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A Review of “Atheist Delusions” by David Bentley Hart
- 2018/05/22
- 再生時間： 20 分
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あらすじ・解説
All of us know someone who is not a believer in Christ. Many of us likely know someone who is not only an unbeliever, but one who is aggressive in their unbelief. If the subject of religion or faith comes up, they bring up an area in which they think Christians or Christianity itself reflects poorly and hammer relentlessly against your faith. At times, religion doesn’t even have to come up at all, knowing you are a Christian, they will bring it up using you as a target for their bully pulpit. If you have experienced anything along these lines, or someone you care about is an unbeliever, Atheist Delusions by David Bentley Hart is for you . . . it is not for your unbelieving friend . . . it is for you. Not that an unbelieving friend couldn’t benefit from reading this book. However, in Peter’s exhortation to “always be ready” to give an answer for the “hope that is within you,” the qualification is to do so “with gentleness and respect” (1 Peter 3:15) and Hart provides very strong answers in this book. Hart is a theologian, a visiting professor, and is referred to as a “polemicist.” Atheist Delusions is an overview of how frequently and consistently full historical context is ignored in order to serve a humanist agenda. Hart sets the record straight on a number of distorted narratives and he begins with this note: Perfect detachment is impossible for even the soberest of historians, since the writing of history necessarily demands some sort of narrative of causes and effects, and is thus necessarily an act of interpretation, which by its nature can never be wholly free of prejudice.[1] This is important to remember as often information is presented as an unbiased and clear view of history, when in fact, the presentation is a result of a very distorted lens. Everyone, even historians, bring preconceptions and a particular worldview to the table. Beware of those who are not honest about it. Hart’s intention with the book is to present a more even handed history of the church for the first five centuries,[2] or if one does not believe a Christian can do that objectively, a reader will at least have to consider the case Hart makes as it is much more fully sourced and comprehensive than the standard church detractors. Specifically, he states: My chief ambition in writing is to call attention to the peculiar and radical nature of the new faith in that setting: how enormous a transformation of thought, sensibility, culture, morality, and spiritual imagination Christianity constituted in the age of pagan Rome; the liberation it offered from fatalism, cosmic despair, and the terror of the occult agencies; the immense dignity it conferred upon the human person; its subversion of the cruelest aspects of pagan society; its (alas, only partial) demystification of political power; its ability to create moral community where none had existed before; and its elevation of active charity above all other virtues. Stated in its most elementary and most buoyantly positive form, my argument is, first of all, that among all the many great transitions that have sparked the evolution of Western civilization, whether convulsive or gradual, political or philosophical, social or scientific, material or spiritual, there has been only one — the triumph of Christianity—that can be called in the fullest sense a “revolution”: a truly massive and epochal revision of humanity’s prevailing vision of reality, so pervasive in its influence and so vast in its consequences as actually to have created a new conception of the world, of history, of human nature, of time, and of the moral good. To my mind, I should add, it was an event immeasurably more impressive in its cultural creativity and more ennobling in its moral power than any other movement of spirit, will, imagination, aspiration, or accomplishment in the history of the West.[3] (When you read about the transformative power the church has had on culture,