David Bentley Hart’s recent Valentine’s Day revelation (in his Substack) of being temperamentally irreligious, not disposed to belief in his own resurrection (though he is convinced of Christ’s), and his lack of personal spiritual devotion, contained doubts and expressions of disbelief with which I am personally well-acquainted, but I suppose I have never taken my own proclivities as seriously as Hart does his. In fact, I have never considered either my capacity for belief nor my tendency toward doubt to be of primary importance. Belief is no great accomplishment, and to think it is, is precisely the problem in imagining doubt is determinative of moral engagement. Hart’s “dishonesty,” as he terms it, is not really his keeping his irreligious tendencies a secret (“no natural aptitude for religious sentiment, enthusiasm, devotion, or ritual observance”) but his abandonment of any hope in making a difference by forsaking the church and Christian identity. This failure is no revelation, however, as its unfolding is evident in the arc of his work and thought.
Given Hart’s Confessions, How Can it Be That All Shall Be Saved?
It is focus on personal salvation, going to heaven (missing hell) when you die, that Hart supposedly traded for a more expansive universal salvation in That All Shall Be Saved: Heaven Hell and Universal Salvation. He was so insistent on universal salvation, that he considered “hopeful universalism” a “timid” form of faith, and his more robust dogmatic universalism the only honest option. He can know universal salvation is the case, and hope need not enter into it.
But what can this mean for one who cannot “conceive of any kind of postmortem existence” and for whom life after death is perceived as “banal, tedious, or horrific” and who seems to prefer personal annihilation (Hart says he “could unresentfully cease upon the midnight without pain, knowing that afterward no one would bother me”)? He concludes, “Never having been fully convinced that existence is much of a blessing, I cannot think of nonexistence as obviously a curse.” Everyone may miss hell, only to go to the grave and obliteration, but what about the universal salvation upon which he was so insistent?
He abandoned hope for knowledge it seems, only to play his own game of “oddly unregenerate ‘rational’ fundamentalism” (of the sort he attributes to William Lane Craig). In light of his revelations about near total lack of belief in resurrection (which is Christian salvation), this turns out to have been mere posturing and formal argumentation (my original critique here). Hart’s tone, his entertaining arrogance, is not a side-light of his work but is gained from a perspective in which formal argumentation replaces real-world engagement in combating evil and living out the Christian life. While one might be certain of formal statements about God and salvation, does this form of certainty give rise to ethical behavior, to resistance to evil, to assuming personal responsibility, or does it in fact have the opposite effect? (Hart confesses, he has little to no interest in the church or in the practice of Christianity, which is the place of moral engagement in combating evil.)
The Problem of Evil Looms Too Large
Among Hart’s revelations is that he finds the problem of evil irresolvable and therefore admits a sort of defeat. “I have never, moreover, been able to get very far past the problem of evil when it chooses to spring up in the road before me like the Lord in the path of Moses on the way back to Egypt; nothing the staretz Zosima says provides an adequate response to Vanya’s ‘rebellion’.”
Hart has long resisted any notion of a theodicy. A position I appreciated enough that I used his Doors of the Sea in the classroom, but even then I detected he was making a weak case for the problem of evil, inasmuch as it never touched upon God. In order for God to not be implicated in the problem of evil, Hart calls upon divine apatheia, which is beyond comprehension. A book devoted to disclaiming theodicy, reverses course in the case of God so as to provide Him, if no one else, a way out through God’s transcendence. God is beyond evil and the world, and Christ does not enter into the equation (which, as I understand it, is God’s real-world answer to the problem of evil). For Hart, the Cross, rather than being an unfolding defeat of evil (as an ongoing battle) is “a triumph of divine apatheia” (p. 81).
Hart’s confident universalism and divine apatheia function in much the same way. Formal cause is protected in both instances, by dismissing the contingencies of evil as entering into the equation. He never explains the how of universal salvation, but affirms it as a formal necessity, and by the same token evil is not explained and yet God is formally free of evil. This is accomplished not by focusing on what is knowable about God in Christ, but by trusting primarily in what is apophatic, ahistorical, and ultimately unknowable. One might speak of this trust as “certain” as part of a formal argument but it is a certainty that has nothing to do with the real world-defeat of evil found in the historical Jesus. In Christ, God does not wash his hands of evil, but directly engages it.
The fault is not in the logic of the argument but the limited perspective. His dogmatic universalism plays the role of a theodicy, in that it relieves him of any personal responsibility of organized resistance to evil. Then he can paint the bleakest picture of evil, and resist any possible explanation, including the explanation that Christ is defeating evil.
I too would resist a theodicy, other than that God in Christ is defeating evil, but this is not a formal argument and does not explain evil, and it falls short of the sort of formal certainty upon which Hart depends. In fact, this may be unsatisfactory for one who demands certainty and makes no room for hope. Belief in Christ does not function as a formal argument or theory, rather there is real world resistance and hope of defeat of evil in the eschaton.
There is no Hope in the Church
Of his books, the one I appreciated most, may have been the one in which he drops the mode of formal argument. Hart painted a bleak picture of the church in Tradition and Apocalypse, suggesting there is no relation between the church of the apostolic era and the institution that took its place. The latter, he claims completely contradicts the former. There is no continuity, no “organic vitality,” no “living idea” which can possibly connect them (pp. 826-829). In this book however, the entire argument depends on the apocalyptic hope of the title bringing the kingdom to a future perfection (see my previous discussion, here).
