 |
| 
Tom
Registered Member
Date Joined Jul 2001
Total Posts : 10353
| Posted 3/29/2006 11:25 AM (GMT -6) |   | | Just finished it. My ideas:
1) Has some of the best-worded criticisms of theological determinism I've ever read. You'll wanna remember them for later! This guy can craft a slam like nobody I know.
2) Looked to me like his theodicy was basically the Warfare Worldview--straight up. Not as hammered-out as Greg's, but Hart's book is not long and wasn't intended to be a full-fledged theology. But from what I could tell it was totally in line with the Warfare Worldview.
3) In addition to (2), Hart also argues for divine impassibility (but argues God also really feels and experiences the world). He also several times pointed out that God's time is "true time" over an above our "cosmic time." I have no idea what this even means, but Hart seemed to think it explained something very important.
All in all, a good book. For those who are into the Warfare Worldview it's nothing new. For readers who have only ever thought of evil and suffering from the standard view that God calls all the shots for good reasons, it'll be a welcome surprise. I'm just sorry that his vocabulary was often so removed from that of non-believers who are likely to read him. He often makes his points very inaccessible by going out of his way to find rare words when there are perfectly common ones available he could have used without hurting his meaning. You do NOT want Hart writing evangelistic tracks for common folk. They don't speak that lingo. And since Hart claimed to have written this for average hurting people in the wake of 9/11, I'm afraid it's a bit inaccessible.
| | Back to Top | | |
 |
PotOnWheel
Registered Member
Date Joined Jul 2001
Total Posts : 9890
| Posted 3/29/2006 12:07 PM (GMT -6) | | | Wonderful review, Tom.
Link to Hart's Book, and to an interview with him
(o) Post Edited (PotOnWheel) : 3/29/2006 12:19:29 PM (GMT-6) | | Back to Top | | |
|
PotOnWheel
Registered Member
Date Joined Jul 2001
Total Posts : 9890
| Posted 3/29/2006 3:42 PM (GMT -6) | | p.61 bottom "Perhaps no..." and on 62 -- in some thick sentence structure -- he says "that cosmic time is a phantom of true time, that we live in an umbratile interval between creation in its fullness and the nothingness from which it was called..."
I only _hope_ that I understand what he's saying.
Helping me is the comment Behr makes in "The Mystery of Christ" that it was only and finally on the Cross that the prophesy "let us make man in our image" was ever and for the first time fulfilled, in Christ himself, the true man!
When I read the above sentence by Hart, I want to anticipate and place myself _after_ the creation is finished.
But I think its slowly obvious that my anticipation is wrong. We aren't "made" yet. WE really ARE in the " umbratile interval between creation in its fullness and the nothingness from which it was called..." The fullness has only come in One human is; and the rest of us wait.
That's what I make of it. Was that the place you were refering to, Tom?
(o)Post Edited (PotOnWheel) : 3/29/2006 3:19:26 PM (GMT-6) | | Back to Top | | |
|
PotOnWheel
Registered Member
Date Joined Jul 2001
Total Posts : 9890
| Posted 3/29/2006 4:46 PM (GMT -6) | | Here's a paragraph from pp.62-63
Nevertheless, and disturbing as it may be, it is clearly the case that there is a kind of "provisional" cosmic dualism within the New Testament: not an ultimate dualism, of course, between two equal principles: but certainlv a conflict between a sphere of created autonomy that strives against God on the one hand and the saving love of God in time on the other. It is a patristic notion (developed with extraordinary profundity by Maximus the Confessor) that humanity was created as the methorios (the boundary or frontier) between the physical and the spiritual realms, or as the priesthood of creation that unites earth to heaven, and that thus, in the fall of man, all of material existence was made subject to the dominion of death. To say that God elects to fashion rational creatures in his image, and so grants them the freedom to bind themselves and the greater physical order to another master — to say that he who sealed up the doors of the sea might permit them to be opened again by another, more reckless hand — is not to say that God's ultimate design for his creatures can be thwarted. It is to acknowledge, however, that his will can be resisted by a real and (by his grace) autonomous force of defiance, or can be hidden from us by the history of cosmic corruption, and that the final realization of the good he intends in all tilings has the form (not simply as a dramatic fiction, for our edification or his glory, nor simply as a paedagogical device on his part, but in truth) of a divine victory.
