RELIGION AND THE INTELLECTUALS
123
Today, the prevailing ideology as regards matter and move–
ment almost ensures that if a person can believe the Christian Faith
at all, he will hold the orthodox Nicene Doctrine of the Trinity. Our
stumbling blocks are different. The prinicipal one, 1 suspect, is the
acceptance of miracles affecting the natural order, e.g. the Virgin
Birth and the Resurrection which would not have bothered a
second century catechuman for five minutes. With this goes an all
too easy acceptance of the Doctrine of Original Sin. But to believe
that "I am shapen in iniquity and
in
sin hath my mother conceived
me" and that "we have no power of ourselves to help ourselves"
without at the same time believing "as in Adam all sleep even so in
Christ shall be made alive" is, of course, not Christianity at all, but
simply another variant of the pessimism we find in Homer.
1 do not know if it was easier to believe the Christian Faith in
the past than now, but 1 do know that Christians and the Church
today share with everyone else in our civilization the experience of
"alienation," i.e. our dominant religious experience-and this
is
why, 1 think, we find miracles so difficult-is of our distance from
God. Hence the typical "modern" heresy is not a mechanized magical
sacramentalism, or any form of Pantheism, but a Barthian exag–
geration of God's transcendence which all too easily becomes an
excuse for complacency about one's own sins and about the mis–
fortunes of others. The abandonment of hope for a general social im–
provement which the editors suggest as a possible cause for a
religious revival will lead a man not to Christianity but to one of
those religions which hold that time is an illusion or an endless cycle.
To the degree however that a would-be Christian believes in his
depravity without believing in the miracle of his redemption,
his
religion is, what the Communists say it must be, opium for him–
self and the people.
III.
Objective and Subjective.
All of us have suffered in recent history the experiences of
what can happen when mathematical quantitative notions of mass
and number or biological notions like species or class are applied as
absolutes to human life. No reader of PR, 1 imagine, is going to
accept any religion, naturalistic or otherwise, which does not allow
and account for our experience of ourselves and our friends as
