Great lecture! Maybe our freedom consists in repeatedly erring about gods-- striving to gain insight into the mystery and failing spectacularly?

How can anyone write a true theodicy until God . by revelation , gives understanding of His plan and His will for mankind's destiny which is contained in scripture . Few love Satan for example despite Christ's plain command in scripture to do so " love your enemies " ; exposing their lack of understanding of the God who is love , along with His plan and His will. God is Sovereign down to the roll of a dice so you better believe evil and suffering are part of His plan to achieve His will of subjecting all things unto Himself so that He is all in all.

Harold bloom said all American religion is gnostic I feel that these new converts to Eastern Orthodoxy are turning Orthodoxy into some neo-Victorian new age fantasy when they are not turning it into an evangelical appolegy, when they are not whole heartedly embracing the spectacle.

The humanities would still be alive if they were driven by the vision and conviction voiced here by DBH. Instead, the humanities are dying because they are represented by people like Dr. Brennan, who can't really even grasp Hart's central claims much less respond to them in any meaningful way. Brennan is so out of his depth. He can only wring his hands over DBH's use of Heidegger--in spite of the fact that Hart is taking issue with Heidegger as much as he is endorsing Heidegger. Brennan's other argument is that his Indian relatives wouldn't care about Christianity. I can't imagine the restraint it took on Hart's part not to unload his deep understanding of Vedantic thought on Brennan.

Incredible

Thank you for uploading this. Wonderful.

Suffering and evil are not problems for Christians.

🎸

Great lecture. Also interesting how Christians in the United States seem to have been able to integrate this new view of personal freedom into their theology much better than other christians.

In case you're looking for his essay version of this talk, you can find it in his book, "The Hidden and the Manifest: Essays in Theology and Metaphysics," essay 13. Death, Final Judgement, and the Meaning of Life

I studied theodicy, because I am a retired Registered Nurse (Haematology & Palliative Care), and often encountered suffering. I found the writings of STANLEY HAUERWAS ('Naming the Silences') especially compelling: because he uses another writer's example of his daughter's treatment for a form of leukaemia. Hauerwas leaves us with mystery: but not a mystery which damages the love of God.

Most gnostics are teens trying to be edgy

24:40 thirteen years later and this seems all the more explicit

I never really understood why Hart connected totalitarianism to voluntarism/nihilism. I guess there might be a link of a necessary connection, but the idea of making a perfect man seems like it requires moral realism (rather than requiring anti-realism).

Pity about the recording.

1:10:28 bookmark 40:00 bookmark

What I find rather bizarre is how anti-religion apologists literally can't quote any religious text or theologian, or even accurately describe historical events, because they simply don't care enough to study more than what they already believe they know, but still are arrogant enough to believe they are capable enough of engaging in debates. That's embarrassing. The guy is supposed to be an expert in secularism and can't quote one name from memory, gives rather childish accounts of history, and goes on firmly holding the same points as he started without nor a developed philosophical stance, nor any worthy example whatsoever. I've never read David Bentley Hart either, but I feel bad that he had to debate on such poor terms.

I'm slave to the idea 💡 of being free ✨️

20:16

Sophistry

The reason for these caricatures is quite obvious: opponents of religion WANT there to be a boogeyman. Perhaps for the same reason that conspiracy theorists (implicitly) WANT there to be a cabal of elite oligarchs orchestrating world events. That reason is simply the hope that there is an easy fix to our problems. The notion that science alone (sometimes humanitarianism is also appealed to) can liberate us from our predicament is just so attractively simple. But this narrative really makes a religion of Reason and a messiah of Science.

Freedom from slavery to our passions

47:53 "And then maybe even that strange, and haunting, and irrecoverable immediacy of the small child's experience of the world is a foretaste of our true home"

Too much repeating. Terry doesn’t under that DBH’s point is that Christian “moral grammar” is a necessary condition for the kind of ethics he is talking about. Not that Christianity necessarily produces moral outcomes. And DBH doesn’t actually go on to give concrete examples that prove his point. Like, for example, how one can see the lack of certain ethical principles in antique pagan ethics secularists might take for granted.

