Putting a roof nail in some quotes from NYT’s excellent interview with David Bentley Hart, which I’d like to come back to:
The New Testament speaks of creation as something broken and distorted and destroyed by spiritual freedoms gone astray, and the whole structure of reality that we know is in some sense alien to true creation. […]
But that means we don’t justify this evil or that evil as part of some grand plan, but rather see the world as a place in need of rescue from a catastrophe that has occurred in some frame of reality we don’t know and don’t understand.
My fear of theodicy is that it becomes not just a justification of God but a justification of evil. It’s not just that I’m trying to justify God in the face of a child dying from diphtheria or a death camp; I’m actually justifying the death of that child and that death camp. At that point, the whole moral grammar of the New Testament seems to collapse in on itself.
the ancient premise was that we could read like persons in whom the act of reading was an inspired grappling with a difficult text. … the Bible is not a revealed text, it is a text that allows for revelation.”
the more you know about the history of doctrine and the more you understand how minimalist it actually is, when you look at the formulations of doctrine in Christian history, you realize the degree to which they’re trying to end the controversy by coming up with a bare grammar that can be agreed on, but whose contents are endlessly contestable.
The institution of the church, to my mind, has been a 50-50 phenomenon, as evil as good, as Christian as non-Christian. In itself, it is not Christianity. In fact, what we call Christianity in itself is not Christianity. That’s just a blanket term we use for anyone who makes even an ostensible claim to loyalty to Christ.
But this man and these teachings — and this consuming moral attention that is required of us and the messianic light in which that’s cast, by which I mean a light that’s both historical and eternal at once — so that what we do in time already has an eternal meaning and then eternity is already something spilling into time.
“Inasmuch as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me.”
And especially at this moment politically and culturally in which the name Christianity in this country and in other parts of the world has been conscripted yet again, but with even more brazenness, into a justification for cruelty, bigotry, violence, murder even, the waging of war, the persecution of those seeking refuge. The New Testament is pretty clear on strangers in our midst. You’re going to be judged by how well you treat the strangers in our midst. For me, that’s maybe 80 percent of my faith now, just this burning sense of obligation to those whom this man loved. And in calling him God or calling him the revelation of God, I realized that that love is absolutely incumbent on me.