David Bentley Hart is one of the world’s most formidable and provocative theological minds. He is an Eastern Orthodox scholar of religion, a philosopher, a cultural commentator and a fiction writer. Dr. Hart is the author of more than 30 books spanning theology and metaphysics, philosophy, biblical scholarship and translation, political theology and linguistics, as well as his fiction and children’s novels.
I spoke to Dr. Hart about why Jesus captured his imagination, whether suffering and evil in the world calls God’s goodness into question, and why he doesn’t believe that the Bible teaches the concept of eternal conscious torment. He explained why he believes beauty is a central category of Christian thought, why moral reasoning and moral intuitions must be an essential part of biblical interpretation, and why materialists can’t adequately explain how consciousness has emerged.
Dr. Hart also shared with me why he’s become increasingly indifferent to dogmatic and institutional authority, why he believes that historically the church has been as evil as it has been good, and why he has a “burning sense of obligation” to those whom Jesus loved —— the poor, the marginalized, the strangers in our midst. What emerged in the interview is a sense that he feels compelled to defend the character of God against many of those who claim to speak for God.
Our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, is the sixth in a series of interviews I am doing that explores the world of Christian faith.
Peter Wehner: You’ve described yourself as a “thoroughly secular man,” one having little or no natural aptitude for religious sentiment. The Christian religion as a dogmatic and institutional reality is secondary and marginal to your faith. If C.S. Lewis was, in his words, the most reluctant convert in all of England, it seems to me you qualify as one of the more reluctant converts in all America, or maybe to be more precise, one of the most surprising converts in America. You and Lewis differ in important respects, yet like Lewis you write beautifully and powerfully about the Christian faith and about Jesus. What is it that drew you to faith and what keeps you there? Why is Christianity the story you inhabit?
David Bentley Hart: The word convert probably doesn’t suit me very well in this context. I have converted from certain things to other things. I was a high church Episcopalian as a boy and became Eastern Orthodox as a young man. But it’s true that I’ve never had the aptitude for spontaneous piety of the churchly sort. From an early age, I had a profound sense of some mystery lying beyond nature. And when I’m in natural settings, that’s when my capacity for reverence tends to kick in. But institutional claims, dogmatic claims, the demands of piety, the romance of piety have never had a hold on me by themselves.
What made Christianity compelling to me from an early age had to do with two considerations. One is that I couldn’t account for the claims made about Easter by the early Christians in the New Testament. The more I studied, too, I became more and more convinced of the extraordinary oddity of these claims as compared to what happened with other messianic movements.
Now within the context of more modern history, we’re aware of movements that can take off from a prophet claiming a certain charisma and can be fairly successful in their own terms. But this was something different. This was within the context of messianic expectations in first century Judea that simply seemed not to have come to pass. Other figures before Jesus who had been the focus of messianic movements had died. And rather than his followers simply scattering to the four winds, they soon appeared claiming to have had an experience. And just as a historical anomaly I found this experience hard to explain away psychologically or sociologically.
But that was further along in my education. The thing that always gripped me was the personality, the person, of Jesus as presented in the Gospels. I had a good classical education from an early age and was aware there was some huge epochal shift in his teachings that I’ve never been able to see simply as a fortuitous historical event.
To me, something new happened there. Many of the things that we now take to be morally appealing in Jesus were actually rather scandalous in their time. These weren’t just new principles; some of them were considered wrong. A sort of boundless degree of forgiveness was not an ideal, not even in Stoicism, not even in the prophets. Jesus also had this concern for the most abject, the most indigent people in the world. There was a category of the deserving poor in the ancient world. But the ptōchoi, the most wretched, while always the object of minimal charity, were regarded as being too debased as a rule to make it worthwhile to provide them with more than some alms. What made the ministry of Jesus so strange in late antiquity was that he made them the actual center of his concern, and even declared that the Kingdom of Heaven was theirs. So that was it. It’s the strangeness, it’s the uncanniness of this figure in his time and place first and foremost that captured my imagination and continues to do so.
