Matthew Henry John Bartlett

+64 27 211 3455
email me

Friday 21 January, 02005

Christ & Nihilism

by Matthew Bartlett @ 10:00 am

In his article Christ and Nothing — an epic, panoptic and magisterial survey of the West before, during and after Christianity — David B Hart writes:

It is worth asking ourselves what this tableau, viewed from the vantage of pagan antiquity, would have meant. A man of noble birth, representing the power of Rome, endowed with authority over life and death, confronted by a barbarous colonial of no name or estate, a slave of the empire, beaten, robed in purple, crowned with thorns, insanely invoking an otherworldly kingdom and some esoteric truth, unaware of either his absurdity or his judge’s eminence. Who could have doubted where, between these two, the truth of things was to be found? But the Gospel is written in the light of the resurrection, which reverses the meaning of this scene entirely. If God’s truth is in fact to be found where Christ stands, the mockery visited on him redounds instead upon the emperor, all of whose regal finery, when set beside the majesty of the servile shape in which God reveals Himself, shows itself to be just so many rags and briars.

[via Toby]

2 responses to “Christ & Nihilism”

  1. Deborah says:

    I wish I could find a sentence to use “panoptic” in.

Leave a Reply