You Are Gods On Nature And Supernature David Bentley Hart by David Bentley Hart 9780268201937, 9780268201944, 9780268201920, 0268201935, 0268201943 instant download after payment.

A friend has suggested to me that I might have subtitled this collection “Studies in Vedantic Christianity.” I have no objection in principle, though I suspect that to have done so would have provoked so much preliminary consternation and suspicion from some readers as to render the essays incapable of having any effect upon them. And, after all, I might just as well have characterized the position defended in these pages as “Neoplatonic Christianity,” since that says more or less the same thing. I have refrained from doing that as well, though, chiefly because, to my mind, the phrase constitutes something of a pleonasm. Perhaps, however, it would be best simply to note that—on the question of “grace” and “nature”—these pages advance an Eastern Christian view over against a particular set of Western Christian traditions. Indeed, if there is one thing on which all the great Orthodox theologians of the last century were agreed, despite all their differences from one another, it was that the entire problem of grace and nature (which was known to them almost exclusively from Thomist sources, many of them French) was a false dilemma created by an inept reading of Paul and by a catastrophic division into discrete categories of what should never have been divided. There is only χάρις, which is at once that which is freely given, the delight taken in the gift, and the thanksgiving offered up for it; and all those things that a distorted theology converts into oppositions or dialectical contraries or saltations—grace and nature, creation and deification, nature and supernature—are in fact only differing vantages upon, or continuously varying intensities within, a single transcendent act, a single immanent mystery.