...Neither Christian nor Jew cares much about the logic of salvation. The soul stands in fear and trembling, sick unto death - which is the same as sin - and reaches out for grace. The Jews do this as a kinship community (Blutgemeinschaft), in Franz Rosenzweig's phrase; Christians must do so as individuals, because as Christians they abandon the doomed ties of kinship, and instead join the assembly (ecclesia) that calls them out from among the nations.

The remnants of Christian state religion rot and stink on the dying continent of Europe. Christianity cannot persist except as a continuing revival, a recurring conversion - as a sequence of singular events, rather than as an orderly process. Awaiting execution in Hitler's prisons, the German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote that in a world come of age, the Christian religion no longer could exist as organized practice, but only as an expression of individual conscience.

America was created for precisely this purpose, to replace state religion on the European model with a religion of individual conscience. Such a religion must be schismatic, multi-sectarian, short on doctrine but long on inspiration. America's kaleidoscope of Protestant denominations, so bewildering to Europeans, constitutes the only type of milieu in which Christianity yet may flourish. Although Christian communities are burgeoning throughout the world, they will succeed only in emulation of the American version.

With right the Vatican may defend the record of the Spanish Inquisition, but it alters not a jot or tittle of the awful sentence - oblivion - that history has passed upon European Christianity.