6 Revelation in History
Reason and revelation have figured as two opposing principles in a long tradition of debate about the sources and the criteria for Christian believing. As we have seen, the eighteenth century was, above all, the time when the attempt was made to show that Christianity was acceptable within the limits of reason and without recourse to revelation. There is a long Anglican tradition which affirms Scripture, tradition, and reason as the three sources and criteria for the Church's faith. Contemporary theological debate has highlighted the role of experience as providing the contemporary context within which alone the message of Scripture and tradition has to be grasped. The contemporary experience of people, especially their experiences of oppression or alienation, are seen as the context without which the text cannot be rightly interpreted. How are we to understand the proper roles of and the interrelations between these three factors in seeking firm foundations for our belief?
In one respect we can claim that there has been an important clarification in the course of the last three decades. The relation between the first two of the Anglican triad-Scripture and tradition-has been a matter of dispute between Protestants and Roman Catholics ever since the Reformation. At the first session of the Second Vatican Council, when the first draft for the conciliar statement on revelation was presented to the bishops, it had as its title The Two Sources of Revelation. That draft was rejected. The document finally promulgated has as its title Divine Revelation. Its first two chapters are called "Revelation Itself" and "The Transmission of the Divine Revelation." Tradition is thus in no sense a distinct source for divine truth; it is that continuing activity in which, to quote the Council's text, "the Church's full canon of the sacred books is known, and the sacred writings themselves are more profoundly understood and unceasingly made active in her" (Verbuin Dei 11.8). Tradition is not a separate source of revelation from Scripture; it is the continuing activity of the Church through the ages in seeking to grasp and express under new conditions that which is given in Scripture. The study of Scripture takes place within the continuing tradition of interpretation.
It would be equally inappropriate to speak of reason as though it were a third source of true knowledge to be put alongside Scripture and tradition as the third in a triad. No one can grasp and make sense of what is given in Scripture except by the use of reason, and-similarly-reason does not operate except within a continuing tradition of speech which is the speech of a community whose language embodies a shared way of understanding. Reason is a faculty with which we seek to grasp the different elements in our experience in an ordered way so that, as we say, they make sense. It is not a separate source of information about what is the case. It can only function within a continuing linguistic and cultural tradition. What is very obvious when one looks back-for instance-on the use of the word "reason" in the theological apologetics of the eighteenth century is that the word denoted a set of assumptions about what is the case, assumptions derived from the science and philosophy of the time. The sociology of knowledge has taught us to recognize the fact, which is obvious once it is stated, that in every human society there is what Peter Berger calls a "plausibility structure," a structure of assumptions and practices which determine what beliefs are plausible and what are not. It is easier to see the working of the plausibility structure in a culture of a different time or place than it is to recognize it in one's own. When "reason" is adduced as a third source of truth, or a third element in a threefold criterion of truth, it is obvious that what is happening is simply that the reigning plausibility structure is being allowed to operate. Now that the Roman Catholic duet of Scripture and tradition has been eliminated, it is to be hoped that the Anglican trio of Scripture, tradition, and reason will soon follow it. Let me try to spell out more fully why I think this should happen.
What was said in the previous chapter about the role of tradition in science helps us to recognize that all use of reasoning depends on and is embodied in a tradition. First, and most obviously, we cannot reason except by the use of language. Language embodies the ways in which a continuing community has learned to grasp its experience in a coherent way. It expresses the concepts which give shape to its understanding. And the language is only learned as, from early childhood, we use it in the way that our parents and teachers and older contemporaries use it. In learning a language we are being inducted into a tradition, and we have no way of developing our powers of reasoning except through the use of this language. Later we may also learn a second or third language, and that raises issues to which I will come in a moment.
Second, we learn to use our reasoning powers by entering into the experiences, the discoveries, the debates, and the disagreements of those who have gone before us. A tradition of reasoning is never static. It exists only through the continually renewed efforts of those who live in it to say what rationality is, what way of grasping things makes sense. This will involve debate and disagreement, sometimes passionate. To someone living in a totally different tradition, these debates may seem meaningless and futile.
It is customary for people living in the contemporary post-Enlightenment world to express mocking astonishment at the passion of the theological debates in the first centuries of the Church's history, or those among the scholastic theologians of the late Middle Ages. Certainly no one could say that they did not know how to reason: their reasoning was of a subtlety and power that has seldom been matched. But their reasonings do not make sense to one who is completely domesticated in a different plausibility structure.
