The devastating thesis of this book is ""that there is a deadly and irreconcilable opposition between western civilization and Christianity, and that one of them must destroy the other."" Throughout his more than forty years of teaching and writing, says John L. McKenzie, he felt a vague but strong discomfort -- a malaise. He finally realized that it was a ""deliberately unrecognized discord between what I was and the word of God which I had so long studied. My way of life and my world demanded the maintenance of a number of assumptions which the world of God compelled me to question. My way of life and my world did not permit me to ask those questions. When the questions grew to an intolerable number, this book was the only way to find comfort, the comfort which I hope is reached by at last achieving total candor."" And candid John McKenzie is in this piercing analysis of the confrontation between Christianity and a world which has twisted it, softened it, rationalized it, and evaded its basic precepts.