Note 8 — THE RELIGIOUS PROBLEM OF THE PRESENT

To think of the world’s activity as God’s activity; of mankind’s development, filled with struggles and sufferings, as the story of a divine struggle and Passion; of the world-process as the process of a God, who in each individual creature fights, suffers, conquers and dies, so that he may overcome the limitations of the finite in the religious consciousness of man and anticipate his future triumph over all the suffering of the world—that is the real Christian doctrine of redemption. To revive in this sense the fundamental conception from which Christianity sprang—and which is independent of any historical reference—is, indeed, to return to this religious starting-point. Protestantism, on the contrary, which repudiates Paul’s religion and sets up the Gospels as the foundation of its belief, nevertheless does not go behind Christianity’s development into the Church, back to the origin of Christianity, but remains always within this development, and deceives itself if it thinks that it can prevail over the Church from the point of view of the Gospel.8