I am accused of being a covert right-winger because I've posted a video of an interview with David Bentley Hart who used to write for First Things. If the idiot had listened to the videos he'd know that David Bentley Hart doesn't write for First Things anymore because of political disagreements he has with those who run the thing, so that's not true.
For the love of Mike, adults can agree with people about some things as they disagree with them about other things, that's one of the pillars of being an adult instead of a perpetually pubescent jr. high schooler - as so many of those with college credentials now are, into their senectitude.
I happen to agree with him on a major and enormously consequential error that has led a huge part of Western Christianity astray, the Augustinian popularization of predestination (as a more complex and worse stand is usually abbreviated), original sin, eternal damnation, and the idea that Jesus was crucified as an expiation of God the father's wrath over Adam and Eve eating fruit they were told not to. I think much of what is wrong in Western Christianity* is as a result of those Augustinian impositions on the Gospel, the Epistles, the Apocalypse (what Protestants call "Revelations"). There are, of course, other things that have been terrible in the long history of Western treatment of the Gospel, etc. that's not a comprehensive list.
I will point out that much of that disappears if you read the actual text of the Bible as translated NOT to push any of those later ideological impositions on it, something which seems to be being done more and more in the West, these days. I think it's actually a kind of great age of leaving that stuff behind in Christian theology.
That leads to my citation of that writer who I respect most of all, among living authors, Marilynne Robinson's call for the rehabilitation of John Calvin's reputation. I did look and do, actually, find that she is right about his Geneva Bible translation and, even more so, commentary as the source of the American traditional understanding of liberalism in liberal provision for the poor, the widow, the sick, the prisoner, the stranger living among us, etc. I would love to hear Calvin's response to, as I recall, Cotton Mather's racist, genocidalist use of the book of Joshua to permit the murder of the natives of North America and the theft of their land because it doesn't look like something in line with the parts of Calvinism that Robinson uses to make her case. Of course, he was long dead by that time.
Calvin was, as D. B. Hart points out, the proponent of the most extreme and degenerate form of Augustinian predestination in which it is asserted that millions and jillions of unbaptized infants are burning in eternal torment because their parents had failed to have water poured over them in the nick of time, even babies born to parents who had never heard of baptism, of Jesus or the Bible. You can't overlook that kind of stuff in Calvin even if you like the idea that he told people to support the poor and destitute and, as Robinson points out, despite the frequent criticism of him for the execution of Michael Servetus, the unitarian**, Geneva during his time was, in Europe, one of the least murderous loci. It's an interesting fact that it wasn't a Calvinist who led the trial against Servetus, it was one of Calvin's opponents who sentenced Servetus to be burned at the stake along with his books. The trial and burning has done nothing for the reputation of Calvin.
I can agree with Hart overall that it's regrettable that Augustine, no doubt in a really bad mood over the crumbling Roman empire, inserted some of the worst and widely influential of ideas into Western Christianity, some of which are featured, heavily, in the anti-Christian propaganda that has filled the "enlightenment" culture ever since. It's been demanded, over and over and over again, for the past two decades that I defend things that I don't only not agree with but which appear nowhere in the Second Testament or the First and which, often, in Catholic terms, were hardly universally believed, either. Some of the more clueless of the atheist idiots have demanded I defend stuff Luther or Calvin or some later figure in that line held which they assume was part of Catholic teaching - not that there isn't plenty to reject in official Catholic doctrine and dogma as well.
Real adults agree with people they disagree with at other times, sometimes they agree on a lot of things, sometimes they agree with someone on little to nothing. It's the adolescents' idea of an intellectual who figures someone who is wrong about one thing is wrong about everything in every case, or at least when they figure it's useful for them to totally denigrate them.
I don't believe in eternal damnation, I wouldn't be surprised if there is some penalty for evil done in this life but as Mark Twain pointed out, you'd have to believe God is a total monster undeserving of love if you believed in eternal punishment. It might take a long, long time. When someone interviewing Hart was asked about the "what about Hitler" argument against his universalism, he said, "Well, I suppose Trump has to go somewhere after he dies." I'm sure we might disagree on some political stands but that doesn't mean I have to reject someone who thinks that.
* As I mentioned several times recently, I think one of the worst things about Orthodox Christianity is how apt it is to become entangled in nationalism and national politics. That is something that the Roman Catholic and many Protestant denominations in Western Christianity have gotten away from, in the case of the Catholics, through the liberation of the Papal States and, for example, some Calvinist churches in early 19th century New England, they had to give up with some reluctance but they're a lot better off. far more Christian, when they don't get involved in political machinations and, worse, nationalism. That doesn't mean they aren't critical of those when the countries and governments are rotten and evil. Congressman Fr. Robert Drinan, for example, was a very good Congressman and a very good priest while in Congress, especially on the House committee that adopted the articles of Impeachment against Nixon. His article over Nixon's war crimes in Cambodia and Laos was rejected but it was among Nixon's gravest crimes and moral atrocities.
** Servetus, the more I read about him, as with Bruno, would seem to be constitutionally unable to not be asking for trouble wherever he went. I've got my problems with Unitarians, being a New Englander of the left, I've probably been exposed to more of them than people elsewhere. They can be friggin' full of themselves and are, at times, extremely impractical. Some are, as Mrs. Oliver Wendell Holmes jr. put it, Unitarians for political cover and a Unitarian was the least you could be, William Cohen was a nominal Unitarian, as I recall. But some are good, even reliable. You can't judge them by the label.
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