Wehner: You’ve said you found Jesus to be an “infinitely compelling” figure, and that you “cannot fit him easily into the normal chronicles of human history.” You just explained why. You’ve pointed out that the issue of suffering and evil in the world isn’t an argument against God’s existence, but it does go directly to the issue of divine goodness. You’ve stated that “we exist in a world of monstrous evil and monstrous suffering. And the theist traditions tell us that behind all of this is a God of infinite justice, mercy, love and intellect.” The contrast between the suffering of children and the claim that God is all-powerful and all-good is enough to call into question the claim itself. So what’s the best way for Christians to think about theodicy, the defense of God’s goodness and omnipotence in the view of the existence of evil? Is it found in Christ’s wordless kiss to the Grand Inquisitor in “The Brothers Karamazov,” which can be understood as a moment of healing grace rather than a logical response to an argument, as an act of mercy and empathy that transcends human understanding? Or is there a better way to think about this?
Hart: There’s a partial answer in that, but it’s one that requires interpretation. Curiously enough, I’m not a great admirer of Dostoyevsky as an artist. I don’t think he was an equal of Tolstoy. But what he did have was a moral genius that could break through even his horrible prejudices, like his antisemitism. No one has ever stated more powerfully the moral case against accepting the terms of our existence as adequate to the claims of God’s goodness. By “terms of our existence,” I meant the evils Ivan makes so much of in the chapter “Rebellion,” which are principally the sufferings of children. For him, on these terms, existence in this world and even the promise of some final Kingdom in which all will be reconciled cannot be justified. And yes, I think the figure of Christ, the silent, the enigmatic figure of the Christ who reverses the kiss of Judas there and bestows a kiss of forgiveness, of reconciliation, is part of it.
But my first piece of advice on theodicy has always been to avoid theodicy, because any attempt to justify the ways of God to man in terms of why this happened already presumes a kind moral teleology to evil. Here’s what I mean by that: theodicy tries to show how evil exists as part of a great plan to achieve some greater good, which of course justifies evil. It makes it seem as if, yes, it’s sad that little girl died of cancer, but in the end it was necessary. That strikes me as obscene. Whatever one thinks of that, the New Testament never speaks in such terms. Rather, it treats evil in terms of a kind of provisional dualism. It sees evil simply as a contingent distortion and violation of creation, sustained by the arkhōn of this kosmos, against which God is at war in Christ, and which is overthrown by Christ.
The New Testament speaks of creation as something broken and distorted and destroyed by spiritual freedoms gone astray, and the whole structure of reality that we know is in some sense alien to true creation.
In the Gospel of John, the arkhōn of this kosmos, the ruler of this world, or in Paul, the god of this age, is not God, but a malevolent figure, whether symbolic or real. I don’t know if I find it adequate, but I find it sufficiently persuasive at least to say that a ruined creation as the result of a necessary spiritual freedom that is the only way in which spiritual beings can come into real existence is the closest we can come to an explanation.
But that means we don’t justify this evil or that evil as part of some grand plan, but rather see the world as a place in need of rescue from a catastrophe that has occurred in some frame of reality we don’t know and don’t understand.
My fear of theodicy is that it becomes not just a justification of God but a justification of evil. It’s not just that I’m trying to justify God in the face of a child dying from diphtheria or a death camp; I’m actually justifying the death of that child and that death camp. At that point, the whole moral grammar of the New Testament seems to collapse in on itself.
Wehner: I’ve sensed in your writings, especially in the energy and intensity with which you’ve dealt with some issues, that you feel deeply that the character of God needs to be defended against people who are claiming to speak for God.
Hart: Christian history has been a constant struggle between two fundamentally irreconcilable pictures of God. One is based on the terms of Christ’s public ministry and the notion of a loving father from whom children can ask and expect to receive all real blessings and who loves the poor and the ptōchoi — the downtrodden, the forgotten, the rejected — and comes to save.
Then there’s the other language of the God who elects a particular portion of humanity for himself, who is willing to condemn or at least to allow souls to go to hell for an eternity of suffering for the failure to understand what they should be doing or what they should believe. That latter image in part is grounded in the apocalyptic idiom of the New Testament, but actually isn’t there in anything like the form it later assumed. There’s no teaching of the hell of eternal torment in the New Testament. The idea of the Gehenna was a prophetic image of rejection and destruction for evil, not this fully, grandly realized picture of some eternal torture chamber. The imagery that Christ used of judgment belonged to a metaphorical idiom inherited from the prophets, but also was part of the apocalyptic language of the time. The metaphors contradict one another if taken literally.
