The well-informed, frequently puzzled by foreign affairs, are sometimes even mystified by problems of the Middle East, an area of unusual volatility, controversy, and seeming unpredictability. Yet that area need not be less knowable than other regions. Actually, the Middle East may well prove to be more intelligible and predictable than most regions.

There are, I admit, some genuinely puzzling s pects to the Middle East—one is the military ascendancy of a small and reputedly unmarital people over vast masses of war like people. But after several decades of unremitting hostility to Jewish political assertiveness in the Middle East, it is surely a suspension of rationality to suppose—as most of us seem to—that the atmosphere can be cleared by some semantic formulation.

There are hatreds which are devoted to real things and people, and there is a hatred which displaces inner violence onto any accessible external object. The deepest causes for hate are racial, fraternal, communal. No trip by Henry Kissinger will mend the savagery of Moslem Pakistani toward Bengali Hindu or solve the fixed enmities of Ulster, for such wars are merciless and personally felt, "popular" in the most terrifying significance of that word.

America's turbulent relationship with China, and the Kissinger expedition, cannot be understood in terms of such hatred. Yet one does find in American feelings toward China a violent and unstable emotion that cannot be accounted for in a relationship based solely on rational calculations of interest and advantage.

Are the message, structures and socio-political implications of Christianity in harmony with the teaching, person and life of its Founder? To the degree that one of its functions is to examine this question critically at every moment, theology today is confronted with urgent revolutionary imperatives.

This reflection may possibly seem applicable only to the Western or Euroamerican world, and it is undoubtedly true. However, two things are clear: First, the present epoch requires that everyone return to his sources and examine his own roots inorder to assume his identity creatively rather than accept it passively.