I must admit that was an entertaining read. I can see McClymond’s point about the florid prose. But there was one paragraph that stood out for me:
If ever (say, in a fit of morbid prurience, induced by a spell of malarial fever) you should decide to sample some of the books written by “Oxfordians”—those poor, pale, demented neurasthenics who believe that the Shakespearean canon was actually written by the talentless fop Edward de Vere—you will notice that none of them is marked by brevity. Invariably, they come in at around 1000 turgid pages. There is a certain logic to this. The more preposterous a conspiracy theory is, the more elaborate and tortured the argument it requires; the very absence of any real corroboration makes it inevitable that any attempt to prove its veracity will consist in nothing but the frantic accumulation of every hint of a shadow of an echo of evidence, however illusory. Precisely because it is obviously false, its “demonstration” is potentially infinite.
That would be a wonderful summary of Richard Carrier’s book.
"Those of them who were able (as, again, McClymond clearly is not) to read the Bible with a real knowledge of its language and the conceptual world in which it took shape were simply certain that universalism was its final word. Origen interpreted the whole deposit of scripture in light of 1 Corinthians 15, as did Gregory of Nyssa after him. The latter, in fact, produced perhaps the most majestic, coherent, compelling, and theologically sophisticated reading of the New Testament’s soteriology, cosmology, and eschatology in the history of Christian thought."
i) The fact that Origen and Gregory of Nyssa were native Greek speakers can actually be a disadvantage because the kind of Greek they naturally spoke, wrote, and read wasn't NT Greek. Take the cliche that many NT Greek words have Hebrew meanings.
ii) More to the point, their conceptual world is far removed from the NT or OT conceptual world. It filters the text through an alien grid.
Hart also reviewed Michael McClymond's new book The Devil’s Redemption:
ReplyDeletehttps://afkimel.wordpress.com/2019/10/02/gnosticism-and-universalism-a-review-of-the-devils-redemption/
I must admit that was an entertaining read. I can see McClymond’s point about the florid prose. But there was one paragraph that stood out for me:
DeleteIf ever (say, in a fit of morbid prurience, induced by a spell of malarial fever) you should decide to sample some of the books written by “Oxfordians”—those poor, pale, demented neurasthenics who believe that the Shakespearean canon was actually written by the talentless fop Edward de Vere—you will notice that none of them is marked by brevity. Invariably, they come in at around 1000 turgid pages. There is a certain logic to this. The more preposterous a conspiracy theory is, the more elaborate and tortured the argument it requires; the very absence of any real corroboration makes it inevitable that any attempt to prove its veracity will consist in nothing but the frantic accumulation of every hint of a shadow of an echo of evidence, however illusory. Precisely because it is obviously false, its “demonstration” is potentially infinite.
That would be a wonderful summary of Richard Carrier’s book.
"Those of them who were able (as, again, McClymond clearly is not) to read the Bible with a real knowledge of its language and the conceptual world in which it took shape were simply certain that universalism was its final word. Origen interpreted the whole deposit of scripture in light of 1 Corinthians 15, as did Gregory of Nyssa after him. The latter, in fact, produced perhaps the most majestic, coherent, compelling, and theologically sophisticated reading of the New Testament’s soteriology, cosmology, and eschatology in the history of Christian thought."
Deletehttps://afkimel.wordpress.com/2019/10/02/gnosticism-and-universalism-a-review-of-the-devils-redemption/
i) The fact that Origen and Gregory of Nyssa were native Greek speakers can actually be a disadvantage because the kind of Greek they naturally spoke, wrote, and read wasn't NT Greek. Take the cliche that many NT Greek words have Hebrew meanings.
ii) More to the point, their conceptual world is far removed from the NT or OT conceptual world. It filters the text through an alien grid.
I stopped counting at 10 areas that Hart says he is an expert and Mc. none
ReplyDeleteAt least you can't fault Hart for a lack of self esteem.
Say what you will, at least Rob Bell was somewhat entertaining.
ReplyDelete