those who give up the ancient formulations of alleged knowledge about “God, his nature and attributes, and his relations with man and the universe” break with Christianity. They may still admire Jesus, as some Jews and Hindus do, too; but they are no longer Christians. But could one remain a Christian and retain the ancient formulations without employing any double standard, without gerrymandering or double-speak?

One can avoid all this by the simple expedient of refusing to think about one’s religion. But if one does that, is one a Christian? Or one can say: I accept everything, though on the face of it a lot of what I am accepting appears mutually contradictory—which only shows that reason is, as Luther said, “the Devil’s bride” and “God’s worst enemy” (XII, 1530; VIII, 2048). Again, one refuses to think about one’s religion. But if one insists on thinking about it without gerrymandering and double-speak, one has to say: this I accept, this not; this I believe, this not; this I admire, this not. And if one employs no double standard, one will have to add: in other scriptures and religions, too, I find things I accept, believe, and admire, including much that compares very favorably with much in my own tradition. Still, one may conceivably conclude, it is my own tradition that I love best, though I really agree with no more than a fraction of it. And if that is what one does, one may wish to be a Christian, but one is, literally, a heretic.

To show what is wrong with theology in the ordinary sense of that word (dogmatic theology), one does not require a positivistic, Kantian, or Humean theory of knowledge. The faults of theology can be seen with the naked eye. To show that these charges against theology can be sustained against the best theologians, one must consider some of these men. If I had named no names, I should be open to the allegation that nobody, or at least no one of any stature, had actually done what I accused theologians of doing. I have therefore singled out a few men of acknowledged stature.

Profound disagreements are compatible with profound, albeit only partial, admiration. But anyone with high standards of honesty will have more than partial admiration for exceedingly few people.

Those who wish that I might have dealt at greater length with Bultmann, Tillich, or Aquinas will find that I have dealt with some of their other writings in my Critique, Chapters V–VIII; and that there I have also considered some other theologians. Here I have confined myself to what seemed necessary to support my criticisms. So the two books should supplement each other.

The rejection of natural and dogmatic theology does not involve any repudiation of the critical, historical, and psychological study of religion. On the contrary, such inquiries are most valuable. Those who want to improve their thinking about the important questions of life and become more conscientious should surely consider the divergent answers given by some of the great religions.

One need not ignore the theologians; but instead of studying theology one should study theologies—as part of the history of religions. The committed study of a single theology—or a single philosophic system, or the views of a single scientist whose theory differs from the theories of many other scientists—is a training in unsound method, partiality, and special pleading. Instead of being taught how some one theory can be patched up indefinitely if only we allow it privileges that we carefully deny to its competitors, students should be exposed to a variety of views and led to discover what can be said for and against each.

Moreover, theological approaches, being denominational, are not at all propitious for determining what answers were actually given by the great religious figures of the past, or even what questions they asked. In few areas is it so hard to read honestly and responsibly, instead of reading one’s own prior convictions into the texts; and in theology the latter tendency is institutionalized.

This is not to say that theologians have a monopoly on reading religious texts badly. It is exceedingly difficult to read them. Tolstoy wrote an essay, How to Read the Gospels and What is Essential in Them, and argued: “To understand any book one must choose out the parts that are quite clear, dividing them from what is obscure or confused. And from what is clear we must form our idea of the drift and spirit of the whole work. Then, on the basis of what we have understood, we may proceed to make out what is confused or not quite intelligible…. That was how I read the Gospels, and the meaning of Christ’s teaching became so clear to me that it was impossible to have any doubts about it…. What is comprehensible to one may seem obscure to another. But all will certainly agree in what is most important….” Sancta simplicitas! That is what Luther thought, too. But Luther considered Paul and John most important, and especially the doctrine of justification by faith alone; Tolstoy, the Sermon on the Mount, and especially the commandment, “Resist not evil.”

Such divergent responses of great human beings to texts, such total responses to verses that set languishing hearts afire, have a more unsettling effect on us than the neat systems of theologians. Luther and Tolstoy openly based their religion on a few key passages; the unsoundness of their procedure is obvious; but as we read them, and others like them, we experience the challenge of religion: we are put on trial and stand some chance of becoming more thoughtful and sensitive, less slothful and complacent. Theological systems, on the other hand, lack what Luther, depreciating Melanchthon’s system, called “real seriousness.” They mute the challenge and, albeit unwittingly, facilitate complacency.

Some people who are misleadingly called theologians might well agree with all this. This critique is directed, as was made plain at the beginning of this chapter, against what the Oxford English Dictionary calls “dogmatic theology,” not against everybody who happens to be teaching at a theological seminary or against so-called theologians who are really philologists or historians. Ernst Troeltsch’s Social Teachings of the Christian Churches is a monument of impartial and fair-minded scholarship and not in any proper sense of the word a theological work, although he was still a professor of theology when he wrote it and did not formally abandon theology to become a professor of philosophy until a little later (1915). Hermann L. Strack was a professor of theology at the University of Berlin, and Paul Billerbeck was a pastor, but their fascinating five-volume Kommentar zum Neuen Testament am Talmud und Midrasch is not a work of theology either. The same consideration applies to Richard Niebuhr’s Social Sources of Dcnominationalism and Morton Scott Enslin’s Christian Beginnings. It would be easy and pointless to lengthen this list.

From the claim that dogmatic theologians use unsound methods and are unfair to rival points of view when they do theology, it does not follow that they are unsound or unfair when they do other things, or that they have a monopoly on the faults charged against them. Some philosophers, past and present, are open to the same charges. A philosopher who criticizes theology is surely under no compulsion to defend all philosophers; and I certainly have never come close to doing that.

If a philosopher takes the attitude that Plato and Kant must be defended at all costs, if necessary by the most far-fetched interpretations, and that their works must be read as we should not read those of any other philosopher, this would be a personal defect; it is certainly not of the essence of philosophy. On the contrary, his approach would be patently unphilosophical. In theology, on the other hand, such partiality, such special pleading, such a double standard is institutionalized.

One practical conclusion remains to be drawn. Theological seminaries create many of the problems that their products are expected to resolve. For years the students at the seminaries are trained to see their own denomination as they see no other one; then they are supposed to go out as spiritual leaders, teaching people how to love their neighbors as themselves, sitting down with representatives of other faiths in mutual respect and understanding. Having been trained to see Catholicism as the Catholics do not see it, Judaism as the Jews do not experience it, and other Protestant denominations as they do not look to their own members, the young clergyman is expected to collaborate with priests and rabbis and to busy himself in the ecumenical movement, doing his best throughout his professional career to heal breaches which, but for the training which he and the other ministers, rabbis, and priests received, would long have disappeared.

These criticisms of theology leave open the question how, in detail, I should deal with such an ancient theological problem as that of suffering; or how I should read the Old Testament, or the New Testament. In the next three chapters I propose to take up these problems in turn.

My point of view is not that of a disciple. But if a man were a true disciple of the Buddha, of the prophets, or of Jesus, could he fail to be against theology? Could he help becoming a heretic?