Messianic or "Bourgeois" Religion?

1.0 To issue critical diagnoses of such a well-organized and internationally highly regarded religious community as Catholic Christianity in West Germany is in itself a delicate venture. The problem becomes more difficult when what is attempted is to show that the critical area is none other than the one in which Christians in these parts seem most at home. In the comparatively large degree of harmony between the practice of religion and the experience of life in society. The critical hypothesis we shall try to substantiate in what follows begins with this question: Is Christianity in West Germany in the end a bourgeois religion-with great social value but without a messianic future?

Bourgeois Future-Messianic Future

2.0 When the Church in West Germany repeats the messianic sayings about the Kingdom of God and the future it represents, it is speaking in the main to people who already have a future. We could say that they bring their own futures to church with them, the strong and unshakably optimistic to have it religiously endorsed and rounded off, the anxious to have It protected and strengthened by religion. In this way, the messianic future frequently becomes a ritual rounding off and transfiguration of a "bourgeois" future already worked out and-as death approaches-an extension of this bourgeois future and the ego, which that thrives in it into the transcendence of eternity. In the Christianity of our time, the messianic religion of the bible has largely become "bourgeois" religion. This observation is not intended as a denunciation of the "bourgeois": his social role is not, as such, our subject. Nor is it primarily a criticism of the fact that the Church in Central Europe consists mainly of the so-called "petty bourgeoisie" and "bourgeoisie" who set the tone of Church life in our own country, too, It is more the expression of a worry about Christianity which, it seems to me, loses its identity if it does not realize and emphasize its difference from "bourgeois" religion.

2.1 In this "bourgeois" religion, the messianic future is in the gravest danger. Not in danger of being alienated and becoming a tranquillizer or a consolation, an opium for the have-nots, for those with no future, but of turning into an endorsement and encouragement for the haves, the propertied, for those in this world who already have plenty of prospects and future.

2.2 The messianic future of Christian faith does not just endorse and reinforce our preconceived "bourgeois" future. It does not prolong it, add anything to it, complete or transfigure it. It disrupts it. "The first shall be last and the last shall be first." The meaning of love cuts across the meaning of having: "Those who possess their lives will lose them, and those who despise them will win them." This form of disruption, which drops like a bomb on our complacent present, has a more familiar biblical name: "repentance." turning of hearts, metanoia. The direction of this turning is also marked out in advance for Christians. It is called discipleship. We must remember this if the future for which faith fits us is not to be interpreted In advance In terms of "bourgeois" religion-or, In other words, If we do not want simply to replace the messianic future with our own future, the one in which we are well in control.

The Change of Heart Is Not Taking Place

3.0 To change states of affairs Is said not to be the concern of the Gospel and not the business of the Church, which seek to change hearts. This Is true and false at once. The moving of hearts is, in fact, the first step to the messianic future, It is the most radical and most demanding form of reversal a9d revolution, and it is so because changing states of affairs never changes all that really needs to be changed. However, this also means that this change of heart is certainly not an invisible, or, as people like to say, "purely inward" process. If we are to trust the Gospel testimonies, It goes through people like a shock, reaches deep down into the direction of their lives, into their established system of needs, and so finally into the states of affairs which that helps to shape. It damages and disrupts one's own interests and alms at a revision of familiar practice.

3.1 I want to express the fear (again, not as a denunciation, but uncertainly and with sadness) that this change of heart is not taking place-at least not in the form in that it is publicly proclaimed. The crisis (or the disease) of life in the Church is not just that this change of heart is not taking place or is taking place too little, but that the absence of this change of heart is also being obscured by the appearance of a mere belief In faith. Are we Christians In this country really changing our hearts, or do we just believe in a change of heart, and under the cloak of belief in a change of heart, remain the same? Are we disciples or do we just believe in discipleship, and under the cloak of belief in discipleship, continue in our old ways, the same old ways? Do we love, or do we believe in love, and under the cloak of belief in love, remain the same egoists and conformists? Do we share the sufferings of others, or do we just believe in sharing them and remain, under the cloak of a belief in sympathy." as apathetic as ever?