What he did not tell us at that time, is that he has given up on the church. “I find myself now barely able to abide most hymnody, litanies, the psalter, or even (I am ashamed to say) sacrament.” His identity is no longer that of a Christian: “Most important of all, it seems to me, is the absence of any interest in ‘Christian identity’ on the part of someone with my irreligious tendencies.” Apart from apocalyptic hope, which he has apparently abandoned, this reduces Tradition and Apocalypse to a negative history without apocalyptic possibilities.
In the book Hart did not attempt to address the gaps he notes, which make later forms of the faith a contradiction of the Christianity of the New Testament and the early church. He admitted, he is offering no practical solutions and no program of action. It is now clear that he needed no answer, no program of action, because he does not identify with any church, including the Orthodox Church. He has no interest in “Christian identity” or identity with any church, most especially the Orthodox Church (he describes his particular dislike of Orthodoxy), which in his public persona he never abandoned.
I concluded a review of his book with this statement: “Mine is a more peaceful and anti-institutional inclination (while recognizing none have escaped Christendom and its seeming necessities). I presume we really should attempt to reduplicate the economy, the nonviolence, and the disempowerment of the first church and the first Christians so as to put in place the lived reality of the peace of Christ. I presume it is not enough to name the failures, without specifying their nature and striving to rid ourselves of the specific forms of violence, the oppression and contradictions which have negated and continue to negate the gospel preached by Jesus and the Apostles. Specifying the nature of this failure comes with the practical necessity of doing something about it; an imperative of which Hart remains free.”
I wonder how many have been pressed into service of institutional Christianity following Hart’s public example, not realizing his true, secular stance?
Empty Gnosticism and Neo-Platonism
Hart also confesses that he finds the Japanese Tea Ceremony preferrable to celebration of the Eucharist, and would make the Tea Ceremony the center of any religion he invented. His glorification of the East and especially of Japan, already betrayed orientalist notions (as explained by Edward Said), which scholars of Japan recognize as part of the nationalist mythologizing (Nihonjinron), to which non-Japanese are peculiarly susceptible. The irony is that the Tea Ceremony has been traced, some argue, to an imitation of the communion service, which is Said’s point: Orientalism is primarily a reification of the East undertaken by the West.
The significance of Hart’s focus on Vedantic religion and privileging of the East, and raising it to religious significance, is the end-point of his gnostic Neo-Platonism, favoring formal and rational arguments. He had previously rejected the bodily – enfleshed resurrection, arguing that Paul was a dualist, holding to a Platonist split between flesh and spirit, arguing that resurrected bodies have no flesh and that the writers of the New Testament were, indeed, denigrating the flesh and did not hold to the notion that flesh was a designation for the “sinful nature.” [1] It is no surprise he has now gone a step further, not only relinquishing the importance of the enfleshing work of Christ in the body, but giving up even on the vague survival (spiritual resurrection) he formerly espoused.
As I previously pointed out (here), Hart is wrong in presuming that it is Protestants who have innovated the notion that Jesus was raised and ascended in a fleshly body (it is the overwhelming position of the early Church) and he is wrong in presuming that Paul’s contrast between spirit and soul (in I Cor. 15) is typical of the ancients. But Hart is bent upon making his Platonism Christian by reading the New Testament in the context of contemporaneous thought, presuming Paul and John are mostly reflecting and not critiquing the received understanding found in Plato and the Gnostics.
Hart has long argued for a standard rationality, inclusive of Christianity which, as with his own thought, does not challenge the pagan worldview. He presumes there is a given understanding (knowledge of God as creator and law giver) available to all persons (whose capacity for reason remains largely intact in spite of sin) and that salvation does not pertain to epistemology. For him, flesh means being mortal and not sinful. As he puts it, “In the New Testament, ‘flesh’ does not mean ‘sinful nature or ‘humanity under judgment’ or even ‘fallen flesh.’ It just means ‘flesh,’ in the bluntly physical sense. . ..” This means death is a natural outworking of creation, and salvation is deliverance from what God calls good (a “shedding of flesh”).
However, when Paul describes the “body of death” and connects it to the working of the flesh, he certainly does not mean that this flows naturally from what God has created or that sin is an inevitable result of creation. In presuming Paul is just an extension of his time (more of the same), Hart misses the deep nature of the Pauline critique of human wisdom and he falls into the very dualism constitutive of this wisdom.
Conclusion
The justice enacted in Christ, deals in the realm of human history and human experience, and allows for human understanding of the finite kind and not the transcendent reason of formal argumentation (Hart’s focus). Christians might refer to certainty, but it is a certainty in progress, working itself out in history, and engaged not in terms of an absolute philosophical certainty but the “hopeful” certainty of faith. The former need not take into account the realm of evil or the contingencies of history. The latter, is a humble “hopeful” certainty which deals in the reality of human perspective and the existential fact of suffering and evil. It is not clear Hart has shifted or abandoned a belief he might have once had, rather it is doubtful that he ever adhered to a humble, hopeful, faith centered on the historical work of Christ. His recent confessions indicate the end point of the trajectory traceable throughout the course of his work.
[1] David Bentley Hart, “The Spiritual Was More Substantial Than the Material for the Ancients,” in Church Life Journal (July 26, 2018), https://churchlifejournal.nd.edu/articles/the-spiritual-was-more-substantial-than-the-material-for-the-ancients/