More on Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite

Last updated on: September 7, 2017 at 12:10 am by Peter Leithart

More on Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite 2017-09-07T00:10:11+06:00 Peter Leithart

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

Hart, Beauty of the Infinite
Part 2, section I: Trinity

Proposition 3: The Christian God shows the beauty of the infinite, and thus can be “traversed” by way of beauty.

i. Desire’s Flight.

God, Hart suggests is “all” but not a totality. That is, He is not a pantheistic all, but instead “contains and exceeds, give creation its breadth and difference, but at the same time infinitely transcends his gift” (p. 188). God’s infinity not only surpasses finite creation “qualitatively,” but also “quantitatively” since He is the world’s “supereminent plentitude, whose radiant beauty is truly declared in creation’s swift and shifting play of forms and distances” (p. 188). As he has emphasized before, Hart insists on the uniqueness of Christianity in affirming a determinate and formed, and therefore a beautiful infinite. God, in fact, is transcendently determinate – more fully Himself than any creature is itself. What is beautiful is never the product of some “enfeebling, deceptive, or violent stilling of the prior tumult of being, but is itself the grammar and element of an infinite motion, able to traverse all of being without illusion or strife” (p. 189).

No theologian, in Hart’s view, captures this vision of God’s boundless beauty more clearly than Gregory of Nyssa, whom Hart describes, following Ekkehard Muhlenberg, as “the first ‘Greek’ thinker either to attribute to God, or to develop a philosophical description of, positive infinity” (p. 190). Nyssa recognized clearly, for instance, that the creation is essentially movement. The original act of creation was a movement from “the darkness of nonbeing toward the light of God” (p. 189), and since that original act creation has been nothing other than ceaseless change: “the created dies every moment, writes Gregory, to be reborn the next” and “if it ceased to change, it would cease to exist.” An individual it never merely an individual but a nation and “the whole of humanity is an unfolding ‘series,’ a successive realization of the creative word (the first Adam) that God uttered in making humanity in his image” (p. 189).

To say that created things are in constant motion is to say that they are constantly pulled by something beyond them, by a desire for good or evil. Human being is ecstatic, longing for an elusive beauty, ultimately for the beauty of God: “Desire is the energy of our movement, and so of our being” (p. 190). Hart argues that Plotinus, for all the advancements of his thought, never reached a truly transcendent infinity, and never had any notion of transcendent difference. Because of his Trinitarian convictions, Nyssa developed a metaphysics in which multiplicity leads toward the highest truth; we don’t skim off the multiplicity of the world to get to the truth of the one, for God Himself, infinite truth, is multiple. Thus, “to pass from the vision of the world to the theoria of the divine is not simply to move from appearance to reality, from multiplicity to singularity, but rather to find the entirety of the world in all its irreducible diversity to be an analogical expression (at a distance, in a different register) of the dynamism and differentiation that God is” (p. 192). Creation “co-responds” and “corresponds” to God in a way that Plotinus could never have conceived. Our responsiveness is thus not an impulse that leads to a final stasis; “our desire does not subserve a return to the stillness of our proper being: it is our being” (p. 192).

ii. Changeless Beauty.

Much of what Nyssa means by “infinity” overlaps with the conceptions of Plotinus. For both, infinity means “incomprehensibility, absolute power, simplicity, eternity” (p. 192). For both, the infinite is boundless. Hart intends to defend precisely this “classic theism,” and in this section the classic conceptions of God’s immutability and eternity in particular.

