Top 40 David Bentley Hart Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Wisdom is the recovery of innocence at the far end of experience.”

— David Bentley Hart

2. “God’s pleasure – the beauty creation possesses in his regard – underlies the distinct being of creation, and so beauty is the first and truest word concerning all that appears within being; beauty is the showing of what is; God looked upon what he had wrought and saw that it was good.”

— David Bentley Hart

3. “God is not only the ultimate reality that the intellect and the will seek but is also the primordial reality with which all of us are always engaged in every moment of existence and consciousness, apart from which we have no experience of anything whatsoever. Or, to borrow the language of Augustine, God is not only superior summo meo – beyond my utmost heights – but also interior intimo meo – more inward to me than my inmost depths.”

— David Bentley Hart

4. “Empiricism in the sciences is a method; naturalism in philosophy is a metaphysics; and the latter neither follows from nor underlies the former.”

— David Bentley Hart

5. “God’s love, and hence the love with which we come to love God, is eros and agape at once: a desire for the other that delights in the distance of otherness.”

— David Bentley Hart

6. “The one reality you can’t evade is personal experience.”

— David Bentley Hart

7. “To speak of God, however, as infinite consciousness, which is identical to infinite being, is to say that in him the ecstasy of mind is also the perfect satiety of achieved knowledge, of perfect wisdom. God is both the knower and the known, infinite intelligence and infinite intelligibility. This is to say that, in him, rational appetite is perfectly fulfilled, and consciousness perfectly possesses the end it desires. And this, of course, is perfect bliss.”

— David Bentley Hart

8. “Christians, for instance, are not, properly speaking, believers in religion; rather, they believe that Jesus of Nazareth, crucified under Pontius Pilate, rose from the dead and is now, by the power of the Holy Spirit, present to his church as its Lord.”

— David Bentley Hart

9. “Our sacred writ is advertising, our piety is shopping, our highest devotion is private choice. God and the soul too often hinder the purely acquisitive longings upon which the market depends, and confront us with values that stand in stark rivalry to the one truly substantial value at the center of our social universe: the price tag.”

— David Bentley Hart

10. “We have progressed so far that we have succeeded in tearing the atom apart; but to reach that point we may also have had to regress in our moral vision of the physical world to a level barely above the insentient.”

— David Bentley Hart

11. “All finite things are limited expressions, graciously imparted, of that actuality that he possesses in infinite abundance. And, simply said, this way of thinking about God is – or so the classical traditions claim – the inevitable result of any genuinely coherent attempt to prescind from the conditions of dependent finitude to a rational definition of the divine.”

— David Bentley Hart

12. “All reasoning presumes premises or intuitions or ultimate convictions that cannot be proved by any foundations or facts more basic than themselves, and hence there are irreducible convictions present wherever one attempts to apply logic to experience. One always operates within boundaries established by one’s first principles, and asks only the questions that those principles permit.”

— David Bentley Hart

13. “Materialists believe that absolutely everything, even the formal structures of culture and the intentional structures of consciousness, can be reduced without remainder to an ensemble of mechanistic interactions among intrinsically mindless physical elements; and I suppose anyone capable of believing that is capable of believing practically anything.”

— David Bentley Hart

14. “There is, after all, nothing inherently reasonable in the conviction that all of reality is simply an accidental confluence of physical causes, without any transcendent source or end. Materialism is not a fact of experience or a deduction of logic; it is a metaphysical prejudice, nothing more, and one that is arguably more irrational than almost any other.”

— David Bentley Hart

15. “It is just as often the case, however, that men are violent solely from expedience, because they believe in no higher law than the demands of the moment, while.”

— David Bentley Hart

16. “These are attitudes masquerading as ideas, emotional commitments disguised as intellectual honesty. However sincere the current evangelists of unbelief may be, they are doing nothing more than producing rationales – ballasted by a formidable collection of conceptual and historical errors – for convictions that are rooted not in reason but in a greater cultural will, of which their arguments are only reflexes.”

— David Bentley Hart

17. “The reason the very concept of God has become at once so impoverished, so thoroughly mythical, and ultimately so incredible for so many modern persons is not because of all the interesting things we have learned over the past few centuries, but because of all the vital things we have forgotten.”

— David Bentley Hart

18. “A straw man can be a very convenient property, after all. I can see why a plenteously contented, drowsily complacent, temperamentally incurious atheist might find it comforting – even a little luxurious – to imagine that belief in God is no more than belief in some magical invisible friend who lives beyond the clouds, or in some ghostly cosmic mechanic invoked to explain gaps in current scientific knowledge.”

— David Bentley Hart

19. “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.”

— David Bentley Hart

20. “The most effective technique for subduing the moral imagination is to teach it to mistake the contradictory for the paradoxical, and thereby to accept incoherence as profundity, or moral idiocy as spiritual subtlety. If this can be accomplished with sufficient nuance and delicacy, it can sustain even a very powerful intellect for an entire lifetime.”

— David Bentley Hart

21. “Evidence for or against God, if it is there, saturates every moment of the experience of existence, every employment of reason, every act of consciousness, every encounter with the world around us.”

— David Bentley Hart

22. “The world is unable to provide any account of its own actuality, and yet there it is all the same.”

— David Bentley Hart

23. “But there is something delusional nonetheless in his optimistic certainty that human beings will wish to choose altruistic values without invoking transcendent principles. They may do so; but they may also wish to build death camps, and may very well choose to do that instead. For.”

