To believe does not mean that one makes it easy for oneself indealing with the world in its history. The Christian faith especially does not live "beside" or "above" history. It is not a successful flight out of it, out of its painful changes, its heights and itsdepths into a beyond without a history. It is, rather, a genuinelyhistorical faith, based on a unique and unrepeatable historicalevent, the ultimate "Yes" and "Amen" of God to man in hisSon Jesus Christ (see 2 Cor. 1, 19f.). The Christian faith is always necessarily concerned with history, for it cannot conceal itsown nature: for faith, the healing and saving revelation oftranscendence takes place in history. That is why the Christianfaith is always also necessarily concerned with the particularhistorical present, through which alone it enters into the greatcontext of the one historical life. The Christian lives his ownparticular life in its historical present out of fidelity to the eventand the Gospel of Jesus Christ. But to remain true in everyparticular historical situation to an original historical eventmeans to bestow upon this event in the present a future, to layhold on the present itself as hope.,

What, then, is the historical situation that is presented to faithtoday and in which it must prove its fidelity as hope? This question is not an easy one to answer. The answer will alwaysremain partial and fragmentary. For never is an historical presentsomething unambiguous. It is never, as it were, mono-causal,to be understood in terms of one historical origin, but alwayslives and operates out of the most various impulses. The consciousness that lives in it and gives it its form is never simplyof one kind, a unified thing. Nevertheless, there is an innertendency of the elements that make it up, there are featureswhich become more and more comprehensive, more compelling,more unavoidable and in this sense more representative, and outof which the physiognomy of an historical situation finallyemerges. It is true that even this picture of an historical situationhas, again, many features, and obviously we can only seize on onehere, but one that is, we hope, a dominant one, namely, the particular experience of the world today. With this reservation weshould like to formulate the thesis that the historical situationwith which faith is faced today and in which it must prove itselfas hope, is that of the transition from a divinized to a hominizedworld. But what is a "divinized" or—as we can also say—a"numinized" world and what is a "hominized" one? What changein man's relation to the world and his understanding of it doesthis transaction involve?

This transition is connected in intellectual history with another event, with a development within the history of minditself, namely, that formal re-orientation of thought away fromthe world towards man, away from nature towards history, awayfrom substance to the subject and its free subjectivity, in short,away from a more "cosmocentric" towards an "anthropocentric"way of thinking, the historical beginning of which we commonlyconnect with the beginning of the modern period (without goinginto the question of when this "modern period" began in termsof intellectual history). Here man grasps himself in his freehistorical subjectivity. He experiences and fulfills himself nolonger as an existent beside other existents in the world, but as

the world's subjectivity, to whom the modes of the world's being,nature, culture, society, are ever more available and who now drawsthis world ever more profoundly into the history of his own freesubjectivity. Perhaps we can say, summing it up briefly, that the"anthropocentric apex" of the reality of the world becomes visiblein this modern way of thinking. The understanding of the worldchanges from seeing it as nature to seeing it as history.

As an inner consequence of this new situation in the history ofmind we can also see the slow emergence of a transformation inman's relation to and experience of the world, a process that hastaken centuries and is clearly seen by about the middle of thenineteenth century. The experience of man as a speculativeworld-subject moves out of its inner life to involve itself activelywith the world, thus leading to that transition from the divinizedor numinized world to a hominized one that we experiencetoday as the crisis and the future of our faith.

