It is at this point that we touch the central core of our culture, which is an ideal of knowledge of what are called "the facts," a knowledge that is supposed to be quite independent of the personal commitment of the knower.

Neither. freedom nor equality are words that can take us to the heart of the matter. The breakdown of relationships will destroy freedom and will destroy equality, but neither of these will be achieved by being sought for itself.

"Fact," says Alasdair Maclntyre, "is in modern western culture a folk-concept with an aristocratic ancestry."8 The aristocrat involved was Lord Bacon, who advised his contemporaries to abjure speculation and collect facts.

the conservative evangelicals, were often unaware of the cultural conditioning of their religion and therefore guilty, as many of them now recognize, of confusing the gospel with the values of the American way of life without realizing what they were doing.

Thus science is sustained in its search for an understanding of what it sees by faith inwhat is unseen. The formula credo ut intelligam is fundamental to science.

Saul the Pharisee can only see Jesus of Nazareth as a saboteur of the law. Paul the Christian can see the law as the paidagogos that brought him to Christ; and he can see Christ as the fulfillment of the law.

We are witnessing the same thing, but under Christian auspices, in the emergence of what is called "the Religious Right" in the United States. The leaders of this movement, while accepting the biblical doctrine regarding the radical corruption of human nature by sin, in effect exempt themselves as "born-again Christians" from its operation.

for-according to the famous Godelian theorems that have never been disproved-within any rigidly logical mathematical system there are propositions (or questions) that cannot he proved or disproved on the basis of the axioms within that system, and consequently it is uncertain that the basic axioms of arithmetic will not give rise to contradictions.

The idea that one can or could at any time separate out by some process of distillation a pure gospel unadulterated by any cultural accretions is an illusion. It is, in fact, an abandonment of the gospel, for the gospel is about the word made flesh.