trated. As Christians fail in their task, contemporary society
remains without guidance and runs into a blind alley; thereby
it learns what it lacks. The description of this process fills large
parts of our book. But the defect alone would not suffice for re-
newed insight if Christians themselves, put to shame by the
poverty of their sermons, had not rediscovered and proclaimed
the height and depth dimensions of their message. Deeply rooted
in and committed to their time, steeled by constant wrestling
with Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, in a power of faith and wealth
of ideas unknown for one hundred years, a generation of preach-
ers and teachers after the First World War has disclosed new
horizons. Will Christianity not preach again, however, an escape
from the world into the Egyptian desert, or the erection of a
Byzantine Empire or of a Puritan capitalism, or what else? But
precisely because Christianity had been able, in unending meta-
morphoses, to achieve all this at its proper time, therefore it
speaks to our time out of this time and its distress. This, too, our
book tries to describe.

Hence Christian doctrine as a hypothesis of scientific think-
ing cannot curtly be rejected. Rather the decision between this
hypothesis and the conventional one depends exclusively on the
efficiency of either one in the analysis of the material problems.
The proof of the pudding is in the eating. In this respect we
contend that academic social science, because of its methodologi-
cally necessary narrowness, ignores the decisive events and prob-
lems of the present age, and that it discourages and must dis-
courage the forces now active, since it must teach that all this is
delusion. Unable to jump across the shadow of its own narrow-
ness of method, it strives to cut the width of the social world
down to its own reach. To sum it up in one sentence: Academic
social science knows no theory of liberty. The wider scope of our
own approach on the one hand permits and commands us to
integrate into it the indispensable achievements of social science,
but on the other hand our approach must be positively tested
against the problems missed by social science, including e.g. the
Marshall Plan and the emancipation of the colonial peoples. In
other words, the truth of the Anselmian proposition "Credo ut
intelligam" must be demonstrated.

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