God is boundless because of His fullness. Boundaries arise only where contraries arise, and since “God is without opposition . . . transcendent of all composition or antimony” He is boundless, and in this sense He is simple (p. 193). God is eternal not only in the sense that He is without beginning and end but also in the sense that He experiences no succession or sequence of moments. For Hart (and Nyssa), this does not render God inert or static; He is eternally dynamic, and the dynamism of creation is precisely an increasing participation in the eternal dynamism of God. Creation moves in a temporal series, and exists in a spatial extension that is foreign to the order and movement of the Triune Persons, but this succession in creation is dependent upon the boundlessness of God’s own existence: “the Trinity’s perfect act of difference also opens the possibility of the ‘ontico-ontological difference’” (p. 193). We embrace God’s infinity in an endless series of finite instances, so that the Creator-creature distinction is (again) not a difference of appearance and reality, stasis and change, but two different modes of apprehending the infinite. The soul’s ascent to God is not a departure from distance and movement but “an endless venture into difference” (p. 194). Thus finite reality belongs to the infinite, though the opposite is the case only “ecstatically: possessed, that is, in dispossession” (p. 194).

For Gregory, desire can move away from the infinite toward the “evil” of nonbeing. Gregory treat evil as “that purely privative nothingness that lies outside creation’s motion toward God” and “never stands in relation to the infinite but is always an impossible attempt at an ending, a constant breaking of the waves of being upon an uninhabitable shore, the ceaseless cessation of time” (p. 194). Yet, negativity is in no way for Gregory (as it is for Hegel) constitutive of being. There is no necessary sacrifice, no contradiction and sublation. Thus creation “is a symphonic and rhythmic complication of diversity, of motion and rest, a song praising God, the true, primordial, archetypal music”; more succinctly, “we are music moved to music” (pp. 194-195), moved to endlessly various variations by our desire for the boundless and eternal music of God.

For Christian thought, then, human beings are created as vessels of the glory of God, as a site where the infinite and finite meet without violence to the finite. In this context, created change is not something to be regretted or escaped. Change is a grace: “the good is infinitely various in its intonations. For creatures, who cannot statically comprehend the infinite, progress in the good is, Gregory observes, the most beautiful work of change, and an inability to change would be a penalty” (p. 195). Creaturely mutability marks our difference from God therefore; He is always already an infinite fullness, containing the end and the beginning. But creaturely mutability is also the way to God. We are capable of attaining an excellence of soul through participation in God precisely through our ability to move, to change, not as though we could become substantively what God is. By successive motion toward and constant expansion in our desire for God, we come to apprehend the infinite God. As Hart rightly and profoundly points out, our capacity to receive God does not have any pre-existing limits; citing Nyssa, he suggests that the “soul partaking of divine blessings” is like “a vessel endlessly expanding as it receives what flows into it inexhaustibly; participation in the good, he says, makes the participant ever more capacious and recep
tive of beauty” (p. 196). Gregory does not confine this progress in “deification” to Christology alone. Rather, the infinite has been “introduced into the entirety of the common human nature” in the incarnation (p. 199). This is salvation: Not freedom from change, but ever-greater apprehension of and ever nearer movement toward God, who remains forever infinitely beyond us and infinitely near to us.

iii. The Mirror of the Infinite.

Our access to God thus comes through our yearning for Him. We attain to a vision of divine beauty through a likeness to that beauty: “the likeness to divine splendor that one achieves in oneself through participating ever more fully in the beauty of God’s light” (p. 202). Filled with God, “one becomes a sign, entirely, an inflection and reflection at a distance of the divine glory, a deferral of God’s presence that is simultaneously a real embrace of his infinite, an impression of God that is also another emphasis, another expression” (p. 202). In this state, “every dualism, especially that between flesh and spirit, is overcome, so that ‘the manifest exterior is within the hidden interior, the hidden interior within the manifest exterior’” (p. 202).

The invisible God thus moves within the visible, only because the visible is always first a movement within God’s infinity. Hart suggests that God is invisible in two senses: First, in the sense that God is infinite in His divinity, and thus invisibility is a property of all three persons; but in another sense, there is the invisibility of the Father that becomes the manifestation of the Son and the illumination of the Spirit. The invisibility of transcendence “proceeds” from the Trinitarian invisibility, and this is the reason why our “restless mutability” can become “a way of mediation between the infinite and the finite” (p. 203). Hart explains: “We can mirror the infinite because the infinite, within itself, is entirely mirroring of itself, the Father’s incomprehensible majesty being eternally united to the coequal ‘splendor of his glory,.’ His ‘form’ and ‘impress,’ in seeing whom one has seen the Father; we can become images of God that shine with his beauty because the Father always has his image in the Son, bright with the light of his Spirit” (p. 203). But this would be impossible if God were not invisible in His transcendence, since that allows God to be “inapprehensible to the soul” yet “present to the soul as a creature never could be – within its very being” (p. 203).

