Carolina QuotesChrist is a persuasion, a form of evoking desire... Such an account [of Christ] must inevitably make an appeal to beauty.
David Bentley Hart Connected to the Carolinas
Source
p. 3
- work
- The Beauty of the Infinite (2003)
- year
- 2003
- locator
- p. 3
Cite this record
“Christ is a persuasion, a form of evoking desire... Such an …” David Bentley Hart. Carolina Quotes, record CQ-22021CE0F0. https://carolinaquotes.com/quote/22021ce0f0
More from David Bentley Hart
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.
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.