An epiphany I had the other day about the problem with experts, with reference to a book by David Bentley Hart.
I’ve just finished reading “The Story of Christianity” by David Bentley Hart. He is, as you may recall, the author of “Atheist Delusions” – a book I highly recommend. Anyway, I came across the book recently, and as I’d enjoyed Atheist Delusions – and as the Kindle edition was 56p on Amazon (still is, at the time of writing!) then I decided to give it a go.
Let me say this: the foundation degree at Oak Hill includes a two-year church history and doctrine course (which is what I’ve been doing for the past couple of years). This book basically goes through all that we’ve done on the “church history” part. In fact, if you wanted to do the course that we’ve been doing in book form, this wouldn’t be a bad place to start.
Most of the major events and people are covered (some things in more depth than on our course), and the whole thing is written well and engagingly. To give you an idea – I’ve been able to follow it while at the same time suffering from sleep deprivation from a one month old baby. That speaks well of the book!
There are a few areas where I’d disagree with Bentley Hart, mainly I think in theological emphasis or interpretation of particular events, but as a historian he does a great job. And although most of the events are covered, this isn’t the book to go to if you want to look at church history in great depth – it’s a popular-level overview.
I would recommend this book to pretty much anyone who has an interest in Christianity and who – like me until a couple of years ago – is ignorant of much of church history. Let me give you a few reasons why I think this book is worth reading:
Most importantly, many people have misgivings about the future of the church at the moment. This book will help to put things in perspective: the church has survived a tough 2,000 years. Christians have been persecuted in the past, and indeed today many endure persecution (apparently Christians are the most-persecuted world religion). And yet, Christianity is still growing fast in many places. This book certainly gave me a lot more confidence in the church’s future, which is surely worth it!
Recently I mentioned that I was reading through “Atheist Delusions” by David Bentley Hart, and I said I would write up a review of it when I’d finished reading it. Well, I’ve finished reading it now, and really enjoyed it. Quite a lot of the book deals with the same kind of things I’ve been talking about with regards to atheism/secularism, although he takes it from a different angle. Essentially, Hart is going on a journey through Christian church history, and along the way correcting a lot of misperceptions about the past and how our society relates to that. From that perspective, I think he does brilliantly: he writes like he knows what he’s talking about – he’s done the reading and interacted with what we know historically (unlike a lot of the so-called ‘New Atheists’, who seem to basically ignore it). His basic contention is that the New Atheist reading of history is completely back-to-front, when Christianity arrived on the scene it changed the world in ways which are hard for us to imagine now.
Speaking of the New Atheists, it’s written in a fairly robust style in that he spares no love for the likes of Dawkins, Hitchens, Dennett and Harris – although in general they (and especially Dawkins) spare no love for Christianity in their books so it’s like for like. And most of the book is spent not so much on interacting with their arguments directly but interacting with history and various views on it. My main problem with the style of the book was that it is fairly dense prose, which isn’t really good when you’re trying to read it late at night! It’s definitely a book which you really need to be fully awake for to read properly, but it’s worth it.
What I’d like to do is pull out some of his arguments about secularism, which should both tie in with what I’ve said before as well as give you a flavour of what the book is like. This all comes from the last quarter of the book, the previous three-quarters being groundwork for it. (I apologise that it’s a bit long… skip to the end for my tl;dr!) I’m going to do this in two sections – firstly about Christian morality as opposed to the pagan morality which preceded it, and then secularism.
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