For creatures there is a real distinction between “subject and object, motion and motion’s aim, ecstasy and form, participation and ‘substance,’” since this is the “essential act of ‘repetition,’ its need to participate in even its own essence.” But precisely this “dyadic oscillation” makes it possible for us to participate in and be united to the infinite God. God’s transcendence thus does not conflict with a doctrine of participation and deification; the former is the necessary assumption of the latter.

Hart wonders whether Gregory would have accepted the later Orthodox distinction between God’s essence and energies, and adds this in a footnote: “I am not at all convinced that Palamas ever intended to suggest a real distinction between God’s essence and energies; nor am I even confident that he energies should be seen as anything other than sanctifying grace by which the Holy Spirit makes the Trinity really presence to creatures. I take the distinction to mean only that God’s transcendence is such that he is free to be the God he is even in the realm of creaturely finitude, without estrangement from himself and without the creature being admitted thus to an unmediated vision of the divine essence” (p. 204, fn 75).

In this context, Hart makes some intriguing comments about signification. God, he argues, is not merely at an infinite distance, but IS that distance, the infinite distance “that cannot be, but must be, and throughout eternity is being, traversed” (p. 205). All distance belongs to the interTrinitarian act that gives being to everything. And this means that “the divine image is not . . . some distant facsimile of God: the soul’s virtue is God’s own overflowing goodness within it” (p. 205). Such is the nature of signs in general: “in its deferral and difference from what it indicates, in its constant motion of difference, it may yet be the form of presence” (p. 205). Created things are images (temporally successive) of the “complex simplicity” of the Triune life, and thus “when the soul is adapted to the diversity of perfections it perceives in the divine life, it becomes an ever clearer expression, a visible and living sign of God. The creature’s extension in time becomes an endless commentary, an endless series of particular perspectives, on God’s unextended eternity” (p. 205). This neatly captures the postmodern insight into the sign as “trace” and “absence” while also challenging the nihilistic implications that often accompany that insight.

For Gregory, salvation is creation (and Gregory sees this universalistically): “Salvation, for Gregory, is simply the same act – but made perfect in Christ – by which God rouses us each moment form nonbeing, as a pure stirring of love, seeking union with him” (p. 206). Evil must be overcome if the finite is joined to the infinite that draws it out of its limitations. There is no dark side to God, no negative or contrary, and the soul must move beyond evil toward infinite good. All evil is, for Gregory, single, “the single fact of that which strives against the will of God in creation, a limitation absurdly opposing itself to his limitlessness.” Were God to fail to bring all creation to union with Himself, it would imply “an impossible dualism,” in which an “endless godlessness” stood over against the “endlessness of God” (p. 207).

iv. Infinite Peace.

Hart summarizes some of the themes of the preceding sections here. God is in Himself the gift of distance, and the distance and difference within the creation is not a contrary to Him but an expression of an infinite reality within God Himself. Hart also returns to the theology of the sign. The structure of the image reflects the reality of God, in which there is an uncreated and eternal dynamic of sign and signifier: “Not by dissolution into a higher essence, but by an analogical correspondence of its created structure of difference and mediation to the God whose inner life is one of differentiation and mediation, the image expresses the truth of distance, of the God who is Trinity” (p. 208). Creation announces the glory of God not only according to “a logic of substances” but primarily “as a free and flowing succession of semeia.” Instead of a strong distinction between substance and sign, “one should perhaps speak of ‘substantial signs’ or of ‘semiotic substances’” (p. 208), and then launches into a dense discussion of a “baroque” reading of Gregory through the lenses of Deleuze’s treatment of Leibniz. But enough.