3.2 It is no theological answer to these questions to stress that, after all, repentance is grace. Theology should take particular care that this appeal to grace does not slip into that leniency we show ourselves, that it does not simply become confused with that indulgence we show to our own bourgeois hearts. The same applies to the objection that such a criticism of contemporary Christianity ignores the sin in which Christians continue to be trapped. Clearly, theological talk about sin and the forgiveness of sins must not be arbitrarily separated from the messianic call for a change of heart. And then when people insist that this change of heart is in the end a purely "inward process", that is certainly not an article of faith but entirely an ideology of our "bourgeois" religion with which we yet again conceal from ourselves our failure and refusal to change.

3.3 A "bourgeois" theology assists this concealment. For example, in its theological discussion of the last things, the messianic future was long ago freed from all apocalyptic tensions: there really are no dangers, no contradictions, no downfalls left. Everything is dominated by the idea of reconciliation. However, by taking this line, this bourgeois eschatology unconsciously gives our present a certificate of moral and political innocence, reinforces this "bourgeois" present in itself instead of pushing it beyond itself: everything will be all right in the end anyway, and all differences reconciled.

3.4 In this process, hope in "bourgeois" religion steadily loses its messianic weakness, the fact that it still expects something. But the price hope pays for being detached from expectations that could ever he disappointed is high! Hope becomes a hope without expectations, and hope without expectation is essentially hope without joy. I think this is the source of the joylessness of so much joy in "bourgeois" Christianity.

3.5 Love in "bourgeois" religion, too, it seems to me, loses more and more of its messianic character. Messianic love is partisan. There was certainly a privileged group around Jesus-those who were otherwise under-privileged. The universality of this love does not consist in a refusal to take sides, but in the way it takes sides, without hate or personal hostility-even to the folly of the cross. Is there not a concept of universal Christian love in "bourgeois" religion that is just sloppy, and one that hardly needs any longer to prove itself as love of enemies because the feeble and unpartisan way it bridges all the agonizing contradictions means that it has no opponents left at all?

3.6 Under the cloak of "bourgeois" religion there Is a wide split within the Church between the messianic virtues of Christianity that are publicly proclaimed and ecclesiastically prescribed and believed In (repentance and discipleship, love and acceptance of suffering] and the actual value structures and alms of "bourgeois" practice (autonomy. property, stability. success). Among the priorities of the Gospel, the priorities of "bourgeois" life are practiced. Under the appearance of the belief in repentance and the belief in discipleship, the "bourgeois" subject is set up-with an absence of contradiction that even It finds uncomfortable- with its interests and its own future.

3.7 If I am right, Kierkegaard's critique of "Christendom" can be taken as an early form of criticism of "bourgeois" religion in Christianity. Kierkegaard claimed that "Christendom"-without attracting attention and even without noticing-had more or less identified Christian existence with the "natural" existence of the "bourgeois": the Christian practice of discipleship was covertly transformed into "bourgeois" practice. In the shape of "Christendom." Christianity had once again successfully and quasitriumphalistically come to terms with the power of the prevailing society, in this case with that of "bourgeois" society. But at what price? No less, says Kierkegaard, than the abolition of Christianity itself, the Christianity of discipleship, as he keeps on insisting. I regard this as an early critique of Christianity as a "bourgeois" religion, which is in the full sense, prophetic and not at all obsolete today, but-for Catholics and Protestants-more urgent than ever.

Rigorism Instead of Radicalism

4.0 The bishops feel the dangers that the "bourgeois" religion as practiced contains for the life of the Church. They are aware of the danger that the Church will not so much move the hearts of the "bourgeois" as be changed by the "bourgeois" into an institution of "their" religion, a service-Church to supply their security requirements. Nevertheless, our Church's pastoral approach to "bourgeois" religion tends, in my view, to be based on resignation, a strategy of latent distrust, fed by the suspicion that the "bourgeois" is not to be trusted In the end, that ultimately, he would overwhelm Christianity with his priorities and preferences if there were relaxation even at one point. So the bishops react with legal rigorism in those cases in which actual or supposed truisms of "bourgeois" society come into most evident conflict with the preaching of the Church, as in the question of divorce or the readmission of divorced people to the sacraments, In questions of family and sexual morality, and lastly in the matter of compulsory celibacy, to mention only these examples. This is not an attack on the Christian Ideal of monogamy or a plea for sexual libertinism or an attack on the eschatological-apocalyptic virtue of celibacy. The question is simply whether such legal rigorism is the way to overcome the contradictions of "bourgeois" religion in Christianity and make the Christian alternatives to a life that has become "bourgeois" really visible. Or, to put It an other way, whether this is the way to heal the split between the messianic virtues of the Gospel we preach and those the "bourgeoisie" practice; i.e., whether repentance for discipleship is possible.

