SOURCE: “Reflections on Hans Küng's Theology for the Third Millennium,” in Modern Age, Vol. 33, No. 2, Summer, 1990, pp. 157-64.

[In the following essay, Lambert outlines Küng's vision for the Church in the twenty-first century as expressed in his Theology for the Third Millennium.]

If Erasmus returned to the earth today would he be a Catholic or a Protestant? There is one who believes he would be a Küngian.

Hans Küng, Catholic theologian at Germany's University of Tübingen, whose books, On Being a Christian and Does God Exist?, provoked broad discussion in the seventies among both Catholics and Protestants, has brought his thinking of the past thirty years into focus with another book, Theology for the Third Millennium: An Ecumenical View.¹ Küng believes the Church is drifting into the postmodern age without any sense of where it is going and so offers a proposal to set it on a true course, one which will not only guarantee the Church's survival but also help it find common ground with other great world religions.

Küng's program calls for more than casual review, since he is regarded by many Protestants to be the Catholic of the future and a prophet of Christian restoration and unity.² He is certainly not unrepresentative of certain Catholic thinking I have run into despite his conflict with the Curia, and so is not ignorable by Catholics either. I do not know what the Eastern Orthodox think of him, but he includes them too in his wide-sweeping trimillennial vision.

Küng's project is complex. I propose to examine only his notion of managing theology in the postmodern age, what he means by the Gospel and truth, and where he thinks Christianity is going in the next millennium.³

THE POSTMODERN PARADIGM

Küng holds the division of Christendom in the sixteenth century was a disaster from which the Church has never recovered. What was needed at the time was an Erasmus without the historical Erasmus's flight from commitment, a weakness which allowed the Church to be torn between Luther's fanatical excesses and Rome's blind intransigence.⁴ Küng, perhaps, thinks of himself as the Erasmus of today, as he calls for a revival of biblical thinking without biblicism, a renewal of tradition without traditionalism, and a restoration of Christian authority without authoritarianism.⁵

Küng puts it simply: the Church has lost the world. The modern age is dead; the new age, the “postmodern,” is here; and the Church has no credible relation to either. He does not want Christians to give up the triumphs of the Enlightenment—scientific method and the democratic process, but does want them to move beyond “the superstitious faith in reason and progress.” A new religiousness has taken off on its own outside the Church, he maintains, and its energies must be engaged in reconstructing the Christianity of the future.⁶

Küng finds Thomas S. Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions suggestive for what he would like to see done in Christian theology.⁷ Kuhn, in that now famous book, argues that new hypotheses in science arise through what he calls “paradigm changes” in scientific thought, those global shifts in theory, like Newton's and Einstein's physics, which turn science in fundamentally new directions. Although the new theoretical models build on the methodology accepted in their time, they push those systems into breakdown by creating questions beyond their power to answer. The result is that, partly through rational and partly through irrational gropings, a novel scientific insight, adequate to the questions, arises. Meeting resistance at first, it weaves a pattern of credible data around itself and becomes the only thing thinkable. Kuhn holds that no old model can be replaced until a new one is ready; and that the new model can even get shelved briefly, while the necessary psychological and institutional changes necessary to receive it get moved into place. Witness the resistance to the work of Galileo. Kuhn believes that science is now entering a new “third” phase, in which the positivist falsification method will yield to a more holistic inductive approach.⁸

Küng says the theological epochs through which Christian thinking has passed can be understood in terms of Kuhn's paradigm analysis.⁹ “Macro-paradigms” in theology can be illustrated by the Augustinian and Thomistic revolutions; “meso-paradigms” by the intermediate shifts in thinking like those surrounding the idea of grace or those in sacramental theology; and “micro-paradigms” by the debates over the hypostatic union in Christology.¹⁰ Küng acknowledges that Kuhn's theory constitutes a problem for theology, for while science can treat every paradigm as “provisory,” theology must hold to a continuing truth that doesn't so much need discovering as recovering.