Tbh it felt like Terry was being interrupted too much. Just let him make his point before he speaks.

What is that word that sounds like Buynasian I.e. Dominican determinism?

What a fool! He is not even capable of showing that his own religion is the only true one let alone refuting any atheist thinker!

How about making a Documentary about Atheist Regimes. Much more Eviil to talk about !!!

My take is that we need to apply double standard to God versus people on the issue of killings. After all God kills all of us, in peaceful time with natural death. In the Bible God promises eternal life after our earthly deaths, so while we shalt not kill, God always kills. That may reduce the horror of God’s killings in the Old Testament.

58:01 holy crap, is that Fr. John Behr asking the question?

He is been too generous to Christianity here. Christianity crushed and banned any rival religion and plunged the west into intellectual darkness for centuries, which would be repeated all over again in the colonial period.

I think he loses it a bit around the 22nd minute mark. Kill God? Human goodness grounded in nature? Has he not studied Buddhism, for instance? (I happen to know he has.) God is not a necessary hypothesis as far as the freedom to will the good of the other is concerned. Indeed, as he points out in his talk on universalism, if Hod WERE the psychopath of late Augustinian and Calvinistic conception, TRUE morality would require precisely a rebellion against this celestial despot, very much like a Bodhisattva, i.e. the Buddhist parallel of a messianic figure. And nature? Nature is a brutal cesspool of Darwinian natural and sexual selection, fundamentally and quintessentially ableist and abusive. Nature is precisely what the spirit/conscious transcend, in angelic, buddhistic, etc. Love, not the SOURCE of our morality. And this includes the moral/ethical impulse to see beauty in nature (often projection of transcendental beauty upon a fallen, material plane) and to save conscious creatures within nature, including suffering animals.

The horrendous suffering of animals is even more scandalous. Especially since christians act as if our modern way of livestock is somehow defendable.

Thank you...

Minute 26:00 onwards, Wow!

I don't understand, is bennets argument that since Indians don't care about Christianity its claims cannot be universal?

I love his reflections.

10 minutes in and I know where this is going. Alright, I think presuppositions might have something to do with explaning the willingness to embrace nihilism. In people embracing this worldview which would contradict absolutely empathy for other people in this type of framework the question then becomes how does one prevent hedonism which hurt everyone and helps no one? I think the saying goes something like..have your cake and eat it too

France as a pinnacle o well being sounds ridiculous now.

Heidegger at Todnauberg.

Nothing Indo-European about Isis, the most popular goddess of late antiquity. If you talk in this pompous way all the time, people may take you to be really smart. He needs to read David Potter on the late empire and the persecutions.

Insufferably pompous in his self-invention of Christianity. Even when he says something true he is so irritating he makes you want to entertain falsehood.

Absolutely blows every easter sermon I've ever heard out of the water

14:40

Very helpful

11:00

I don't believe in God. I have an alternative argument for "the problem of evil". What if there is no such thing as "evil" in our universe. I recognize that bad things happen. I recognize that there are things that are generally good(and bad) for most people. I feel that all bad things exist because we(as a species) have not learned all of our lessons yet.

I wonder if Hart has ever debated any of those guys, David has this way of critically analyzing those guys, and correctly, but never really getting into the fight. As guys like William Lane Craig, and John Lennox and others do all of the real battle. I just wonder what it would have been like to see Hart do battle with Hitchens, before he died. Just saying.

This Brennan guy could drone on for hours without saying anything at all. I listened to him for 20 minutes and have zero takeaways

This guy's description of Dawkins is humorous. "He hasn't done the heavy lifting". Dawkins, rightly, doesn't waste his time on something so patently ridiculous as this branch of human ignorance called religion. And this series of videos is intolerable due to the interviewer's tween-like awe for this confused mess of a man.