What bothers us most about the Christian Faith is, above all, the burden of the all-too-many documents that have been accumulating throughout history and that now present themselves to us with a claim on our faith. That this is where the immediate difficulty lies can be seen in the extraordinary resonance that ensues whenever an author seems to have mastered the multiplicity of documents and to have resolved them into the unity of a simple acceptance of faith. When we hear again and again that this or that book, this or that lecture, has had a liberating effect, it becomes obvious that people today experience the form of faith as a burden, but that they are, at the same time, animated by a desire to believe, otherwise they would have no qualms about simply ignoring the whole question. A liberation by theologians that gives the conviction that one is, nonetheless, still within the framework of the Faith would not be questioned. However paradoxical it may sound, there exists even today a nostalgia for the Faith. The world of planning, of research, of exact calculations, and of experiment is obviously not sufficient in itself.
From: Glaube und Zukunft, pp.26-27
