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Was it coincidence that brought Francis and Edith Schaeffer to their home in the Swiss Alps on an April Fools Day? Or was it another of God's subtle ironies pointing ahead to the essence of their future work?

Was God, in other words, as so often in history, choosing the foolish and weak things of the world to shame the wise and strong?

Despite the recent post-modernist revolt, Western culture still labours under much of the mythological residue left over from the Enlightenment. The axiom, for example, that religion is unimportant and irrelevant still survives.

Society should be redesigned along secular lines. Substitution of a materialistic for a religious worldview would leave morality unaffected and economic prosperity and political peace to thrive. It would simply be a case of being more practical - more tolerant, more progressive, less superstitious.

Christianity has always recognised two basic 'impossibilities': the impossibility of unaided human salvation and the impossibility of unaided human knowledge. Paul says: 'no one will be declared righteous . . . by observing the law' and again, 'the world in its wisdom did not know God'.

As evangelicals we are familiar with the first, less with the second - which is serious not only for the inerrancy debate, but also for our whole experience, for the central issue of our time is not soteriology (salvation), important and necessary as that remains, but epistemology (knowledge). The West's current disorientation and distress flows naturally from its intellectual bankruptcy.