This struggle has been constant throughout Christian history. The most monstrous pictures of God come from the Christian tradition just as the most radiant images of God come from what Christians believe. With Augustine late in his life, with Calvin, even with Thomas Aquinas, the understanding of predestination, ante praevisa merita, that is without any prevision of the merits of those elected or left derelict, is a pretty early deformation.
Rational theodicy does the same thing in a more emollient way. It’s simply trying to look at a picture of God that you’ve decided must be understood in terms of pure sovereignty, pure power, pure righteousness before and even after mercy, but trying to explain it in a way that makes it sound more morally palatable. So as I say, dogma and tradition as such don’t compel me. If I find them deficient, I feel no moral or intellectual obligation to take them seriously.
I do think that among Christians, a defense of the character of God as revealed in the person they say they believe to be the manifestation of God in history — Jesus — is a perennial need.
Wehner: You argued in “That All Shall Be Saved” the case for apokatastasis, the restoration of all things, which to varying degrees has been a minority position throughout Christian history. You’ve made the case that there’s a strong scriptural basis for universal restoration based on a dozen or so verses in the New Testament — Titus 2:11, 2 Peter 3:9, Luke 3:6, John 12:32 and Romans 5:18 and 11:32 to name a few — that seem to promise, in the most unqualified terms, a final salvation of all persons. Why do you think that the view of hell as a place of eternal conscious torment got fixed into the Christian imagination? I should add that you don’t argue that hell doesn’t exist — Gehenna and Hades, which are of course different concepts …
Hart: Well, I understand hell as a real condition, a real state that we know in this world. So I don’t deny that.
Wehner: So why do you think people have put eternal conscious torment as primus inter pares and downplayed or neglected the verses that seem more unqualified in terms of all shall be saved? And what do you think is the key error of well-read and well-intentioned people who believe in eternal conscious torment?
Hart: I believe the key error is that they’ve been taught this from an early age to such a degree that at some crucial point the memory is one which I think psychologically they tend to repress. At some point they made a moral decision to believe something that all moral sanity told them was a vicious view of reality. I think the truth now, after all these centuries and over the course of Christian history, is that it’s simply been forced as the story that the irrefragable authority of the church backed up.
We have to remember that the notion of a place of eternal torment, at least of torment in the afterlife, does appear within the apocalyptic literature of the Second Temple period. And that was heavily influenced by Persian thought, which does have a day of judgment and a notion of heaven and hell, although in Zoroastrian tradition, hell isn’t necessarily a permanent state either. Nonetheless, this had entered into the imagery.
But the notion of a place of eternal torment as it appears in later tradition has more antecedents in Hellenistic tradition. The Platonists had this notion of a final damnation that you find even in Plato himself. It’s not clear to what degree that it’s used as a sort of edifying myth or not, but nonetheless it’s there. And it was very much part of the discourse of the Late Antique world. And there was an early sort of apocryphal gospel, by Nicodemus supposedly, where the imagery of hell as we know it appeared pretty early in the tradition. We do have fairly impressive figures from the fourth century — including Augustine and Basil of Caesarea — telling us that there were many parts throughout the Christian world where the majority belief was that hell was not an eternal state, though the actual proportion of who believed what is impossible to ascertain. Basil’s brother Gregory of Nyssa was openly a Universalist and was never condemned for it.
So why did the view that hell isn’t an eternal state die out? I’ve often thought that in part it had to do with the interests of empire. Once the church ceased to be a sort of disreputable and seditious, loose affiliation of odd mystics and outcasts and members of a mystery religion, one that didn’t even have a doctrinal consensus yet, and became a pillar of imperial society, the institutional imperatives became paramount. So there was a uniformity of teaching, but also a teaching that was agreeable to an institution that now represented power and represented keeping people in line.
I think it was almost inevitable that the harshest possible construal of the New Testament would soon become the doctrinal lingua franca. But the teaching of eternal conscious torment really isn’t in the New Testament.
There are lots of frightening images — being kicked out of a wedding feast, being made to go to prison for a while, being burned up like branches in a fire, destroyed — not roasted throughout eternity. But the notion of this hell of eternal torment really is something that has only the most nebulous foreshadowings in the New Testament. And as you say correctly, the seemingly unambiguous statements of universal redemption are far more plentiful. And 1 Corinthians 15 — this final vision of God becoming “all in all” — would be taken up systematically by figures like Origen and Gregory of Nyssa, for whom it is the revelation of the true mystery of God in Christ that ultimately all things are reconciled.