4.1 The main fault of this rigorism with which the official Church reacts to the crisis and disease of Church life Implied by "bourgeois" religion is that it seems to be no real help to the base, to the average parish. It is the parishes that have to bear the full weight of this contradiction. It is here that it is becoming clear that the rigorism at the Church offers no salvation in the battle against the distortions of "bourgeois" religion if the radicalism of repentance is not faced and risked in common.

4.2 In the local community, the contradiction between the messianic virtues of Christianity that are preached and the "bourgeois" ones that are actually lived is particularly painful. The "bourgeois" virtues of stability, the competitive struggle, and performance a obscure and crush the messianic virtues of repentance, selfless, and unconditional love for the least of the brethren," and compassion, which receive only notional assent-virtues that cannot be practiced in exchange relations, for which you get literally, nothing, as in the love that does not insist on recompense, loyalty, gratitude, friendship, and mourning. They have a diminishing existence and are at most-under the division of labor- devoted to the family, which in turn, is coming more and more under the pressure of social exchange processes.

4.3 In the family, the sector to which the Christian virtues in their privatized form are allocated, the contradictions are becoming blatant. Here love has, as it were, to be reduced to a love that sacrifices universal justice. But where Christian love is lived only in the family. It soon becomes Impossible to live even there. As with celibacy, the Christian family is tending too much to develop into an isolated mode of life, exactly the same tendency present in "bourgeois" society.

4.4 Of the alternative, discipleship lived in practice, there is no sign. The more difficult it becomes to conceal this contradiction with the Gospel, the more emphatic the ecclesiastical appeals seem to become that present the family and celibacy as islands of Christian virtue-and, it seems to me, the greater the danger to them from legal overloading.

4.5 The "family" model of the parish is threatened by the same fate that already seems to have overtaken the family. It is losing its young people or is no longer able to integrate them with their criticisms, their alternative attitudes, and their experiments in political emancipation. However there are young people waiting for the call to discipleship, there Is a longing for radical Christian existence, for alternatives to "bourgeois" religion. If these young people are becoming increasingly hard to reach, if they are gradually going away to other struggles, the fault is not theirs alone.

4.6 If the term "bourgeois" religion is justified, this will become particularly clear in the role that money plays in It. Money is, after all, a tangible symbol of "bourgeois" society, and the principle of exchange that governs It down to its foundations. An examination of the function of money in a "bourgeois" religion involves more than looking at the semi-ideological status of Church tax. The main issue is the compensatory function that money, in general, has acquired. One aspect is its use by the Church authorities, where fines are instituted as a disciplinary measure, and money becomes almost an aid to the maintenance of ecclesiastical orthodoxy. More Important, however, is the salvational function of money for Christians. In general, Money, often acquired totally without compassion, becomes a substitute for compassion with the suffering of others: it serves to express solidarity and sympathy, as compensation for the neglect of a wider Justice imposed by a society determined at a fundamental level by exchange. Thus, money becomes the great link between the Christian virtues, which in "bourgeois" religion are kept strictly to the private sphere, and social suffering: It becomes a quasisacramental of solidarity and sympathy. Even then, in its quasisacramental role, it still expressed something of what, in my view, it cannot provide- the direction and spread of our love and compassion by those messianic standards for which there are really no limits to liability. The problem of the big Church charities is not that they exist, but that, in the minds of the Christians of our country, they take the necessary help out of the wider messianic context (which includes factors such as solidarity. political education, and a desire for practical change) and reduce it to a process of mere monetary contributions.

Radicalism Instead of Rigorism

5.0 I start from the presumption that the reason for the Church's loss of appeal is not that it demands too much but that, in fact. it offers too little challenge or does not present its demands clearly enough as priorities of the Gospel itself. If the Church were more radical in the Gospel sense, it would probably not need to be so rigorous in the legal sense. Rigorism springs from fear, radicalism from freedom, from the freedom of Christ's call. For the Church's preaching and pastoral work, acting by the priorities of the Gospel should include using the all-embracing strategy of love to attack the ideal of exchange as it seeps down to the moral foundations of social life, It means overcoming the reification of interpersonal relations, their increasing interchangeability and superficiality, lf it does this, the Church is radical without necessarily having to be rigorous in the legal sense. If it did this, for example, it could admit to the sacraments even those who had failed in their marriages and asked for forgiveness, without having to fear that it was opening the floodgates. Nor would the Church then need compulsory celibacy to dress up a Christianity that had lost its radicalism. There would be no danger that the apocalyptic virtue of celibacy would die out; it would constantly reemerge out of the radicalism of discipleship.

