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God's beauty: the aesthetics of faith
Christian Century, Sept 7, 2004 by William C. Placher
Second, for someone committed to moving from the rhetoric of violence to the rhetoric of peace, Hart is often oddly nasty in his own rhetoric: "Setting aside its atrocious oversimplifications, the problem with Tillich's approach ..." Levinas's work "is poor philosophy--the banal tortured into counterfeit profundity, the obviously false propounded as irresistibly true ..." "Scharlemann's treatment of traditional Christian metaphysics is surprisingly inept." And so on. Just rhetorically, this seems a bad strategy; readers inclined to doubt that these well-known figures are quite as dumb as Hart claims will begin to wonder about Hart's own assertions.
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I am also frustrated by Hart's choice of conversation partners: he is always responding to one more contemporary philosopher but the great theologians of the 20th century often get little mention. I think Wolfhart Pannenberg and above all Karl Barth are engaged in projects more like Hart's than he acknowledges, and he needs to figure out his similarities and differences with them. Maybe that's the next book.
Still, The Beauty of the Infinite is a major work by a really smart guy. It will not hit the best-seller list, but it will be one of the books with which other serious theologians should find themselves engaged.
William C. Placher teaches at Wabash College.
COPYRIGHT 2004 The Christian Century Foundation
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning
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