This volume, the conclusion to the trilogy that began with Jesus and Christ, was intended to be about the church and indeed it is; however, its approach is quite different from that originally planned. Contrary to the author's hopes for a new church pattern, in the years after the Second Vatican Council the council's vision of the church was not given institutional church continued to see itself in pre-Vatican, Tridentine terms, as the incontrovertible interpreter of God, above all criticism. Faced, then, with a malaise and polarization in church life, the author altered his original plan of completing his trilogy with an expressly ecclesiological tract, because he deemed it more important to search, once again for the kernel of the gospel and the Christian religion.