”The Christian understanding of evil has always been more radical and fantastic than that of any theodicist; for it denies from the outset that suffering, death, and evil have any ultimate meaning at all. Perhaps no doctrine is more insufferably fabulous to non-Christians than the claim that we exist in the long melancholy aftermath of a primordial catastrophe, that this is a broken and wounded world, that cosmic time is the shadow of true time, and that the universe languishes in bondage to ’powers’ and ’principalities’ — spiritual and terrestrial — alien to God. In the Gospel of John, especially, the incarnate God enters a world at once his own and yet hostile to him — ’He was in the world, and he made the world, and the world knew him not’ — and his appearance within ’this cosmos’ is both an act of judgement and a rescue of the beauties of creation from the torments of fallen nature.”
”But, simply said, there is no more liberating knowledge given us by the gospel — and none in which we should find more comfort — than the knowledge that suffering and death, considered in themselves, have no ultimate meaning at all.” […]
"We can rejoice that we are saved not through the immanent mechanisms of history and nature, but by grace; that God will not unite all of history’s many strands in one great synthesis, but will judge much of history false and damnable; that he will not simply reveal the sublime logic of fallen nature, but will strike off the fetters in which creation languishes; and that, rather than showing us how the tears of a small girl suffering in the dark were necessary for the building of the Kingdom, he will instead raise her up and wipe away all tears from her eyes — and there shall be no more death, nor sorrow, nor crying, nor any more pain, for the former things will have passed away, and he that sits upon the throne will say, ’Behold, I make all things new.’”
- Hart, David Bentley, 2007: Tremors of Doubt. I: In The Aftermath; Provocations and Laments. Eerdmans Publishing Co.: Grand Rapids. S. 109.
- Hart, David Bentley, 2007: Tsunami and Theodicy. I: In The Aftermath; Provocations and Laments. Eerdmans Publishing Co.: Grand Rapids. S. 113,117.
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