Wehner: I want to move from eternal conscious torment to beauty. In “The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth,” you argue for a return to beauty as a central category in Christian thought. What is it you hope to convey to people about beauty which they might not otherwise see?
Hart: Part of that relates to the question you asked at the beginning, about the moral character of God. If you’re actually persuaded of the goodness of God then you’ve committed yourself to believing that there’s some analogy between what you understand justice and mercy to be and what you’re ascribing to God. So if you get to the point where it just becomes equivocal, that you say, “It’s good that God condemns babies to hell” or “It’s good in a way we don’t understand,” what you’re saying is your faith is just nonsense. It should clue us in if the story we tell has a hideousness to it. But there’s more to it than that. I really do believe that there are transcendental orientations of any living mind, like the good, the true, the beautiful. It doesn’t mean that we pursue them avidly with full attention psychologically at every moment, but that we do have these values that provide an index for us in which we judge other things.
Why do you desire to own a painting? The reason you desire it might be purely for an investment. But if you really desire the painting for itself, it’s because you have a prior desire that’s more general and transcendental for the beautiful as such. Beauty is an ultimate value for you.
I think the beautiful is probably for us in this world the best indication of what transcendental desire is, the desire for something in itself. Every other thing that we call a transcendental, like truth or goodness, you can try to explain away in a consequentialist way. You say you love the truth, but what you mean is you love accuracy because you want to gain power over a situation. You say you love goodness, but what you’re meaning is you really want moral compliance from others. But in the case of beauty, all those explanations fall woefully short of the phenomenon. Beauty has a kind of impersonal, compelling fullness to it that we can’t reduce to simple mechanical categories.
In Christian thought I think beauty is important because there’s a certain aesthetic revolution that occurred in Christian thought.
One of the curiosities of Christian social history is a series of cultural changes in which we feel it is licit to look for beauty. You have the picture of Christ before Pilate in the Gospel of John, one of my favorite examples. I returned to it almost obsessively because as anyone who studied the ancient world knows, in everyone’s eyes at the time, this tableau would not have meant what it has come to mean for us.
It would have been obvious that Pilate enjoys a certain glorious eminence because he represents both the power and the cult of Rome. He’s an aristocrat, a patrician. There’s a scale of reality that’s the hierarchy of all things, that’s a social hierarchy that includes humanity and the divine. Someone like Pilate is closer to the divine. But that hierarchy also goes right down to the lowest of the low, the slave, and below the slave the ptōchos — that indigent, absolutely marginal human being. And yet there’s an inversion of perspective in that tableau.
We’re invited to see Christ, this slave, this peasant, this colonialized person, this convict. He’s a slave under Roman law. He has no citizenship and he’s under condemnation. So he has the status of one totally not his own. According to Roman law, Jesus is non habens personam — he has no face, he’s no person before the law.
Where you can see this more prodigal notion of the beautiful spilling out of the height of hierarchical thinking into all things, into those we’re now supposed to see as our brothers and our sisters and our kin, radiant with the beauty of God, radiant with the face of Christ, is probably the story of Peter going apart to weep when he hears the cock crow for the third time.
Erich Auerbach, the great literary critic, pointed to this correctly as a sort of strange epochal shift in the sensibility of Western literature. Before then, rustics simply were not worthy of serious tragic attention. The tears of a rustic could be an object of ridicule or mirth, or could just be an ornamental detail: Even the peasants were crying. Things were so bad that peasants, who lose children all the time, they’re just cattle anyway, were weeping. But the notion of a fisherman, poor, probably illiterate, going aside and weeping in grief at the realization that he had betrayed the love of his master in the sense of his teacher, his guide, this is something new.
And so the beautiful fascinates me, not only as a category in itself but within Christian thought as a category that went through a radical revision. Now it’s obvious to us. All of us, whether we’re Christians or not, feel this sense that we really can find this compelling beauty in the face of someone who is not.
So the reason theology should think about beauty is threefold. What it says about transcendence; what it says about adequate conceptions of God; and ultimately what it says about — what is revealed about — our fellows, about the world around us, by what happens to the category of beauty in the long unfolding of Christian history.
