On September 14th a central memorial ceremony was held in the New York Yankee Stadium: a multireligious, patriotic liturgy at whose centre stood the American star-spangled banner. This religious dramatisation of the Stars and Stripes in those days of terror proves that September 11th was at least a matter of religion: a matter of a violence of religious origin, whose trail of blood runs from Manhattan via Kandahar to places which are not yet known. Once religion comes into play, there is a need to criticise its potential malignancy, so that people are able to get out of the vicious cycle of religious violence. One year after September 11th these theological theses would like to contribute to the project of shedding light upon this ‘depraved part’ of all religions by emphasising eight basic differences which constitute religion and cause its characteristic dangers. Therefore current terms are to be used against their everyday usage in a strictly formal sense as instruments for analyzing sacred and profane phenomenons of religion.

In their everyday life, people experience the power of the Holy as something extraordinary, that magically attracts them and repels them at the same time—but never lets them go. It is precisely this inescapable difference which constitutes religion, at the centre of which, according to Rudolf Otto’s classic definition, there is the mysterious experience of a ‘mysterium fascinosum, tremendum et augustum’. September 11th revealed this constitutive ambivalence of the Holy, because it unveiled the double face of religion: the face of mighty violence, embodied by the pilots of death, and the face of powerless hope, embodied by the New York firemen.

When we theologians interpret the great teachings of traditional Christianity — the doctrines of the Holy Trinity and the two natures of Christ, for example — it often appears that our task is a very difficult one. What I mean is that when we think about the three-in-oneness of God we tend to presuppose that this three-in-oneness is a mathematical absurdity, and when we think about the two natures of Christ we almost instinctively presuppose that we are thinking about a self-contradictory nonsense. This is because whereas it is normal to say that 1 + 1 + 1 = 3, we seem to be saying something that contradicts this when we say that the Father, the Son, and the Spirit are God. Absurdly, we insist that ‘these three are one’. And whereas we know that squares cannot be circles, we seem to be saying something like this when we say that Jesus Christ is simultaneously God and man. Such doctrines confront us as difficult riddles that need to be solved, problems that need to be cracked. We presuppose that Christian doctrine is, in one sense or another, intellectually outrageous; we think that it is essentially paradoxical, and we think that it provides a challenge to human reason. And because theology spends its time dealing with confusing and bewildering paradoxes it seems appropriate that theology itself is understood to be something that is very difficult to do.

At the heart of Christian belief is a gift: the ‘free gift of God. . . in Jesus Christ our Lord’. The language of gift is peppered through the New Testament and constitutes one of its most distinctive features. It portrays an abundant and generous God who acts out of love, without expecting return, and whose generosity in no wise depends on our activity. Traditionally, this utter gratuitousness of God’s gifts has been cited and defended in connection with the doctrine of divine sovereignty: God’s gifts must be offered without expectation of any return, because to claim otherwise would be to imply that God desires something, and so lacks it in the first place.

However, this affirmation is in some tension with another: that at the heart of Christian life is a response, in the worship and works of God’s people. While the image of a needy God is alien to Christian understanding, it is equally alien to the Christian understanding to postulate a God who does not want or intend a responsive movement from God’s people. Herein lies a dilemma for Christian theology: how to hold together such an exalted view of the necessary freedom and unconditionality of God’s gift with the maintenance of human responsibility and so capacity to respond?

So Christians must at one and the same time preach that God gives freely; and that to love God is necessarily to serve God. This tension is a familiar and perennial one, beginning with the faith-versus-works controversy of the New Testament itself, and re-emerging regularly throughout Christian history.