5.1 Then, too, authority in our Church would lose the bureaucratic face that everyone complains about: it would be able to take on more clearly the features of an authority for religious guidance, display its administrative and legal competence less, and its religious competence more.

Politics, Morality, Religion: The World Context

6.0 How can we bring about a shift in priorities? How can we achieve a renewal that will affect even the psychological foundations of bourgeois" life? I see only one-way: we need a change of direction throughout the Church, throughout society, and in the whole world of politics. This is not a detour or an escape into undemanding abstraction. What is much more of an abstraction today is the approach that abstracts from the worldwide connections in which our Individual and social life is involved.

6.1 Our world, for the first time aware of itself as a whole, is at the same time riven with deep, agonizing oppositions, which threaten more and more to become an apocalyptic gulf between poor and rich, rulers and ruled. Purely political or economic strategies for ending those oppositions are either not in sight or are proving inadequate, only with difficulty covering up the apparent Irreconcilability of the Interests. This makes many people bewildered and apathetic and drives others into hatred and fanaticism (a much more likely result of our ubiquitous apathy than a conversion to committed love). Others take up rigid defensive attitudes and end by adopting a strategy of self-preservation and internal security.

6.2 Everyone can see the signs of this looming social apocalypse: the atomic threat, the Insanity of the arms race, the destruction of the environment, terror, the global struggle for exploitation (the North- South conflict) with its danger of a social war on a world scale. However, the catastrophe remains mostly ideas "in the head," not in our hearts. It produces depression, but not grief, apathy, but not opposition. People seem to be becoming more and more voyeurs of their own downfall. Counter-measures are scarcely to be seen, probably because the familiar strategies and prophecies are failing.

6.3 It is certainly not my intention here to mystify "the catastrophe" or to ridicule any nuance, any sign of an initiative, by some slick juggling with the idea of the totality of the disaster-quite the opposite. My only aim is to see that we appreciate the scale and nature of the action that has become necessary. Must we not start from the assumption that the oppositions that are producing hatred and despair or apathy can only be overcome without a catastrophe when there is a change in personal priorities in the rich countries of this earth (and not just among the grabbers within the oppressed nations who have grown rich through their ruthlessness), in other words, when there is a real change of heart here? Is this not the only way in which the poor and exploited can escape from their damaged lives, stunted as they are from the very beginning? Is not moral action becoming a factor in world politics? To put it the other way, are not economics and politics becoming part of morality in a new way?

6.4 Christians are convinced that such a moral reorientation cannot be kept up unless it is supported by religion. They start from the assumption that where religion not only disappears among the so-called enlightened elites, but even among the people the report of the existence of God Is no longer abroad, man's very "soul" dies, and in the end, the apotheosis of banality or hatred dawns. The individual becomes a machine, a new sort of beast, or Just an offense, to be dealt with by totalitarian means. It is precisely for these reasons, in view of the situation I have described, that Christianity with its moral reserves and its capacity for repentance is called to stand the test of history. It is my view that nothing Is more urgently needed today than a moral and political imagination springing from a messianic Christianity and capable of being more than merely a copy of accepted political and economic strategies.

The Church's Work of Reconciliation

7.0 The Church's international character provides us with a dramatic illustration that focuses on this situation and the challenge it contains, or the call for a change of heart that rises from It. This is the relation of the rich churches to the poor churches, let us say, of the German-speaking churches to those of the Latin American subcontinent.

7.1 I am not placing the question of repentance in the context of the international Church in order to have an imaginary parade ground for aesthetic radicalism. This is no abstract speculation about the future, but a practical question. Have others, namely, our fellow participants at the Eucharistic table in the one Church, even a present? We can forget about the future completely for the moment!

7.2 This concern with the Church internationally should also have another effect. I am convinced that there will only be reconciliation between the traditionalist wings and the more liberal wings of our European Church if the Church's work of reconciliation makes its main task reconciliation between the poor and rich churches as a whole and so makes a contribution to the reconciliation of our painfully torn world. In other words, the goal of sanctity must be linked with that of militant love.

