The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss

Despite the recent ferocious public debate about belief, the concept most central to the discussion―God―frequently remains vaguely and obscurely described. Are those engaged in these arguments even talking about the same thing? In a wide-ranging response to this confusion, esteemed scholar David Bentley Hart pursues a clarification of how the word “God” functions in the world’s great theistic faiths.

Ranging broadly across Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Vedantic and Bhaktic Hinduism, Sikhism, and Buddhism, Hart explores how these great intellectual traditions treat humanity’s knowledge of the divine mysteries. Constructing his argument around three principal metaphysical “moments”―being, consciousness, and bliss―the author demonstrates an essential continuity between our fundamental experience of reality and the ultimate reality to which that experience inevitably points.

Thoroughly dismissing such blatant misconceptions as the deists' concept of God, as well as the fundamentalist view of the Bible as an objective historical record, Hart provides a welcome antidote to simplistic manifestoes. In doing so, he plumbs the depths of humanity’s experience of the world as powerful evidence for the reality of God and captures the beauty and poetry of traditional reflection upon the divine.

• Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies
• The Story of Christianity
• That All Shall Be Saved: Heaven, Hell, and Universal Salvation
• The New Testament: A Translation
• The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth
• The Doors of the Sea: Where Was God in the Tsunami?
• The Hidden and the Manifest: Essays in Theology and Metaphysics
• The Last Superstition: A Refutation of the New Atheism
• Five Proofs of the Existence of God
• A Splendid Wickedness and Other Essays