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Joshua Philip's avatar

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“This latest book [You Are Gods] continues the trajectory away from historical Christianity evident in Hart’s recent work.” - Ed Feser

If one ventures over to Feser’s blog to peruse the comments on his post about his review, one finds many similar comments from readers regarding Hart’s deplorable and pitiful departure away from orthodox Christianity, in contrast to all his earlier works, where he was a staunch orthodox apologist for the Faith. One can find similar remarks made by McClymond in his interviews where he speaks against universalism.

To which I say...wtf are they talking about? Have they even read any of Hart’s books? This is such an annoying and idiotic criticism because Hart talks at length of Gregory of Nyssa’s universalism and monism in The Beauty of the Infinite, which was his first book from 20 years ago!

For example, “Gregory's universalism, though, is a subordinate issue; what is of interest here is the light it casts on Gregory's larger vision. That is to say, Gregory's understanding of the infinite never dissolves into abstraction: infinity is God alone, in his fullness, in whom all richness, beauty, motion, and life already dwell, without violence, negation, diremption, or the sacrifice of the particular.”

The Experience of God from a decade ago speaks much of Vedanta; and Atheist Delusions, from 2009, Hart’s most popular “orthodox” book that gained him praise from all manner of fundamentalists, evangelicals, and apologists, has several pages devoted to universalism, including this particular line:

“The threat of eternal torment is an appeal solely to spiritual and emotional terror, and to the degree that Christians employed it as an inducement to faith, their arguments were clearly somewhat vulgar. The doctrine of hell, understood in a purely literal sense, as a place of eternally unremitting divine wrath, is an idea that would seem to reduce Christianity’s larger claims regarding the justice, mercy, and love of God to nonsense.”

Hence, all these remarks that these critics make, where they praise Hart’s earlier works but rebuke his latest ones, are revealing of one of three possibilities: either 1) they’re intentionally lying and misrepresenting Hart’s views or 2) they’re lying that they ever read his earlier books or 3) they’re too stupid to have understood what it is they read.

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