When Caesar wins

...In the case of those religions which go back to Abraham there is a consistent belief that God has been revealed and demands a change of heart...

...We have made religion an entirely private thing, a strongly held, but absolutely personal, opinion...

...I respect those who feel the need to bother me with their beliefs...

...If they were right, it would grieve me too...

...Some of my embarrassment is for their ignorance about what I believe...

...And the proselytizer would argue, of course, that these are people who need to be reached...

...or (if they are as rude as most of them seem to be) making damn nuisances of themselves by implying that the real choice is between the belief pressed by the nuisance, or damnation-a choice which makes it clear to the nonbe-liever that, if these folks are right, the universe is wrong...

...One reason, I suspect, is that objectivity is expected of academicians, and fear of the opinion of colleagues is almost an academic obligation...

...The God made known to Moses from the darkness of Sinai, the God whose answer to Job was not an answer, this unknowable one who nevertheless chose to be revealed, the creator of everything who for reasons beyond our understanding made a covenant with human beings-something here cannot be contained or enshrined, and certainly does not exist for our use...

...Tolerance is a civic virtue, a socially necessary politeness...

...For most of us faith means a belief that a certain set of statements about God is true (which may in practice mean little more than that we hope those statements are true...

...Proselytizing probably works only on those people who are already predisposed to move in the direction of the pros-elytizer...

...It assumes a common ground of interest and focus that is too broad to be very helpful, and ignores much of the ugly history of Jewish and Christian relations...

...All three religions go back to Abraham and the rejection of idolatry-they have been called "Abrahamic" religions-but what seems to me much more significant is that all three are religions of revelation...

...Some Jewish friends once had to be very polite, but very firm, with a friend who was an evangelical Christian and who wanted to give them propaganda published by Jews for Jesus...

...C.S...

...In an odd way, though, I have something in common with them, more than I do with people who find religion an interesting set of metaphors, which we may use and recast for our own ends...

...Very few of us could say with Paul's conviction, "For me, to live is Christ...

...Of course human beings have had to speak of encounters with the divine in metaphorical ways...

...The Roman Pantheon included the gods of all the conquered nations of the empire...

...Since I don't share their particular version of Christianity, some of them believe I will be damned, and it grieves them...

...However, there is a sense in which we can speak of a religious tradition that includes Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, and it is a tradition which differs not only in its history but in its central claim from all other religions...

...This is not a comfortable truth...

...A God of revelation challenges the whole notion of toleration at certain basic levels...

...They understood her sincerity, and it didn't leave a permanent strain in their friendship, partly because she had the sense to drop it...

...This seemed terribly intolerant...

...but something really has been encountered there...

...If we experienced this as a transforming joy, a life-bearing truth, we would not be so generally passive about it...

...A belief in such a God implies that some people may be drastically wrong, and that the degree to which they are wrong could have eternal consequences for them...

...I know that many Jews resent this term, and they have a profoundly important point...

...It could be that we have accepted a more or less pagan approach to our own religion...

...It is easier, in such company, to speak of religious traditions as sets of intriguing metaphors for the human attempt to deal with the unknowable...

...The assumption that the Judeo-Christian tradition is somehow one thing, and that we know and can speak with some clarity about what that thing is, is at the very least misleading...

...Some of them, at least, really are doing it for my sake...

...the Jews were distrusted for refusing to allow the God of Israel to be enshrined with all the other gods...

...The ancient Romans were in some ways real models of tolerance...

...Part of this, no doubt, is a deep belief that the God who would damn, say, Anne Frank or Gandhi for not being Christian isn't worth worshiping...

...The initiative was God's, not ours...

...but this does not really place us in the tradition of those who took to heart the belief that God's love is worth living for, even dying for...

...Recently, proselytizing has fallen out of fashion among mainstream Christians and members of most other faiths...

...it may also affect those who are unchurched, but not happy in their condition...

...The insights of the Baal-Shem, Rumi, St...

...There is a tendency among scholars of religion, including Christian scholars, to downplay the significance of this claim...

...And the Jews were, of course, right...

...They are that, of course...

...It feels so much more reasonable to see the correspondences between the metaphors used by all great traditions-it fits in with the prevailing mood of a pluralistic society...

...But it has limits...

...For relatively few of us does faith have the more profound meaning of complete trust in God, and living with the risks that trusting someone unknowable involves...

...All believed that an unknowable God, for reasons of a compassion so profound we cannot imagine it, chose to be made known to us, and moved toward us...

...Religion is not a constantly shifting set of metaphors for whatever we want it to mean...

...To the extent that we see our religion that way, Caesar wins...

...A God who is not "beyond good and evil," a God who makes demands of us, is not as easy to live with as a more distant and vague divine principle toward which people move as they wish, if indeed they wish to move that way at all...

...We use our religion as an adult version of the story a child finds familiar, comforting, and reassuring...

...Their God was not like the gods of other nations, a god to be used for patriotic reasons or personal gain...

...It is a little embarrassing to have to say to a group of largely agnostic colleagues that while you respect other religious traditions, you believe that something really happened on Sinai, or that Jesus' Resurrection is more than a metaphor for the hope his memory offered his mourning followers...

...Another reason for our passivity with regard to our religion is even more disturbing...

...From the empire's point of view, it was...

...Francis-not to speak of Abraham, Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed-are about something more than the human search...

...This in turn leads some people, no doubt acting out of the goodness of their hearts, to try to save the potentially lost through (if they are polite) initial, cautious attempts at conversation and, if interest is shown, persuasion in the form of more information, with no coercion attached...

...Lewis wrote somewhere that to speak of man's search for God is like speaking of the mouse's search for the cat...

...Proselytization tests those limits in interesting ways...

...As anyone who has had to endure the sales pitch of a door-to-door salesman for Jesus (usually in the form of a pitch for the seller's "Bible-believing" church) can testify, it can be an embarrassing experience...

...But either they are more than that, or a lot of very impressive people have wasted their lives by being more than merely interested in a topic worth writing papers about...

...The belief that God revealed divine truth to human beings is at their center...

...Part of it may also be the result of having been "witnessed to...

...It isn't enough to find this interesting, or to read it in terms of what is currently acceptable to most secular folks...

...a heart hardened to this message will know consequences...

...I wonder, though, whether there aren't other reasons we don't see believers doing more to present to others what they claim to believe...

...Revelation is at the center of our faith...

...One could be that we really don't believe it, in any profound sense of the word...

...Seraphim of Sarov, and St...