Theology - Trinity

Previous Post

June 21, 2005

Translation, 2 Kings 9

Next Post

June 22, 2005 Power and Celebrity

Browse Our Archives

Select a Category 1 Corinthians 1-2 Samuel 1968 Abelard Abortion Abraham Acedia AD 70 Adam Smith Addiction Advent Advertising Aeneid Aesthetics Africa African Christianity African Church African religion Age Aging Agriculture Airline industry Alabama Alasdair MacIntyre Albania Alcohol Allegory Alms Alternative Medicine Ambrose America American Christianity American culture American economy American Evangelicals American Foreign Policy American history American Literature American Military American Politics American Religion American Revolution Anagogy Analytic Philosophy Anamnesis Ancient Egypt Ancient Greece Ancient history Ancient Near East Ancient Religion Angels Anglican Church Anglicanism Animism Anointing of the Sick Anselm Anthropology Anthropomorphism anti-Catholicism Antiquities Antonio Lopez apocalypse Apocalyptic Apocalyptic language Apostles Creed Aquinas Archeology Architecture Arianism Aristotle Ark of the Covenant Art Art History Ascension Aseity Assurance Athanasius Atheism Athens atonement Attention Attributes Augustine Austin Farrer Authority autonomy Avant-garde Awe Bach Ballooning Balzac Banking Bankruptcy Baptism Baptists Baseball Basketball Bavinck Beatitudes Beauty Behavioral Economics Being Benedict XVI Benjamin Benjamin Franklin Beowulf Berkeley Bernie Sanders Bertrand Russell Bestiary Bible Bible - criticism Bible - NT Bible - NT - 1 Corinthians Bible - NT - 1 John Bible - NT - 1 Peter Bible - NT - 2 Corinthians Bible - NT - 2 Peter Bible - NT - Acts Bible - NT - Colossians Bible - NT - Ephesians Bible - NT - Galatians Bible - NT - Gospels Bible - NT - Hebrews Bible - NT - James Bible - NT - John Bible - NT - Jude Bible - NT - Luke Bible - NT - Mark Bible - NT - Matthew Bible - NT - Paul Bible - NT - Philippians Bible - NT - Revelation Bible - NT - Romans Bible - NT - Thessalonians Bible - NT - Timothy Bible - OT Bible - OT - Amos Bible - OT - Chronicles Bible - OT - Daniel Bible - OT - Deuteronomy Bible - OT - Ecclesiastes Bible - OT - Esther Bible - OT - Exodus Bible - OT - Ezekiel Bible - OT - Ezra-Nehemiah Bible - OT - Genesis Bible - OT - Habakkuk Bible - OT - Hosea Bible - OT - Isaiah Bible - OT - Jeremiah Bible - OT - Job Bible - OT - Joel Bible - OT - Jonah Bible - OT - Joshua Bible - OT - Judges Bible - OT - Kings Bible - OT - Lamentations Bible - OT - Leviticus Bible - OT - Malachi BIble - OT - Micah Bible - OT - Nehemiah Bible - OT - Numbers Bible - OT - Pentateuch Bible - OT - Proverbs Bible - OT - Psalms Bible - OT - Ruth Bible - OT - Samuel Bible - OT - Song of Songs Bible - OT - Torah Bible - OT - Zechariah Bible - OT - Zephaniah Biblical Law Biblicism Billy Graham biography Biology Biololgy Biotechnology Blasphemy Blindness Blog news Blogging Blogroll Bloomsbury Group Bob Dylan Body Body symbolism Boethius Boko Haram Bonhoeffer Book of Common Prayer Books Botany Boundary Brexit Britain British History British Politics Bruce Springsteen Buddhism Bureaucracy Burial Business C. S. Lewis C. S. Peirce Calendars Caliphate Calvin calvinism Camille Paglia Canon Capitalism Cappadocians Carl Schmitt Catholic Social Teaching Catholicism Catholicity Causation cemeteries Cervantes Charism Charismata Charity Charles Dickens Charles Hodge Charles Simeon Charles Taylor Charles Williams Chaucer Chermistry Chess Chesterton Chiasm children China Chinese Exclusion Act Chivalry Chopin Chretien de Troyes Christendom Christian Democracy Christian reconstruction Christianity in Britain Christianization Christmas Christology Chronology Church church and state Church architecture Church Calendar Church history Church of England Church Year Cicero Circumcision Cities City of God Civil Religion Civil Society Civil War Civility Classical Theism Classics Climate Change Clothing Coleridge Colloquy of Marburg Colonialism