Have the 'fires' of modern criticism melted away Christianity's claim to truth? Seminal thinkers such as Feuerbach, Marx, Nietzsche and Freud argued that religious belief is nothing more than an illusion, triggered by our own psychological and social needs. Jung claimed that traditional Christianity was a gross distortion of the divine. Paul Avis does not deny the reality of those human factors which shape our beliefs, but he argues that it is possible to take seriously both human distortions of religious truth and also the reality of the transcendent God. These in-depth studies of the most unsparing critics of Christianity point to the possibility of a faith chastened and refined in the fires of criticism.