Wehner: That’s a stunning answer, and if I might say so, a beautiful one. I now want to ask you about when moral intuitions clash with what people perceive to be biblical doctrine, and I need a bit of time to set up the question, so bear with me.
It appears to me that too many Christians suspend their intellect and moral reasoning in order to justify actions they claim are commanded by God in the Bible. Their view is the Bible should shape us rather than vice versa, and we should allow the biblical texts to shape our worldviews.
Set aside for now, one, the noetic effects of sin, which Paul acknowledged when he wrote in 1 Corinthians 13, “we see through a glass darkly,” but which evangelicals often overlook; and two, Christian history, which demonstrates how often people have misinterpreted the Bible on issues ranging from geocentrism to evolution, from the age of the Earth to slavery to much else. The point I want to make is that in any other context, certain actions they ascribe to God would be deemed to be morally horrifying.
John Piper is a very influential figure in the reformed Calvinist world. He takes the accounts about genocide in the Bible to be literal rather than allegorical. Piper was once asked, how can it be right for God to slaughter innocent women and children in the Hebrew Scriptures? He answered, “It’s right for God to slaughter women and children anytime he pleases.” According to Piper: “God is not beholden to us at all. He doesn’t owe us anything.” Piper then added this, “We’re all sinners and we deserve to die yesterday and go to hell.”
John MacArthur, who influenced generations of evangelical preachers, said that if God purposed to consign people to eternal conscious torment, “who are we to question his purpose?”
Calvin said in “Institutes of the Christian Religion” that there could be no election without its opposite reprobation, which he understood to be God’s eternal decree, whereby God foreordained that certain people would be excluded from the number of those saved by grace. They will instead experience for all eternity God’s wrath. “Whom God passes by he reprobates,” Calvin wrote, “and that for no other cause but because he is pleased to exclude them from the inheritance which he predestines to his children.”
I’d like for you to comment on any aspect of this, including how you think about the dialectic — and sometimes the outright conflict — between our moral intuitions, which are obviously imperfect and can lead us astray, and the words in the Bible, which have often been incorrectly interpreted and led Christians astray.
Hart: The immediate question you have to ask is: The Bible shapes us according to whose reading of it? The notion that the Bible is a document that’s in full uniform agreement with itself throughout is just prima facie nonsense. It contradicts itself again and again. It’s a human document. It’s not something that dropped out of heaven like a golden tablet inscribed with oracles directly from the lips of God.
The view you described completely inverts the intuitions of the earliest great exegetes of Scripture in both Jewish and Christian tradition, both rabbinic tradition and patristic tradition. What makes a text inspired isn’t that it’s a set of oracles, but that the actual act of reading itself has to be inspired. And the things that strike us as morally unpalatable are the very things that not only Origen, but just about any of the great figures that we call church fathers agreed were morally unpalatable. That’s the scandal of the text, the skandalon that’s supposed to show us that a literal reading is wrong at a spiritual level.
This notion of allegory was the standard spiritual reading of Scripture for the Early Church, well into the Middle Ages, even though there were readers who might’ve taken a more literalist reading of certain episodes. They believed we were given a moral sense because this is an indication of the reality of God and the possibility of human language capturing the truth.
If our words are so meaningless that we can ascribe to God a goodness that in our case would be evil, obviously the word not only is collapsed into equivocation, but that equivocity is an absolute contagion. It destroys all intelligibility. It means all theological language is meaningless, in which case your faith is meaningless. So for God to order the slaughter of women and children, whereas for a human being to give such an order would be the most abysmal evil, then obviously something has gone amiss.
In the case of John Piper or other evangelicals in the Calvinist vein, this is their tradition. It’s a 16th-century early modern notion of absolute sovereignty as the measure of freedom and power. That concept of freedom doesn’t exist in the early world, in the early church, in late antiquity, in anything like the same way. Yes, we believe in God’s power to dispose, but it’s always united to a power fully to realize his nature, which is infinite goodness.
This notion that the ultimate mark of God’s “God-ness” is absolute sovereignty comes into Christian thought in the West and fixes itself in early modern thought. So in Calvinism, we have an exaggeration to the point of obscenity that exists in the thought of the late Augustine. And it’s there because Augustine thinks he’s being a faithful reader of Paul. Alas, Augustine did not really read Greek, and so the very categories he was working in were defective.
