Following his move to The Big Apple to serve with InterVasity’s Graduate & Faculty Ministry at NYU this fall, David is back to wrap up his series on Why You Must Be Dying to be a Christian Scholar. For earlier posts in the series click here and here. Take it away David! ~ Thomas B. Grosh IV, Associate Director of ESN, editor of ESN’s blog and Facebook Wall
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4. We are surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses. In his lucid (though acerbic) book, Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), David Bentley Hart summarizes the “simple but thoroughly enchanting tale†underlying modern attitudes toward the Christian Tradition:
Once upon a time, it went, Western humanity was the cosseted and incurious ward of Mother Church; during this, the age of faith, culture stagnated, science languished, wars of religion were routinely waged, witches were burned by inquisitors, and Western humanity labored in brutish subjugation to dogma, superstition, and the unholy alliance of the church and state. Withering blasts of fanaticism and fideism had long since scorched away the last remnants of classical learning; inquiry was stifled; the literary remains of classical antiquity had long ago been consigned to the fires of faith, and even the great achievements of “Greek science†were forgotten till Islamic civilization restored them to the West. All was darkness. Then, in the wake of the “wars of religion†that had torn Christendom apart, came the full flowering of the Enlightenment and with it the reign of reason and progress, the riches of scientific achievement and political liberty, and a new revolutionary sense of human dignity…. (33)
Hart goes on to note that the sole defect of this “simple and enchanting tale†is “that it happens to be false in every identifiable detail.†(34) Nevertheless, most modern Western people have swallowed this tale hook-line-and-sinker. [Read more…] about Why You Must Be Dying to be a Christian Scholar (Wrap Up)