David Bentley Hart

North Carolina · connectedBorn 1965

American author, Orthodox theologian, and philosopher

Worked at Duke University

non-fiction writer, university teacher, philosopher, religious studies scholar, church historian, Orthodox theologian

Quotations with a citation

Christ is a persuasion, a form of evoking desire... Such an account [of Christ] must inevitably make an appeal to beauty.

Beauty crosses every boundary, traverses every series, and so manifests the God who transcends every division.

Creation's being is God's pleasure, creation's beauty God's glory; beauty reveals the shining of an uncreated light. … Creation is only a splendor that hangs upon that life of love and knowledge, and only by grace; it is first and foremost a surface, a shining fabric of glory, whose inmost truth is its aesthetic correspondence to the beauty of divine love. … It is delight that constitutes creation, and so only delight can comprehend it, see it aright, understand its grammar. Only in loving creation's beauty—only in seeing that creation truly is beauty—does one apprehend what creation is.

The secret irony pervading these arguments [on objections to the goodness of God] is that they would never have occurred to consciences that had not in some profound way been shaped by the moral universe of a Christian culture.

The cross of Christ is not, after all, simply an eternal validation of pain and death, but their overthrow. If all the tribulations of this world were to be written off as calculably necessary contributions to redemption -- part of the great "balance" of things -- then Christ's sacrifice would not be a unique saving act so much as the metaphysical ground for a universe of "sacrifice," wherein suffering and death are part of the sublime and inevitable fabric of finitude; and divine providence would be indistinguishable from fate.

There is a sense in which Ivan's love of that little girl [in The Brothers Karamazov] is always in danger of becoming a kind of demonic compassion: a desire that she not exist at all, a conviction that it were better she had never been summoned into the wounded freedom of cosmic time or called into rational union with God than she suffer the wrongs done her at the hands of fallen creatures.

Unless the world is truly set apart from God and possesses a dependent but real liberty of its own analogous to the freedom of God, everything is merely a fragment of divine volition, and God is simply the totality of all that is and all that happens; there is no creation, but only an oddly pantheistic expression of God's unadulterated power.

In the libraries

Open Library Atheist delusions · 2009 View library record ↗ Open Library Story of Christianity · 2009 View library record ↗ Open Library That All Shall Be Saved · 2019 View library record ↗ Open Library The New Testament · 2017 View library record ↗ Open Library The beauty of the infinite · 2003 View library record ↗ Open Library The doors of the sea · 2005 View library record ↗

Read David Bentley Hart

Atheist delusions 2009 Find a copy That All Shall Be Saved 2019 Find a copy The beauty of the infinite 2003 Find a copy The New Testament 2017 Find a copy The doors of the sea 2005 Find a copy Story of Christianity 2009 Find a copy

Recorded without a firm citation

Kept here, labelled, rather than mixed in above.

The final encounter with God, or an encounter with God that would take you beyond doubt, wouldn't have the character of a metaphysical proof.