Distinguishing between theological and scientific paradigm upheavals, Küng states that Christian theology is “essentially defined by its relation to history,” especially to its origins. The primal testimony, the New Testament, remains “its continual reflexive point.” All the historic creeds and theologies take as a presupposition that the Gospel as presented in Scripture is the norm of Christian thought.¹¹ Changes in theology take place on the basis of the Gospel, but never against the Gospel, he asserts. The “norming norm” (norma normans) of the living Word always corrects all historic “normed norms” (norma normata), those creedal standards by which the Church has met the challenges to its teaching. Changes in theological history, however, in contrast to shifts in scientific history, tend to come about regrettably through defiance and condemnation, shelving new ideas by suppressing their discussion, then transforming accepted new models into iron dogma.¹²

What theological model is right for the postmodern era? Küng answers that it must be “true” (neither conformist nor opportunistic), “free” (non-authoritarian), “critical” (non-traditionalistic), and “ecumenical” (non-denominational). The two constants for this theology are (1) the ever-changing world and (2) the never-changing Gospel.¹³

In 1983, an International Ecumenical Symposium took place in Tübingen, in which Küng was a participant along with theological notables like Langdon Gilkey (Chicago), Jürgen Moltmann (Tübingen), J. B. Metz (Münster), Jean-Pierre Jossua (Paris), Edward Shillebeeckx (Nijmegen), Mariasussi Dhavamony (Rome), to name a few. The symposium took up the paradigm approach as a means of piloting Christian theology through the postmodern crisis. Kuhn was invited, but could not be present; Stephen Toulmin, of Chicago, a student of developing scientific concepts and critic of Kuhn, was present and helped shape the discussions.¹⁴ It was concluded by all present that while no one theologian or theology can create a paradigm change, every theologian must face the question of whether his thinking meets the paradigm expectations of his time.¹⁵ The symposium believed there were some matters that “we don't have to argue about anymore”: the polycentrism of the political world, the ambiguous powers of technology for good or ill, persisting social antagonisms, the weakening of the belief in progress, the threat to the university world and “book” culture by the spread of specialization, the jolt to Christianity as the one, true religion, and the awakening of suffering minorities, especially women.¹⁶ From the distance of just six years one can see the costive leftward tilt of such ecumenism.

Further illustrative of the quite un-Erasmus-like extremes to which the conferees gave utterance was the outline of the four dimensions which are to be translated into theological reality: (1) the biblical, in which theology must remain true to the “one constant” of the Gospel while subjecting Scripture to historico-critical exegesis and de-masculinizing biblical terminology; (2) the historical, in which the universal relativism of liberal humanism is replaced with “the relativism of a universal network of connections” (time reconceived as a “web” instead of a “line”) and in which there will be created a viable symbiosis (!) between history and the environment with a view to world peace; (3) the ecumenical, in which Christian thought moves from a denominational-controversial style to an inclusive, “relatively absolute” (!) style, reading the Scripture in the “Indian” (Far Eastern) manner and paving the way through an “inner Christian ecumene” for a future ecumene of all religions; (4) the political, in which is born a new whole-world political consciousness. The symposium couldn't decide whether European or Latin American liberation theology would prevail in the struggle against fringe colonialism, but agreed that there had to be theological diversity in the postmodern paradigm. Küng summarizes the ethos of this new “critical ecumenical” theology as both Catholic and Protestant, traditional and contemporary, Christocentric and ecumenical, scholarly and practical.¹⁷ No Christian point of view, whatever its origin, is to be left out of the communal process.

MANAGING THE PARADIGM SHIFTS

Putting aside Küng's summary of the ethos of critical ecumenical theology, from which it would be difficult to demure, given its limitless inclusiveness, if one takes up the “no longer debatable” assumptions that the International Ecumenical Symposium accepted as operative for postmodernism and the four dimensions which the conferees said must be translated into theological reality, one is puzzled about the shape of the paradigm under discussion. Is there a clue as to which of the postmodern leitmotifs is fundamental to the rest? Most models of understanding which alter history seem, in retrospect, to have been determined by seminal work in a single arena of thought, or even by a single figure: the apostolic age, the work of Augustine, or Aquinas's recovery of Aristotelianism. We deal here with what Jacob Burckhardt aptly called “the theory of storms.”¹⁸ Paradigm changes are immensely complex, this the symposium confessed.¹⁹ Yet in the tabulation of “musts” the symposium asks postmodern theology to take up some issues which seem less than paradigmatic; in fact one might ask whether the whole set together constitute a credible paradigm. What mysterious mustering of ontic shocks does “the relationism of a universal network of connections” point to? What epistemic metamorphosis is a “relatively absolute” style of ecumenical conversation coming to grips with? Does the advocacy of an “Indian” way of reading the Bible or de-masculinizing biblical terminology amount to anything more than surrender to current politico-expository rages? How permanent is the concussion of specialization on the life of high culture? Isn't the damage to intellectual life more in the way of a “capitulation of the clerks”? Isn't what Küng and the symposium ask theology to do, despite their objections to the domestication of Christianity by Western culture, really a step toward the assimilation of Christianity to a vague, even Eastern religionism?

