51 Quotes by David Bentley Hart

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.

If something is worth being rude about, it is worth understanding as well.

Voltaire sees only the terrible truth that the history of suffering and death is not morally intelligible. Dostoyevsky sees – and this bespeaks both his moral genius and his irreducibly Christian view of reality – that it would be far more terrible if it were.

The soul is a story that can always be retold.

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.

The most effective technique for subduing the moral imagination is to teach it to mistake the contradictory for the paradoxical, and thereby to accept incoherence as profundity, or moral idiocy as spiritual subtlety. If this can be accomplished with sufficient nuance and delicacy, it can sustain even a very powerful intellect for an entire lifetime.