There are two main barriers to Christian faith set up by our twentieth-century secularised culture. The first is the conviction that faith is irrelevant to the real problems of the twentieth century. The second is our inability to accept the reality of a being with powers that transcend our own. These two barriers are very different, the first being very concrete, the second very abstract. Yet they are connected by the Christian belief that we—the citizens of the twentieth century, and the rest of humanity too—are caught in a predicament which only one with powers that transcend our own can overcome.

In this article I want to do two things. I want to give an account of the predicament in which we are caught that will show both that there really is one, and also that it is a predicament that human powers alone are insufficient to overcome. I also want to present an argument to show that at least one notion of a transcendental power (and being) answers to something real and cannot be dismissed as mythical, symbolic or ‘religious’.

The predicament in which we are caught is our inability to create the kind of community that we cannot but desire. To give a better idea of the nature of this community the lack of which constitutes the essence of our predicament, I will give two examples of attempts to achieve it and try to show why they fail.