What is postmodernism? Used first as an appellative for changes in architecture … àla Mies van der Rohe and Frank Lloyd Wright, it then invaded the other arts to denote anything anti-traditional, even nihilistic. Küng uses the term simply as a heuristic device, although preferring the term “ecumenical” to describe the presuppositional changes through which the world is moving.²⁰ Modernity's confidence in enlightened reason, science, and progress is giving way, he says, to something not yet nameable. Central to this change, however, is a world religious crisis. The duty of theologians, thus, is to “sublate” the repressed dimensions of modernity, especially those of religion, “to produce a new, liberating, enriching effect.”²¹

Postmodernism, thus, is little more than a tag for something ambivalent, even indeterminate.

Are immediately visible alterations in scientific theory, social arrangements, or political enthusiasm portents of global shifts in human consciousness? If they are, can they be programmed for? It is vital to recognize the challenges to faith that arise, but can one build a heilsgeschichtliche technique which will enable the Church to meet religious assaults for the next one thousand years? Even the next one hundred? One can be pardoned for being skeptical when programs like those of Küng are put before the Christian public.

What “world” is Küng talking about? We cannot blame Küng for missing the recent tidal shifts in the communist world, but were there not signs of a boom in the world market economy during the eighties? Surely, it was not unknown in 1983 that technology was changing the character of labor. The symposium drops not one tear over family disintegration in the West. How were these issues missed?

What “theologians” is Küng talking about? Küng is no stick-in-the-mud. He confesses that theological subjects and locales can change: “[N]ot only the university, but the case community can be a place for theology.”²² Non-academic types can participate—industrialists, engineers, seamen—anyone who has a serious theological interest. Yet he appears to set aside as of no consequence the thinking of rapidly growing fundamentalists, evangelicals, and traditional Catholics. Shouldn't the Church in its entirety be represented at ecumenical paradigm conferences? “Ideological opponents are neither to be ignored nor labeled as heretics,” he asserts.²³ Where, then, are the exegetical scholars like F. F. Bruce and George Eldon Ladd, the theologians like Bernard Lonergan and Carl F. H. Henry, the historians of thought like Russell Kirk and Thomas Molnar, journalists like William F. Buckley and George Will, scientists like Stanley Jaki?

What “theologies” get included? Where do the humble sects come in—the Mennonites, the holiness alliances, the charismatics? Do fringe groups like Jehovah's Witnesses, Christian Scientists, and Mormons have a word of faith for the ecumene? Küng's proposals seem addressed to a very exclusive circle whose thinking is congruent with the outer limits of mainline Protestantism. Küng has even less longitudinal sympathy, the kind that embraces the triumphant dead. Augustine, Aquinas, yea even Peter and Paul, are all to be brought under the corrective ordination of the new paradigm.²⁴

Most conservatives would share Küng's belief that the death of religion expected in late modernity (Marx, Nietzsche) has not taken place and that what is at issue is not “forgetfulness of being” (Heidegger) but forgetfulness of God (Buber).²⁵ This presupposition, however, is hardly enough to warm one up to Küng's ecumenism.

KüNG AND THE TRUTH

“There can be no true Church without a true theology,” he announces. Christianity needs “a thinking account of faith that seeks and says Christian truth in truthfulness.”²⁶ These statements present Küng's first criterion for the new theological paradigm.

All theological truth is to be measured, he writes, by “the Gospel.” Even the New Testament must be measured by the Gospel, since the New Testament is a collection of apostolic and sub-apostolic responses to the original oral kerygma concerning Christ. In fact, according to Küng, the New Testament is the first instance of adapting the Gospel to a thought-world receiving it and thus provides a model of how Christians of every age are to rethink the Word of God in terms of the ever-changing paradigms controlling their discourse.²⁷ Küng couldn't be more specific:

The common key experience of salvation in Israel and Jesus as coming from God is never given “pure,” but always through varying modes of interpretation, through varying sorts of concepts and images, schemata and models of understanding. These can be concepts such as “Son of Man” and “Son of God,” images such as the descent into hell and the ascent into heaven, individual schemata such as bloody sacrifice of atonement and ransoming of slaves in the doctrine of redemption, whole models of understanding such as the apocalyptic vision of the end of time…: they all derive from a past world of experience and language, which for the most part no longer speaks directly to us.²⁸

What needs to be done?

