I would like to move one of the comments from my last post on Hart to the top of this post. “The reason I think I have more ground to stand on in rejecting an evil God for a seemingly “weak” one, is that I think this the more scriptural route. God will show us …
In It Together
These posts of mine on Hart’s book Doors of the Sea have generated a goodly amount of comments. So before considering his next section, allow me a quick comment on one point that has surfaced in those comments, I believe more than once. An attempt has been made to distinguish between a logical mystery (how …
To the Law and to the Testimony
In the next section, we come to the hinge of Hart’s objections. And it provides us with a textbook case of what happens when very intelligent people go beyond what it is written. Certain indisputable truths provide the premises for them, and then they reason from those premises until they come to a conclusion that …
The Breakers of Jehovah
Yesterday’s message was on Psalm 42. The title comes from verse 7 — “Deep calleth unto deep at the noise of thy waterspouts: all thy waves and thy billows are gone over me.” This is just one of many passages that has direct relevance to our on-going discussions in the “Doors of the Sea” thread.
Hands in Pockets, Whistling
Hart’s second section in the second half of his book depends almost entirely on good writing, a goodly dose of mysticism and lots of handwaving. Here is how that section concludes: “It is impossible for the infinite God of love directly or positively to will evil (physical or moral), even in a provisional or transitory …
Despite an Occasional Verbal Flourish
The second part of Hart’s book is his positive statement of “Divine Victory.” The first section of this second half sets the pieces on the board for us. “To behave or live according to nature is for some of us the very definition of sagacity, sanity, or even virtue” (p. 45). This is what the …
Eucatastrophe at the Eschaton
The fifth section of The Doors of the Sea contains Hart’s central concerns with inadequate Christian theodicies (as he considers them), and is the section where he showcases Ivan Karamazov’s rebellion against God. “This is the splendid perversity and genius of Ivan’s (or Dostoyevsky’s) argument, which makes it indeed the argument of a rebel rather …
Narratival Calvinism and Storyless Readers
In his fourth section, Hart begins to interact with certain expressions of Calvinism. The Calvinists Hart was responding to are represented but not named, and since there are no footnotes to follow, I am puzzled over how to respond to this. Unvarnished Calvinism is hard for some people to take, and because they have trouble …
A Different Kind of Telling
In his next section of The Doors of the Sea, Hart starts with a discussion of Voltaire’s “exquisite savagery” in his famous poem that made fun of certain popular theodicies in the wake of the devastating Lisbon earthquake. “If indeed the theodicist would have us believe that the present order of the world is a …
John Wesley’s Hatband
In the second section of his first chapter, Hart takes “emotional and rhetorical opportunism” to task, and does so ably. He is not fond of the “triumphalistic atheist” who declares immediately that the “materialist creed has been vindicated” (p. 7) by natural disasters such as the Asian tsunami. “But the alacrity with which some seize …