Third, the development of a tradition of rationality is never unrelated to the social, political, economic, military, and cultural changes which the society in question is going through. The tradition is never a merely cerebral one. The rationality which is accepted is part of and is embodied in the total life of a community. It responds to the new experiences which that community is having-whether these come from outside or from within. The tradition of thought is not a disembodied ghost which has a life apart from the total life of the society which carries this tradition. The rationality is embodied in this society, with all its elements of contingency, particularity, and sheer happenedness. By this I do not mean to endorse the determinism of some Marxists and sociologists. I do not mean that the ideas about which a society argues are merely the products of its economic or military or other experiences. That way leads, of course, to logical absurdity. But neither is the rationality something developed apart from the actual experiences of the society in question. There is a continuing reciprocal relation of challenge and response in which a society whose tradition is alive and vigorous responds to and seeks to master its circumstances.
Fourth, it might be objected that this way of understanding the use of our rational powers leads to complete relativism. If all rationality is the exercise of the reasoning powers of a particular community, responding to particular historical happenings and using a particular language; if there is no such thing as a supracultural rationality which can judge between rival forms of rational discourse, do we then have to surrender the quest for truth? Is there no truth which is true for all, but only "truth-as-it-appears-to-us-in-our-culture"? Following (in part) the argument of Alasdair MacIntyre (Whose Justice, Which Rationality? chaps. 18 and 19), I suggest three lines of thought in response to this objection.
a. All traditions of rational discourse are continually changing in the effort to make sense of experience. Old formulations and concepts are called in question as not being adequate to the realities which the community is facing. Sometimes the tradition is strong and flexible enough to respond to the new situation without a radical break from the past. Sometimes this does not happen. The tradition faces a crisis. There are internal self-contradictions: there are experiences which cannot be understood in terms of the existing ways of thought. At this point another, rival tradition of rationality appears on the scene-perhaps one that was always present but muted by the success of the reigning tradition, perhaps a new arrival. It confronts the reigning tradition with a radical challenge. It offers another way of seeing things, another vision of the shape of things and of the human story, a paradigm shift. Some, perhaps many, adherents of the old tradition find the new one more adequate to the realities they face, and are converted to the new view. The fact that this happens demonstrates that while all exercise of rationality is within a social tradition, the tradition is not ultimate; it is subject to the test of adequacy to the realities which it seeks to grasp. Truth is grasped, can only be grasped, within a tradition, but traditions can be and are judged adequate or inadequate in respect of their perceived capacity to lead their adherents into the truth.
b. Traditions of rationality are embodied in languages. A rival tradition cannot become a serious threat to the adherents of an existing tradition unless these latter are able to learn the language in which the rival tradition is embodied. One may learn a language at two levels. It may be simply a second language: the learner continues to think and reason in the native language, but learns to find words and phrases in the second language which correspond as closely as possible to those of the first language. But one may acquire what Maclntyre calls a "second first language," a language which is learned in the same way that a child learns to use the native tongue. A missionary or an anthropologist who really hopes to understand and enter into the adopted culture will not do so by trying to learn the language in the way a tourist uses a phrasebook and a dictionary. It must be learned in the way a child learns to speak, not by finding words to match one's existing stock, but by learning to think and to speak in the way the people of the country do. A person who seeks to learn it in that way quickly discovers that the two languages are mutually translatable only to a very limited extent. Words used in the two languages to denote the same kinds of things have very different meanings because of the different roles that these things play in the two cultures. If I may take an example from Indian experience, anyone who has been nourished in the Saivite devotional poetry of the Tamil poets, and who is also as thoroughly at home in English as many Indians are, knows that the poetry is untranslatable into English. Of course the words can be rendered into English, but if the resulting English text were given for translation back into Tamil by someone who did not know the originals, the resulting translation would mean something quite different. There are many Indians for whom English is (in Maclntyre's phrase) a second first language, and some (alas few) English for whom Tamil is a second first language. Both of these will in some measure have come to be at home in both worlds. The English missionary can feel the force and beauty of the worldview embodied in the Tamil poetry. He can set it beside the worldview in which as an Engllish person he has been trained and the biblical worldview into which he seeks to grow. There is thus an internal dialogue in which the question at stake is: "Which is more adequate for grasping and coping with reality with which all human beings are faced?" This is a dialogue about truth. In this dialogue the two traditions of rationality are compared with one another in respect of their adequacy to the realities with which all human beings have to deal. And, obviously, this internal dialogue is the necessary precondition for the external dialogue which is at the center of a missionary's proper concern. Although the two ways of reasoning are not mutually translatable except to a limited degree, that does not mean that they cannot be compared in respect of their adequacy to enable human beings to know and cope with reality.
