[Kielimafian tarkennus kuvatekstiin 7.2]
David B. Hart ei väistä pahuuden, kärsimyksen ja modernin teodikean ongelmaa, mutta hänen mielestään deistit ja kalvinistit ovat käsittäneet kristinuskon [siten myös teodikean]väärin/vääristyneesti - ellei peräti hereettisesti.
Jumala ymmärrettynä samanaikaisesti universumin harmonisen balanssin suvereeniksi etukäteen säätäjäksi [jolloin pahuus/kärsimys oikeutetaan tulevan harmonian ehtona] sekä oman sadistis-juridisen 'vapaan' tahtonsa orjaksi [lakiin sidotun jumalan vapaus on harhaa] ei ole kristillisen tradition Jumala eikä koherenttia uskoa vaan modernin nominalistisen voluntarismin korruptoiman uskon epätoivoinen harharetki ei-mihinkään - loputtoman ja päämäärättömän valinnan vapauden mielenhäiriöön, jossa oikeus on yhtä positivistista kuin kalvinistisen Jumalan suunnitelma ihmisen varalle karmis-saatanallisessa sattumanvaraisuudessaan oikeudenmukaista/rr.
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Intellektuaalisesti syvällisimmät skeptikot ja järkevimmät tosiuskovaiset eivät ole aidosti toistensa verivihollisia, koska heidän uskonsa ja epäuskonsa kumpuaa samasta moraalisesta perinteestä [Sokrates, Job, Jeesus] mutta eri tavalla [luodun joskin langenneen] maailman pahuuden ja kärsimyksen olemassaoloon reagoiden [etenkin Ivan Karamazovin ja Nietzsche'n ateismi]. Typerimmät fundamentalistit [niin uusateistit, kreationistit kuin modernia gnostilaisuutta edustavat kalvinistikin] sen sijaan ovat koko maailman pahennus, pahuus ja tylsyys.
Vaikka maailma on langennut [toisin sanoen pahuus ei ole Jumalasta] ja vaikka Jumala on saattava kaiken entiselleen viimeisellä tuomiolla, Ivan Karamazoville yhdenkin viattoman lapsen kärsimys on liian kova hinta siitä, että kaikki on joskus muuttuva [uudelleen] hyväksi. Ivanin kapinaan Jumalaa vastaan riittää syyksi, että tuo sietämättömän epäoikeudenmukainen kärsimys ylipäätään on erottamaton osa luotua maailmaa.
Ivan ei kiellä Jumalaa - hän vain palauttaa pääsylippunsa taivaaseen. Kiitos ei - ei noilla 'ehdoilla', joiksi Ivan pienelle lapselle aiheutetun mielettömän kärsimyksen tulkitsee. Vaikka Jumala itse ei intentoikaan lasten kärsimystä [lukuunottamatta kalvinistien persoonattomaan karman lakiin verrattavaa suvereenia hirviö-jumalaa], hän ei saa Ivanilta anteeksi sitä, että sallii ihmisten aiheuttaa viattomalle helvetin.
Tämän syytöksen ensimmäinen ja kuuluisin esittäjä [joskin hieman eri syistä kuin Ivan] on tietenkin Job.
Ivan Karamazovin kapina on ehkä syvällisintä kristinuskon omaa sisäistä kriisiä, itsekritiikkiä ja skeptisismiä Jumalaa kohtaan. - Tällaisen skeptisismin jumala-käsitys on teistinen, kun taas esim. Voltairen valistuksenaikainen [popularisoitua teodikeaa satirisoiva] vuodatus Lissabonin maanjäristyksen jumalallisesta epäoikeudenmukaisuudesta käsittää Jumalan deistis-antroporfistisesti eikä näin ollen osu kritiikissään kristilliseen Luojaan vaan eettisen deismin abstraktiin ja populaarilla teodikealla tulkittuun pahantahtoiseen ja epätäydelliseen - gnostikkojen demiurgi-jumalaan.
[Palaan asiaan David Bentley Hartin pienen kirjan The Doors of the Sea: Where Was God in the Tsunami? toisen osan 'Divine Victory' merkeissä]
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Dr. David Bentley Hart
B.A., University of Maryland
M.Phil., University of Cambridge
M.A., University of Virginia
Ph.D., University of Virginia
David Bentley Hart is a renowned Eastern Orthodox theologian and has taught at the University of Virginia, the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Duke Divinity School and Loyola College. David is known even in the scholarly world for his vast array of knowledge on a variety of subjects, and some have said that he is one of the most important theologians in the English speaking world. Hart is the author of several books, including In the Aftermath: Provocations and Laments and The Story of Christianity: An Illustrated History of 2000 Years of the Christian Faith. His book, The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth has been called one of the most important works of theology in the last decade. He has also published articles in The Wall Street Journal, First Things and The New Atlantis. David lives in Virginia with his wife, Solwyn, and son, Patrick.