A divinized world? Let us start from the position that man inthe past experienced his world as "nature." Right up to the recentpast man knew that in his activity within the world he wasalways exposed to, and set within, a comprehensive context ofnature. He knew that he was embraced and carried, but alsothreatened and called into question by a totality of nature whichseemed absolutely superior to him and his life in the world andto which he ultimately always submitted unquestioningly. His"civilization," his shaping of the world was always a small, special"sector," surrounded by an unconquerable nature that wasalways bigger than he. This nature constantly rejected and withdrew itself from him, as the ultimately untouchable, "vernal"mystery of his experience of the world. It was his "bosom" and"mother," in which he knew that he was held graciously, butalso an "avenging goddess, who pursued him with her catastrophes and calmly destroyed what he had created. Thus the lifeof man in the world was dominated by the experience of a nature that, in the sovereignty of its reign, seemed to possess almost divine features. It was the foil to man's understanding ofhimself. He saw himself as the image of this comprehensivecosmos of nature, arrest in pre-established order, as a "microcosm." It was ultimately also an excellent medium for his religious experience. Man's open exposure to an uncontrollablenature gave to the face and processes of nature, in man's eyes,something almost of a tangible divine subjectivity. It had toappear as something numinous not least to the believer, something which reflected the holy radiance of God, as an epiphanyor even projection of God himself. And the workings of nature,operating according to ungovernable laws, easily appeared tohim, in an aggregate, as the working of God himself. Thus manwas easily able to experience divine salvation history against thefoil of the history of the cosmos, and see an almost unbrokentransition between the working of nature and the sovereign working of God in salvation. Thus man lived and saw himself and hisreligious experience within the framework of a nature that haddivine features. He lived, briefly, in a directly divinized or numinized world. In it his religious experience acquired a strongcategorical visual quality, but also constantly ran the risk that ispeculiar to this view of the world, namely, of thinking of Godand nature pantheistically as the same thing: Deus swe natura(Spinoza).

This historical situation of man's life in the world has changedtoday. Our present age stands in the middle of this transition, thefull force of which still seems not to have burst upon us. Man'sexperience of the world is no longer dominated by that comprehensive whole of nature, within whose uncontrollable power manstands and within whose sovereignty and numinous radiance thepresence and power of God himself breaks a thousandfold likethe white light in a prism. Nature, formerly the one who embraced, has become the one who is attacked; it has lost itsmajesty and is becoming enslaved. Its laws are in our hands. Wehave, as it were, had a peep at its cards, and this has resulted in the disappearance of everything numinous and of all the taboosfrom our experience of the world. Today human life is no longerabandoned to the world as nature, but rather this world-nature isincreasingly exposed to the clutch of man.

Nature is always a nature that man has involved himself with,that he has worked on, the beginnings of a civilization, a natureout of which mankind constructs its world, "and if his technologyseparates off a piece of wild nature and leaves it alone, like a'national park,' this still exists by its grace and as part of itsrationalization plan" (von Balthasar), like a concession to theromantic longing of an existence from which "vernal" nature iseverywhere slipping away under the inroads of technology.

But man himself always knows that he is more and moreremoved from the enfolding unity of a pre-given nature andexperiences himself as the active subjectivity of nature whichstands over and against it and interferes with it, planning andtransforming, in order to construct a world out of it. In relationto nature man sees himself as a demiurge, a master-builder ofthe world, who creates his world out of the material of nature,the world of man, a hominized world.

Let this suffice as a rough preliminary characterization of thehistorical situation that faces faith today. It is true that just asthere has never been a purely divinized world, so there will neverbe a purely hominized world. Both remain in their pure form afrontier experience for man. We are concerned here only withthe illumination of the specific state of consciousness in the manof today and tomorrow who must see himself and live his lifewithin the framework of a hominized world.

2.The hominized world is now experienced by many chiefly as acrisis and shattering of their faith. The fact that the world is falling more and more into the hands of men seems to mean thatit has sunk from its high dignity or the creation of God to becomethe material of purely human creativity; it appears as a worldwithout magic, without the numinous, as purely secular. Manyfamiliar media of religious experience are on the wane. Everything present in the world-understanding of man falls more andmore beneath the human shadow and shows itself to derivedirectly from man. What shines out of the world today, primarily and directly, are not the vestigia Dei but the vestigiahominis. The "creation" of God, in the process of hominization,seems mediated everywhere by the "work" of man. In everythingwith which we are concerned in our secular life we encounter,more or less, not really nature as created by God, but the worldthat is projected and transformed by man, and in this we encounter ourselves. But God appears to have become less involvedwith the world and therefore less visible than before, and inmany men today faith seems to be dying because of its own lackof object and definition. It is as if it had lost its whole worldlycategorical richness and vitality. Further, many people hasten tointerpret their experience of the growing invisibility of God andhis activity as atheism. This, in my opinion, is the intellectualroot of the increasing existential weakness of our faith and alsoof essential forms of the thematically presented lack of faith inour days.

5.In this connection let us note that the important and specificforms of theoretical atheism start as interpretations of this newexperience of the world, as interpretations of this transition fromthe divinized to the hominized world, from the world-experienceof a numinous "nature" to world-experience within the framework of the creative freedom of man and the de-divinization of this world that is involved in this handing over of the world tohuman freedom.

It is precisely this transition, in my view, that Nietzsche proclaims as the event of the "death of God." We men have broughtabout this "death of God," since we have now finally come toourselves in our freedom. We have extinguished the unhelpfuldivine constellation, since in this freedom we have finally ourselves moved into the middle of the world. It is quite clear thatthe Marxist model also starts with the beginning of this newexperience of the world, with the transition from the divinizedto the hominized world. Marx himself explicitly relates his ideaof a "real humanism" to that transition in man—as he says—"from contemplating the world to changing it." Here, for Marx,there begins the process of the unmasking and abdication ofreligion and the bestowal on man of his "real humanity." Thosewho come later, Bertrand Russell and others, interpret the originof that process of universal illumination and enlightenment ofthe world which takes place in a hominized world and in thecourse of which all the "numinosities" and taboos within theworld are progressively removed, so that the God-lessness of theworld becomes increasingly visible, out of the "future of unbelief."

These forms of atheism see the Christian experience of Godas so bound up with the model of a divinized world that withthe historical decline of the divinized world framework they atthe same time declare the "death of God." The un-worldlinessand invisibility of God that emerges in this transition to a hominized world is interpreted as plain unreality. The denuminizationof the world that becomes more and more obvious in the hominization process is experienced as the loss of the dimension of thenuminous altogether. The "anthropocentricity" of the newexperience of the world, in which man moves into the center ina hitherto unique and incomparable way, is experienced as the direct contrast to "Christian theocencricity" and made into agenerally eschatological "humanism without God."

Such varieties of unbelief are so powerful today and their arguments so seductive because they are the first to have taken holdtheoretically of that world-experience in whose irresistible historical rise we are living today and which increasingly dominates all of our opinions and ideas, thus becoming categoricallymore powerful. Perhaps we are given here again one of thosehistorical constellations in which the Christian mind makesthings so infinitely difficult for itself because it responds far toohesitantly and distrustfully to a new historical experience anddoes not seek to understand it in a venturesome, creative way, aspart of what comes to it out of its own future. When theologycatches up with this new situation it can easily look like a subsequent "readjustment." However, it is not for us to speak here ofthis problem of Christian self-understanding in the world. Wehave to establish here only one thing in relation to our subject:

in the face of this new experience of the world we cannot andmust not simply "go on believing" behind locked doors, asthough before Pentecost. We must face the crisis of this newunderstanding of the world. Then we may begin to see that thistransition from the divinized to the hominized world, from theexperience of the world within the framework of a comprehensive "nature" to the experience of the world within the framework of the creative freedom of man and the secularization of theworld bound up with this handing over of the world to humanfreedom, has emerged not simply against, but originally precisely through, Christianity. The profound reason for this viewwould be found if we draw a parallel between this transition inthe world-situation of man and the change in the situation of the Western mind althogether. It would appear that the formal reorientation of thinking from a "cosmocentric" to an "anthropocentric" approach, bound up with the beginning of the modernworld, has ultimately emerged not against, but through, theimpulse of the Christian spirit. But we must here pass over whatwe have endeavored to show elsewhere and be satisfied in thisconnection to point as briefly as possible to those elements in theChristian Gospel that themselves open up the process of ahominization of the world, or at least imply its possibility.