c. If the relativist claims that, since all reasoning is embodied in a particular social context, no claim to know the truth can be sustained, one has to ask for the basis on which this claim is made. It is, after all, a claim to know something about reality-namely that reality is unknowable. What is the social context within which this claim can be formulated? The answer, MacIntyre suggests, is that the social context is that cosmopolitan world in which individuals live a rootless existence and are without a firm and stable social tradition. One element in this kind of cosmopolitan culture is the use of an international language such as English into which, it is supposed, all forms of human thought can be translated. Translations of the literature of a vast variety of human societies are in fact available. The person shaped by this culture will thus have the illusion of having an overview of all these different traditions without having had the actual experience of seeing the world through any of them.
For a person who dwells in the contemporary cosmopolitan culture, shaped by the reigning dichotomy between "facts" and "beliefs," it will be natural to relativize all the differing belief systems. And when, in this culture, "reason" is set against the specific, historically shaped tradition of Christian belief, it is obvious that what is happening is that the "plausibility structure" is performing its normal function. The Christian, on the other hand, will relativize the reigning plausibility structure in the light of the gospel. There is no disembodied "reason" which can act as impartial umpire between the rival claims.
The conclusion of the discussion so far is that when reason and tradition are opposed as separate or rival criteria of truth, then the nature of reason is being misunderstood. Every exercise of reason depends on a social and linguistic tradition which is, therefore, something which has the contingent, accidental character of all historical happenings. Lessing's great gulf which he confessed himself unable to jump, the gulf between accidental events of history and universal truths of reason, disappears on closer inspection. There are no "truths of reason" except those that have been developed in a historical tradition. The reasoning of Aristotle was developed in the actual context of the life of the Greek polis. The reasoning of John Locke was developed in the context of the rising property-owning citizenship of the England of that period. The reasoning which forms the texture of Christian theology arises out of the historical happenings which form the subject matter of the biblical record. It is the activity of a specific community among other human communities, namely that community which con tinually seeks to understand and cope with all experience in the light of what was disclosed to those who were participants in or witnesses of these happenings. The happenedness, the particularity, the contingency of these events, and the consequent particularity of the Christian Church as one community among the many human communities, do not invalidate the universal claim which its rational activities make and must make. It shares this particularity with every form of rationality. This social context of rationality becomes clear when we look at the use of the idea of "self-evident truths" which played such a large role in the eighteenth century. The famous statement of the American founding fathers, "we hold these truths to be self-evident... ," reads oddly now. It is obvious to us that the statements which follow these words are by no means self-evident. What we call "self-evident truths" are not the starting point for rational argument, but the product of a long history of rational argument. The mathematician John Puddefoot writes: "An axiom set is not the foundation of a system, but the product of generations of mathematical enquiry as it has eventually been formalised, or axiomatised" (Logic and Affirmation, p. 16).
Clearly, then, reason does not operate except within a continuing social tradition which cannot be understood as a purely cerebral operation unrelated to the ongoing experiences of the community which carries this tradition forward. The contemporary advocates of "contextual theology" wish to emphasize the role of contemporary experience in the formulation of theological truth. Theology, they affirm, cannot be a matter of timeless truths handed down from generation to generation in Bible and creeds; it must arise out of the experience which people are having now. It must be, as is often said, inductive rather than deductive. It does not start with dogmatic statements-the "axioms" of theology-and then argue deductively from them as to what is to be believed and done now; rather, it must begin with analysis of the present situation and discover, in this situation, what God is doing now. One must begin, as is often said, with the facts. This approach to theology is particularly congenial in the English scene with its strong tradition of empiricism. But, as the modern philosophers of science have so thoroughly taught us, "facts" are always theory laden. What we see depends on the conceptual framework formed by the tradition in which we stand. All experience is interpreted experience. The empiricist concept of experience as simply bare uninterpreted sense data was, says Maclntyre, a cultural invention of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries designed to bridge the gap which had opened up between "seems to be" and "is." It is a concept of experience which has had a short history and surely has no future. In the development of one particular form of contextual theology, namely the liberation theology of Latin America, it is clear that the "facts" are interpreted through Marxist theory. This may well be, probably is, a necessary corrective to the way of interpreting the facts through the concepts of post-Enlightenment economic theory as Christians in affluent circumstances have done. But it has to be asked whether it is intellectually coherent to use one conceptual framework for diagnosis and another for treatment.