(o)Post Edited (PotOnWheel) : 3/29/2006 3:49:34 PM (GMT-6) | | Back to Top | | |
|
PotOnWheel
Registered Member
Date Joined Jul 2001
Total Posts : 9890
| Posted 3/29/2006 7:12 PM (GMT -6) | | |
Tom, Does it help, to have read the first half, to know what he definitely is not embracing?
------------------------------
Interesting:
Beginning just below the top of 75 ("No less metaphysically confused..."), continuing through new paragraph, and then through 78, he makes some carefully crafted distinctions. (I like his talent for doing that.)
(o)Post Edited (PotOnWheel) : 3/31/2006 9:36:47 AM (GMT-6) | | Back to Top | | |
|
PotOnWheel
Registered Member
Date Joined Jul 2001
Total Posts : 9890
| Posted 3/31/2006 10:17 AM (GMT -6) | | He innitial article was at the REQUEST of the Wall Street Journal. Then, the project grew through debative discussions on the WSJ blog -- with people probably having even more profuse vocabularies. Finally, Hart's editor was the one that pulled him into actually publishing it as a book.
But not that the publisher is Eerdman's! That's not some obscure university press.
http://www.eerdmans.com/shop/product.asp?p_key=0802829767
I was grateful for the history of philosophy lesson in the first part. But I have to say that wading through new vocabulary is less painstaking than learning who Voltare and Kant were and what impact they have played.
All in all... its good education for me.
.
But I do think that there is a CONNECTION between the vigor of parcing between one work or another and the vigor of making keen distinctions between ideas. Like where he lays out the observation regarding the incarnation that it is "not natures" that suffer, but persons; therefore it is not necessary to claim that Christ's divinity suffered, for he suffered "in his flesh."
A appreciate a sharp mind, who can craft words to preserve distinctions. (Two things I'm not always able to do.  )
(o)Post Edited (PotOnWheel) : 3/31/2006 9:35:10 AM (GMT-6) | | Back to Top | | |
|
PotOnWheel
Registered Member
Date Joined Jul 2001
Total Posts : 9890
| Posted 3/31/2006 10:23 AM (GMT -6) | | Now for a funny response...
http://www.animal.ufl.edu/sharp/documents/Teaching/The%20fog%20Index.htm
SAMPLE ESSAY
In promulgating your esoteric cogitations or articulating your superficial sentimentalities and amicable, philosophical or psychological observations, beware of platitudinous ponderosity. Let your conversational communications demonstrate a clarified conciseness, a compact comprehensibleness, no coalescent conglomerations of precious garrulity, jejune bafflement and asinine affectations. Let your extemporaneous verbal evaporations and expatriations have lucidity, intelligibility and veracious vivacity without radomontade or Thespian bombast. Sedulously avoid all polysyllabic profundity, pompous propensity, psittaceous vacuity, ventriloquial verbosity and vaniloquent vapidity. Shun double-entendres, obnoxious jocosity and pestiferous profanity, observable or apparent.
In other words, say what you mean and DON'T USE BIG WORDS!
| | Back to Top | | |
|
PotOnWheel
Registered Member
Date Joined Jul 2001
Total Posts : 9890
| Posted 3/31/2006 3:40 PM (GMT -6) | | | | |
|
PotOnWheel
Registered Member
Date Joined Jul 2001
Total Posts : 9890
| Posted 3/31/2006 4:26 PM (GMT -6) | | I don't want to derail this thread from its primary focus, as Tom has taken the lead; nor do I desire to in any way carry on a conversation with myself...
But I think that it is very interesting to place side-by-side the emotional speculation as to Trinity and Incarnation that Yancey does in his last chapter (pp.270-271) of "The Jesus I Never Knew" with the clear and exhaustively examined and delineated (OK, I'm exagerating.) treatement of some of those very same notions in Hart's pages 75 through 78.
-----------------------------
Where's D?
TdA back stateside yet?
(o) | | Back to Top | | |
| Forum Information | Currently it is Monday, November 09, 2026 12:51 PM (GMT -6)
There are a total of 97,718 posts in 6,040 threads.
In the last 3 days there were 0 new threads and 0 reply posts. View Active Threads
|
Forum powered by dotNetBB v2.42EC SP3
dotNetBB © 2000-2026 |
|
|