Color Comedy Comenius Commodity Communio Communism Community Comparative religions Computer Science Confederacy Confessionalization Conflict Congregations consciousness Consecration Conservatism Constantine Constitution consumerism Contra Faustum Conversion Coriolanus Cormac McCarthy Cosmology Cosmopolitanism Council of Trent Counter-culture Counter-insurgency Courage Courtly love Covenants Crafts Craftsmanship Cranach Creation Creativity Creator-creature Credit Crime Crime and Punishment Crisis Critical scholarship Criticism Cross Cubism Cultural theory Culture Culture War Dance Daniel Dennett Dante Darwin Dave Eggers David David Foster Wallace David Hume David Jones Deadly sins Death Debt Dechristianization Decolonization Deconstruction Defoe Deja vu Democracy Denis de Rougemont Denominationalism Derrida Descartes Developmental psychology Devils Diocletian Discipleship Disenchantment Disgust Diversion Diversity Divine energies Divine Impassibility Divine Simplicity Divine Warrior Doctrine dogma Dominion Donald Trump Dostoevsky Douglas Campbell Douglas Farrow Dreams Dualism Durkheim Dystopia E.M. Forster Early Christianity Early Modern Europe Easter Eastern Europe Eastern Orthodoxy Ecclesiology Ecclesiology Economics Economy Ecumenism Eden Edgar Allan Poe Edmund Spenser Education Egypt Election Elites Emergence Emma Emotion Empire England English History English Reformation Enlightenment Entertainment Entrepreneur environmentalism Envy Epic Epiphany Episcopals Epistemology Epistles Equality Erasmus Ernst Kantorowicz Eros Eschatology Eternity Ethics Eucharist Europe Evangelicalism Evangelicals and Catholics Together Events Evil Evolution Exile Face Fairie Queene Fairy Tales Faith family Family and Marriage Fantasy Farming Fashion Fasting Fatherhood Fear Femininity Feminism Fertility Fetishization Feud Feudalism Feuerbach Fiction Figs Film Finance Finland Fire Flag Flags Flannery O'Connor Flood myths Folly Food football Foreign Affairs Foreign Policy Foreknowledge Forgiveness Foucault Fracking France Francois Mauriac Franz Rosenzweig free will Freedom Freedom of God French Revolution Freud Funerals Future G. K. Chesterton Gambling Gaming Gay Marriage Gender gender identity Genealogy Geography George Berkeley George Eliot George Herbert; Poetry George Romanes Gerald Manley Hopkins Germany Gethsemane Gift Gifts Giorgio Agamben Global Christianity Global economics Globalism Globalization Glorious Revolution Gnosticism God's sovereignty Gods Goethe Golf Good Friday Gospel Gospels Gothic Gothic architecture Grace Grammar Gramsci Gratitude Greek Literature Greek Philosophy Greek Religion Greek Science Gregory of Nyssa Guillermo del Toro H. Richard Niebuhr Haiku hair Hamann Hamlet Handicap Handles Hands Hans Urs von Balthasar Happiness Harold Bloom Harper Lee Harvest healing Heaven Heavenly treasure Heavenly treasure Hebrew Bible Hebrew language Hegel Heidegger Hell Hellenism; Judaism; Revelation Henri de Lubac heresy Herman Dooyeweerd Hermeneutics Herod Heroic Heroism Hesiod Hidegard of Bingen Hierarchy Hieronymus Bosch Historicism Historiography History History - Early Modern History - Middle Ages Hoaxes Hobbes Holiness Holy Saturday Holy Spirit Home Homeless Homer Homosexuality Honor hope Horror Hospitality Housing Hugh of St. Victor Human Rights Humanism Humor hylomorphism Hymns Hypocrisy. Iago Iconoclasm Identity Ideology Idleness Idolatry Iliad Images Imagination Immigrant churches Immigrant Religion Immigration Imperialism Improvization Imputation Incarnation Incest India Individualism Indonesia Inequality Inerrancy Infant Baptism Infant mortality Infanticide Ingratitude Innovation Inspiration Institutions Insult Intellectual History Intellectuals Intelligent Design International Politics Internet Intimacy IQ Iran Iran-Iraq War Iraq Ireland Irony Islam Islamic State Islamism Ismail Kadare Israel Ivan Illich J. Gresham Machen J.N. Figgis Jacob Jacques Lacan James Bond James