… [T]he crucial point is that … the Gospel … once again be heard afresh and understood. … Theology, then, is interested not just in a simple “application” of a supposedly eternal doctrine, but rather in the “trans-lation” of a historical message … into our present-day world of experience.²⁹

He asks,

What then should decide the issue in the crucial first-and-last questions affecting man and humanity? The biblical experiences, the Christian message, the Gospel, Jesus Christ himself. For this Christ Jesus is in person the “essence of Christianity,” the “Christian message,” the “Gospel” itself, indeed God's “Word,” “made flesh.”³⁰

The test of all theological truth, then, is the Gospel. But what is the Gospel? Scanning Küng's language at this point is a test in reading. In one statement above the Good News has a threefold character: (1) “biblical experiences,” (2) “the Christian message” (“Gospel” is in apposition to this?), and (3) “Jesus Christ himself.” The phrases in the series, by no means identical, move as if by subliminal direction from experience through speech to personal reality as if one were doing the most obvious thing in the world. Küng teases logic while weaving a spell in order to say that Christian truth is a non-propositional Person: “for this Christ Jesus is in person the ‘essence of Christianity’. .. the ‘Gospel’ itself.”

What is gained by metamorphizing the kerygma into a numinous presence, even if the presence is that of the living Christ? Well, it removes the embarrassment of propositional revelation for one thing. God can thus reveal himself immanently within human experience; and since, on Küng's terms, human experience is already saturated with pre-understandings which shape revelation as it arrives, the Gospel is always relative to its time. If the New Testament writers use the only apparatus available to them—the legendary-miraculous, their schematic cannot be binding on us. To be faithful to Saints John and Paul we must use non-supernaturalistic keys to unlock the Word for our day.

Küng's principle, however, undermines his assertion that the Gospel brings all theologies under judgment. The nominalism of his formative notion does just the reverse of what he affirms: it focuses the weight of interest on the interpreting instead of on the thing to be interpreted. If this is the case, are age-old narratives and concepts ever disposable? Does not continuity in Christian belief, on its nearer, more accessible human side, mean we have to focus on all interpretive models, not just our own, as a way to discovering the aletheia of Scripture? Surely, if the older models were so potent a source of discovery in their time, shouldn't something of rare perspicacity be left over in them by which we can be enriched? If the Church includes the mighty dead in glory, would not churchly continuity suggest we are in interpretive communion with Christian experience in all its catholicity?

More directly, one can raise the epistemological question of how we can “experience” Jesus apart from all authoritative criteria of faith, such as are found in the canonical texts. Abandoning these, how does one know, in publicly persuasive terms, that he is in touch with the “Living Word”? When is a “presence” the Presence?

Küng protests that he does not want to break with tradition, only decalcify it.³¹ The Gospel will take care that old paradigms are not wholly repressed.³² The antique modalities, however, must never get in the way of the living Christ nor be equated with his truth.³³ The criterion has to be “understood in and through the experiences that believers have had, in very different ways, in this history with their God.”³⁴ The truth of Scripture can only be revealed to faith. We must bring faith to the testimony, we cannot get it from the testimony.³⁵ One asks what kind of credulity is here being demanded of the seeker that couldn't with equal justification be demanded were he confronted with the Zend-Avesta?

Most orthodox Christians could accept Küng's position that the Bible is a gathering into one the many experiences believers have had in history with their God; but if “experience” is taken as something nonverifiable either historically or rationally, even the most sympathetic reader must fall into bewilderment.

It is clear that Küng is using the word truth axiologically. He treats truth sheerly as a value.³⁶ His program is addressed not to the intellect but to the will. He has no criterion of truth to offer but that of being reasonable and open. When is one's faith a “true” faith? Why, when it is trusting. The fundamental a priori of all knowing, he argues, is trust.

… [T]he very act of having this basic trust reveals an original rationality, an inner reasonableness: a basic trust that in this so broken world can be experienced as a gift.³⁷

Has Küng happened on a new Cartesian certainty? I reason as if I could, therefore I can! If he has, he vitiates his discovery by adding that this rationality is “original” (does he mean a founding act of consciousness or something simply unique?); or further, when he describes this trust as “inner reasonableness” (is reasonableness ever anything but “inner,” or does he mean “innate”?); and still further, when he states that this basic trust is a “gift.” Does he mean a “given”? But Küng ranges from the discursive to the devotional with mystifying agility.

