ABSTRACT
It no doubt takes the Nietzschean - and ethnocentric - prevention of a fin-desiecle Parisian intellectual to pen an ‘Epistle to the last Christians’; or to question whether such a thing as a Christian love-discourse still exists. In fact, the ‘lost tribe’, though rare enough in the rue d’Ulm, the location of France’s elite Ecole normale superieure, are more numerous worldwide than at any time in their history; while the quiet revolution of twentieth-century Christian theology, when discerned amid more visible upheavals, will be seen by those who have followed it - how numerous they are is an altogether shrewder question - to have tended solely towards disengaging this discourse from its cultural accretions, often using the paradigm shifts taken from the natural and human sciences to return more surely to its own energising sources.
