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Title: The Doors of the Sea: Where Was God in the Tsunami?
ISBN: 0802829767
Author:
David Bentley Hart
Publicate Date: 2005-07-15
Publish: 2005-07-15
List Price: $14.00
Average Customer Rating: 4.0
Format: Hardcover
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Amazon Lowest New Price: $7.49
Amazon Lowest Used Price: $4.74
Amazon Merchant Price: $11.20
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| Customer Review: |
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1: Thinking well
This is a brief but substantial little book. Hart challenges the reader to think well about one of the big issues we face, suffering. Hart calls for us to look beyond simplistic theodicy, theism and atheism and to come to grips with a perplexing issue of the human experience. Get this book and read it... It will be worth your time.
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2: The Doors of The Sea
Our church read and discussed this book. It was very difficult to read with so many words that we had to look up in the dictionary. It seemed to be un nessary to have so many words difficult for all of us to understand. THis took away from the meaning of the book and so it didn't result it much understand what the author was trying to say. Fortunately our priest did try and explain some of the meaning so we did come out with some conclusion.
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3: Well Written, but Needless Apologetics.
This short nearly poetically well written book makes for interesting and thoughtful reading. The author discusses various natural disasters ("acts of God") including the 1753 Lisbon flood, Voltaire's response, and many more horrific historical episodes, concluding with the recent tsusami in Indonesia..since then, events in Burma and China, among many others, have also occurred. The problem of evil in God's realm is nicely analysed. However, the standard condemnations of atheists and agnostics who do no go along with theodicy apologetics are there in full force. Therefore, though the book is worth reading, it addresses only those who are part of the choir, and from a scientific standpoint leaves much to be desired.
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4: In a nutshell
This is a tough book to wade through. Hart's prose is as thick as tar. And he meanders quite a bit, as if he's writing filler to meet a minimum word count (the books is small, and barely 100 pages long). The only people who would really profit from it are those with a theological/philosophical education and a good dictionary. That being said, let me try to summarize his conclusions in a nutshell.
1) Evil and sin are meaningless.
2) God does not need to use sin or evil to show forth that He is good or loving.
3) Theodicies that try to explain evil and sin away actually pervert the gospel by giving them a meaning they don't posess. Christ came into the world to overthrow evil and sin, not to use these for good.
4) The tsunami is part of the fallen world of meaningless suffering. Yet, the Christian should work to see the world for the good creation it is, in the hope that Christ will come again to make all things new.
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5: Excellent Treatise of the Problem of Evil
On the first day of my vacation with my family, I just read The Doors of the Sea by David Bentley Hart (Eerdmans, 2005). I could not it put down. I recommend it to any reader who wants to delve deeper into the problem of evil. Hart wrote this wonderful little treatise, subtitled "Where was God in the Tsunami", in the wake of the Indonesian Tsunami. Out of his deep faith and informed mind and with profound honesty and eloquence, Hart responds to the horrors of that 2004 tsunami in the Indian Ocean. Chris Tilling reviewed and recommend the book on his web blog, Chrisendom, and his enthusiasm was so unrestrained that I immediately ordered my copy.
Against the backdrop of two manifestations of Natural Evil (the 2004 tsunami, and the Lisbon earthquake/tsunami/fire of 1755) and Dostoyevsky's portrayal of Moral Evil in The Brothers Karamozov, Hart thoughtfully weaves his "elucidation" of God's goodness, evil's reality, suffering, and redemption. With his multiple scathing denunciations of Calvinistic determinism (which he calls absurd) and eloquent dismissals of all other standard Christian theodicies (many of which he unapologetically identifies as "blasphemous flippancies"), Hart shows his utter contempt for much of what passes as Christian explanations of the problem of evil.
The truth, Hart helps us to see, is to be found in the context of free-acting evil, the understanding of the cosmos as entropic and death driven, the coexisting of two Kingdoms (life/light and death/darkness ... but Hart is no dualist!), the suffering that results from this state of affairs, and the glory that awaits a final consummation.
Hart's thoughts closely parallel many of my own; he comes nearer than anything I've ever read to the concepts that make sense for me. There are still significant differences, and Hart would doubtless include mine in the category of "rational theodicies" which he uniformly rejects. Nevertheless, I continue to pursue a sensible theodicy, encouraged and re-inspired by Hart's superb book.
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