In the third chapter, "Knowing and Believing," I said something about the way in which the data of experience function in the formation of overall theories and worldviews. I spoke of the role of intuition and imagination in the formation of new theoretical patterns. There is an intuition that a kind of rational coherence lies hidden behind apparently incoherent data. There is often a long period of brooding reflection. At some point there is an imaginative leap with a new vision of coherence, something which compels assent by its beauty, its simplicity, and its comprehensiveness. In the present chapter I have spoken of the Christian community as having a tradition of rationality which springs from what was disclosed to those who were witnesses of or participants in the events which are described in the Bible. There is, clearly, some analogy between this kind of disclosure and the imaginative leap that marks the birth of a new vision in scientific discovery. Events and experiences disclose a deeper meaning than first appeared. "Surely God is in this place, and I knew it not." A bush in the desert becomes the place where the lonely exile finds himself met and challenged by a living presence. "Who do you say that I am?" "You are the Christ." These moments of disclosure surely have something in common with the moments when great new visions of the coherence of nature flash into the mind of a scientist. There is something akin to these moments of disclosure in the experience of Kepler describing the discovery of his Third Law: "At last I have brought it to light and recognized its truth beyond all my hopes.... The pure Sun itself of the most marvellous contemplation has shone forth" (Harnionices Mundi, Book V, chap. 1, quoted by Polanyi, Personal Knowledge, p. 7).
Surely there is a likeness between these moments of disclosure in the work of science and the moments of revelation in the story of religion, but certainly there is also a difference. Kepler says, "I have brought it to light"; the prophet says, "God spoke to me." We begin to speak not of discovery but of revelation. What is at stake in this differ ence of language? Does the use of the word "revelation" mean that reason has been left behind? Obviously not. Both the discovery by Kepler of a new pattern in the movement of the heavenly bodies and the disclosure to Moses of a personal calling become the starting point of a tradition of reasoning in which the significance of these disclosures is explored, developed, tested against new experience, and extended into further areas of thought. There is a tradition of rational thought which takes the experience of Moses as its starting point and continues through the succeeding millennia into the present day in various forms, Jewish, Christian, and Islamic. Reason operates in this tradition no less rigorously than in the tradition of thought which has developed from the discoveries of Kepler. The difference between these two traditions is not that one relies on reason and the other on revelation. Both are inconceivable apart from their rationality. The difference lies at the point of contrast between the two ways of expressing the original experience: "I have discovered" and "God has spoken."
The difference lies at the point which was so unforgettably identified in the book of Martin Buber, I and Thou. Buber was the one who, at least for my generation, clarified the distinction between two kinds of experience, the experience of the world of I-it, and the experience of the world of I-You. The former is the world of the autonomous reason, the reason which is in control, which can say at the end, "I have discovered." In the world of I-it, I am in control. I decide what questions to ask, what tests to apply. I analyze and dissect. I formulate hypotheses. I force the world to answer the questions I put to it. I am sovereign. In the world of interpersonal relations the situation is different. It is, of course, true that it is possible to treat other persons in the way I have just described. I may try to force a person to answer the questions I put, but that person can refuse. I may set about analyzing the person's character, but I will not get far unless the person cooperates. I may perform operations to dissect and analyze the structure of his brain to find out how it works, but of course I can only do so by killing the person. In other words, I can gain a vast amount of knowledge about other people by the use of the autonomous reason and the tools which have been developed by psychology, neurology, sociology, and other sciences. The range of such investigation is unlimited. But it will never bring the knowledge of another person which is available to me if I will trust the other person as a free subject, listen to that person, answer the questions he or she puts to me, allow myself to be challenged, in other words abandon the role of sovereign autonomy and become a trusting and listening person. And it is obvious that if I move from the first attitude to the second, what has happened is not that I have abandoned the use of reason. I am still a rational person making rational judgments and drawing rational conclusions from data. The difference is in the role that reason is called to play. Reason has become the servant of a listening and trusting openness instead of being the servant of a masterful autonomy. The difference is not between the use of reason and its abandonment; it is the difference between two ways of understanding the world, one in which the self is sovereign and the other in which I understand myself only in a relation of mutuality with other selves.