Jordan James Joyce James KA Smith James Wood Jane Austen Jane Jacobs Jealousy Jed Perl Jeff Koons Jeroboam Jesus Jewish War 66-70 AD Jihad Johann Georg Hamann Johannine Epistles John Ashbery John Behr John Bunyan John Calvin John Donne John Frame John Howard Yoder John Knox John Milbank John Milton John Owen John Rawls John Ruskin John Stuart Mill John the Baptist John Webster John Wesley John Williamson Nevin Jonathan Edwards Jorge Luis Borges Joseph Conrad Joseph Ratzinger Journalism Joy Judaism Judaize Judgment Judith Butler Jurgen Moltmann Justice Justification Kalevala Kant Karl Barth Karl Marx Karl Polanyi Karl Rahner Kazakhstan Kazuo Ishiguro Kenneth Lonergan Kierkegaard King Lear Kingdom of God Kitsch Knighthood Knowledge Korea Labor movement Lactantius Lamech Lament Landscape Language Latin America Laughter Law Law and Punishment Leftism Lent Les Murray Levi-Strauss Levites Leviticus Liber Mundi Liberal arts Liberal Theology Liberalism Light Lighthouse Linguistics LIstening Literacy Literary structure Literature Liturgics Liturgy Locke Logic Love Luther Lutheran Lutheranism Lying Lytton Strachey Macbeth Machiavelli Machines Madness Mainline Manhattan Manicheanism Manners Manufacturing Manuscripts Mao Zedong Maps Marcion Marilynne Robinson Marketing Marriage Martha Nussbaum Martin Bucer Martin Chemnitz Martyrdom Marx Marxism Mary Mary Douglas masculinity Mass Materialism Mathematics Maundy Thursday Max Weber Media Mediation Medication Medicine Medieval Church Medieval exegesis Medieval Literature Medieval theology Medieval Thought Medievalism Memory Merchant of Venice Mesopotamian Religion Messianic Metaphor Metaphysics Methodist Mexican-American War Michel de Montaigne Michel Faber Middle Ages Middle East Midwifery Mikhail Bulgakov Military Millennium Mind Miracles Miscellaneous Mission missionaries Mixed constitution Modern self modernism Modernity monasticism Monotheism Monroe Doctrine Monsters Montaigne's Essays Moral philosophy Mormonism Moses Mother Teresa Motherhood Motive Mount of Olives Movies Multiculturalism Murder Music Musicals Mutability Mutability Mystery Mysticism myth N. T. Wright Narrative Nation-State Nationalism Natural Law Natural-Supernatural Nature Nature and culture Nature and Grace Nazi Nazirite Necrophilia Nero Nestorianism Neuroscience Nevin Lectures New Atheism New Testament New York City Newbigin News NGOs Nibelungenlied Nicholas of Cusa Nicholas of Lyra Nietzsche Nigeria Nihilism Nobel Prize Nobility Nominalism Norbert Elias Norman MacCaig nostalgia Novels Numerology Obama Objectivity and subjectivity Occasionalism Odysseus Oil Old Testament Oliver O'Donovan Ontology Origen original sin Orthodoxy Othello Owen Barfield Pacifism Pactum salutis Paedocommunion Paganism Pain Painting Paleoconservatism Palm Sunday Pannenberg Parenting Pascal Passions Passivity Pastoral Care Pastoral theology Patrick Modiano Patristics Patronage Paul Peace of God Peace of Westphalia Penal substitution Pentecost Pentecostalism Perichoresis Pericles Persecution Person Peter Peter Enns Petrarch Philip K. Dick Philip Melanchthon Philosophy Philosophy of Action Philosophy of History Philosophy of language Philosophy of science Phone booth Photography Physics Pictures Pierre Bourdieu Place Planned Parenthood Plants plato Play Plot Plotinus Pluralism Pneumatology Poetics poetry Poetry & Stories Poland police Political Philosophy Political theology Political Theory Politics Pop Culture Pope Francis Popular Culture Populism Pornography Porphyry Post-Colonial Theory Post-Structuralism Postmodernism Postmodernity Potential Poverty Power Practice Pragmatism Prayer Preaching Predestination Prediction Prehistory Premillennialism Presbyterian Priesthood Prince Charles Prison Reform privacy Private Prodigal Son Progress Progressivism Property Prophecy Prophet Propitiation Prosperity gospel Prostitution Protectionism Protestantism Providence Prudentius psalms Pseudo-Dionysus