Tag: David Bentley Hart
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In Defense of a Certain Tone of Voice
by David Bentley Hart Read part one, two, and three of this four-part series. Having completed—albeit somewhat elliptically—my “itinerary” of the argument of That All Shall Be Saved, I have reserved the final installment of my report for a last, brief, bitter, even somewhat petulant and self-pitying complaint about some of the more belligerent readings […]
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Can Persons Be Saved?
by David Bentley Hart Read part one and part two of the series. Before resuming my “itinerary” of the argument of That All Shall Be Saved, one additional point seems worth stressing. Though in the last installment the issue was raised of whether God intends or permits evil, the book’s argument has nothing to do with […]
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What God Wills and What God Permits
by David Bentley Hart In my previous installment of this report, I addressed the final phase of the argument put forward in That All Shall Be Saved, which concerns the nature of rational freedom and the question of whether the idea of a hell of eternal torment can plausibly be defended as an expression of […]
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What Is a Truly Free Will?
by David Bentley Hart I should explain. I am in the process of preparing a kind of “interim report” on my recent book That All Shall Be Saved, in preparation for a number of public events, and perhaps in anticipation of a second edition of the text. And the editors of Public Orthodoxy have kindly offered me […]
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Marcionism, Allegorical Exegesis, and the Question of Universal Salvation
by Roberto J. De La Noval The publication of David Bentley Hart’s That All Shall Be Saved has provoked no small amount of controversy since its release. Though Hart’s argument for universal salvation encompasses diverse arenas of thought—theological anthropology, the moral meaning of creatio ex nihilo, the phenomenology of human volition—it is his treatment of […]
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Nor Height Nor Depth: On the Toll Houses
by David Bentley Hart Among a great many Orthodox scholars in the academic world (especially when they gather together in hushed colloquy among the shadows and feel at liberty to speak strictly entre eux) it is often taken as depressing evidence of how radically the public intellectual culture of Orthodoxy in America has degenerated in […]
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The Mythology of the “Historical Present”
by David Bentley Hart I should not take exception, I suppose, if critics occasionally question my choice to render all Greek present tense verbs as English present tense verbs in my recent translation of the New Testament. The same choice was made, as it happens, by Tyndale and by his successors on the committee of […]
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The Vale of Abraham
by David Bentley Hart I may be entirely mistaken here, I confess it; that is why, in my footnotes for the tale of the rich man and Lazarus in Luke 16, in my recent translation of the New Testament (Yale University Press), I freely state that mine is a speculative rendering. But, if I am […]
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An Open Letter to Paul Griffiths
by David Bentley Hart Dear Paul, We have been friends for some twenty years or so now, and you know that I revere the lucidity of your mind, as well as the serene inflexibility you bring to your theological and philosophical convictions, with an admiration bordering on idolatry. I even sometimes find that semi-Jansenist pall of […]
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Are Christians Supposed to Be Communists?
by David Bentley Hart | ελληνικά This essay originally appeared in the New York Times Sunday Review and has been republished here with permission of the author. It was in 1983 that I heard the distinguished Greek Orthodox historian Aristeides Papadakis casually remark in a lecture at the University of Maryland that the earliest Christians were […]