[394] prescribed by the modern mind and the situation they wanted to deny. So we are here in the necessity to make one fundamental statement--l don't want to speak about "Religion in the Present Situation of the World" AT ALL!--namely that religion^a comes from one dimension and goes into another, from above to below, from below to above, and that IN THIS dimension, it has a Yes and No to the WHOLE of reality, but IS NOT a PART of it!

My whole theological work was directed by early realization of this situation. And the situation still prevails--and perhaps in this country a little bit more than in Europe, but in any case, in the whole Christian world. And so the attempt to liberate religion^b from the bondage of a level of thought and experience to which it does not belong, or only indirectly belongs, is the continuous task of every philosophy of religion^c. How can we fulfill this task? It can be fulfilled only with the tools which are given to us--

nobody can PRODUCE them. And there are tools given to us in the present-day situation, the tools produced by the resistance against the present-day situation. Let me now talk about the movements of resistance. They are outside of the church^d, and partly also inside; outside of theology^e, and partly inside; but predominantly they come from a secular^f world which, so to speak, has broken through the basis on which it was built. In our language^g, in the last ten years, we call this breaking-through-the-carrying-and-supporting foundations, "existentialism^h." But since this word is a clumsy one, and everybody is afraid before he even tries to understand what it COULD mean, we might also describe it in other words.