Thursday 6 May 2010

What Terry Eagleton & Daid Bentley Hart have in common

I have just started reading Terry Eagleton's polemical Terry lectures published as Reason Faith and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate after just having finished David Bentley Hart's stunningly important book Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and its Fashionable Enemies. 

Eagleton is a Marxist literary and cultural critic of atheist persuasion and Hart is theologian of Eastern Orthodox conviction. What do they have in common? It's early days with respect to the Eagleton contribution but so far it seems that they have some important things in common in their response to Dawkins, Hitchens and the current wave of atheist critics of Christianity. They both:
  • write in vigorous and direct English
  • are convinced that the quality of the atheist criticism of Christianity has sadly declined and is embarassingly ill informed when compared to that offered by its critics in previous centuries
  • argue a case, though each on somewhat different grounds, that Christianity is revolutionary
It looks like there might be value in a comparative discussion of both books from an Anabaptist perspective. No promises.

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