Carolina QuotesUnless 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.
David Bentley Hart Connected to the Carolinas
Source
p. 91; on Predestination in Calvinism.
- work
- The Doors of the Sea (2005)
- year
- 2005
- locator
- p. 91
Cite this record
“Unless the world is truly set apart from God and possesses a…” David Bentley Hart. Carolina Quotes, record CQ-2FAAE5007B. https://carolinaquotes.com/quote/2faae5007b
More from David Bentley Hart
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.
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.
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.