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 …

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 …