John > John's Quotes

“in churchmen, luxury is wrong, except in connection with representations and ceremonies. It seems to reveal habits which have very little that is charitable about them. An opulent priest is a contradiction. The priest must keep close to the poor. Now, can one come in contact incessantly night and day with all this distress, all these misfortunes, and this poverty, without having about one's own person a little of that misery, like the dust of labor? Is it possible to imagine a man near a brazier who is not warm? Can one imagine a workman who is working near a furnace, and who has neither a singed hair, nor blackened nails, nor a drop of sweat, nor a speck of ashes on his face? The first proof of charity in the priest, in the bishop especially, is poverty.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“On the other hand, a completely good God, whose nature is pure love, produces people who imitate him by exemplifying love. That God, who willingly laid down his life for others, inspires loving followers who truly are free—free to move beyond the slavery of self-seeking into self-giving, sacrificial love. ”
― Bradley Jersak, A More Christlike God: A More Beautiful Gospel

“So while God in his fullness is far beyond our comprehension, who God is can be known through the revelation of the Cross, by which we mean cruciform love, by ‘laying down his life.’ Love is not merely one of God’s attributes. Love is who God is in his very nature. God is Love in a way that exceeds character qualities. God is living love.”
― Bradley Jersak, A More Christlike God: A More Beautiful Gospel

“The fundamental truth of God’s nature (love) seems irreconcilably incompatible with day-to-day life in this world (affliction).”
― Bradley Jersak, A More Christlike God: A More Beautiful Gospel

“The Cross is God’s eternal love, refracted through human sin. What God’s love looks like now, refracted through human sin, is a crucified Jewish man.”
― Bradley Jersak, A More Christlike God: A More Beautiful Gospel

“Where are your free and compulsory schools? Does every one know how to read in the land of Dante and of Michael Angelo? Have you made public schools of your barracks? Have you not, like ourselves, an opulent war-budget and a paltry budget of education?”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“that still would hardly reduce all other religions to mere falsehood. More to the point, no one really acquainted with the metaphysical and spiritual claims of the major theistic faiths can fail to notice that on a host of fundamental philosophical issues, and especially on the issue of how divine transcendence should be understood, the areas of accord are quite vast.”
― David Bentley Hart, The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss

“There is an old Scholastic distinction between religious treatises written “de Deo uno” and those written “de Deo trino”: between, that is, those that are “about the one God” known to persons of various faiths and philosophies and those that are “about the Trinitarian God” of Christian doctrine.”
― David Bentley Hart, The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss

“God is not only the ultimate reality that the intellect and the will seek but is also the primordial reality with which all of us are always engaged in every moment of existence and consciousness, apart from which we have no experience of anything whatsoever. Or, to borrow the language of Augustine, God is not only superior summo meo—beyond my utmost heights—but also interior intimo meo—more inward to me than my inmost depths.”
― David Bentley Hart, The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss

“As Gregory of Nyssa (c. 335–c. 396) said, if one does not read scripture in a “philosophical” fashion one will see only myths and contradictions.”
― David Bentley Hart, The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss

“Now the Bible came to be seen as what it obviously is not: a collection of “inerrant” oracles and historical reports, each true in the same way as every other, each subject to only one level of interpretation, and all perfectly in agreement with one another.”
― David Bentley Hart, The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss

“Beliefs regarding God concern the source and ground and end of all reality, the unity and existence of every particular thing and of the totality of all things, the ground of the possibility of anything at all. Fairies and gods, if they exist, occupy something of the same conceptual space as organic cells, photons, and the force of gravity, and so the sciences might perhaps have something to say about them, if a proper medium for investigating them could be found.”
― David Bentley Hart, The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss

“As it happens, the god with whom most modern popular atheism usually concerns itself is one we might call a “demiurge”
― David Bentley Hart, The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss

“For to say that God is being, consciousness, and bliss is also to say that he is the one reality in which all our existence, knowledge, and love subsist, from which they come and to which they go, and that therefore he is somehow present in even our simplest experience of the world, and is approachable by way of a contemplative and moral refinement of that experience. That is to say, these three words are not only a metaphysical explanation of God, but also a phenomenological explanation of the human encounter with God.”
― David Bentley Hart, The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss

“I knew that love gives to him that loveth, power over any soul beloved, even if that soul know him not, bringing him inwardly close to that spirit; a power that cannot be but for good; for in proportion as selfishness intrudes, the love ceases, and the power which springs therefrom dies. Yet all love will, one day, meet with its return. All true love will, one day, behold its own image in the eyes of the beloved, and be humbly glad.”
― George MacDonald, Phantastes

“all the major theistic traditions insist at some point that our language about God consists mostly in conceptual restrictions and fruitful negations. “Cataphatic” (or affirmative) theology must always be chastened and corrected by “apophatic” (or negative) theology. We cannot speak of God in his own nature directly, but only at best analogously, and even then only in such a way that the conceptual content of our analogies consists largely in our knowledge of all the things that God is not.”
― David Bentley Hart, The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss

“And it is this unconditioned and eternally sustaining source of being that classical metaphysics, East and West, identifies as God.”
― David Bentley Hart, The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss

“To believe that being is inexhaustibly intelligible is to believe also—whether one wishes to acknowledge it or not—that reality emanates from an inexhaustible intelligence: in the words of the Shvetashvatara Upanishad, “pure consciousness, omnipresent, omniscient, the creator of time.”
― David Bentley Hart, The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss

“To speak of God, however, as infinite consciousness, which is identical to infinite being, is to say that in him the ecstasy of mind is also the perfect satiety of achieved knowledge, of perfect wisdom. God is both the knower and the known, infinite intelligence and infinite intelligibility. This is to say that, in him, rational appetite is perfectly fulfilled, and consciousness perfectly possesses the end it desires. And this, of course, is perfect bliss.”
― David Bentley Hart, The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss

“The soul’s unquenchable eros for the divine, of which Plotinus and Gregory of Nyssa and countless Christian contemplatives speak, Sufism’s ‘ishq or passionately adherent love for God, Jewish mysticism’s devekut, Hinduism’s bhakti, Sikhism’s pyaar—these are all names for the acute manifestation of a love that, in a more chronic and subtle form, underlies all knowledge, all openness of the mind to the truth of things. This is because, in God, the fullness of being is also a perfect act of infinite consciousness that, wholly possessing the truth of being in itself, forever finds its consummation in boundless delight. The Father knows his own essence perfectly in the mirror of the Logos and rejoices in the Spirit who is the “bond of love” or “bond of glory” in which divine being and divine consciousness are perfectly joined. God’s wujud is also his wijdan—his infinite being is infinite consciousness—in the unity of his wajd, the bliss of perfect enjoyment. The”
― David Bentley Hart, The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss

“God is the one act of being, consciousness, and bliss in whom everything lives and moves and has its being; and so the only way to know the truth of things is, necessarily, the way of bliss.”
― David Bentley Hart, The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss

“The atheist who proudly and persistently strives to convince others that there is no God does so out of a devotion to the absolute, to the highest of values, to the divine. It is an old maxim—one that infuriates many unbelievers, but that happens to be true nonetheless—that one cannot meaningfully reject belief in the God of classical theism. If one refuses to believe in God out of one’s love of the truth, one affirms the reality of God in that very act of rejection.”
― David Bentley Hart, The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss

“So, yes, it certainly is not the case that one needs to believe in God in any explicit way in order to be good; but it certainly is the case, as classical theism asserts, that to seek the good is already to believe in God, whether one wishes to do so or not.”
― David Bentley Hart, The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss

“The saint, says Swami Ramdas (1884–1963), is one whose heart burns for the sufferings of others, whose hands labor for the relief of others, and who therefore acts from God’s heart and with God’s hands.”
― David Bentley Hart, The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss

“As Bernard of Clairvaux (1090–1153) says, “Love is sufficient in itself, gives pleasure through itself and because of itself. It is its own merit, its own reward. Love looks for no cause outside itself, no effect beyond itself. … I love because I love, I love so that I may love. Love is something great insofar as it returns constantly to its fountainhead and flows back to its source, from which it ever draws the water that continually replenishes it. … For when God loves, he desires only to be loved in turn. His love’s only purpose is to be loved, as he knows that all who love him are made happy by their love of him.”7”
― David Bentley Hart, The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss

“In the experience of the beautiful, one is apprised with a unique poignancy of both the ecstatic structure of consciousness and the gratuity of being. Hence the ancient conviction that the love of beauty is, by its nature, a rational yearning for the transcendent.”
― David Bentley Hart, The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss

“God is thus experienced as that bliss in which our natures have their consummation because that bliss is already, in God, the perfect consummation of the divine unity of being and consciousness: infinite being knows itself in infinite consciousness and therefore infinitely rejoices.”
― David Bentley Hart, The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss

“God” has become the name of some special physical force or causal principle located somewhere out there among all the other forces and principles found in the universe: not the Logos filling and forming all things, not the infinity of being and consciousness in which all things necessarily subsist, but a thing among other things, an item among all the other items encompassed within nature.”
― David Bentley Hart, The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss

“If there is some demiurge out there, delicately constructing camera eyes or piecing together rotary flagella, he or she is a contingent being, part of the physical order, just another natural phenomenon, but not the source of all being, not the transcendent creator and rational ground of reality, and so not God. By the same token, if there is no such demiurge, that too is a matter of utter indifference for the question of God. How, after all, could the existence or nonexistence of some particular finite being among other beings provide an ultimate answer to the mystery of existence as such?”
― David Bentley Hart, The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss

“Popular atheism is not a philosophy but a therapy.”
― David Bentley Hart, The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss