Overview: Can we find religious inspiration in great atheist writing? It is a paradoxical challenge but an urgent one. The gap between secular and religious understandings of the world has become impossibly wide. It is damaging Christianity and cutting young people off from the possibility of faith. Yet if God exists, everything we learn about the world should tell us more about God.

Verdict: The Devils’ Gospels started in a youth discussion group at Oxford’s University Church. Each month the author would introduce a different atheist book to the teenagers to see where the discussion would lead. Four of the best are given the status of gospels here: Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Jacques Derrida’s Writing and Difference, Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, and Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion. These books each have, in their own way, shaped the world we live in today.

Author Christopher Gasson is a journalist, publisher, and amateur theologian. He studied politics, philosophy and economics at Oxford University. While his children were young, he took responsibility for the University Church’s Sunday school and youth discussion group. Growing up he had felt that Church liked to wrap up children in intellectual cotton wool out of fear that their faith be upset by even the gentlest questioning.

He was therefore determined that the discussion group should therefore address the most difficult and dangerous challenges to Christianity rather than ignore them. What he discovered was that God is robust enough to stand up to such questioning and the adults in the congregation had just as much appetite for such discussion as the teenagers. The Devils’ Gospels was born.

The Devils’ Gospels captures the energy of their ideas in language simple enough for a bright 11-year-old to understand, and uses it to shed greater light on the nature of God. But it is not just written for intelligent teenagers trying to find their way towards belief. It is aimed at two other important groups: Christians who feel that they aren’t getting the answers that matter from the Church, and non-believers who want to explore the possibility that there may be more to life than physics and biology.

Thus in what is a most enthralling exploration, The Devils’ Gospels: Finding God in Four Great Atheist Books is one of those cannot put down, page-turning prose that dutifully challenges the reader to question their long-felt, long-standing understanding of right and wrong; albeit here in a way that quickly becomes a reflective re: Faith and the true nature of Evil.

About the Author - Christopher Gasson is a journalist, publisher, and amateur theologian. He studied politics, philosophy and economics at Oxford University and subsequently took responsibility for running the University Church’s Sunday school and youth discussion group.

In his day job he publishes a successful specialist magazine covering the water industry and is an occasional contributor to the New Statesman magazine. He lives in Oxford, UK.

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