— David Bentley Hart

24. “If something is worth being rude about, it is worth understanding as well.”

— David Bentley Hart

25. “Sin is the repetition of an absence, whose logic is suppression, aversion, and privation.”

— David Bentley Hart

26. “God” has become the name of some special physical force or causal principle located somewhere out there among all the other forces and principles found in the universe: not the Logos filling and forming all things, not the infinity of being and consciousness in which all things necessarily subsist, but a thing among other things, an item among all the other items encompassed within nature.”

— David Bentley Hart

27. “It is only because a dreamer has temporarily lost the desire to turn his eyes toward more distant horizons that he believes he inhabits a reality perfectly complete in itself, in need of no further explanation. He does not see that this secondary world rests upon no foundations, has no larger story, and persists as an apparent unity only so long as he has forgotten how to question its curious omissions and contradictions.”

— David Bentley Hart

28. “For, despite all our vague talk of ancient or medieval “science,” pagan, Muslim, or Christian, what we mean today by science – its methods, its controls and guiding principles, its desire to unite theory to empirical discovery, its trust in a unified set of physical laws, and so on – came into existence, for whatever reasons, and for better or worse, only within Christendom, and under the hands of believing Christians.”

— David Bentley Hart

29. “Now the Bible came to be seen as what it obviously is not: a collection of “inerrant” oracles and historical reports, each true in the same way as every other, each subject to only one level of interpretation, and all perfectly in agreement with one another.”

— David Bentley Hart

30. “The current fashion in belligerent atheism usually involves flinging condemnation around with a kind of gallant extravagance, more or less in the direction of all faiths at once, with little interest in precise aim.”

— David Bentley Hart

31. “What distinguishes modernity from the age of Christendom is not that the former is more devoted to rationality than was the latter but that its rationality serves different primary commitments.”

— David Bentley Hart

32. “Voltaire sees only the terrible truth that the history of suffering and death is not morally intelligible. Dostoyevsky sees – and this bespeaks both his moral genius and his irreducibly Christian view of reality – that it would be far more terrible if it were.”

— David Bentley Hart

33. “As far as I am concerned, anyone who hopes for the universal reconciliation of all creatures with God must already believe that this would be the best possible ending to the Christian story; and such a person has then no excuse for imagining that God could bring any but the best possible ending to pass without thereby being in some sense a failed creator.”

— David Bentley Hart

34. “The soul is a story that can always be retold.”

— David Bentley Hart

35. “To bracket form and finality out of one’s investigations as far as reason allows is a matter of method, but to deny their reality altogether is a matter of metaphysics.”

— David Bentley Hart

36. “To believe that being is inexhaustibly intelligible is to believe also – whether one wishes to acknowledge it or not – that reality emanates from an inexhaustible intelligence: in the words of the Shvetashvatara Upanishad, “pure consciousness, omnipresent, omniscient, the creator of time.”

— David Bentley Hart

37. “God became human so that humans should become God. Only the God who is always already human can become human.”

— David Bentley Hart

38. “To the most literalist readers of scripture, of course, Darwin’s ideas were scandalous simply because they contradicted the creation story of Genesis; but the ancient Christian practice of reading that story allegorically had never died out in Christian culture, and there were many 19th-century Christians who found the idea of special evolution entirely inoffensive.”

— David Bentley Hart

39. “Western society was on the verge of discovering that a radical materialism could breed horrors far greater than even the worst religious fanaticism.”

— David Bentley Hart

40. “It may well be that, when Christianity passes away from a culture, nihilism is the inevitable consequence, precisely because of what Christianity itself is.”

— David Bentley Hart

41. “If God is the good creator of all, he must also be the savior of all, without fail, who brings to himself all he has made, including all rational wills, and only thus returns to himself in all that goes forth from him. If he is not the savior of all, the Kingdom is only a dream, and creation something considerably worse than a nightmare. But, again, it is not so. According to scripture, God saw that what he created was good. If so, then all creatures must, in the ages, see it as well.”

— David Bentley Hart

42. “The Cappadocian arguments against the Eunomians were many, complex and subtle; but perhaps the most effective was the simplest: if it is the Son who joins us to the Father, and only God can join us to God, then the Son is God; and if, in the sacraments of the Church and the life of faith, it is the Spirit who joins us to the Son, and only God can join us to God, then the Spirit too must be God.”

— David Bentley Hart

43. “As a community, it was distinguished in part by its disdain of riches. The Christians held all possessions in common, and the wealthy among them were obliged to sell their property to assist the poor members of the community.”

— David Bentley Hart

44. “Orthodox Christology, after all, insists not merely that there is no conflict or rivalry between Christ’s divinity and his humanity, nor merely that they are capable of harmonious accord with one another. Rather, it asserts that humanity is so naturally compatible with divinity that the Son can be both fully divine and fully human at once without separation or confusion, in one agent whose actions are all therefore at once fully human and fully divine.”

— David Bentley Hart

45. “The discourse of power is, of its nature, bombastic, pontifical, and domineering.”

— David Bentley Hart

46. “There is no abiding difference within the one gift of both creation and deification; there is only grace all the way down and nature all the way up, and “pure nature” – like pure potency or pure nothingness – is a remainder concept of the most vacuous kind: the name of something that in itself could never be anything at all. Creation, incarnation, salvation, deification: in God, these are one gracious act, one absolute divine vocation to the creature to become what he has called it to become.26.”

— David Bentley Hart