Küng's implicit usage contradicts his explicit teaching. The truth in Christianity, he is declaring, is its ethical adaptability to the changing paradigms of discourse through the Christian's ineffable relationship to Christ. It is on the basis of this judgment that we are to go on agreeing with all the rest he says. But to say this is to be propositional not numinous. Dare we then go on to believe that there are only propositional truths about Christianity, but none in Christianity?

CHRISTIANITY AND OTHER RELIGIONS

In the third, climactic section of his book, “A New Departure Toward a Theology of the World Religions,” the true telos of Küng's critical ecumenism comes into view. He asks the question, “Is there one true religion?”

His answer? From the outside (i.e., objectively) there are many true religions; from the inside (subjectively) there is only one—mine.³⁸ There is no neutral position from which one can see which religion is the true one.³⁹ What then can one do? Confess his “historically conditioned position” and say, “Since I cannot possibly take all the paths at the same time, I'll take the one I know.”⁴⁰ We must realize, Küng argues, that real Christians, after all, have never believed in Christianity, but in Christ. The living Word is their regulative theological principle.⁴¹ Forgetting this, Christians over the centuries have fallen into untrue religion. Prophets have had to arise in the Church and “enlightened ones” outside the Church to call the faithful back to this truth, “among whom the prophet Muhammed and the Buddha should no doubt be included par excellence.”⁴²

There is no Christianity-in-itself, no Buddhism-in-itself, he advises. No given configuration of a religion should be considered its one holy form.⁴³ During its history a religion wears many faces. Is the real for religion, then, the apparent? Once again Küng's theology hovers on suicide, for if a religion is whatever it happens to be at a certain time and place, then there are no untrue versions into which that faith can fall, nor need any prophets arise to correct them.

The intentio of his theology is consistent when he winds up by saying that Christianity, like all religions, is in via (“on the way”). In the end, he pronounces, no religion will be left standing, only “the one Inexpressible, to whom all religions are oriented.”⁴⁴

But wait. There is a test for true religion, one to which every religion must submit. A religion is true, he tergiversates, when it promotes human flourishing—when it creates social solidarity and tolerance, when it replaces ecclesiocentrism with philanthropy, when it relativizes religious constitutions for human good:

This means that the more humane (in the spirit of the Sermon on the Mount) Christianity is, the more it appears to the outside as a true religion.⁴⁵

And so the pragmatist, not the existentialist, test prevails.

I have not seen the German edition of Küng's book, so I cannot be certain what word is being translated by Heinegg to give humane in English. Judging from Küng's approach, I am sure that the sentimental-humanitarian reading is accurate. It is clear Küng cannot understand at least one strand of New Testament theology if he thinks the Sermon on the Mount is humane. It is true that in the opening beatitudes certain qualities of life, like poverty of spirit, meekness, and purity of heart are praised, but thereafter the severest burdens of discipleship are imposed on the believer, even to the climactic, “Be ye perfect, even as your Father in Heaven is perfect.”⁴⁶ “Humane” for whom?

Küng shows only a conventional knowledge of Hinduism and Buddhism, both of which are based on the profoundest pessimism about the nature of existence and hold that deliverance from the horrors of karma is achieved by the nihilation of consciousness (moksha). The Buddha's originality consisted in offering a way of meditation which made the vigors of yoga sutra and the tortures of Jain asceticism unnecessary. What Christianity, with its assumptions about the goodness of creation and the meaningfulness of history, can have to do with such acosmic religions is difficult to understand. One would have expected Küng to begin his “synthesis” by an approach to the theistic faiths of the East, like Parseeism and Sikhism.

Is Küng's critical ecumenical theology Christian, or Christianistic—something imitative of Christianity, an attempt to restore the appearance of apostolicity, yet alien to apostolicity at the core?⁴⁷

Küng may think of himself as an Erasmus at heart, but he is no Erasmus in style. Learned, prodigiously energetic, he writes repetitiously and cumbrously. What he needs are the opposite virtues of restraint and elegance to approach the Erasmian ideal.

If Erasmus were alive today would he be a Catholic or a Protestant? Who knows? I think he would not be a Küngian.