It is thus surely clear that the traditional dichotomy, which has played such a large role in theology, between reason and revelation, rests on a serious misunderstanding. The real issue is, of course, between two different views of what is the case. If it is the case that the ultimate reality which lies behind all our experience is, in some sense, personal; if-that is to say-we approach an understanding of that ultimate reality most closely by following the clues which are given to us in personal relationship, then it will follow that personal knowledge of that reality will only be available in the way in which we come to know another person, or at least in a way which is more like this than the way in which we come to know the working of the electrical circuits in the human brain. Of course it is obvious that there is a kind of knowledge available through the ways of knowing which are appropriate to the "I-it" world. There is such a thing as "natural theology." If ultimate reality is best understood on the analogy of personal being, or, to put it in more familiar terms, if God has created all things and has made all human beings in his image, and has never left himself without witness in the mind and conscience of any people, then it will follow that data are available from which it is possible to arrive at the hypothesis that God exists. But between this kind of knowledge and the knowledge that we have of another person whom we know and trust personally, there is a radical discontinuity. The sort of analytical, psychological, sociological, or neurological knowledge of the working of another person's mind is not in any way a step toward the knowing of another person which we experience in love and friendship. By itself, it could only lead us away from such knowledge. That truly personal knowledge only becomes a possibility when I abandon the sovereign claim of autonomous reason, the claim to know the other person without that person's self-communication in speech and act and gesture; when I am ready to stop my investigations and listen, to be addressed, to be called in question, to be summoned to an adventure of trust. Natural theology, in other words, is in no way a step on the way toward the theology which takes God's self-revelation as its starting point. It is more likely, in fact, to lead in the opposite direction.
It is a misunderstanding of this position to say that the human person has no possibility of knowing God. The possibility is actualized in the fact that God does reveal himself and has revealed himself. As Karl Barth says, it is in the actual meeting of God with us that we come to know that "man is capable of perceiving the God who meets him and reveals himself to him; that he is capable of distinguishing him from himself and vice versa; that he can recognize his divine being as such and his word and his will" (CD 111/2, p. 399). It is from this self-revealing of God that men and women can learn to discern the evidences of his presence and work through their daily experience of the created world. In doing so, we use our reason. The true opposition is not between reason and revelation as sources of and criteria for truth. It is between two uses to which reason is put. It may be put to the service of an autonomy which refuses to recognize any other personal reality except its own; which treats all reality as open to the kind of masterful exploration that is appropriate to the world of things, where the appropriate phrase is: "I discovered." But it may equally be put to the service of an openness which is ready to listen to, be challenged and questioned by another personal reality. In neither kind of activity can we engage except as rational beings. When reason is set against revelation, the terms of the debate have been radically confused. What is happening is not that reason is set against something which is unreasonable, but that another tradition of rational argument is being set against a tradition of rational argument which takes as its starting point a moment or moments of divine self-revelation and which will therefore naturally continue to say, not "We discovered," but "God spoke and acted." From another tradition of rational discourse it is of course possible to say that "God" does not exist and that the language of revelation has to be translated into the language of discovery. "God spoke to Moses" will perhaps be translated as "Moses had a religious experience." The lines are then laid down for a dialogue between two traditions of rationality, not between reason and revelation.
The argument so far leaves open a number of questions which have to be addressed in the next two chapters. Are we speaking about a general revelation available to all peoples, or about a special revelation to one people-the people of Israel? Is historicity, historical factu ality, necessarily bound up with this revelation? If the revelation is to one people, how does this relate to God's purpose for his whole creation? We have to speak about revelation as history and about the logic of election. These will be the subjects of the following chapters.