There is no doctrine of actual predestination in the New Testament. Anyone who knows the language and puts these things in context knows otherwise. And the passages about election have historically, since the time of the late Augustine in the West, been read contrary to what they say.
For instance, the most famous passages on election and dereliction are Romans 9 through 11. That’s what Calvin refers to, especially when he says, in effect, “Well, if you have election, we need also dereliction.” Except that’s not what Paul says. Paul says just the opposite. Paul starts with the possibility that this is true, that there might be vessels of wrath stored up. But then he thinks this is morally unintelligible. It would make God a liar, his covenants false. So he reasons.
Paul goes through this agonized reasoning on the relationship of Israel and the Church and finally, the conclusion of Romans 11, is that this is all part of how God is allowing all ultimately to reach the same end, that all of Israel will be saved, and that instead of there being vessels of wrath who are different from vessels of mercy, it turns out everyone is both. All have been bound together in their disobedience that all might be set free, that all might be saved. Yet historically that passage has been broken up into separate verses and read contrary to itself.
Hermeneutically, you can’t be shaped by the Bible unless you’re also determining how you shape it as an object of interpretation. There used to be a clear canon for this. Gregory of Nyssa comes right out and says: God did not really slay the firstborn of Egypt. If you take that literally, you would be ascribing to God something worse than the foulest of men. So the ancient premise was that we could read like persons in whom the act of reading was an inspired grappling with a difficult text. And this is true also in rabbinic tradition.
I’ve heard evangelicals, just as a kind of rhetorical ploy, accuse people of antisemitism if they don’t adhere to a literalist view of the Old Testament. But where in Jewish tradition was there ever that kind of literalism? The rabbis didn’t see the command of genocide as something that they were obliged to take seriously as a guide to future behavior. It was a hard story. It was part of the received literary, cultural, religious and mythological past that had to be meditated on and turned into allegory or meditation on the law or a language of love between the scholar trying to understand the mysteries of God and God giving himself in Torah and Tanakh.
Also, again, the Bible is not a revealed text, it is a text that allows for revelation.
The final reply would be that it was always understood by the earliest Christian tradition that moral intelligence is absolutely crucial. Without it, every reading is going to be a false and probably pernicious reading.
Wehner: The so-called new atheists, including Daniel Dennett when he was alive and Richard Dawkins today, are materialists, meaning they believe that all aspects of life including consciousness can be explained by physical scientific processes. There’s no room in their worldview for an immaterial soul. Your friend Iain McGilchrist, a philosopher and psychiatrist in neuroscience, has said that he has a deepening sense that “there is something very important, very deep in the world that is not summed up in a material account.” The way he put it is that “not everything that matters is matter and is measurable.” As I understand your view expressed in, among other places, your Platonic dialogue, “All Things Are Full of Gods,” materialists can’t adequately explain how consciousness has emerged given their materialistic presuppositions, and you believe, too, that the foundation of all reality is spiritual and mental, not material. Can you expand on what you most want to convey to readers in that book?
Hart: The reason I’m not an atheist is that I think the philosophical arguments against it are unanswerable, or at least the philosophical arguments for something beyond materialism are unanswerable.
The problem with people like Dennett wasn’t so much his truculence toward all things religious, which was quite real, but that he was in an odd bind that a lot of modern materialist thought is in: Our sciences are not strictly mechanistic. Physics has not been mechanistic in a comprehensive way for more than a century now. Biology, the life sciences, are undergoing some rather extreme paradigm shifts regarding the levels of intentionality within cells, how homeostasis comes about, and the degree to which genetic-centric theory was adequate. It wasn’t. Richard Dawkins’s “The Selfish Gene,” just at the logical level, fails. And as a scientific proposal, it was decades out of date when it first appeared.
The 17th-century metaphysics of the sciences has captured our minds at a far deeper level than it did originally. The whole reason the mechanical picture of nature was created was to perfect a method of inductive reasoning. So instead of presuming metaphysical causes and instead of presuming the activity of God or the soul, we were going to start just from physical processes, viewing them as mechanical, as machine processes that we would examine discreetly. That’s a very good impulse. It’s why we have medical treatments today that were undreamed of before this revolution in thinking.
