The Distinctiveness of Christianity

World as Gift

David Bentley Hart explains why God's transcendence over the creation and His immanence within it makes all the difference in the world.  This is one reason why the Christian religion is not one religion amongst a smorgasbord of  faiths, but the One True Faith before which all other religions are idolatrous perversions of the truth.

Christian thought taught that the world was entirely God's creature, called from nothingness, not out of any need on his part, but by grace; and that the God who is Trinity required nothing to add to his fellowship, bounty, or joy, but created out of love alone.

In a sense, God and world were both set free: God was now understood as fully transcendent of--and therefore immanent within--the created order, and the world was now understood entirely as gift.

On Holy Ground

Sacred World; Sacred History

Materialists like to portray Christians as living in an unreal, make believe world.  It's a small step from there to paint Christians as ignorant simpletons.  Uneducated rubes. 

Another (related) slur is that Christians are anti-science because they do not value the world of matter.  They are so "heavenly minded" they are of no worldly good. 

Of course these slurs are just that.  They betray a profound ignorance of that which materialists presume to criticise.

Without God, Without Creed, Part II

In Baal We Trust

We continue our series upon the causes of modern Unbelief in the West.  The redemptive context is that the first Christendom has fallen, being replaced by materialism, atheism, and secularism.  This represents a divine curse upon God's people.  The Bible makes it very clear: when God's people turn away from Him, He will bring the curses (and not the blessings) of the Covenant upon them (Deuteronomy 28).  Being given over to the hand of Unbelief is one of those curses. 

James Turner, in his important book, Without God, Without Creed: the Origins of Unbelief in America argues that Christendom began to apostasize and disobey (thus, preparing for the triumph of secular atheism in the twentieth century) at the end of the seventeenth century.  At the time it appeared to be a small matter.  But it provoked God to wrath and eventually tore down Christendom.  It had to do with beginning to assert the autonomy or independence of the creation from the Creator.  Turner writes: