Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies

by David Bentley Hart

Publisher:

Yale University Press

, 2010

Overview

Among all the great transitions that have marked Western history, only one—the triumph of Christianity—can be called in the fullest sense a “revolution”

In this provocative book one of the most brilliant scholars of religion today dismantles distorted religious “histories” offered up by Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, and other contemporary critics of religion and advocates of atheism. David Bentley Hart provides a bold correction of the New Atheists’s misrepresentations of the Christian past, countering their polemics with a brilliant account of Christianity and its message of human charity as the most revolutionary movement in all of Western history.

Hart outlines how Christianity transformed the ancient world in ways we may have forgotten: bringing liberation from fatalism, conferring great dignity on human beings, subverting the cruelest aspects of pagan society, and elevating charity above all virtues. He then argues that what we term the “Age of Reason” was in fact the beginning of the eclipse of reason’s authority as a cultural value. Hart closes the book in the present, delineating the ominous consequences of the decline of Christendom in a culture that is built upon its moral and spiritual values.

Key Features

• Follows the format of a “historical essay”
• Serves as an apologia for a particular understanding of the effect of Christianity upon the development of Western civilization
• Concerns with the history of the early church, of the first four or five centuries, and the story of how Christendom was born out of a culture of late antiquity

Contents

Part I: Faith, Reason, and Freedom: A View from the Present

• The Gospel of Unbelief
• The Age of Freedom

Part II: the Mythology of the Secular Age: Modernity’s Rewriting of the Christian Past

• Faith and Reason
• The Night of Reason
• The Destruction of the Past
• The Death and Rebirth of Science
• Intolerance and Persecution
• Intolerance and War
• An Age of Darkness

Part III: Revolution: the Christian Invention of the Human

• The Great Rebellion
• A Glorious Sadness
• A Liberating Message
• The Face of the Faceless
• The Death and Birth of Worlds
• Divine Humanity

Part IV: Reaction and Retreat: Modernity and the Eclipse of the Human

• Secularism and its Victims
• Sorcerers and Saints

Product Details

• Title: Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies
• Author: David Bentley Hart
• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Print Publication Date: 2010
• Pages: 272
• Language: English
• Resources: 1
• Format: Digital › Logos Reader Edition
• Resource ID: LLS:ATHEISTDELUSIONS
• Resource Type: Monograph
• Metadata Last Updated: 2021-02-08T16:36:03Z

About David Bentley Hart

David Bentley Hart is an Eastern Orthodox theologian and philosopher. He is visiting professor at Providence College, having previously held the Robert J. Randall Chair in Christian Culture there. Hart previously taught at the University of Virginia, the University of St. Thomas (Minnesota), Duke Divinity School, and Loyola College in Maryland. He was trained at the University of Cambridge and the University of Virginia.

(From Theopedia.com. Freely redistributable under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license.)