7.3 These poor churches have already given us this new model of Christian life. They have given it to us in the witness of those countless Latin American Christians who have lived the messianic virtues of disciple-ship to the extent of sacrificing their lives. They are the productive model of sanctity for our time: sanctity, not as a strictly private Ideal that one seeks for oneself and that can, therefore, easily lead into conformism toward the existing situation, but sanctity that proves Itself in an alliance of mysticism and militant love, that takes the suffering of others itself. Our time certainly has a martyrology of its own, it contains the names of the lay people, priests, and bishops who have risked all and given all In the struggle for a Church with the people. With them, these allies united by messianic confidence, repentance becomes possible: the spell of "bourgeois" religion is broken. Such a perspective shows how little the current priorities in the life of the West German Church are simply the natural priorities of a church; it shows that there can be quite different pastoral priorities from those that are central in this country.

7.4 A change of direction on a massive scale is taking place in the churches of Latin America, which, in my view, has a providential significance for the whole Church and in which, in one way or another, we are all involved. In the last ten years (since Medellin) an upheaval has been going on there that could be described as the change from a Church that ministers to the people to a Church of the people The suffering and oppressed people are finally becoming the masters of their history-not in opposition to the Church or by ignoring the Church, but through the Church and in the power of its messianic hope. It could, therefore, come about that one day not just the oppressed people, but also the victorious people, could become part of the Church! It is, of course, true that Christian hope exists even in a life under oppression. The messianic hope of Christians is, after all, much more a hope of the slaves and the damaged of this earth than a hope of the victors. However, the "successful" and prosperous Christians are the last people this entitles to argue for a strictly interiorized version of Christian hope that they then impose on the poor churches.

7.5 Moreover, It is that same Central European, "bourgeois" religion of interiority that influential cardinals, bishops, and certain working parties in my country seem to want to became the new standard for the Medellin Church in Latin America. This vision fills me with fear and prompts me to ask whether the cost to Latin America of all the alms is not, indeed, out of this world.

7.6 Sharing the fate of these churches challenges us here to change. Only if we change, will Christians here be able to show help and solidarity. The direct struggle of the poor and oppressed people there must be matched here by struggle and resistance against ourselves, against the insidious ideals of always having more, of always having to increase affluence. It must be matched by a struggle against the over determination of the whole of life by exchange and competition, which only permits any solidarity and sympathy as an alliance of expediency between partners of equal strength and any humanity only as a humanity of expediency. A repentance of this sort, which extends down to the affective foundations of life, is required of us not by some abstract progress of humanity, but by the Church as a Eucharistic community and as a sign of messianic hope.

7.7 A Brazilian bishop-and it wasn't Dom Helder Camara-recently wrote to me, "No German can say he isn't an exploiter." A hard saying, but nevertheless, an episcopal one. We Christians in this country must live with the suspicion of being oppressors, if perhaps oppressed oppressors. The suspicion is not refuted by the fact of our willingness to give alms. The challenges of the love demanded here cannot be satisfied merely by the "sacrament" of money, particularly because the way in which that money was acquired itself increases the poverty that the same money is supposed to relieve. Clearly, something more is required here, a radical process of repentance, a new relationship to social identity, property, and affluence in general, which will be very hard to establish.

Some Rethinking-Where Should the Change of Heart We Have Described Start?

 8.0 Where must we begin the change in priorities and the new approaches? Obviously, it can only be done in lengthy processes of transformation. I am quite certain that there are sufficient reserves of enthusiasm and energy for change even in our Church, but I venture to ask whether these energies are being properly approached and "harnessed." For example, do the Church organizations, which are more or less all organized according to social models of a past age, release the spiritual and social energies that are undoubtedly invested in them in a way that allows them to respond to the challenge? To put the question more sharply the other way around, why do the Church authorities want organizations of this type, and why were the new-style youth organizations of the 1960s treated by the bishops with so much suspicion? To take up an earlier idea, could not the big Church charities, which are almost our only channel for showing solidarity with the poor churches, do much more than merely collect money? Ought they not, precisely because they realize that money is far from innocent, take an active part in developing the awareness, not just of the recipient countries, but also of the givers? In this respect, I feel that these important charities, as part of a process of universal solidarity, are only in their beginnings.

8.1 There are signs that the Christians in West Germany are ready to learn and change. In recent years, hostility, still perhaps rather vague, toward the destructive effects of capitalism has developed at the base. Ecological responsibility is becoming an issue. There is a committed, if still relatively powerless, interest in the plight of the poor churches, and of the Third World In general. At the Wurzburg synod, there was a new attempt, at least at the level of planning, to take up the battle for youth and, no less important, for the workers. If our general pastoral approach turns away from the defeatist attitude of a "floodgates strategy" and faces the challenges of radical repentance, the beginnings at a new sort of parochial activity, youth work, or industrial mission would not have to be given up as lost before they had seriously begun.

8.2 When I mentioned signs of a new messianic practice I did not mean merely the process in this country that could be called a swing to religion" or "the return of society to religion." These are popular labels, and recently not only Church circles, but also political parties have been trying to cope with this phenomenon, but in my view, it is profoundly ambiguous. The "return to religion" does not necessarily mean that a society, as it were, wants to go beyond itself; it may be calling in religion to enable it to remain itself, to reinforce its own security, because it senses that religion will be its ally in defending a threatened status quo. Where Christianity in this country gives way to this social pressure, it may become more respectable, but I am afraid it will also slip even further into the role of a purely "bourgeois" religion, soothing society's conscience in the face of the worldwide challenges we have mentioned and enabling It to go on living as it does now. An authentic turning to religion, on the other hand, would have to mean a turning to repentance, to the messianic practice of love.

Discipleship as Class Treason?

9.0 It is possible that the demands of love here may seem to be treason-a betrayal of affluence, the family, and the customary patterns of life. However, It is also possible that this is just the place where we need discernment of spirits in the churches of the rich and powerful countries of this earth. Certainly, Christianity does not exist only for the brave, but we are not the ones who define the challenges of love, and we are not the ones who fix the conditions by which it is tested. So, for example, Christian love in periods of nationalism must be quite prepared to be suspected of lacking national feeling. In situations of racism, it will incur the suspicion of race treason. In periods when the social contradictions in the world cry to heaven, it will incur the suspicion of class treason for betraying the allegedly obvious interests of the propertied.

9.1 Did not Jesus Himself incur the reproach of treason? Did not His love bring Him to that state? Was He not crucified as a traitor to all the apparently worthwhile values? Must not Christians, therefore, expect, if they want to be faithful to Him, to Christ, to be regarded as traitors to bourgeois' religion? True, His love, in which in the end everything was taken from Him, even all the authority and dignity belonging to love suffering in powerlessness, was still something other than the expression of a sharing in solidarity of the suffering of the unfortunate and oppressed. It was the expression of His obedience, with which He suffered for Gad and His powerlessness in our world. But must not Christian love, which imitates His, constantly strive toward that obedience?

9.2 When the practice of Christian love is placed under the sign of this obedience, which forbids us to confuse the mystery of God's will with the quite unmysterious desire of familiar ways of life for self-preservation, something of the messianic power of this love may be revealed. It strikes deep into preconceived patterns and priorities of life, it has power to move hearts, power not to increase sufferings but to take them on itself. It has the power to show unconditional solidarity, partisan and yet without the destructive hate that negates the individual, combining in itself the aims of sanctity and militant love-even to the folly of the cross. Yes, folly, for such a "change of hearts" will probably be dismissed by the experienced strategists of the class struggle as feeble or useless, and branded as treason by those who are infatuated with exchange and who reject the inhuman consequences of capitalism only verbally, if at all.

9.3 All this may seem to some a considerable exaggeration. But what would a more cautious and "balanced" discussion of the messianic practice of discipleship be like? How would caution and "balance" throw light on the crisis we have been talking about?

Translated by Francis McDonagh

NOTE

1. This is a revised version of the lecture I gave to the 1978 Catholic Congress in Freiburg entitled "Faith-the capacity for a future?" (Glaube-Defahtgung zur Zukunft7). The emotion that I was both unable and unwilling to remove from the text is perhaps best explained by the fact that in a country in which Christianity, so to speak, has a potential majority in political and social life, critical attitudes can only be introduced in a more or less "missionary" speech.

This paper could not deal with many important matters, such as the historical process of the association of Christianity and the "bourgeoisie" and the so-called dialectic of the "bourgeois" history of freedom. This is frequently ignored, particularly in progressive liberal theologies, which allows a tacit identification of the "bourgeois" and the Christian subject. There was also no discussion of the "bourgeois" principle of individuation and the Christian principle of individuation, etc. For these and similar matters the reader is referred to J. B. Metz Glaube In Geschichte und Geseilschctjt (2nd ed. 1978).