This modest-sized apology of Christianity is unique among all of the books that defend the faith against the recent salvos by the new atheists.  Hart is a first rate theologian with a prodigious vocabulary (read it on a Kindle and save yourself lots of dictionary time) and an incisive command of history.  He wields these important weapons with wit and a healthy measure of condescension for the “fashionable” herd of new atheists.  The book presents a survey of early church history – which many Christians are not very familiar with – and thereby establishes that the “Christian Revolution” was tectonic in its size and influence.

His point is to argue that the history of Christianity, as a cultural force which eclipsed the pagan world, should disempower the new atheists’ hope for a secular utopia.  They are blinded to the fact that their own Christianized ethics collapse when the seat of Christian authority is abdicated.  Hope for any kind of moral paradise must be grounded in the unique truths associated with the incarnation of God.