This is a book, which, according to the dust jacket “will unsettle believers and unbelievers alike”. The author is the principal of Wycliffe Hall, Oxford and is a Professor of Historical Theology in the University. His first studies were in the natural sciences. As an undergraduate he professed atheism, founded an Atheist Society and saw Marxism as holding the “key to the future” (p.176).

Atheism, and its alternative, have been in the news, or certainly in the bestseller lists. Richard Dawkins’ book The God Delusion has been the subject of newspaper articles and television programs. It has provoked a variety of responses, including one from the author of this book. The response is entitled ‘The Dawkins Delusion’.

The Economist, which is selective in the choice of the books which it reviews, dealt with several works on this subject in 2006 under the heading “To believe or not to believe”.

Closer to home Quadrant joined the debate in several articles including a memorable ‘Letter from God to the Editor’ coming from the pen of Peter Coleman.

The Twilight of Atheism is instructive, readable, serious and sometimes lighthearted, ambitious and of considerable historical scope. It ranges from Homer to Dr Dawkins himself.

Its thesis, and its title, is not to be read to imply the new dawn of Christianity. In the final chapters where Professor McGrath addresses the future, he both raises questions as well as venturing into prophecy.

The book begins with brief reference to classical Greek and Roman atheism. However its greater part deals with the period from the fifteenth century on, concentrating principally on movements of thought and events in regions that were traditionally Christian.

The author’s passing comments on the sixteenth century rearrangements of religion and power in Europe, as a prelude to both violent political change and philosophical revolution, are both provocative and stimulating.

Were the intellectual forebears of Feuerbach, Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud to be found among the critics of Christianity in the eighteen hundreds? The rise and dominance of the natural sciences is referred to, but not at length.

A longer chapter is given to the nineteenth century ‘Crisis of Faith’ with mention of the ‘Life of Jesus Studies’ and concurrent themes in the literature of the period. The infl uence of such movements is still, I would say, very much with us.

The emergence in the nineteen sixties of the ‘Death of God’ debate is given a chapter. Looking back over half a century it is hard to remember what all the fuss was about. Perhaps Bishop John Robinson is better remembered for his writings on the New Testament.

The last chapters of this book may be for many the most arresting. Atheism is described as “in its twilight”. Religion is back in favour.

We are introduced to postmodernism, with some helpful explanations for those, who, like myself, are not quite sure what postmodernism actually is.

And then, in the final chapters we encounter what could be said to be the central positive theme of the whole book, that is, the affi rmation that “there is something in human nature that will cause us to yearn for God” (p.181).

Augustine’s prayer is quoted, “You have made us for yourself and our heart is restless until...”. The longing remains part of us. And, as said elsewhere, we are born with an “incurable nostalgia for the Garden”.

The rejection of imagery within the Protestant tradition, the claim that “knowledge tended to take the form of information” rather than “encounter between the believer and spiritual realities” is asserted. And this resulted, according to the author, in a vacuum, an emptiness.

“The outcome was inevitable and predictable, God became an absence in the world” (p.202). Pietism was “a corrective infl uence in Protestantism,” (p.204), but “mainline Protestant orthodoxy presupposed a disembedded God” (p.202).

Atheism has now but a “fading appeal” (p.257). And if atheism does not have much of a future, what is the future or futures of Christianity?

Reconstruction, multiplicities are suggested, and well to the fore, Pentecostalism, offering “a direct personal, transformative encounter with God in the worship of the Church and in personal experience” (p.225).

Will this be so? Professor McGrath has moved from history to prediction. Time, or eternity, will hold the answer.

The debates, past and present, which are discussed in this book will remain with us. So, TS Eliot, writing in 1931, contrasts Voltaire with Blaise Pascal, as protagonists of unbelief and faith respectively, and comments “in the end we must all choose for ourselves between one point of view and the other”.

And, while writing of Pascal, I would close by mentioning one of the more arresting and chilling of his Pensées, and one not irrelevant to this book.

“Men hate religion and fear it, lest they find it to be true”.

Bishop Donald Cameron is the former Anglican Bishop of North Sydney and is now retired.