Rory discusses Hart's The Doors of the Sea

For the many who have read D. B. Hart's little book The Doors of the Sea: where was God in the tsunami?, you might be interested to join the discussion over on Rory's blog. He's just finished this fascinating little tome and has begun a series of chapter summaries.

The problem of evil - and the problem with theodicies - was an early theme of this blog (especially in this series), and Hart's book has been a source of further reflection.

Link love

It's been a while since I've shared the love.

Alastair posts some Thoughts on Rowling's revelation that Dumbledore is gay.

Michael has discovered Hart's often breath-taking The Doors of the Sea and offers some reflections upon providence.

Rory is reflecting upon lessons learned about churches (big and little) while in the UK recently.

Frank has noticed a worrying tendency in Christian responses to climate change.

Mark has been posting some (more lengthy) thoughts on creation science (or as MPJ would say: 'creation' "science"). I've just linked to the first few posts in a series that already contains eleven lengthy posts.

Hart on learning to see

Sometimes we don't see what's under our noses. Sometimes we see but do not perceive. Having one's eyes open and head pointed in the right direction is no guarantee of correct vision. Hart makes an excellent point about the labour of vision that is required in order to see straight in a world bent out of shape:

[A]ll of nature is a shattered mirror of divine beauty, still full of light, but riven by darkness. ... [T]o see the goodness indwelling all creation requires a labour of vision that only faith in Easter can sustain; but it is there, effulgent, unfading, innocent, but languishing in bondage to corruption, groaning in anticipation of a glory yet to be revealed, both a promise of the Kingdom yet to come and a portent of its beauty.

- David Bentley Hart, The Doors of the Sea:
Where Was God in the Tsunami? (Eerdmans: 2005), 102-3.

Learning to see creation rather than merely 'nature' does not mean closing our eyes to the pain all around (and within). Instead, it is to look thankfully not fearfully, seeing abundance rather than scarcity. It is to look caringly rather than instrumentally, seeing beauty before usefulness. It is to look hopefully, seeking glimpses of the glory yet to be revealed.

Hart on costly comfort

Some discussions of the problem of evil distinguish between a pastoral response to those who might be hurting and an intellectual and/or theological and/or philosophical response to satisfy the inquirer. Hart argues that this is a false dichotomy. In particular, whatever we say about God's sovereignty we ought to be able to say to someone in grief. Can we really tell a father who has just lost four of his five children in the tsunami that 'his children had died as a result of God's eternal, inscrutiable and righteous counsels, and that in fact their deaths had mysteriously served God's purposes in history, and that all of this was completely necessary for God to accomplish his ultimate design in having created this world'?

Words we would not utter to ease another's grief we ought not to speak to satisfy our own sense of piety. ... For if we would think it shamefully foolish and cruel to say such things in the moment when another's sorrow is most real and irresistibly painful, then we ought never to say them. ... [S]uch sentiments would amount not only to an indiscretion or words spoken out of season, but to a vile stupidity and a lie told principally for our own comfort, by which we would try to excuse ourselves for believing in an omnipotent and benevolent God. In the process, moreover, we would be attempting to deny that man a knowledge central to the gospel: the knowledge of the evil of death, its intrinsic falsity, its unjust dominion over the world, its ultimate nullity; the knowledge that God is not pleased or nourished by our deaths, that he is not the secret architect of evil, that he is the conqueror of hell, that he has condemned all these things by the power of the cross; the knowledge that God is life and light and infinite love, and that the path that leads through nature and history to his Kingdom does not simply follow the contours of either nature or history, or obey the logic immanent to them, but is opened to us by way of the natural and historical absurdity - or outrage - of the empty tomb.

- David Bentley Hart, The Doors of the Sea: Where Was God in the Tsunami?
(Eerdmans: 2005), 99-101.

Twelve points for the location of the photo. Maybe more if you're specific.

Hart on provisional cosmic dualism

      '[T]here are those who suffer from a palpably acute anxiety regarding the honour due the divine sovereignty. Certainly many Christians over the centuries have hastened to resituate the New Testament imagery of spiritual warfare securely within the one all-determining will of God, fearing that to deny that evil and death are the "left hand" of God's goodness in creation or the necessary "shadow" of his righteousness would be to deny divine omnipotence as well.
      Nevertheless, and disturbing as it may be, it is clearly the case that there is a kind of "provisional" cosmic dualism within the New Testament: not an ultimate dualism, of course, between two equal principles; but certainly a conflict between a sphere of created autonomy that strives against God on the one hand and the saving love of God in time on the other.'

