He is seconded by his guest, a well-known ex-Marxist journalist and political commentator, who has written a book on the same subject. Together they make witty, withering and scornful attacks on religious belief in general and Christianity in particular.

The biologist is Richard Dawkins and his book is The God Delusion. The journalist is Christopher Hitchens and his book is God Is Not Great. Between them they are getting some "hear, hear" from the assembly and have got some of the junior members doubled over in mirth.

Suddenly the senior professor of literary criticism wades in and focuses the spotlight of his massive erudition and theoretical sophistication on what it soon becomes clear is the astonishing philosophical, theological and historical ignorance of Dawkins and his guest.

The professor is Terry Eagleton, and as he goes on you suspect that he might be slightly tipsy because his rant is so far ranging and stream of consciousness. But you listen with fascination because the rhetoric has lightning flashes of wit which completely leave the other side eclipsed. As an American guest you must, of course, sit through long, rambling anti-American asides about Bush and neoconservatives, but that is the price of learned British company.

Such is the experience of reading Terry Eagleton's Terry Lectures given at Yale. They are entertaining, in places scintillating, raise important political and theological issues, give striking cultural analysis and at their most promising subside into very witty but self-indulgent rhetoric.

They read more like high table than lecture and, in the end, this is for the worse. Eagleton has his own critique of Christianity, which is that it has not been faithful to its revolutionary identification with the poor, its own commitment to the dispossession of power and privilege. But he has absolute contempt for the sophomoric liberal secularism of the pair he puts in their place by addressing them as "Ditchkins."

There are two main elements to Eagleton's critique of the new atheism. Firstly, he accuses the new atheists of getting their rejection of theology "on the cheap" by critiquing a parody of traditional theology based on half-understood Sunday School stereotypes.

Eagleton accuses "Ditchkins" of thinking of God in crudely anthropomorphic terms and being culpably ignorant of the sophisticated way in which Thomist theology, for instance, has handled the relationship between God and creation, including the relationship between science and religion which "Ditchkins" has gotten hopelessly confused.

Secondly, Eagleton shows himself a more serious sort of ex-Marxist than "Ditchkins" and demonstrates how embedded in market economy capitalism is their pathetic belief in the myth of progress under the benign reign of reason.

Eagleton rightly brings the pair up short for having a lot to say about the Inquisition and nothing to say about the Holocaust and Hiroshima. He also challenges liberal secularists to see that the championing of a technical, instrumentalist reason which is unmoored from any transcendent moral vision produces a kind of cultural destruction which spawns fundamentalism in both the East and the West.

Eagleton thinks that the only competitors for a credible transcendent moral vision in our time are a chastened version of socialism or a nonviolent liberation theological reading of the Bible. He ends his critique by painting "Ditchkins" as the enemies of human progress - as what Marx would call objectively counterrevolutionary- rather than as they like to see themselves, namely, leftist progressives.

Coming from one member of the British academic Left to fellow travelers, this has got to hurt. Returning to our high table: Eagleton has finished his rant, and all are silent for a moment, reminded of the peril of venturing too far afield from one's own specialty.

Then, another voice begins to speak: an American guest, Orthodox theologian David Bentley Hart. The wit is every bit as sharp as Eagleton's.

This American is completely up to the genre of no holds barred debate but he is in control of his argument, proceeds with luminous lucidity and a command of historical detail that quickly earns respect from the learned assembly.

The previous three have said a lot about history in a fast and loose sort of way.

"Ditchkins" has painted the history of Christianity in particular as a history of superstition and oppression. Eagleton has not challenged them much on that score, there being so much low hanging fruit in other areas. Hart's thesis, in turn, is a show stopper.

The triumph of Christianity over the world of late Roman antiquity represents such a vast transformation of civilization and culture that it is the only event truly worthy to be called a revolution. All subsequent Western history can be understood as the drama of this revolution and the counter-revolutionary reaction to it.

The new atheism is thus the most recent reaction to "a truly massive and epochal revision of humanity's prevailing vision of reality, so pervasive in its influence and so vast in its consequences as actually to have created a new conception of the world, of history, of human nature, of time and of the moral good...more ennobling in its moral power than any other movement of spirit, will, imagination, aspiration, or accomplishment in the history of the West" (xi).

Mythical Narrative Hart believes the immensity of this revolution and its humanizing power has been obscured by a historical myth which has become dominant among Western intelligentsia. He calls this myth the grand narrative of modernity.

This mythical narrative traces the triumph of critical reason over irrational faith and the emergence of the modern and tolerant secular state. This secular state takes a form that elevates either individualism or collectivism as the unquestioned ethical norm.

The narrative is kept up with the repetition of wildly inaccurate readings of history that Hart takes apart with meticulous attention to detail.

For example, he documents that the Inquisition, far from unleashing a period of witch-hunting on the European continent, persistently and patiently put a lid on popular hysteria and saved numberless persons accused of witchcraft from mob violence. The hoary boogie man of the Inquisition was clearly a rational brake on a superstitious and magic thinking populous.

Hart brilliantly deconstructs the story of an Age of Faith followed by an Age of Reason and shows instead that, as the West has lost its grip on its founding revolution, it has at the same time lost its grip on anything but the most instrumental and calculating use of reason.

He shows how modern science would not have been possible without the inheritance of the Christian worldview, and "that chief among the accomplishments of modern culture have been a massive retreat to superstition and the gestation of especially pitiless forms of nihilism; and that by comparison to the Christian revolution it succeeded, modernity is little more than an aftereffect, or even counterrevolution-a reactionary flight back toward a comfortable, but dehumanizing, mental and moral servitude to elemental nature" (xii).

Eagleton paints "Ditchkins" as counter-revolutionary in the Marxist sense. Hart offers a more profound definition of revolution and thus an even more poignant description of these unwitting counter-revolutionaries.

They are paving the way for the eclipse of the religion of "the God-man, who summons human beings to become created gods through charity," and the return of the "man-god" who worships will and power and practices a religion that "will always kill and then call it justice, or compassion, or sad necessity" (239).

Both of these books are an intellectual adventure and a treat for those who love language and wit and real argument. Both show up very quickly the new atheism for its setting up and knocking down of strawmen.

Both provide a sobering analysis of challenges facing Western culture as it loses confidence in its own deepest values in the midst of a life or death contest with a metaphysically committed opponent. Either of these books could be given as bibliotherapy to a cultured despiser of religion.

Hart's book is more likely to create a sense of loss and mourning, and consequently of spiritual joy. Of the two, Hart's is the one more likely to be read again and again.

---The Rev. Dr. Leander S. Harding teaches at Trinity School for Ministry in Ambridge, Pa. Leander S. Harding teaches Pastoral Theology and is Head of Chapel at Trinity Episcopal School for Ministry.