Psychological Warfare Psychology Public intellectual Public Life Public Philosophy Public Theology Publishing Punk Rock Pure nature Puritanism Purity Pushkin Putin Pythagoreanism R.J. Rushdoony Race Racism Radical Orthodoxy Rape Rationality Reactionary reading Realism Reason Red State Blue State Reformation Reformational Catholicism Reformational Philosophy Reformed theology refugees reinhold niebuhr Relationality Relativism Relics Religion Religion and science Religions Religious Freedom Religious Liberty Religious Right Renaissance Rene Girard Republican Party Resurrection Resurrection. Revelation Revelations Revenge Revivalism Revolution rhetoric Richard Flannagan Richard II Richard III Richard Wagner Richard Wilbur Righteousness Ritual Robert Frost Robert Herrick Robert Jenson Robert Mugabe Robert Spaemann Robinson Crusoe Rock n' Roll Rod Dreher Rodin Roman Catholicism Roman Empire Roman Religion Romance Romanticism Rome Rootedness Rosenstock-Huessy Rousseau Rowan Williams Rural America Russia Russian literature Russian Orthodoxy Rusty Reno Rwanda S. Y. Agnon Sabbath Sacrament Sacramental theology Sacraments Sacred Sacred Space Sacrifice saints Salt Sam Harris Same-sex marriage Sanctuary Satan Satire Saudi Arabia Scapegoat Scarcity Schism Schleiermacher Scholarship Science Science and Theology Science Fiction Scopes trial Scotland Scott Adams Scott Cairns Scottish Reformation Scotus Scripture and tradition sculpture Sea Second temple Secularism Secularization Self-Help Self-trust Semiotics Semper reformanda separation of church and state Sermon on the Mount Sex Sex Trafficking Sexual abuse Sexual Politics Sexual Revolution Sexuality Shakespeare Shame Culture Shema Sherlock Shopping Silence Simone Weil Simplicity Simpsons Sin Sincerity Sixties Skepticism Slavery Slavoj Zizek Sleep Sloth Social capital Social change Social Imaginary Social Science Socialism Socialization Sociology Sociology of Knowledge Sociology of Religion Sola scriptura Sonnets Sophocles Soteriology Soviet Union Space Spain Speculation Spinoza Spirit Sport Sports Star Trek State State-formation Stephen Masty Steven Bannon Strangers Structuralism structure Subject-object Substitution Suburbs Suffering Suicide Super-Rich Superheroes Supersessionism Supplication Supreme Court Surveillance Symbol Synagogue Taberancle Tabernacle Tax Taxes Tears Technology Teens Teleology Television Temple Ten Commandments Terence Terrence Malick Terrorism Thanksgiving The South The West Theodore Roosevelt Theogony Theological Education Theological Language Theology Theology - Anthropology Theology - Christology Theology - Covenant Theology - Creation Theology - Ecclesiology Theology - Eschatology Theology - Liturgical Theology - Pneumatology Theology - Soteriology Theology - Trinity Theology proper Theopolis Theopolis Institute Theosis Theresa May Thomas A. Clark Thomas Aquinas Thomas Carlyle Thomas Mann Threshing Thucydides Time Tocqueville Tolerance Toleration Tolstoy Tom Wolfe Tools Torah Torture Toscanini Totalitarianism Trade Tradition Tragedy Transhumanism Translation Transubstantiation Travel Trees Trinitarianism Trinity Trinity House Tristan Troilus and Creysede Trump Trump Truth Turkey Twelfth Night Two Kingdoms Typology Ukraine Ulysses Uncanny Uncategorized Uniform Union with Christ United States Unity University Usury Utilitarianism Utopia Value Vatican II Vengeance Vico Victorian Age Victorian Literature Vienna Violence Virgil Virgin Birth Virginia Woolf Vladimir Nabokov Vladimir Solovyev Vladimir Solovyov W.H. Auden Walls Walt Disney Walt Whitman Walter Benjamin Walter Lippmann War Wars of Religion Washington DC Wealth Weddings Will William Carlos Williams William Gilpin William Golding Wine Wisdom wonder Word of God Wordsworth Work Works World Council of Churches World History World War I World War II Worldview Worship Wrath Writing Youth Youth Ministry Yuja Wang Yves Congar Zimbabwe Zwingli Zygmunt Bauman

