The Gospel in a Pluralist Society

I began to see that something of this domestication had taken place in my own Christianity, that I too had been more ready to seek a “reasonable Christianity,” a Christianity that could be defended on the terms of my whole intellectual formation as a twentieth-century Englishman, rather than something which placed my whole intellectual formation un

As Polanyi has trenchantly put it: “The emphatic admission of our fallibility only serves to re-affirm our claim to a fictitious standard of intellectual integrity . . . in contrast to the hidebound attitude of those who openly profess their beliefs as their final personal commitment” (Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge, p. 271).

It is no secret, indeed it has been affirmed from the beginning, that the gospel gives rise to a new plausibility structure, a radically different vision of things from those that shape all human cultures apart from the gospel. The Church, therefore, as the bearer of the gospel, inhabits a plausibility structure which is at variance with, and which