The Story of Christianity Quotes

“Of these, scriptural inerrancy was the only wholly novel principle. It went far beyond the traditional Christian belief in the divine inspiration and truthfulness in scripture; it meant that every single event reported in the Bible was historically factual, every word recorded therein literally true and every apparent contradiction unreal. Such a view of scripture might have been tacitly held by many Christians down the centuries; but, as an explicit dogma, it was contrary to almost all of Christian tradition, Protestant, Catholic or Orthodox.”
― David Bentley Hart, The Story of Christianity: A History of 2000 Years of the Christian Faith

“Western society was on the verge of discovering that a radical materialism could breed horrors far greater than even the worst religious fanaticism”
― David Bentley Hart, The Story of Christianity: A History of 2000 Years of the Christian Faith

“To the most literalist readers of scripture, of course, Darwin’s ideas were scandalous simply because they contradicted the creation story of Genesis; but the ancient Christian practice of reading that story allegorically had never died out in Christian culture, and there were many 19th-century Christians who found the idea of special evolution entirely inoffensive.”
― David Bentley Hart, The Story of Christianity: A History of 2000 Years of the Christian Faith

“The Cappadocian arguments against the Eunomians were many, complex and subtle; but perhaps the most effective was the simplest: if it is the Son who joins us to the Father, and only God can join us to God, then the Son is God; and if, in the sacraments of the Church and the life of faith, it is the Spirit who joins us to the Son, and only God can join us to God, then the Spirit too must be God.”
― David Bentley Hart, The Story of Christianity

“As a community, it was distinguished in part by its disdain of riches. The Christians held all possessions in common, and the wealthy among them were obliged to sell their property to assist the poor members of the community.”
― David Bentley Hart, The Story of Christianity

“He feared that, in the absence of any higher aspiration, humanity might degenerate into those he called the ‘Last Men’ (die letzten Menschen), an insect-like race of vapid narcissists, sunk in petty satisfactions.”
― David Bentley Hart, The Story of Christianity: A History of 2000 Years of the Christian Faith

“No single theologian writing in Greek or Syriac in the patristic period exercised an influence in the Christian East comparable to that exercised in the West by the great North African St Augustine of Hippo (354–430), a man whose restless originality, philosophical sophistication, literary genius and sheer intellectual power set him apart not only from his contemporaries but from all but a very few other theologians. The greatest works in his immense corpus of writings rank high among the enduring monuments of the Christian intellectual tradition.”
― David Bentley Hart, The Story of Christianity: An Illustrated History of 2000 Years of the Christian Faith

“Unlike Nietzsche, though, Dostoyevsky believed the descent of modern humanity into nihilism (whose worst political and social consequences he foresaw with remarkable perspicacity) to be the result not of Christianity’s corruption of the human will, but of the inability of modern men and women to bear the power of Christian freedom.”
― David Bentley Hart, The Story of Christianity: A History of 2000 Years of the Christian Faith

“An oft-repeated tale recounts that a Christian mob destroyed the Great Library of Alexandria in 391 and burnt its books in the street. According to some versions, the repository in question was the original library in the Brucheium, while others state that it was a ‘daughter’ library located in the Serapeum. This tale has entered so deeply into the popular imagination that it even sometimes appears in otherwise respectable books of history. It is, however, a myth, originated in the late 18th century, when the great historian Edward Gibbon read an unwarranted meaning into a single sentence from the Christian chronicler Paul Orosius (fl. 414–17). The subtext of the legend is that the Christians of the fourth century were intensely hostile to the science, literature, and scholarship of classical culture, and that such matters were the special preserve of the pagans of Alexandria. This too is an 18th-century myth. The city’s scholarly and scientific class comprised Christians as well as pagans, and Christian scholars, rhetoricians, philosophers and scientists were active in Alexandria right up until the city fell to Arab Muslim invaders in 642. Regarding the library in the Brucheium – whose size, again, is impossible to determine – many ancient historians believed that it (or a large part of its collection) had already gone up in flames following Julius Caesar’s assault on the city in 48 or 47 BC, during his wars with Pompey. Some historians now also claim that, if any part of the original library remained, it vanished in 272, during the emperor Aurelian’s campaigns to reunite the empire. Whether either story is true, the Great Library of the Ptolemies no longer existed by the late fourth century. As for the ‘daughter’ library, it may have been situated within the enclosure of the Serapeum; there were, at any rate, library stacks in the temple. However, the Pagan historian Ammianus Marcellinus (c.330–95) indicates that whatever library had once been there was long gone before the Serapeum’s demolition in 391. More importantly, none of the original accounts of the temple’s destruction mentions a library, not even the account written by the devout pagan Eunapius of Sardis (c.345–c.420), who despised Christians and who, as an erudite man, would have been enraged by the burning of precious texts. Later Medieval legend claimed that the actual final destruction of the ‘Library’ or libraries of Alexandria was the work of the Arab conquerors of the seventh century ad. Of this, however, no account exists that was written before the 12th century. Whatever the case, the scurrilous story of the Great Library’s destruction by Christians is untrue. It may tell us something about modern misconceptions regarding the past, but tells us nothing about Christian or pagan antiquity.”
― David Bentley Hart, The Story of Christianity: A History of 2000 Years of the Christian Faith

“In its full splendour, before centuries of spoliation stripped it of its treasures, the interior of Holy Wisdom was a magnificent tumult of gold, silver, porphyry, lapislazuli and polychromatic marbles. It was adorned with immense mosaic icons (added in many cases long after Justinian’s time), and with inlays of semi-precious stone. One of its most remarkable features, however, was the quality of the light that filled the enormous central space of the building – a light not infrequently described as ‘ethereal’ or ‘celestial’ or ‘mystical’. The peculiar quality of this light resulted from the single most impressive architectural feature of the edifice: the gigantic dome that seemed to ‘hover’ above the nave. The appearance of weightlessness was achieved by constructing a continuous arcade of 40 windows at the base of the dome, above the main oblong structure of the building, making it appear that the dome floated above the church on a ring of light. In fact, the great weight of the dome was supported by four large and elegantly tapered pendentives resting on four large piers and creating four enormous arches. To the east and west of the central dome, lesser semi-domes descend in a kind of cascade.”
― David Bentley Hart, The Story of Christianity: A History of 2000 Years of the Christian Faith

“Mechanical devices, optical tricks and combustible chemicals were used to simulate miracles and divine visitations. To give the impression that an idol had been inhabited by a divine spirit and brought to life, a clockwork automaton would be used; a hidden speaking trumpet would produce the voice of an unseen god; light reflected from a hidden pan of water onto a temple ceiling suggested a numinous presence; a skull cunningly fashioned from wax would deliver an oracle and then ‘miraculously’ melt away; a darkened temple vault could suddenly be transformed into the starry firmament by light reflected from fish scales embedded in the masonry; and so on.”
― David Bentley Hart, The Story of Christianity: A History of 2000 Years of the Christian Faith

“The great tragedy of the Christological controversies was that, for the most part, the Churches were divided more by language than by belief. The so-called Monophysites, for instance, never meant to deny the full and inviolable humanity of Christ. The so-called Nestorians never meant to deny the real unity of God and man in Christ. There were, however, powerful political forces at play as well: the division of the ‘Oriental’ Churches from Rome and Constantinople was partly the result of indigenous resentment of imperial power.”
― David Bentley Hart, The Story of Christianity

“One of those historical myths that enjoy popular currency, even though they cannot survive the scrutiny of serious historical study, is that, at the dawn of the Christian era, there was a thriving Hellenistic scientific culture that Christianity – through some supposed hostility to learning and reason – methodically destroyed; and that this Christian antagonism to science persisted into the early modern period – as is evident from Galileo’s trial in Rome – until the power of the Church was at last broken, and secular faculties of science began to appear.”
― David Bentley Hart, The Story of Christianity