David Bentley Hart: belief

Transcript context

…Maybe at times, gnosticism is too pessimistic for Hollywood TV and too inegalitarian for modern progressivism, so you have to jettison it. What do you replace it with? A happy ending. Well, I’m not quite sure what your politics are. I have no concern one way or the other about how it’s viewed in regard to progressivism. I’m a socialist, so I’m perfectly fine. I’m not a liberal, but I’m definitely a socialist. My concern about it — and yes, gnosticism in its classical statements, to the degree there was such a thing — I want to point out that in scholarly terms, who knows? There are so many different schools that we’ve simply stuck together and called gnostic that when you actually look at them, the details, much of what we call gnosticism is just actually Pauline or Johannine Christianity in the New Testament, restated with an overlay of fabulism. I think, to be honest, there’s been a vogue of gnosticism in popular culture — not where you’d expect it, but there have been lots of films. Movies versus TV, though. It’s a big difference. Matrix, right?…

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