Religion: Heretic or Prophet?

THEOLOGY (See Cover)

It seems oddly paradoxical that 1966 — intellectually a most permissive year — should almost have produced a certifiable religious heretic.

But that situation is no more startling than its parallel paradox: the casting of doubt on such formidable Christian doctrines as Original Sin and the Virgin Birth, on the Trinity and the Resurrection, has made many men consider — or reconsider — them not with scorn but with respect, not with contempt but with intellectual curiosity.

For the doctrines now being questioned are embed ded in Western man's heritage and, in the manner in which...