- David Bentley Hart, The Doors of the Sea: Where Was God in the Tsunami?
(Eerdmans: 2005), 62-63.

This, once again, raises the question: is evil primarily the instrument or enemy of God? Hart's own answer is unambiguous:

[I]f it is from Christ that we are to learn how God relates himself to sin, suffering, evil and death, it would seem that he provides us little evidence of anything other than a regal, relentless, and miraculous enmity: sin he forgives, suffering he heals, evil he casts out, and death he conquers. And absolutely nowhere does Christ act as if any of these things are part of the eternal work or purposes of God. (86-87)

Hart (again) on suffering and providence

"[Many Christians] clearly seem to wish to believe there is a divine plan in all the seeming randomness of nature's violence that accounts for every instance of suffering, privation, and loss in a sort of total sum. This is an understandable impulse. That there is a transcendent providence that will bring God's good ends out of the darkness of history - in spite of every evil - no Christian can fail to affirm. But providence (as even Voltaire seems to have understood) is not simply a 'total sum' or 'infinite equation' that leaves nothing behind."
...
"Yes, certainly, there is nothing, not even suffering or death, that cannot be providentially turned toward God's good ends. But the New Testament also teaches us that, in another and ultimate sense, suffering and death - considered in themselves - have no true meaning or purpose at all; and this is in a very real sense the most liberating and joyous wisdom that the gospel imparts."

- David Bentley Hart, The Doors of the Sea: Where Was God in the Tsunami?
(Eerdmans: 2005), 29, 35.

Hart on learning from atheists

"[S]ometimes atheism seems to retain elements of 'Christianity' within itself that Christians have all too frequently forgotten."

- David Bentley Hart, The Doors of the Sea: Where Was God in the Tsunami? (Eerdmans: 2005), 25.

Have you noticed this? Can you think of any examples?

Hart on moral outrage and God's existence

Writing after the 2004 tsunami about journalistic responses that declared God decisively disproven, David Bentley Hart argues that Christians ought to experience genuine kindred feeling with those who then rage against the God they don't believe in.

After all, at the heart of of all such unbelief lies an undoubtedly authentic moral horror before the sheer extravagance of worldly misery, a kind of rage for justice, a refusal of easy comfort, and an unwillingness to be reconciled to evil that no one who believes this to be a fallen world should want to disparage. For the secret irony pervading these arguments is that they would never have occurred to consciences thuat had not in some profound way been shaped by the moral universe of a Christian culture.

- David Bentley Hart, The Doors of the Sea: Where Was God in the Tsunami? (Eerdmans: 2005), 15.

Hart on doctrine as winsome apologetics

I presume that a credible defense of Christian rhetoric can be undertaken only from within Christian doctrine: because the church makes its appeal to the world first by pursuing its own dogmatics, by narrating and renarrating itself with ever greater fullness, hoping all the while that the intrinsic delightfulness (and of course, truthfulness) of this practice will draw others into its circle of discourse.

-David Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth (Eerdmans: 2003), 30.

Today, I started reading this fascinating book (a lovely gift). It will be heavy going, but looks very stimulating. His basic question is "Is the beauty to whose persuasive power the Christian rhetoric of evangelism inevitably appeals, and upon which it depends, theologically defensible?" By taking 'beauty' as his theme, a whole way into theology (and evangelism, and philosophy) is opened up that is often overlooked, particularly by Protestants. One of his main points in the introduction is that beauty is not abstract, but is irreducibly associated with particular things in their contingency; the Christian gospel is not a set of timeless truths of universal reason, but is a historical story of such particularity that a modernist is embarrassed.

Anyway, I'd love to hear what people think of the first quote, which comes at the end of the introduction. Is there an intrinsic attractiveness to the good news as it is narrated? Do we believe the good news will strike hearers as good? Is this a repudiation of an apologetics of cultural translation (at least as a first strategy) in which we try to first connect with where people are at and answer the questions they are asking?