A few more words about “religionless.” I expect you remember Bultmann’s essay on the “demythologizing” of the New Testament? My view of it today would be, not that he went “too far,” as most people thought, but that he didn’t go far enough. It’s not only the “mythological” concepts, such as miracle, ascension, and so on (which are not in principle separable from the concepts of God, faith, etc.), but “religious” concepts generally, which are problematic. You can’t, as Bultmann supposes, separate God and miracle, but you must be able to interpret and proclaim both in a “non-religions” sense. Bultmann’s approach is fundamentally still a liberal one (i.e., abridging the gospel), whereas I’m trying to think theologically.

What does it mean to “interpret in a religious sense”? I think it means to speak on the one hand metaphysically, and on the other hand individualistically. Neither of these is relevant to the biblical message or to the man of today. Hasn’t the individualistic question about personal salvation almost completely left us all? Aren’t we really under the impression that there are more important things than that question (perhaps not more important than the matter itself, but more important than the question!)? I know it sounds pretty monstrous to say that. But, fundamentally, isn’t this in fact biblical? Does the question about saving one’s soul appear in the Old Testament at all? Aren’t righteousness and the Kingdom of God on earth the focus of everything, and isn’t it true that Rom. 3.24ff. is not an individualistic doctrine of salvation, but the culmination of the view that God alone is righteous? It is not with the beyond that we are concerned, but with this world as created and preserved, subjected to laws, reconciled, and restored. What is above this world is, in the gospel, intended to exist for this world; I mean that, not in the anthropocentric sense of liberal, mystic pietistic, ethical theology, but in the biblical sense of the creation and of the incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Barth was the first theologian to begin the criticism of religion, and that remains his really great merit; but he put in its place a positivist doctrine of revelation which says, in effect, “Like it or lump it”: virgin birth, Trinity, or anything else; each is an equally significant and necessary part of the whole, which must simply be swallowed as a whole or not at all. That isn’t biblical. There are degrees of knowledge and degrees of significance; that means that a secret discipline must be restored whereby the mysteries of the Christian faith are protected against profanation. The positivism of revelation makes it too easy for itself, by setting up, as it does in the last analysis, a law of faith, and so mutilates what is–by Christ’s incarnation!–a gift for us. In the place of religion there now stands the church–that is in itself biblical–but the world is in some degree made to depend on itself and left to its own devices, and that’s the mistake.

I’m thinking about how we can reinterpret in a “worldly” sense-in the sense of the Old Testament and of John 1.14 -the concepts of repentance, faith, justification, rebirth, and sanctification.