But this was a filtering process. It was creating a bracketing by excluding from our picture of nature all the marks of mentality — not just consciousness, but intentionality with a purpose, purposive thinking, the unity of consciousness. The realities you’re dealing with here are composite. You don’t have to account for that inexplicable oneness that underlies conscious apprehension.
At first everyone was happy just to keep the two realms separate — here’s nature, it’s mechanical; here’s a realm of God and spirits, which is not mechanical. In the terms of Descartes, there’s an extended substance, res extensa — that’s matter, and that works mechanically. And then there’s a thinking substance, res cogitans, the mind, the soul or God, and that works nonmechanically. The two have a liaison with one another in embodied minds, in human minds, but otherwise they’re distinct. And we don’t have to confuse them.
The sciences commendably want to understand everything. And so in time, they weren’t going to accept this segregation of fields anymore. The attitude was: We want to understand mind and consciousness, too.
The problem is that we’re still using a model that was perfected through the exclusion of all the properties of the mental. It is impossible, using that model, to make sense of the phenomena of consciousness. So what you have to do instead is say that the phenomena of consciousness aren’t real. They can be reduced to mechanical processes. The more you try to do this, the more absurd it becomes. You do end up with, say, Dennett, who said that consciousness is an illusion.
This is the bind we find ourselves in. And many of the phenomena of life, I would argue, also don’t fit the mechanical model. You can explain a great deal regarding physiological systems at the level of their mechanical operation. You can explain a great number of things in terms of evolutionary attrition and retention. But there are many things you cannot explain.
I just think that when you pursue the actual phenomena, not basing this on metaphysical or religious commitments, but just the phenomena themselves, the materialist answers invariably fail. They were right in the 17th century — what the mind does is inherently contrary to what mechanism does.
The straightforward materialism of the new atheists with its mechanistic prejudices is the most self-defeating project there is.
To my mind, if you come to the end of a phenomenology of something like conscious acts and you have to square it with your theory, and you say “The theory doesn’t fit the phenomenon so I better get rid of the phenomenon,” that’s no longer good philosophy or good science. The rule of the sciences and the philosophy that deals in natural thought, natural philosophy, is that if the theory doesn’t fit the phenomenon, it’s the theory that goes.
Wehner: As you look back over your journey of faith of the last quarter century, I wonder what you see now that you didn’t see quite as well then, or perhaps what you see differently now that you didn’t quite see then. In what important ways, if any, has your faith changed?
Hart: I have to say I’ve become more and more indifferent to dogmatic and institutional authority. Because one thing your studies do, if you engage in them honestly, is give you knowledge of the history of how we got where we are, but also the history of the texts we’re dealing with, the texts of Scripture, among others, of their multiplicity. I was never a biblical fundamentalist, but I certainly couldn’t have remained one if I had been when I learned the history of the New Testament and realized we don’t even have anywhere in antiquity a single text of the New Testament that matches any other single text of the New Testament. The differences are sometimes small, but sometimes not. They’re quite substantial.
Also the more you know about the history of doctrine and the more you understand how minimalist it actually is, when you look at the formulations of doctrine in Christian history, you realize the degree to which they’re trying to end the controversy by coming up with a bare grammar that can be agreed on, but whose contents are endlessly contestable.
The whole history of theology and division among Christians hasn’t been generally over different doctrines, though that’s happened, too, but quite often it’s been over the same doctrine, just radically different interpretations.
I have also become more indifferent to claims that base themselves only on their own authority. And that’s terrifically liberating because as I say, what I find compelling is the person of Christ.
Whether I know that this is the incarnate Logos in the sense that say a sixth-century Greek Christian might have understood or not is a matter of importance. It’s a matter of entering into an interpretive dialogue with the past and with the tradition of thought I’m in and recognizing that there have been some very brilliant people in this tradition and some really odious people in this tradition. But that’s less important to me than what it is we’re talking about, which is the singular event of this man in history and how it changed things.
The institution of the church, to my mind, has been a 50-50 phenomenon, as evil as good, as Christian as non-Christian. In itself, it is not Christianity. In fact, what we call Christianity in itself is not Christianity. That’s just a blanket term we use for anyone who makes even an ostensible claim to loyalty to Christ.
But this man and these teachings — and this consuming moral attention that is required of us and the messianic light in which that’s cast, by which I mean a light that’s both historical and eternal at once — so that what we do in time already has an eternal meaning and then eternity is already something spilling into time.