The Christian tradition of rationality takes as its starting point not any alleged self-evident truths. Its starting point is events in which God made himself known to men and women in particular circumstancesto Abraham and Moses, to the long succession of prophets, and to the first apostles and witnesses who saw and heard and touched the incarnate Word of God himself, Jesus of Nazareth. These are all happenings within the world of secular events, the world which is investigated by the natural and human sciences. These revelations were always addressed to men and women in particular contexts and called for specific responses within and appropriate to those contexts. The community which responded to this call and challenge had to make sense of and cope with the ever changing circumstances of their ongoing history in the light of what had been revealed to them in the original events. The originally given revelation had to be continually reappropriated and reinterpreted in the light of new situations. It had to be tested to see whether it could continue to provide coherence and meaning for new experience. It was tested almost to the breaking point, especially in the experience of the destruction of the Jewish state and the long exile. That testing in turn provided the background through which the shattering experience which the first disciples had in the sequence of events leading up to Good Friday could be re-understood within the terms of the original revelation. Continually through the centuries the community seeks to find coherence, meaning, and hope in the events, sometimes apparently meaningless and chaotic events, through which it lives. As we have seen in looking at the work of science, so here the argument is necessarily circular. The believer starts from the faith that reality is rational, that a coherent purpose can be discerned in experience. The struggle is to prove that faith true in circumstances which seem to call it in question. The effort is always a rational effort, an effort to find rational meaning in apparently irrational events through the pattern given in the original revelation. So the tradition is being continually reshaped and reappropriated in the struggle to cope with ongoing experience.
Like every living tradition, it is always threatened with the possibility of disintegration. It has to be sustained in its integrity by the intellectual vigor and practical courage with which its members seek to be faithful to it-not by repeating past formulas but by courageously restating the tradition in the light of new experience. Like the tradition of rationality in the natural sciences, it has to be protected against aberrations. It cannot afford the luxury of chasing every maverick idea that turns up. It requires a discipline which has to be enforced not by any centralized authority but by the discernment of the whole body of its adherents. It makes universal claims, but coexists with other traditions of rational argument which make rival claims to universal validity. There is no neutral judgment seat from which these rival claims can be adjudicated. As I have said earlier, there is no form of rationality which is independent of all socially embodied traditions of rationality and which can therefore judge them all.
Clearly it is such a claim to universal judgment that is embodied in the often expressed idea that all claims to revealed truth must be judged by the canons of reason. There are no canons of reason which are not part of a socially embodied tradition of rational debate. It is especially important to say this because, as I said earlier, we who are Western Christians are also part of an international culture which uses the European languages as its medium of reasoning and which makes claims to universal validity-claims which are made more plausible by the success of this culture in establishing itself throughout the world as the standard of what is called "modernization." It is this way of understanding the world which provides the "plausibility structure" for most of the educated and urbanized peoples of the world. If we adhere to the Christian tradition we thus do so in conscious recognition of the fact that this is a personal decision. In contrast to the long period in which the plausibility structure of European society was shaped by the biblical tradition, and in which one could be a Christian without conscious decision because the existence of God was among the selfevident truths, we are now in a situation where we have to take personal responsibility for our beliefs. When we do so, we are immediately faced with the charge of subjectivity. In a consumer society where the freedom of every citizen to express his or her personal preference is taken as fundamental to human happiness-whether this personal preference is in respect of washing powder or sexual behavior-it will be natural to conclude that adherence to the Christian tradition is also simply an expression of personal preference. The implication will be that claims to universal truth are abandoned and that we are back again in a relativistic twilight. The only firmly established truth is the truth of the reigning plausibility structure, which is bound to deny the Chris tian's claim that God has acted in historic events to reveal and effect his purpose for all humankind.
In some situations it is possible to escape from this problem by withdrawing into a ghetto where, in a small community, the Christian tradition can function as the plausibility structure which is not questioned. There are places where that can happen, but they are few. How then do we deal with the threat of this relativism of a consumer-oriented society? In following the argument of Maclntyre I have suggested the answer. It is that one learns to live so fully within both traditions that the debate between them is internalized. As a Christian I seek so to live within the biblical tradition, using its language as my language, its models as the models through which I make sense of experience, its story as the clue to my story, that I help to strengthen and carry forward this tradition of rationality. But as a member of contemporary British society I am all the time living in, or at least sharing my life with, those who live in the other tradition. What they call self-evident truths are not selfevident to me, and vice versa. When they speak of reason they mean what is reasonable within their plausibility structure. I do not live in that plausibility, but I know what it feels like to live in it. Within my own mind there is a continuing dialogue between the two. Insofar as my own participation in the Christian tradition is healthy and vigorous, both in thought and in practice, I shall be equipped for the external dialogue with the other tradition. There is no external criterion above us both to which I and my opposite number can appeal for a decision. The immediate outcome is a matter of the comparative vigor and integrity of the two traditions; the ultimate outcome is at the end when the one who alone is judge sums up and gives the verdict.