For, after all, if it is from Christ that we are to learn how God relates himself to sin, suffering, evil, and death, it would seem that he provides us little evidence of anything other than a regal, relentless, and miraculous enmity; sin he forgives, suffering he heals, evil he casts out, and death he conquers. And absolutely nowhere does Christ act as if any of these things are part of the eternal work or purposes of God.
Interpretation
This quote emphasizes Christ's divine role in overcoming sin, suffering, evil, and death through his actions.
David Bentley Hart's quote reflects on the theological implications of Christ's relationship with sin, suffering, evil, and death. It suggests that Christ's mission is one of active opposition to these human conditions, implying that God's eternal purposes are not aligned with the existence of sin and suffering. Instead, through Christ’s forgiveness, healing, and triumph over death, we are given a glimpse of God's ultimate intentions for humanity, which are centered on redemption and liberation from these burdens.
In practice
In a sermon discussing the power of faith over adversity.
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.
Christians, indeed, have a special obligation not to forget how great and how inextinguishable the human proclivity for violence is, or how many victims it has claimed, for they worship a God who does not merely take the part of those victims, but who was himself one of them, murdered by the combined authority and moral prudence of the political, religious, and legal powers of human society.
Lest we forget, the birth of modern physics and cosmology was achieved by Galileo, Kepler and Newton breaking free not from the close confining prison of faith (all three were believing Christians, of one sort or another) but from the enormous burden of the millennial authority of Aristotelian science. The scientific revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was not a revival of Hellenistic science but its final defeat.
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.
Sometimes I feel like a figment of my own imagination.
The problem with certainty is that it is static; it can do little but endlessly reassert itself. Uncertainty, by contrast, is full of unknowns, possibilities, and risks.
Yes, know thyself: in great concerns or small, be this thy care, for this, my friend, is all.
The continual looking forward to the eternal world is not a form of escapism or wishful thinking, but one of the things a Christian is meant to do.
Religions have always been clearly on to this psycho-therapeutic score. For hundreds of years in the West, Christian art had a very clear function: it was meant to direct us towards the good and wean us off vice.
We do not know what things look like. We know what things are like. It must be a very limiting thing,this seeing. -Aunt Beast
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