Christianity: Its Rise and Fall

About the Book

This book proposes to describe the running conflict which intellectuals have been waging with Christianity and Christianity with the intellectuals from the earlist centuries up to the present day, a conflict which at times seemed resolved but at most times unresolvable.  Basically the problem is this: Can unaided human faculties answer adequately the the ultimate questions about human existence or can only the truths of Revelation answer them?  And ultimately is there such a thing as Revelation?      At one extreme is the fideist or Christian anti-humanist position, which insists that the only important truths are God’s truths, revealed through the Sacred Scriptures, that whatever truths human faculties can discover are superfluous if not false or downright dangerous, and that no mere human faculties can answer the ultimate questions. The other extreme is the humanist anti-Christian position, which is an atheistic position, and which holds that there is no Revalation, that what passes for Sacred Scripture is merely history, philosophy, and poetry, and is therefore subject to all the limitations of any other history or philosophy or poetry.  In this view, the answer to the ultimate questions must come from the word of Man because God did not give Man the word, even if there were a God.      This book, then, describes from the earliest times up to the present the clashes between intellectuals and Christian orthodoxy over these crucial questions, and in the process provides something of an intellectual history of the Western World with an account of the various positions held by the key players in that history.

About the Author

Arther Trace is a retired professor of English and Russian literature. He has published several books on literature, education, and literary criticism as well as dozens of articles. His book What Ivan Knows That Johnny Doesn’t was a Book-of-the-Month-Club Alternate.