Top 67 David Bentley Hart Quotes
#1. But there is something delusional nonetheless in his optimistic certainty that human beings will wish to choose altruistic values without invoking transcendent principles. They may do so; but they may also wish to build death camps, and may very well choose to do that instead. For
David Bentley Hart
#2. Ontological necessity is not a property that can intelligibly attach to any nature other than God's.
David Bentley Hart
#3. It is a distinction, instead, between two entirely different kinds of reality, belonging to two entirely disparate conceptual orders. In fact, the very division between monotheism and polytheism is in many cases a confusion of categories.
David Bentley Hart
#4. It is certainly the demiurge about whom Stenger and Dawkins write; neither has actually ever written a word about God.
David Bentley Hart
#5. naturalism, alone among all considered philosophical attempts to describe the shape of reality, is radically insufficient in its explanatory range.
David Bentley Hart
#6. 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 passes understanding' to a world enmeshed in sin and violence. (1)
David Bentley Hart
#7. These divisions are illusory. What we call "nature" is merely one mode of the disclosure of the "supernatural," and natural reason merely one mode of revelation, and philosophy merely one (feeble) mode of reason's ascent into the light of God.
David Bentley Hart
#8. But, in fact, materialism is among the most problematic of philosophical standpoints, the most impoverished in its explanatory range, and among the most willful and (for want of a better word) magical in its logic, even if it has been in fashion for a couple of centuries or more.
David Bentley Hart
#9. The only ideological or political factions that have made any attempt at an ethics consistent with Darwinian science, to this point at least, have been the socialist eugenics movement of the early twentieth century and the Nazi movement that sprang from it. Obviously,
David Bentley Hart
#10. Enlightenment, if left unclouded by pathetic fancy, leads to a very special and bracing sort of nihilism - positivist, rationalist ... merciless.
David Bentley Hart
#11. 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
#12. We have progressed so far that we have succeeded in tearing the atom apart; but to reach that point we may also have had to regress in our moral vision of the physical world to a level barely above the insentient.
David Bentley Hart
#13. The major religions do, after all, boast some very sophisticated and subtle philosophical and spiritual traditions,
David Bentley Hart
#14. What is absolutely certain is that the naturalist view of things is, as I have said, just a picture of the world, not a truth about the world that we can know, nor even a conviction that rests upon a secure rational foundation.
David Bentley Hart
#15. More simply said, the finite does not add to the infinite but merely expresses the power of the infinite in a limited mode.
David Bentley Hart
#16. God is not merely one, in the way that a finite object might be merely singular or unique, but is oneness as such, the one act of being and unity by which any finite thing exists and by which all things exist together.
David Bentley Hart
#17. It is just as often the case, however, that men are violent solely from expedience, because they believe in no higher law than the demands of the moment,
David Bentley Hart
#18. To believe that being is inexhaustibly intelligible is to believe also - whether one wishes to acknowledge it or not - that reality emanates from an inexhaustible intelligence: in the words of the Shvetashvatara Upanishad, pure consciousness, omnipresent, omniscient, the creator of time.
David Bentley Hart
#19. Lyotard has described the postmodern condition succinctly as "incredulity towards metanarratives":' an attitude commendable in itself, no doubt, but also one that can easily be translated into a dogmatic metanarrative of its own. In
David Bentley Hart
#20. Simply said, one is contingent through and through, partaking of being rather than generating it out of some source within oneself; and the same is true of the whole intricate web of interdependencies that constitutes nature.
David Bentley Hart
#22. God's love, and hence the love with which we come to love God, is eros and agape at once: a desire for the other that delights in the distance of otherness.
David Bentley Hart
#23. Evidence for or against God, if it is there, saturates every moment of the experience of existence, every employment of reason, every act of consciousness, every encounter with the world around us.
David Bentley Hart
#25. The truth of no truths becomes, inevitably, truth: a way of naming being, language, and culture that guards the boundaries of thought against claims it has not validated.
David Bentley Hart
#26. The notion that any discovery of empirical science could possibly reduce God's circumstances, so to speak, or have any effect whatsoever on the logical content of the concept of God or of creation is one of the vulgar errors I wish to expose below.
David Bentley Hart
#27. God is thus experienced as that bliss in which our natures have their consummation because that bliss is already, in God, the perfect consummation of the divine unity of being and consciousness: infinite being knows itself in infinite consciousness and therefore infinitely rejoices.
David Bentley Hart
#28. What distinguishes modernity from the age of Christendom is not that the former is more devoted to rationality than was the latter but that its rationality serves different primary commitments
David Bentley Hart
#29. I sometimes wonder, however, whether in the case of modern atheism and theistic tradition what is at issue is the difference between two entirely incommensurable worlds, or at least two entirely incommensurable ways of understanding the world.
David Bentley Hart
#30. Physics explains everything, which we know because anything physics cannot explain does not exist, which we know because whatever exists must be explicable by physics, which we know because physics explains everything. There is something here of the mystical.
David Bentley Hart
#31. It is pleasant to believe one's society is more "enlightened" or "rational" than all others,
David Bentley Hart
#33. True philosophical atheism must be regarded as a superstition, often nurtured by an infantile wish to live in a world proportionate to one's own hopes or conceptual limitations.
David Bentley Hart
#34. God is not only the ultimate reality that the intellect and the will seek but is also the primordial reality with which all of us are always engaged in every moment of existence and consciousness, apart from which we have no experience of anything whatsoever.
