The story [of Christianity] is strangely like many myths which have haunted religion from the first, and yet it is not like them. It is not transparent to the reason: we could not have invented it ourselves. It has not the suspicious a priori lucidity of Pantheism or Netownian physics.

The singular nature of Christianity … is easily evidenced by Christ’s astounding pronouncement: ‘I am the way, the truth, and the life’ (John 14:6). Notice that Christ does not say that he knows the truth, or that he carries with him the propositions of truth, or that he exemplifies these propositions. Christ says that he is the truth. Jesus Christ is the Word or ‘Truth made flesh.’ Needless to say, this concrete, embodied truth is a radical departure from Hellenistic and thus Western traditions of a propositional truth.

How extraordinarily stupid it is to defend Christianity, how little knowledge of humanity it betrays, how it connives if only unconsciously with offence by making Christianity out to be some miserable object that in the end must be rescued by a defence. It is therefore certain and true that the person who first thought of defending Christianity is de facto a Judas No. 2; he too betrays with a kiss, except his treason is that of stupidity. To defend something is always to discredit it.