SURRENDER AND RELIGION.

If religion is faith concerning man's fate, how can this faith find expression today? This is a historical question: for all that will follow about shedding received notions and holding tradition in abeyance, this tradition, this received notion of the relevance of history, of man's historicity, cannot be done without in assessing surrender and hence its relevance for religion. There are some expectations, in particular two, that the title of this paper may raise but that are false; they should be dissipated at once. One, there will be no discussion of the social aspects of religion. Nor will there be any comparison between the analysis of surrender and innumerable extant comments on related phenomena, such as religious or mystical experiences. In this late historical phase, when there even is a sense in which we might be past history, or might soon be past history, religion may well appear as the mood embraced in an effort to come to terms with two unanswerable questions-it is the phase in our history in which one knows that these questions are unanswerable.