David Bentley Hart
#35. To borrow the language of Augustine, God is not only superior summo meo
beyond my utmost heights
but also interior intimo meo
more inward to me than my inmost depths.
David Bentley Hart
#36. The modern secular state's capacity for barbarism exceeds any of the evils for which Christendom might justly be indicted, not
David Bentley Hart
#37. Christians, for instance, are not, properly speaking, believers in religion; rather, they believe that Jesus of Nazareth, crucified under Pontius Pilate, rose from the dead and is now, by the power of the Holy Spirit, present to his church as its Lord.
David Bentley Hart
#38. For the secret irony pervading these arguments 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.
David Bentley Hart
#39. In another sense he is "being itself," in that he is the inexhaustible source of all reality, the absolute upon which the contingent is always utterly dependent, the unity and simplicity that underlies and sustains the diversity of finite and composite things.
David Bentley Hart
#40. The claim that there cannot be an infinite regress of contingent ontological causes raises a truly difficult challenge to pure materialism; but to imagine that it can be extended to undermine the claim that there must be an absolute ontological cause is to fall prey to an obvious category error.
David Bentley Hart
#42. Sin is the repetition of an absence, whose logic is suppression, aversion, and privation.
David Bentley Hart
#43. Beliefs regarding God concern the source and ground and end of all reality, the unity and existence of every particular thing and of the totality of all things, the ground of the possibility of anything at all.
David Bentley Hart
#45. There is an old Scholastic distinction between religious treatises written "de Deo uno" and those written "de Deo trino": between, that is, those that are "about the one God" known to persons of various faiths and philosophies and those that are "about the Trinitarian God" of Christian doctrine.
David Bentley Hart
#46. An honest and self-aware atheism, therefore, should proudly recognize itself as the quintessential expression of heroic irrationalism:
David Bentley Hart
#47. Any movement of the mind or will toward truth, goodness, beauty, or any other transcendental end is an adherence of the soul to God. It is a finite participation in the highest truth of existence. As Shankara says, the fullness of being, lacking nothing, is also boundless consciousness,
David Bentley Hart
#48. 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 have learned over the past few centuries, but because of all the vital things we have forgotten.
David Bentley Hart
#49. The world is unable to provide any account of its own actuality, and yet there it is all the same.
David Bentley Hart
#50. Thus a plurality of gods could not constitute an alternative to or contradiction of the unity of God; they still would not belong to the same ontological frame of reference as he.
David Bentley Hart
#51. God, however, is first glimpsed within nature's still greater powerlessness - its transitoriness and contingency and explanatory poverty.
David Bentley Hart
#52. The highest vocation of reason and of the will is to seek to know the ultimate source of that mystery. Above all, one should wish to know whether our consciousness of that mystery directs us toward a reality that is, in its turn, conscious of us.
David Bentley Hart
#53. The current fashion in belligerent atheism usually involves flinging condemnation around with a kind of gallant extravagance, more or less in the direction of all faiths at once, with little interest in precise aim.
David Bentley Hart
#54. The discourse of power is, of its nature, bombastic, pontifical, and domineering.
David Bentley Hart
#55. The greatest Church Fathers, for instance, took it for granted that the creation narratives of Genesis could not be treated literally,
David Bentley Hart
#56. It goes without saying that one generally should not try to dissolve disparate creeds into one another, much less into some vague, syncretistic, doctrinally vacuous 'spirituality.
David Bentley Hart
#57. 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 the showing of what is; God looked upon what he had wrought and saw that it was good.
David Bentley Hart
#58. Empiricism in the sciences is a method; naturalism in philosophy is a metaphysics; and the latter neither follows from nor underlies the former.
David Bentley Hart
#59. It seems obvious that both the religious and the irreligious are capable of varying degrees of tolerance or intolerance, benevolence or malice, depending on how they understand the moral implications of their beliefs.
David Bentley Hart
#60. 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
#61. Now the Bible came to be seen as what it obviously is not: a collection of "inerrant" oracles and historical reports, each true in the same way as every other, each subject to only one level of interpretation, and all perfectly in agreement with one another.
David Bentley Hart
#62. The question of God, by contrast, is one that can and must be pursued in terms of the absolute and the contingent, the necessary and the fortuitous, potency and act, possibility and impossibility, being and nonbeing, transcendence and immanence.
David Bentley Hart
#63. The unavoidable conclusion that, precisely because God and creation are ontologically distinct in the manner of the absolute and the contingent, they are morally indiscerptible.
(from Radical Orthodoxy 3.1 (2015): 1-17)
David Bentley Hart
#64. God, according to all the great spiritual traditions, cannot be comprehended by the finite mind but can nevertheless be known in an intimate encounter with his presence - one that requires considerable discipline of the mind and will to achieve, but one also implicit in all ordinary experience
David Bentley Hart
#65. Naturalism, therefore, can never be anything more than a guiding prejudice, an established principle only in the sense that it must be indefensibly presumed for the sake of some larger view of reality;
David Bentley Hart
#66. [I]n every theology or system, every tradition or discursive practice, a story is being told whose peculiar force should be allowed priority over the abstract categories by which the critic might seek to reduce all narrative to the same bare framework of elementary functions.
David Bentley Hart
#67. God, understood in this proper sense, is essentially beyond finite comprehension;
David Bentley Hart
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