A collection of the lectures that were given at the American University of Beirut in 1967 on the topic God and Man in Contemporary Christian Thought has been published as one of a series of American University of Beirut Centennial Publications.1 This book gathers the views and analyses of a considerable number of Christian clergy and thinkers who came from Western Europe and the United States to participate in that series of lectures on the occasion of the American University celebrating its centennial. A number of Arab Christians also participated in the symposium by giving lectures about the state of Christian thought in the region. However, I will direct this review towards the opinions of foreign thinkers in order to give the reader a critical conception of the general state of contemporary Christian thought in the West.

The first aspect of these lectures that attracts notice is that they focus, directly and indirectly, around one major problem, the relation of the Church (the Christian religion) to a modern world that is immersed in secularism, a-religiosity, an immersion that covers [A 117] almost every aspect of its activity. The best example of this focus is the inaugural address that Dr. W.A. Visser't Hooft2 gave under the title “The Contemporary Church.”

Dr. Visser't Hooft began his address with a short description of the state of the Church in the Middle Ages and its comprehensive role in organizing all aspects of individual and social life. That was the age of an integrated Christian society. He then briefly examined the disintegration of the unity of the Christian world into a variety of Christian communities and different churches, especially after the Lutheran Reformation. What increased the intensity of this descent towards fragmentation and disintegration was the bloody struggle between Christianity as represented by its churches, on the one hand, and the nascent natural sciences and movements calling for individualism, humanism, and the interests of the rising middle class, on the other hand. Then the speaker reminded the audience of Nietzsche's famous call “God is dead” and briefly discussed the views of some of the famous critics of Christianity in the nineteenth century, among them Karl Marx and the French philosopher Auguste Comte. He then turned his attention to the revival that Western Christian religious thought had witnessed in the recent past and which is