(1) According to the Christian Gospel, man stands inescapably before the face of his creator, before the absolutely transcendent God, the God semper major, who "dwells in unapproachablelight" (1 Tim. 6, 16), who does not only come to himself in hiscreation, but is infinitely higher than the created world and constantly places it at a distance in its own finitude. But man'sattachment in faith to this God of absolute transcendence,absolute superiority to the world, actually liberates the world. Byconstantly transcending the world towards God, faith does notabandon the world but in this transcendence makes it appearconstantly in its non-divinity, in its pure worldliness. It loses forit its inner-worldly numinosities and absolutizations and thetaboos that arise from them. Faith itself, therefore, produces afundamental secularity of the world.

This faith is not an ideology; it does not absolutize particularareas of life within the world, whether society, science, or whatever, in order to interpret the world and life in the world universally on this basis. In its very transcendence towards God it letsthe world come before itself as world. Precisely as faith it isopenness to the non-absolute, non-divine reality of the world assuch and therefore causes it to be experienced radically as theworld available to man. It is the very basis of the secular experience of the world. It is not its concern and the expression of its nature to bridge the gap directly between the divine and thesecular sphere, between sacrality and profanity. Rather, it establishes this gap, it lets the world be the world, the world of man,so that it can be taken, through man's acting on it, into theprocess of human freedom, which, in its vastness and its fundamental freedom from all control, stands directly before themystery of God himself (whether it knows it explicitly or wantsto know it or not).

Putting it in a negative way in order to make it clearer, wecould say that where there is no faith in a transcendental creator,there is also no genuine secularization of the world and nogenuine availability of this world to men. We know that theclassical pagan world lacked any idea of a transcendent divinecreator. It conceived God more as the principle of the world, asa kind of world reason and world law, as the immanent regulatorof a cosmos at rest within itself. The divine itself was an elementin its account of the world. For the Greeks, therefore, the worldalways had the radiance of the numinous about it, it was alwaysthe inchoate beginning of God himself, the morning twilight ofthe gods on all its horizons. But this very divinity which theworld itself makes directly manifest, the mystic religious veil,this apotheosis of nature and the resultant piety towards theworld (which never lets the world be wholly secular, becauseGod is never wholly divine), is not a genuine Christian, but apagan experience. Only the heathens, says Paul, have many godsand lords in the world (1 Cor. 8, 5), "yet," he goes on, "for usthere is one God, the Father, from whom are all things and forwhom we exist" (v. 6). But its relation in faith to this one Godmakes the world itself appear as non-divine and, in this sense, asgod-less, as deprived of myth and magic.

On the other hand it is precisely this liberation of the worldinto its worldliness which takes place for the first time inChristian faith in creation, which roused in man the uncondi-tional will towards the illuminating and discovering world,which paved the way for man's active disposing of the world,for its homini2ation.

(2) A second element in the Christian Gospel, which containswithin itself the seed of the hominization of the world, is thefact that this Gospel brings man to himself in the incomparableuniqueness of his historical freedom. Man appears here in hisunique personal existence, which cannot be subsumed under ageneral anonymous category of the world or nature, but whichis rather infinitely superior to all being that is simply of theworld.

In the light of the Gospel of scripture the world is not asuperior comprehensive entity, within whose pre-establishedorders man is included, but it is what is available to man, thematerial, as it were, of his becoming a man in history beforeGod and of the latter's gracious turning to us in Jesus Christ.¹All the world's being has its "anthropocentric apex" in theGospel of scripture. It is not simply the untouchable frameworkand horizon within which the drama of human freedom isplayed. The world "exists," rather, for the sake of human freedom: it is to become a hominized world. It appears as a world inthe process of coming to be, which acquires its own naturethrough the freedom of man bestowed by God, throughout hissinful involvement with himself and his flights of grace.