Notes

1. Translated by Peter Heinegg (New York, 1988). Hereafter to be cited as “Küng.”

2. I belong to a religious movement originating largely in nineteenth-century rural America, the broad aims of which were a plea for Christian unity on the basis of the New Testament alone. Some present-day adherents of the movement believe Küng is speaking their language.

3. To be fair to Küng it might be more accurate to say, “where Christianity should go in the future,” since Küng, in spite of the book's title, makes no claim to be spelling out a thousand year program. Yet if his dream of a single world religion comes to pass, it will take at least another thousand years, and then some, to bring about, if the past two thousand years tell us anything about religious progress.

4. Küng, pp. 20-46.

5. Ibid., pp. 2-8.

6. Ibid., pp. 3-10.

7. Chicago, 1962.

8. Küng, pp. 129-131, 147.

9. Küng prefers “models of interpretation” for “paradigm,” but rarely uses his preferred expression.

10. Küng, p. 134. I am not prepared within the limits of this paper to debate the appropriateness of Küng's taxonomic illustrations, but suspect they could be vigorously challenged.

11. Vatican II calls Scripture “the soul” of Christian theology, Küng points out. Ibid., p. 17.

12. Ibid., pp. 155-160.

13. Ibid., pp. 164-168.

14. Stephen Toulmin, Human Understanding: The Collective Use and Evaluation of Concepts (Princeton, 1972).

15. Küng, p. 173.

16. Ibid., pp. 175-177.

17. Ibid., p. 206.

18. Jacob Burckhardt, Force and Freedom: Reflections on History, edited by James Hastings Nichols (New York, 1943), p. 79.

19. Küng, p. 173.

20. Ibid., p. 2.

21. Ibid., p. 9. Religion in the modern period has, Küng states, “for thoroughly understandable reasons, been ignored, tolerated, repressed, and persecuted,” but will rise in the postmodern paradigm to “play an important, though more diffuse role.” Ibid., p. 10.

22. Ibid., p. 174.

23. Ibid., p. 205.

24. Küng says traditional theology is to be included in the postmodern ecumene, yet he pans the Thomistic metaphysics in which he was schooled.

25. Küng, p. 7.

26. Ibid., p. 161.

27. Ibid., p. 167.

28. Ibid., pp. 167-168.

29. Ibid., p. 168.

30. Ibid.

31. Ibid., pp. 154-60.

32. Ibid., p. 158.

33. Ibid., p. 159.

34. Ibid., p. 167. “… God writes straight even in crooked lines and can reach his goals by way of our humanity and historicity without doing any violence to human beings.” Ibid., p. 55.

35. “Anyone who experiences Scripture this way, as the Gospel in faith, becomes certain that the Bible is interpenetrated and filled with the Spirit, that it is truly ‘inspired.’” Ibid., p. 63.

36. Emeth in the Hebrew and aletheia in the Greek, he points out, mean fidelity, constancy, reliability. Ibid. The question of truth, he says, aims at more than pure theory; the truth is never only established in systems of true propositions, “as opposed to which all others are false,” truth is at the same time a praxis, a way of experience. If religion promises an ultimate unity of meanings for living, then “the True (verum) and the Good (bonum) … overflow into one another in religion; and the question of the truth … is at the same time the question of … valuableness.” Ibid., pp. 238-39.

37. Ibid., p. 202.

38. Ibid., p. 248.

39. Ibid., p. 250.

40. Ibid., p. 254.

41. Ibid., p. 251.

42. Ibid.

43. Ibid., p. 223.

44. Ibid., p. 255.

45. Ibid., p. 253.

46. Matthew 5:48 (KJV).

47. Is Küng's theology a revival of the modernism of Alfred Loisy and George Tyrrell? A number of the old marks are there: the desire to bring Catholic thought into line with Protestant higher criticism, the demand for a wholly naturalistic/immanentist account of the origins of Christianity, the notion of revelation as man's interpretation of his religious experience, opposition to propositional revelation, the test of truth as fruitfulness for life and society, and so on. Frederick Copleston finds the clue to modernism in the assumption that the human mind cannot transcend the sphere of consciousness. Loisy, Copleston says, held that Christianity promoted the ideal of humanity and was passing into the religion of humanity. See Frederick Copleston, S. J., A History of Philosophy, Vol. IX. Maine de Biran to Sartre (Garden City, 1985, c1974), p. 247.