If the confession that Jesus is lord is not true, then, quite frankly, we best be done with Christianity forthwith. The history of Christianity is too chequered, and it has cast too many painfully long shadows over the history of the world, for us to have any justification in continuing to proclaim our confession of Jesus lordship as good news unless Jesus is Lord. Only then can we have confidence that the church, especially when we see and experience it at its worst, is not something self-contained, nor something exhausted by the pursuit of its own ends. We should be confident that this gospel is true because we live in a culture whose very foundations arise from a systematic rejection of that which Christianity claims to be true. The quickest way to grasp the nature of the modern west is to recognise that in many ways it is founded on the critique of religion and the specific rejection of Christianity.
Sociologists speak of secularisation, philosophers of naturalism and materialism.
All of the modern sciences start from the assumption that humans are best explained in terms of themselves without reference to the transcendent or to the otherness of God. What was truly shocking two hundred years ago is now more frequently an unrecognised part of the mental furniture of any self-respecting citizen of the west at the end of the twentieth century. 1 If Hogan is right, and I believe that he is, then we should not underestimate the importance of what he is saying. Our culture, whether any particular individual acknowledges it or not, whether we as Christians are conscious of it or not, is systematically oriented away from that which we claim to be true. The critiques of Christian faith which emerged in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries lie behind two developments which have been pivotal for the character of contemporary western societies.