Dishonest to God

Abstract

The problem is thus partly historical. We can, helped by long tradition and by a familiar culture, partly put ourselves in the place of the first disciples, the Gospel-writers. We can even partly under-stand St Paul, the true inventor of Christianity as a religion sepa-rate from Judaism. But their natural imagery is not ours, much as we may love it, and all its associations. This is because of all that we know that they did not. Our viewpoint is inevitably different, and we cannot honestly overlook the gap that exists between us and them, or pretend that it does not exist. It is the issue of this gap that I try to address in the following chapters, not as a theo -logian, but as someone above all interested in morality, politics and the law, as well as in the concept of imagination itself, which, as Dennis Nineham understood, is central to the very existence of religion. It hardly needs to be said that other animals are not religious, nor are they, like us, politicians or law-makers. Neither do they have the need to explain the world to themselves. It is the human imagination that both demands and supplies such all-embracing explanations, human beings alone need to place themselves in the universe as a whole, and religious belief has historically been their way of doing this.