“ Christianity has from its beginning portrayed itself as a gospel of peace, a way of reconciliation (with God, with other creatures), and a new model of human community, offering the 'peace which passe… David Bentley Hart
“ Now, as it happens, theology is actually a pitilessly demanding discipline concerning an immense, profoundly sophisticated legacy of hermeneutics, dialectics, and logic; it deals in minute detail with… David Bentley Hart
“ And to my son Patrick, without whose assistance (as P.G.Wodehouse said somewhere of his daughter) this book would have been completed in half the time, all love and all joy. David Bentley Hart
“ At some level, it is even tempting to think that since strict materialism is among the most incoherent of superstitions - one that has never really asked the question of the being of things in any dep… David Bentley Hart
“ Among all the many great transitions that have marked the evolution of Western civilisation ... there has been only one—the triumph of Christianity —that can be called in the fullest sense a "revoluti… David Bentley Hart
“ The reason the very concept of God has become at once so impoverished, so thoroughly mythical, and ultimately so incredible for so many modern persons is not because of all the interesting things we h… David Bentley Hart
“ What makes today’s popular atheism so depressing is neither its conceptual boorishness nor its self-righteousness but simply its cultural inevitability. It is the final, predictable, and unsurprisingl… David Bentley Hart
“ A higher understanding of human freedom, however, is inseparable from a definition of human nature. To be free is to be able to flourish as the kind of being one is, and so to attain the ontological g… David Bentley Hart
“ And now that we exercise so comprehensive a medical and technological mastery over whole regions or nature at whose mercy our ancestors lived out their lives, we enjoy the unprecedented luxury of bein… David Bentley Hart
“ There is, of course, some comfort to be derived from the thought that everything that occurs at the level of secondary causality - in nature or history - is governed not only by a transcendent provide… David Bentley Hart
“ To bracket form and finality out of one's investigations as far as reason allows is a matter of method, but to deny their reality altogether is a matter of metaphysics. David Bentley Hart
“ Late modern society is principally concerned with purchasing things, in ever greater abundance and variety, and so has to strive to fabricate an ever greater number of desires to gratify, and to aboli… David Bentley Hart
“ Does religious conviction provide a powerful reason for killing? Undeniably it often does. It also often provides the sole compelling reason for refusing to kill, or for being merciful, or for seeking… David Bentley Hart
“ I do not mean that there is anything intellectually contemptible in being formally "godless" -- that is, in rejecting all religious dogmas and in refusing to believe in the God those dogmas describe.O… David Bentley Hart
“ Providence then - and this is what is most important to grasp - is not the same thing as a universal teleology. To believe in divine and unfailing providence is not to burden one's conscience with the… David Bentley Hart
“ For if indeed God became a man, then Truth condescended to became a truth, from whose historical contingency one cannot simply pass to categories of universal rationality; and this means that whatever… David Bentley Hart
“ Christians, indeed, have a special obligation not to forget how great and how inextinguishable the human proclivity for violence is, or how many victims it has claimed, for they worship a God who does… David Bentley Hart
“ Christ is a persuasion, a form evoking desire, and the whole force of the gospel depends upon the assumption that this persuasion is also peace: that the desire awakened by the shape of Christ and his… David Bentley Hart
“ God's pleasure--the beauty creation possesses in his regard--underlies the distinct being of creation, and so beauty is the first and truest word concerning all that appears within being; beauty is th… David Bentley Hart