(3) A further aspect of the Gospel of scripture is revealedfinally by the central word of the incarnation of God. "God tookon flesh" is the central proposition of our faith. Verbum carofactum est. In order to bring out the important thing of thisGospel for our faith, let us say: Verbum homo factum est. For inthe incarnation of the eternal Word it was not the world itself

1. See the passage 1 Cor. 3, 22f,, quoted above.

that was immediately divinized. The final turning of God towards the world took place, rather, in man. He and only he isthe place where God has for ever accepted the world and itshistory. God's relation to the world and to history is mediatedand perfected in man. Its divinization takes place via its hominization. Verbum homo factum est. In the "Son of God, JesusChrist," "Yes" has come into history, the "Amen" has comethrough him (2 Cor. 1, 19b). He, man, has become, as it were,the transformer between God and the world. He, not the world,is the conjunction, the "mediator" and representative of the"eternal covenant" between heaven and earth. He is the placewhere the relationship of the world to God is opened up or sinfully obscured. Again we see the radical "anthropocentricity" ofthe Gospel of scripture. Precisely in the light of the Gospel of theincarnation of God the world loses its numinously shimmeringdivinity and is given into the hands and responsibility of man andhence liberated to find its own wordliness.

This closes our brief discussion of the basic relationship between man and the world, as it shines out towards us from theGospel of our faith. But do we not see in it the beginnings ofa hominization of the world? And can we not therefore see thathominized world, the irresistible beginning of which we haveabout us today, also as a Christian opportunity and task—insteadof merely as a tremendous danger to our faith? It is true thatnothing justifies us in simply canonizing this concrete process ofhominization of the world in our historical time, in interpretingit, as it were, mono-causally as the historical fulfillment of thehominization of which the Christian Gospel itself is the basis.Such a thing is impossible on principle. Moreover, it would blindus to what is questionable and bad in this concrete process, to theguilt and the failure that is at the same time at work within it.No concrete, historical world situation redeems itself, not eventhe situation of our hominized world today. Nor is it simply ofitself a humanized world. But that does not mean that the homin-ized world is, us it were, structurally more unchristian than theearlier world situation. Faith is not really threatened by thehistorical process of hominization as such, but by the false godsand ideologies that have, in fact, taken over this process andconstantly betray it against its historical origin.

This hominization of the world, as it first began in the Western European sphere and is today becoming more and more thesituation of all men and all peoples, has something to do withthe spirit of Christianity itself. In order to demonstrate thisfundamental connection more clearly and in more detail, weshould have to show how the elements of the Gospel of scripturenamed by us, which point to a hominization process, began towork themselves out in history. We should have to speak first ofthe world-understanding of the late Greek world, into which theChristian Gospel had to be articulated. We should have to showhow and why this divinized world-understanding of the Greekscontinued for a long time to have an influence on the model ofthe actual Christian understanding of die world. We should thenhave to consider how the turning to the. subjective consciousnessin the late medieval period and the beginning of modern times—and the consequent rise of the natural sciences, in which manbecomes more and more an active subjective consciousness overand against the world—emerged from a truly Christian motive,and how finally from this that adventure of the hominization ofthe world began, the mighty proliferation of which we see today,in which man changes more and more from the purely speculative to the practical world-subject, from the observer of theworld to its shaper.

But here we are able to make only the following basic points.(1) This process of hominization does not simply force an interpretation out of the "future of unbelief," however much it maysummon our believing awareness to the crisis and the sufferingof a categorical purification. (2) We do not need to interpretthis process in a Marxist way, even though we should see to how great an extent this new experience of the world is consciousand thematized in Marxism, in such a way, of course, that thisprocess of the hominization of the world is identified with itsautonomous humanhation and thus with an eschatological selfredemption of man. It is this identification that makes Marxisman ideology. (3) The hominization of the world does not needto be interpreted, with Nietzsche, as the "death of God," eventhough we should see that it is precisely Christianity that hasresulted in an experience of the "death of God in the world,"insofar as what we mean by this is the experience of that ;dedivinization of the world that emerges increasingly in the processof hominization. (4) Because the world itself, as a result of itshominization, loses its numinous character, it does not follow thatits connection with the numinous completely disappears. Theresimply appears a new, as it were "anthropocentric" place inwhich the numinous is experienced: no longer the comprehensive openness of the pre-given world, but the freedom that actson this world; no longer all-embracing nature, but the history ofthis hominized nature, taken in hand by men, in its free futurity.²

According to the interpretation we have ventured of the newexperience of the world there is revealed in this experience notsimply the future of unbelief, but the greater future of belief, inwhich what has already happened for man's experience of theworld reaches us through the event of Christianity. Perhaps weshould venture the thought that Christianity stands more at thebeginning than at the end of its history in the world. At least

2. For the interpretation of freedom as the place of the experience of thenuminous, of the "anthropological" (and hence transcendental) startingpoint of a possible "proof of God," for which God—in contrast to an unhistorical interpretation in terms of the next world—appears as somethingcoming to man freely from the future, see J. B. Metz, "Freiheit als philosophisch-theologisches Grenzproblem," in Gott in Welt, Vol. I, Freiburg,1964, pp. 287-314, esp. pp. 308ff. For a modified further discussion of thewhole question of faith and world from the general standpoint of theorientation of faith towards the future, see also viem, "Gott vor uns: Statteines theologisctien Arguments," in Ernst Bloch zu Ehren, Frankfurt, 1965,pp. 227-241.this thought is hardly inappropriate for a faith open to the free,unknown future—and must be so. This idea, moreover, of thefuture of Christianity just beginning, could give us that longerbreath we need—and shall need more and more—in the greatdebate with the ideologies of a hominized world.

How can the believer concretely accept this world situation, andhow can the accepted experience of the hominized world becomethe beginning of an original experience of faith? In order to beable to answer this question in some of its essential features, itremains for us to consider how a world-experience can be communicated at all as the beginning of a genuine Christian experience of faith. This is possible because the particular experienceof the world reveals that it is itself a "frontier experience" ofhuman life, and that this frontier experience, this failure ofhuman existence within the world, is again accepted by man—accepted in the power and the grace of him who by obedientlyaccepting his failure in the world "overcame" the world, acceptedit in the sign of the cross of our Lord. Thus let us ask ourselveswhat the experience of our hominized world is as a frontierexperience of our life, in the acceptance of which we can see thefuture of a genuine Christian experience of faith. Our answer tothis final question cannot disguise its tentative, adumbratorynature. It proceeds in such a way that it gives an account of somebasic features of the hominized world and the experience givenby it and seeks to interpret it in relation to the possibility of anauthentic experience of faith.

(1) The hominized world is a pluralist world. By this phrase,so popular today, we refer not primarily to sociological pluralism,to the large number of pregiven life and social forms which ourexistence today must necessarily take, nor directly to philosophical pluralism, in the sense that there no longer exists today any homogeneous sphere of Christian culture and life, that more and morethe most different and apparently disparate philosophies of lifeco-exist, that the non-Christian religions have an increasing presence in the West, and so on. We are referring, rather, to thatremarkable pluralism of consciousness which follows for theindividual from all this, namely, the fact that man today hasto live more and more within the most various areas of experiences which he is no longer able to bring within his self-experience into a unity that can be grasped intellectually. The danger ofthe disappearance of faith, the beginning of unbelief is obvioushere: religion is easily seen as a "sector," one of many modes ofexperience within this plurali'st world-consciousness. It is thenvery difficult for man to harmonize the absolute nature of religion's claim with the pluralism of the world of his consciousness.The purely secular forces are becoming ever bigger, more powerful, and more various, the religious sector ever narrower, untilfinally it is completely overlaid, as it were outshone by the superior power and diffusion of purely secular experience.

However, even in the pluralism of consciousness within ourworld today we can see the beginning of an authentic experienceof faith—if faith is not seen primarily as a content of consciousness in competition with others, but as the accepted experience otthis uncontrollable and ungraspable pluralism, if faith is seenas the sustained experience of the impossibility of a comprehensive world-view. Does this not show that man does not experiencehimself, in the center of his consciousness, as self-disposing as thecreative originator who has intellectual subjectivity in his ownhands, but that he is always the created, experiencing himself asalready exposed to variety and disjunction? Does this not showthat man can gain more and more power over all the individualthings of life, but that, precisely in the enormous variety of theindividual things he controls, the unity of his controlling existenceincreasingly falls away? That, to use Paul's language, all things belong to him more and more, but he belongs less and less to himself (see, 1 Cor. 3, 22f.)? That, in philosophical language, hebecomes categorically more and more powerful and in control,but transcendentally more and more powerless, as it were, moreand more taken from himself? The existential unity of his life isless under his control than ever.