The greatest epiphany for me came when I was translating the New Testament. I’ve been reading Greek most of my life. I’d read the New Testament in Greek many times, but I was still hearing it through the doctrinal inheritance to some degree, even when I thought I wasn’t. But having to grapple with the text and realizing just how strange, just how uncannily different this is, not only from anything else going on in the Late Antique world, but from received institutional understandings of Christianity, or just our commonplace man-and-woman-in-the-pews understanding of Christianity, became much more intense for me.
I became much aware of this and especially the absolute centrality of the social. When we talk about Christ threatening damnation, this is the indignation of someone who loves the most despised and ignored people of all. And that more and more becomes the center of my faith. “Inasmuch as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me.”
And especially at this moment politically and culturally in which the name Christianity in this country and in other parts of the world has been conscripted yet again, but with even more brazenness, into a justification for cruelty, bigotry, violence, murder even, the waging of war, the persecution of those seeking refuge. The New Testament is pretty clear on strangers in our midst. You’re going to be judged by how well you treat the strangers in our midst. For me, that’s maybe 80 percent of my faith now, just this burning sense of obligation to those whom this man loved. And in calling him God or calling him the revelation of God, I realized that that love is absolutely incumbent on me.
One of the most remarkable things for me about the transition from the pre-imperial to the post-imperial church is how the language of the Didache and the New Testament in these early Christian documents was preserved fairly late. Figures like Basil of Caesarea or John Chrysostom as Patriarch of Constantinople condemning wealth not in a mild way, not saying, “Oh, well, you shouldn’t misuse it, you should use it responsibly,” but condemning it altogether and doing this in the heart of the empire while the emperor and the empress are present.
Any riches you have in excess of what you need is food stolen from the hungry, clothing stolen from the naked. There’s no quarter given.
What also amazes me in later Christian tradition is the way the Sermon on the Mount is translated or the Lord’s Prayer. These are originally very concrete documents about the poor, mostly. The last part of the Lord’s Prayer is about the poor and about those being robbed by the rich. A whole set of things have been sanitized — first by doctrinal convention, but then by conventions of translation.
We think that the Lord’s Prayer asks that God won’t lead us into temptation or will deliver us from evil or give us just our daily bread, whereas what the original Greek is saying is something much more radical. “Forgive us our trespasses” — there’s no word “trespasses” in the Greek. The word is opheilēmata and it literally means debts, and not moral debts. It’s during a debt crisis, and Jesus is saying pray to me that your debtors will relieve you so that you can’t be taken by the bailiff and put in prison because you’ve been dragged into a court, dragged into trial, not “led into temptation,” and reduced perhaps to slavery.
We’ve turned all that into very anodyne and rather nebulous moral councils that a rich person can recite without feeling the irony. But that’s not what the Greek says. And having to translate that word-for-word-for-word made me aware with an acuteness that until then, I hadn’t felt just what was actually going on here.
Wehner: That translation was a phenomenal achievement. A last question, David. What do you hope will be among your greatest contributions to theology, to people’s understanding of God and to people’s understanding of Jesus?
Hart: As I said before, the counsel of conscience is indispensable to understanding any of this. The notion that we’re so depraved and sinful that we can’t see the radiant goodness in the slaughter of a whole town is so perverted that if that were actually part of the essence of Christianity, it would be much better that Christianity ceased to exist right now.
In my mind, there’s actually a fairly simple index of this. Your conscience united to what are pretty clear and concrete moral demands are already a metaphysics; they are already a doctrine. That is, they are declarations of the eternal character of God. If you cannot square the two, if you have to equivocate when you use words like goodness and justice and mercy, then what you believe is, by definition, meaningless and almost certainly evil. I suppose that’s it, actually.
In a general sense, if I have any effect on the larger discourse, it would be just that: The innocence of God, the goodness of God, the goodness of what you understand when you use this mysterious word God, as a verdict on the whole of reality, has to be morally continuous. It has to be coherent. It cannot tolerate this contagion that renders all belief incoherent and evil.
Peter Wehner (@Peter_Wehner), a senior fellow at the Trinity Forum who served in the administrations of Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush, is a contributing Opinion writer and the author of “The Death of Politics: How to Heal Our Frayed Republic After Trump.”
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