Areas of Specialty: Philosophical Theology, Patristics, Asian Religions, Evil and Suffering, Esthetics
Courses taught at the CSC: Seminar: Church and State: A Historical Exploration, History of Christianity
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David Bentley Hart Quotes
D. B. Hart on Nietzsche and Christianity
. . . [Nietzsche] had the good manners to despise Christianity, in large part, for what it actually was--above all, for its devotion to an ethics of compassion--rather than allow himself the soothing, self-righteous fantasy that Christianity’s history had been nothing but an interminable pageant of violence, tyranny, and sexual neurosis. He may have hated many Christians for their hypocrisy, but he hated Christianity itself principally on account of its enfeebling solicitude for the weak, the outcast, the infirm, and the diseased; and, because he was conscious of the historical contingency of all cultural values, he never deluded himself that humanity could do away with Christian faith while simply retaining Christian morality in some diluted form, such as liberal social conscience or innate human sympathy. - (Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies)
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D. B. Hart on some admirable forms of atheism
I can honestly say that there are many forms of atheism that I find far more admirable than many forms of Christianity or of religion in general. But atheism that consists entirely in vacuous arguments afloat on oceans of historical ignorance, made turbulent by storms of strident self-righteousness, is as contemptible as any other form of dreary fundamentalism. And it is sometimes difficult, frankly, to be perfectly generous in one’s response to the sort of invective currently fashionable among the devoutly undevout, or to the sort of historical misrepresentations it typically involves. - (Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies)
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David B. Hart critically on Calvin
Followers of Calvin have been particularly concerned to defend God’s sovereignty. Do you think that tradition presents a particular problem for Christian thinking today?
Yes -- and not only today. I quite explicitly admit in my writing that I think the traditional Calvinist understanding of divine sovereignty to be deeply defective, and destructively so. One cannot, as with Luther, trace out a direct genealogy from late medieval voluntarism to the Calvinist understanding of divine freedom; nevertheless, the way in which Calvin himself describes divine sovereignty is profoundly modern: it frequently seems to require an element of pure arbitrariness, of pure spontaneity, and this alone separates it from more traditional (and I would say more coherent) understandings of freedom, whether divine or human.
This idea of a God who can be called omnipotent only if his will is the direct efficient cause of every aspect of created reality immediately makes all the inept cavils of the village atheist seem profound: one still should not ask if God could create a stone he could not lift, perhaps, but one might legitimately ask if a God of infinite voluntaristic sovereignty and power could create a creature free to resist the divine will. The question is no cruder than the conception of God it is meant to mock, and the paradox thus produced merely reflects the deficiencies of that conception.
Frankly, any understanding of divine sovereignty so unsubtle that it requires the theologian to assert (as Calvin did) that God foreordained the fall of humanity so that his glory might be revealed in the predestined damnation of the derelict is obviously problematic, and probably far more blasphemous than anything represented by the heresies that the ancient ecumenical councils confronted.
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David B. Hart on a true skeptic
But a true skeptic is also someone who understands that an attitude of critical suspicion is quite different from the glib abandonment of one vision of absolute truth for another—say, fundamentalist Christianity for fundamentalist materialism or something vaguely and inaccurately called “humanism.” Hume, for instance, never traded one dogmatism for another, or one facile certitude for another. He understood how radical were the implications of the skepticism he recommended, and how they struck at the foundations not only of unthinking faith, but of proud rationality as well. - [Atheist Delusions]
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D. B. H. on Christianity and Nihilism
For indeed Christianity was complicit in the death of antiquity, and in the birth of modernity, not because it was an accomplice of the latter, but because it, alone in the history of the West, constituted a rejection of and alternative to nihilism's despair, violence, and idolatry of power; as such, Christianity shattered the imposing and enchanting facade behind which nihilism once hid, and thereby, inadvertently, called it forth into the open. - (In the Aftermath: Provocations and Laments)
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D. B. H. on Christian Truth
For if indeed God became a man, then Truth condescended to became a truth, from whose historical contingency one cannot simply pass to categories of universal rationality; and this means that whatever Christians mean when they speak of truth, it cannot involve simply the dialectical wrestling of abstract principles from intractable facts. - (The Beauty Of The Infinite: The Aesthetics Of Christian Truth)
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http://www.publicchristianity.com/david_bentley_hart.html
[videokooste David B. Hartin haastattelusta]
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http://yalepress.yale.edu/book.asp?isbn=9780300111903
http://www.vantaanlauri.fi/arkisto/2010/2010-11-04/kulttuuri/kirjat/tiede-usko-ja-raamattu
https://www.kotimaakauppa.fi/tuote/9789518885279/Ateismin%20harhat
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http://www.clarion-journal.com/clarion_journal_of_spirit/2011/01/david-bentley-hart-on-calvin.html
http://dangerousidea.blogspot.com/2010/09/david-bentley-hart-skewers-new-atheism.html
http://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/430555.David_Bentley_Hart
http://www.thechristianstudiescenter.org/professors/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Bentley_Hart
http://davidbhart.blogspot.com/
http://fi.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pahan_ongelma
http://www.religion-online.org/showarticle.asp?title=3301
http://www.michaelramseyprize.org.uk/titles.php
http://www.boomerinthepew.com/2009/12/attention-kmart-shoppers-god-is-not-our-copilot-and-furthermore-many-of-us-have-no-idea-who-he-is.html
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