Select a Month January 2019 December 2018 November 2018 October 2018 September 2018 August 2018 July 2018 June 2018 May 2018 April 2018 March 2018 February 2018 January 2018 December 2017 November 2017 October 2017 September 2017 August 2017 July 2017 June 2017 May 2017 April 2017 March 2017 February 2017 January 2017 December 2016 November 2016 October 2016 September 2016 August 2016 July 2016 June 2016 May 2016 April 2016 March 2016 February 2016 January 2016 December 2015 November 2015 October 2015 September 2015 August 2015 July 2015 June 2015 May 2015 April 2015 March 2015 February 2015 January 2015 December 2014 November 2014 October 2014 September 2014 August 2014 July 2014 June 2014 May 2014 April 2014 March 2014 February 2014 January 2014 June 2013 May 2013 April 2013 March 2013 February 2013 January 2013 December 2012 November 2012 October 2012 September 2012 August 2012 July 2012 June 2012 May 2012 April 2012 March 2012 February 2012 January 2012 December 2011 November 2011 October 2011 September 2011 August 2011 July 2011 June 2011 May 2011 April 2011 March 2011 February 2011 January 2011 December 2010 November 2010 October 2010 September 2010 August 2010 July 2010 June 2010 May 2010 April 2010 March 2010 February 2010 January 2010 December 2009 November 2009 October 2009 September 2009 August 2009 July 2009 June 2009 May 2009 April 2009 March 2009 February 2009 January 2009 December 2008 November 2008 October 2008 September 2008 August 2008 July 2008 June 2008 May 2008 April 2008 March 2008 February 2008 January 2008 December 2007 November 2007 October 2007 September 2007 August 2007 July 2007 June 2007 May 2007 April 2007 March 2007 February 2007 January 2007 December 2006 November 2006 October 2006 September 2006 August 2006 July 2006 June 2006 May 2006 April 2006 March 2006 February 2006 January 2006 December 2005 November 2005 October 2005 September 2005 August 2005 July 2005 June 2005 May 2005 April 2005 March 2005 February 2005 January 2005 December 2004 November 2004 October 2004 September 2004 August 2004 July 2004 June 2004 May 2004 April 2004 March 2004 February 2004 January 2004 December 2003 November 2003 October 2003 September 2003 August 2003

TAKE THE

Religious Wisdom Quiz

Which prophet was swallowed by a great fish?

Select your answer to see how you score.

Jonah Moses Elijah Ezekiel