the need for the “God-hypothesis” to explain reality and meet human need. This process, which would continue unabated and spread more widely, could not be addressed by an apologetic based on “ultimate questions” (such as despair, sin, and guilt) to which God alone was the answer. Such thinking reduced God to a deus ex machina, a “God from the machine,” who stepped in when everything else failed. Such thinking pushed God to the periphery of human affairs, to become the God of individual piety, bourgeois