Indulging my current enthusiasm for the writings of David Bentley Hart, I'm beginning to read his book "The Beauty of the Infinite". In the introduction I read these following paragraphs and thought them worthy of being passed on.
"As Origen observed, the marvel of Christ is that, in a world where power, riches, and violence seduce hearts and compel assent, he persuades and prevails not as a tyrant, an armed assailant, or a man of wealth, but simply as a teacher of God and his love.... Christ is a persuasion, a form of evoking desire, and the whole force of the Gospel depends upon the assumption that this persuasion is also piece: that the desire of awakened by the shape of Christ and his Church is one truly reborn as agape, rather than merely the way in which a lesser force succumbs to a greater, as an episode in the endless epic of power. Christian rhetoric, then, is already a question to itself; for if theology cannot concede the intrinsic violence of rhetoric as such, neither can it avoid the task of framing an account of how its own rhetoric may be conceived as the peaceful offer of a peaceful evangel, and not as... a practice of persuasion for persuasion's sake, violence, coercion and its most enchanting. Such an account must inevitably make an appeal to beauty.
What Christian thought offers the world is not a set of "rational" arguments that... force ascent from others by leaving them ... at a loss for words; rather, it stands before the world principally with the story it tells concerning God and creation, the form of Christ, the loveliness of the practice of Christian charity -- and the rhetorical richness of its idiom. Making its appeal first to the eye and heart, as the only way it may "command" assent, the Church cannot separate truth from rhetoric, or from beauty." (pp. 4)
Tell the story, display the form of Christ, exhibit the lovliness of Christian charity. How lofty the goal. How attainable!
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