Over recent decades historian''s and sociologists'' analyses have totally challenged the view that was still universally accepted until quite recently (and still prevails in places) that secularization is history''s last word and is an irreversible one-way process. Instead the history of mankind tends to provide evidence of constantly repeated cycles of growth, decline and repeated upsurges of various forms of religion. Religion can no longer be considered - as it was in the 19th century under the influence of Auguste Comte and his positivist heirs - as the "childhood of mankind" and simply a passing phase of development. On the contrary it would appear to be an anthropological constant and an inseparable dimension of human culture. When one specific form of religion loses its vitality and the ability to harmonize with other elements of the cultural system, it goes into decline and is marginalized, and the space left vacant is occupied by a new phenomenon. In that way there can be a revival of a variation of the same religion or denomination, or of some entirely different strand of religion, or in some cases the emergence of a phenomenon, which was previously "secular" in nature, but at a certain moment starts to adopt first the social role of religion and then many other of its characteristics. When Darwin turned biology into history and projected onto nature the social experience of the capitalism of his day - the competitive economic struggle for "the survival of the fittest", that brilliantly creative idea introduced an extremely influential model, which stimulated advances in both the natural and the social sciences. (Theology ought to be very grateful to the theory of evolution for doing away with naïve creationism and offering new scope for spiritual reflection on the amazing inner dynamic of creation.

) But all large metaphors of this kind, which become a powerful myth (and those who employ it forget it is a metaphor, a working model for a new categorization of phenomena and not an eternal truth) have certain limitations and a limited period of validity. The theory of secularization as a conviction about the necessary demise of religion on the one-way path of the inexorable progress of modern knowledge was one of the many vulgarized versions of Darwin''s theory of the survival of the fittest. When the final victory of progress and "scientific atheism" over religion predicted by Marxism went on failing to materialize, the Marxist regimes tried to help achieve the promised goal by the use of violence and sometimes by the merciless genocide of believers. But before the cocks announced the imminent dawn of Christianity''s third millennium, the specter of communism had disappeared from Europe along with the other phantoms of the dark nights of the twentieth century. But those who expected that Christianity in its previous form would occupy the space vacated after communism''s failure were also disappointed. The forms and content of religion are changeable; religion is a current that is too diverse, vital and dynamic to be regulated permanently within firm boundaries. "You cannot step twice into the same river" applies in this case too.; religious renewal and revival are never a return to the same thing.

It is true about those forms of religion, which, from the outside, look like stable, unbroken continuity and take great pains to emphasize their "immutability", as we often hear, particularly in Catholic circles. But continuity and immutability are two fundamentally different things! The most important work about religion in our times, Charles Taylor''s monumental Secular Age, demonstrates convincingly how in Christianity, the historical and cultural context constantly transforms what remains apparently intact. Even though today''s Christians believe "the same thing" as in past centuries, they believe it differently; even when they say the same words they understand them differently, even when they perform the same rituals in the same surrounding, those surroundings and those rituals play a different role in their lives, than they did in the lifestyle of their ancestors. I was recently witness to a personal and internet discussion among clergy of several denomination about whether and to what extent it makes sense to repeat in religious services the ancient wordings of the creeds, which reflect theological conflicts of Antiquity and contain expressions whose original meanings are totally lost on the majority of today''s Christians who recite them. Who is aware nowadays that the creed combines two very different concepts of God - the Hebrew concept of God as a subject (and there can only be one God, the Lord, the Creator or Heaven and Earth), and the Greek concept of "God" as a predicate, and it therefore allowed Christians in a Hellenic or Hellenized culture to talk about the divinity of Jesus without committing the blasphemy of dualism? In the course of that debate the question was also raised, whether a creed recited as part of a peaceful religious celebration was still a creed in the sense of a creed at the time when those who confessed it risked public execution? Someone else responded to those who wish to "update the language of the creed" by quoting Chesterton''s saying that "tradition is the democracy of the dead": we cannot exclude the voice of so many previous generations and place greater significance on the proud oligarchy of those who happen to be present at a given moment on this ancient scene. Nevertheless here too the objection can be raised that the monolithic nature and unanimity of that vague host of the dead might actually be an illusion on the part of us, who view it with hindsight. When we truly delve into the documents of the past we are generally very surprised to find how diversified they are! excerpted from chapter 5.