““A sense of the sacred is inseparable from a sense of radical discontinuity, be it temporal, rational, experiential, or a combination of the three. The mystification that is usually a concomitant of such discontinuity is at the very heart of the Christian tradition especially. Whether is takes the form of Tertullian's reputed "credo quia absurdum est" or the more subtle form of fundamentalism's ahistorical canonicalism, distance is the guarantor of the sacred's status as sacred.””