But if man faces this situation with his infinite interest in aunifying understanding and fulfillment of his life, then he canrealize in a quite new way the mystery of his life, the uncontrollability, the painful removal, the transcendence of the unity ofhis life into that mystery that we call "God," in whom, accordingto the words of the apostle, our "life is hid" (Col. 3.3) andtowards whom we venture the most various initiatives. This adventure in faith is not just a part of our life but the obedienthanding-over of the unity of our life, which withdraws from usmore and more towards its unifying origin.

(2) The hominized world appears as a world in growth. Theworld is no longer experienced as something "timeless," pregiven, resting in itself, a comprehensive openness within whichman stands. It shows itself today primarily as a world in theprocess of coming to be, a world in which man involves himselfand which he shapes. But since- this world comes into beingthrough our freedom, its future seems to lie increasingly in,ourown hands, it seems to become more and more an understandingand manipulated future. Man sees himself in his freedom increasingly as the master in control of this world future and henceof his own destiny. He is responsible for the evolution of thisworld according to the laws of immanent progress, projectingit finally as a "worldly paradise." Thus a new form of unbeliefis born from this new experience of the world: "belief" in theabsolute power to shape the (world) future—in the theory ofthe "superman," of the "classless society," of "real humanism,"et cetera, But is this a legitimate interpretation of the new experienceof the world? Does it not basically show something else, something opposite: the experience that the world dominated bywar constantly disappears away from him into a dark and uncontrollable future? Does there not seem to appear, against thebackground of the hominized, apparently destiny-less world oftechnology, a new land of destiny, a mysterious future that hasbecome for us all the more oppressive and inescapable since whatit shows us is not the unpredictable forces of nature, but the unlimitedness of our own freedom, which has begun to operate onthis hominized world? And therefore is not all purely secularbelief in the future, born from this new experience of the world,a painful awareness of "threatenedness" and anxiety, secretlypoisoning all secular optimism, constantly unmasking and disavowing it, working as an anti-toxin against every world experience that might conceal its own abandonment to an uncontrollable future? Where this frontier experience of human dominationof the world is not suppressed—not even by the other extremeof total secular despair—but accepted and lived through, there isopened to man the possibility of an authentic historical experience of faith. Acceptance of the uncontrollability of the futureof the hominized world makes the mystery of its providentialorigin apparent. Man's experience is that in the precariousnessof the hominized world—which is ultimately the precariousnessof his freedom in this world—someone comes towards himfrom the future, the God who ordains and foresees everything,who has revealed himself in Jesus Christ as the inescapable anduncontrollable free future of man and of the world.

(3) We must consider another basic feature of our hominizedworld: that it will be without miracles—though this means notthat there is not, or cannot be, any experience of the miraculouswithin it, but that the consciousness which it engenders anddominates seems at least narrowed down to exclude the experience of the miraculous. In order for this narrowing down of contemporary man's existential awareness to be overcome from within,as it were, the point would have to be made that the originalmetaphysical location of the experience of the miraculous is notsimply the breakthrough experience of a "closed" order of natureand the world, but the experience of the fundamental permanentopenness of man to the singular, uncontrollable, unexpected, andsurprising elements in this world, how increasingly controllableand calculable in terms of its individual material. Further, weshould have to go into the possibility and actuality of an historical change in the nature of the experience of the miraculous,into the positive and by no means realistic significance of theso-called "relative miracles." The point would have to be madethat the so-called absolute miracle cannot be expected to occuras often as we would want in our experience of the world, if wesee it—as theology would suggest—in a closer inner connectionwith the unique and unrepeatable event of the absolute revelation of God in Jesus Christ; if, therefore, the event of the absolutemiracle is linked more closely than usual with the event of theabsolute revelation in its uniqueness and eschatological definitiveness. This and other points would have to be considered inconnection with the problem of the hominized world as a worldwithout miracles. We are not, however, here able to go into thesubject any further, but shall now briefly consider another finalaspect of the hominized world.

(4) The hominized world appears as a dehumanized world,and this is the greatest danger of our situation: not only theworld as nature but also man himself threatens more and more tobecome "manipulatable." Not only is he, as a subject, in chargeof the hominization process, but he is more and more in dangerof himself being degraded to the object of all this planning andexperimenting subjection and regimentation. Here one can seethat hominization is by no means already humanization. In fact, the process of hominization seems here to reveal itself as a totalthreat to what is human. But we must beware of simply blamingthis very real danger directly on the structure of the hominizedworld as such and thus call it into question as a whole or evencondemn it. Quite apart from the fact that the individual manwas not sovereign and secure in earlier times either, that althoughhe could not be "manipulated" by subtle human techniqueshe could be so by the arbitrary will of unpredictable nature,there emerges at the beginning of the hominized world, besidethe enormous danger of dehumanization, also the possibility(entrusted to us as a task to realize) of a deeper humanizationof human life.

Let us briefly consider once again the situation of the individual in the divinized world. Within its horizon he himself did notclearly emerge in his own quality as a unique and unrepeatableperson. He remained, rather, set within numinous nature, protected and respected as "part" of it, as a "numinous value." Theunique and incomparable quality of the individual could really become universally visible and effective within historical consciousness only when the numinous background disappeared—when inthe subjectivity of his unrenounceable freedom he himself, and notonly nature, came to be considered as no longer automatically untouchable. Is it not the case that human relations such as marriage,friendship, and fraternity are in extreme danger in a hominizedworld, but also that only in it can they come to their full flower,into their absolute uniqueness, admitting of no dehumanization, nooutside exploitation, no tribalization, no institutionalization? Doesnot the hominized world provide (at least in germ) the opportunity for extensive humanization, for more radical attention toother individuals, for an acuter sense of individual responsibility?Would it not therefore seem that men in a hominized worldwould more fully experience in every human encounter (according to a central idea of our faith) God himself? Would he notmore intensely understand that in the affirmed and accepted fact of the absolute and unexploitable individuality of the other, inthe accepted mystery of his own unique self, the transcendentmystery of God himself is present? Would he not then see thatthe other, his brother, is the topos of his numinous experience?It cannot be denied that many people today live this kind offraternity without explicitly knowing that they have alreadybegun to believe in God our brother who seeks to encounter usin the openness and freedom of encounter between men.

The Christian, therefore, sees in the acceptance and practiceof the encounter experience an opportunity for the man of thehominized world to experience the closeness of God himself,and out of the strength of this experience to battle against thespecter of dehumanization that we detect in the horizon.

We must end our discussion here, though much has been leftunsaid. And what has been said may seem merely abstract or toomuch of a sketch. But must not faith today first seek and regainits full visible presence? Must it not first accept the hominizedworld as part of its own historical development and in acceptingit overcome it? No other way is open to. it today. The hominizedworld still lies more before us than behind us. Man is changingmore and more from an observer of the world to its shaper. Hisview of the world is its transformation. But precisely in this waythe attitude of man gains a quite new, almost cosmic weight.And that is why it is decisive today, not merely for the salvationof the individual but for the face of the world, whether a manbelieves or not. The responsibility of faith becomes boundless.The hominization of the world must not be left to the ideologies,it must be taken hold of in hope as a burden and a task. Everything we have tried to say was concerned to show that faith isable to do this task. In the hominized world, which ultimatelyChristian faith itself will have made historically possible, manmoves in an incomparable way into the center of the world.This anthropocentricity does not mean that man's experience ofGod is radically obscured, but that ultimately a greater immediacy is given to the experience of the numinous: we encounterGod as the transcendent mystery of the unity and richness ofhuman life, which is constantly lost in the pluralism of its areasof experience; as the uncontrollable future of human freedomimpinging on the world itself; finally, as the God whose nearnessseeks to reveal itself in our encounter with our brother. Thusfaith has a genuine future in the hominized world—less obvious,it is true, less apparent, but more inescapable than ever.

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