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Buy The Doors of the Sea: Where Was God in the Tsunami? by David Bentley Hart available and for sale on Brightsurf
| View Larger Image | The Doors of the Sea: Where Was God in the Tsunami?
by David Bentley Hart
| | List Price: | $14.00 | | Price: | $11.20 | | You Save: | $2.80 (20%) |  | | Available: | Usually ships in 24 hours | | | | | Sales Rank: | 173884 | | Studio: | Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company | | | Binding: | Hardcover | | Number Of Pages: | 108 | | Publication Date: | July 15, 2005 | | Publisher: | Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company |
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EDITORIAL REVIEWS |
Book Description
As news reports of the horrific tsunami in Asia reached the rest of the world, commentators were quick to seize upon the disaster as proof either of God's power or of God's nonexistence. Expanding on his short piece in the Wall Street Journal, "Tremors of Doubt," David Bentley Hart clarifies the biblical account of God's goodness, the nature of evil, and the shape of redemption. Hart incisively reveals where both Christianity's critics and its champions misrepresent what is most essential to Christian belief. While responding to atheist skeptics, Hart is at his most perceptive and provocative as he examines Christian attempts to rationalize the tsunami disaster. He contends that the history of suffering and death is not simply part of a divine plan that will make sense of evil. Rather than appealing to a divine calculus that can account for every instance of suffering, Christians must recognize the ongoing struggle between the rebellious powers that enslave the world and the God who loves it. This meditation by a brilliant young theologian of the Eastern Orthodox tradition will deeply challenge serious readers grappling with God's ways in a suffering world. |
CUSTOMER REVIEWS (Average Customer Rating: 4.0 based on 14 reviews)
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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.
June 27, 2008 | |
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.
June 10, 2008 | |
In a nutshell 
This is a tough book to wade through. Hart's prose is as thick as tar. The only people who would really profit from it are those with a theological/philosophical education and a good thesaurus. 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.
May 13, 2008 | |
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.
October 23, 2007 | |
Cogent, powerful, speaks beautifully to the hope and promise of God
Take a $10 chance and buy, read and consider this remarkable and enormously important Christ-centered (read: love-centered) book. Be not, as another wisely observes, mislead by the title: this is a book of keen theological perspicacity, scholarship and complexion, the catastrophic Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004 but, however difficult and unthinkable, the backdrop upon which these beautiful, hope-filled words on the amaranthine love of God are cast. In many ways, the most important, with one exception of course, book I've ever read.
January 09, 2007 | |
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