Hart on the appeal of Christianity

From the introduction to The Beauty of the Infinite (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003):

Christian theology has no stake in the myth of disinterested rationality: the church has no arguments for its faith more convincing than the form of Christ; enjoined by Christ to preach the gospel, Christians must proclaim, exhort, bear witness, persuade — before other forms of reason can be marshaled… Christian thought must remain immovably fixed alongside Christ, in his irreducible particularity, and precisely insofar as the temper of “postmodernism” runs against confidence in universal truths of reason, postmodern theory confirms theology in its original condition: that of a story, thoroughly dependent upon a sequence of historical events to which the only access is the report and practice of believers, a story whose truthfulness may be urged — even enacted — but never proved simply by the processes of scrupulous dialectic. What Christian thought offers the world is not a set of “rational” arguments that (suppressing certain of their premises) force assent from others by leaving them, like the interlocutors of Socrates, 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.