Soteriology, Theodicy, and the Point of It All

"The Triune God is the Revealer, the event of Revelation, and the effect of Revelation."

— Karl Barth

I am, again, hopelessly behind on schoolwork and work work this morning, so brevity is mandatory.

Rather than babbling, I'll post a link below to a fairly extraordinary dialogue in the New York Times between Peter Wehner and David Bentley Hart, a theologian and philosopher who's spent a half century wrestling with the meaning of Christianity and the contradictions inherent in how it has been experienced over the last two millennia. I first encountered Hart when I bought his translation of the New Testament several years ago,

and was particularly struck by how his rendering of what we call the Book of Revelation brought into plain view John of Patmos's simplicity and lack of education when contrasted with the soaring language of the Gospel of That Other John.

Anyway, Hart's observation that the core message of our founding member was one of love and care for the untouchables in our society, and that this was an incredibly radical notion at the time, called me up short. A lot of what he had to say called me up short, in fact.

It's worth the read, long as it may be.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/12/opinion/jesus-christianity-atheism.html