[422] would fall under the same problem as the Roman church^a and the totalitarian movements. It would not allow IN ITSELF the protest AGAINST itself. But this is just what makes Protestantism^b Protestant, that it permits, by its very nature--and therefore ASKS for, by it's very nature, within itself--the PROTEST against itself. How is this possible? This is possible only because Protestantism in its origin was in

the tradition of the Roman church, it still has preserved a lot of the Catholic substance--in traditions, in doctrines, in cult, in ethics--but at the same time, it has exploded and disrupted the authoritarian and, spiritually speaking, totalitarian structure of the Roman church. It has produced churches which tried to continue the original Christian tradition, especially the biblical one, and the early one, but which did not subject [i.e. submit] to any infallibility, either of the Pope or of the Protestant theologians^c, in interpreting the Bible^d. Now this was decisive. And this made it possible for Protestantism^e to get a quite different relationship to culture. I once wrote the sentence-- and I quote it since that time, sometimes--that Protestantism has a pathos for the secular^f, a passion for the secular. Why? Because it belongs to the Protestant principle to see God^g related to the secular as much as to the sacred--we discussed that in the beginning of the lectures last

semester when I spoke of the presence of the ultimate concern in every cultural^h action. This was a Protestantism statement, a consequence of the Protestant principle. Therefore Protestantism is able to subject itself to the criticism which comes from the secular culture--in scienceⁱ, the arts^j, ethics^k, and all other forms of man's spiritual creativity^l. At the same time,