51 Quotes by 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.

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 peace; only the profoundest ignorance of history could prevent one from recognizing this. For the truth is that religion and irreligion are cultural variables, but killing is a human constant.

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 "revolution": a truly massive and epochal revision of humanity's prevailing vision of reality, so pervasive in its influence and so vast in its consequences as to actually have created a new conception of the world, of history, of human nature, of time, and of the moral good.

Christian thought, from the outset, denies that (in themselves) suffering, death, and evil have any ultimate value or spiritual meaning at all. It claims that they are cosmic contingencies, ontological shadows, intrinsically devoid of substance or purpose, however much God may - under the conditions of a fallen order - make them the occasions for accomplishing his good ends.

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.

As far as I am concerned, anyone who hopes for the universal reconciliation of all creatures with God must already believe that this would be the best possible ending to the Christian story; and such a person has then no excuse for imagining that God could bring any but the best possible ending to pass without thereby being in some sense a failed creator.

...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)

The traditional ontological definition of evil as a privatio boni is not merely a logically necessary metaphysical axiom about the transcendental structure of being, but also an assertion that when we say “God is good” we are speaking of him not only relative to his creation, but (however apophatically) as he is in himself; for in every sense being is act, and God—in his simplicity and infinite freedom—is what he does.(from Radical Orthodoxy 3.1 (2015): 1-17)

...the God in whom the majority of Christians throughout history have professed belief would appear to be evil (at least, judging by the dreadful things we habitually say about him). And I intend nothing more here than an exercise in sober precision, based on the presumption that words should have some determinate content.(from Radical Orthodoxy 3.1 (2015): 1-17)