The Beauty of the Infinite | Blog | Think Theology The first, perhaps most crucial thing to understand about the earliest generations of Christians is that they were a company of extremists, radical in their rejection of the values and priorities of society not only at its most degenerate, but often at its most reasonable and decent. In what follows, I will examine Harts rhetoric or style of reasoning, his arguments or substance of reasoning, and his exegesis or biblical foundation for reasoning. I then became aware that notions of divine sovereigntyThomistic or Calvinisticare anathema to Hart. But this book exudes bitterness and rancor, so much so that one wonders whether the author is convinced by his own arguments. Harts voluntary poverty would become involuntary as resources are consumed but not replaced. Hart doesnt seem to admit there is any problem. Harts output is prodigious, and his range of intellectual interestsin the literature of various languagesis staggering. The hyperbolic language is a sign of weakness, not strength. Disarming, insightful, illuminatingand often wickedly funnythe essays in The Dream-Childs Progress give evidence of the great gift we have in a Christian intellectual engaging our world with warmth, candor, and claritybut most of all, with charity. We David Bentley Hart on 'Calvinism WebDavid Bentley Hart (born 1965) is an American Eastern Orthodox theologian, writer, philosopher, and religious studies scholar whose work encompasses a wide range of "We are all worms," said Winston Churchill. And its exceedingly hard to see how the biblical call to self-denial, godly living, and toilsome evangelism can flourish on the basis of a universalist theology. What AOCs Latest Viral Argument Gets Wrong About Capitalism and Profit, Is the Asbury Revival Real? As for the atheist authors, so too for Hart, the God preached and taught by the church through the centuries is inventively sadistic (23), theatrically grotesque (23), a heartlessly capricious gamester (4546), and so a monstrous deity (167). Religion, the arts, philosophy, culture In the Sermon on the Plains list of beatitudes and woes, he not only tells the poor that the kingdom belongs to them, but explicitly tells the rich that, having had their pleasures in this world, they shall have none in the world to come. Author of books and shorter works in a variety of genres--treatises, essay collections, fiction, children's fiction, vignettes, verse--on a variety of topics--religion, philosophy, literature, the arts, politics, culture, baseball, and so forth. He has taught at the University of Virginia, the University of St. Thomas (Minnesota), Duke Divinity School, and Loyola College in Maryland. When you see someone, usually on the right, denouncing secularism without taking note of the material wealth of our culture, they are simply not being serious. In one of the few consolations left us in this darkening world, Monty Pythons whole run is still on Netflix. Challenging the optimism of many contemporary Catholic thinkers (and recently many evangelical thinkers as well) that natural law arguments can provide a convincing, broadly-appealing basis for opposition to gay marriage legislation, Hart provoked a tide of responses and counter-responses in the blogosphere, which continues even now. Yet Harts new book, That All Shall Be Saved: Heaven, Hell, and Universal Salvation, on my view, doesnt merit the same commendation, and lacks the argumentative acuity and literary beauty of the earlier works. He is not dating anyone. Hart has swung from a God-who-does-little (i.e., between creation and eschaton) to a God-who-does-everything, and so one wonders if the author has arrived at a settled view.