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As I began to pursue my doctoral degree at a doughty bastion of liberal Christianity, the University of Chicago Divinity School, I met Professor Frederick Sack (not his real name, but the story that follows is true). An expert in the history of Christian thought, he became a favorite of mine. He also, however, became a considerable theological nuisance.

Though he was converted and raised in the evangelical tradition, by the time I met him, he had drifted theologically. He had become an expert on the father of liberal theology, F. D. E. Schleiermacher, and I noticed a portrait of Schleiermacher on his office wall. Professor Sack was delighted to talk about Schleiermacher, whom he invoked as one of his patron saints—inasmuch as Presbyterians have such benefactors, he allowed with a small smile.

But what then was I to make of the portrait that hung beside Schleiermacher's? For there in this den of liberalism was the unmistakable visage of John Calvin. Professor Sack was delighted to talk of Calvin, too, as another subject of his professional research and another patron saint. Indeed, he said, over much of his career he had labored to show the theological threads that connected Calvin and Schleiermacher.

So I began to probe a little further into Professor Sack's convictions. I brought up the classic conflict between Martin Luther and Desiderius Erasmus in the 16th century over the extent to which our salvation depends on God's free gift or on our response of faith and obedience. Luther, of course, despaired of human potential and placed salvation entirely in God's hands. Erasmus believed that authentic Christianity consisted of following the moral example of Christ. So, I asked Professor Sack, whose emphasis was most correct?

To my surprise, Professor Sack immediately sided with Luther. It is only by God's grace that we are saved, he affirmed. We have nothing of our own to bring. We are saved only through God's work in the Redeemer.

I was nonplussed. But I persisted. Who, then, is this Redeemer? I meant "Jesus," and he meant "Jesus," but what did each of us mean by Jesus as Redeemer? If he was giving the good gospel answer regarding salvation, perhaps he was a Christian after all.

Jesus was one who was entirely transparent to God, was the reply. He is the one in whom we see God at work reconciling the world to himself. All of this, I thought, was close to the mark, but what about the Trinity? Was Jesus a great man who shows us God, or God showing himself as a man? Professor Sack, who had given such a heartwarming answer regarding Luther and God's grace, now replied that he agreed with Schleiermacher: The doctrine of the Trinity was not a mystery to be believed but a contradiction to be dispensed with. Jesus the Redeemer is the mystical person (as in the classical sense of persona, I concluded, rather like an identity God offers us) through whom we see and relate to God. Jesus is not the physically resurrected Son of God now sitting in heaven in human form, as orthodoxy has affirmed.

I finally put the question that for evangelical Christians, at least, is at the very heart of the matter—as it is for missionary-minded Roman Catholics, Orthodox, and other Protestants. Say that one met a pious Muslim from Arabia, I suggested. Should the Christian try to convert that Muslim to Christianity?

No, Professor Sack replied. He stood with the early 20th-century theologian Ernst Troeltsch on this one. Christianity is the authentic form of religion for us in our culture, but Islam is the authentic form of religion for them in theirs. Conversion would thus be unnecessary—indeed, inappropriate.

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February 2003, Vol. 47, No. 2