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James Murnau (aka Tim James)'s avatar

Like you and Daniel, I used to be a convinced Calvinist. So, while I'm not an insider to your experiences, I am very much a former insider to this world. I've crossed over a lot of boundaries that would have horrified by college-age self, and only because I felt I had no choice. So, with that said...

I think the critique that “smart people are just better than most at coming up with reasons to act and believe as they like” carries more weight when it's not coming from a religion as thoroughly fideistic as American Calvinism. There's a long-standing tendency within Calvinism to exclude the purported character of God (and the nature of Scripture) from scrutiny and reasoned inquiry, and this stems from the Calvinist conviction that human reason is fallen and therefore unreliable. Which is perfectly fine if you're convinced (as many people are) that you just happened to be born into the One True Faith, but if you have to decide between rival interpretations, you need smart people. Otherwise, you're not issuing a call for humility; you're committing intellectual suicide.

Hart's universalism was, for many years, something I bracketed away as "well, that's just his weird thing, and I don't really care what he believes." Turns out it's hard to be neutral when one side of the debate has such uniformly terrible arguments. The attempts by Calvinists to attack universalism have been especially telling, since they always (and I do mean *always*) are phrased in such a way as to rebound catastrophically onto their makers, if only they would stop and listen to what they were saying. Which brings me to your friend's remarks on parallels between Hart's thought and Calvinism. The problem is that we're back with fideism disguised as humility, because these arguments about the eschaton being "good in the fullest sense of the word" and "salvation belong[ing] to God" are, within Calvinism, attempts to dodge arguments about the objectional nature of eternal damnation. If all they really amounted to was "I don't know how things will end, but it will be Good," well, fine, but that's precisely the opposite of their meaning. What they really mean is "I know for certain that some (or most) people will be eternally damned, and that will somehow turn out to be okay because God is good." This also applies to the way fundamentalists of all stripes refuse to call evil "evil" in Scripture because if God did it, and God is good, it was must be good too. Hart is right that this is precisely the opposite way that we ordinarily reason. If someone told me that my mom had murdered one of her coworkers, I wouldn't say, "Well, I know my mom is a good person, so murdering her coworker must have been good in some mysterious way." No, I'd say, "It is not possible that my mom murdered a coworker; you're lying." And Hart is also right that this was once a perfectly respectable way to do scriptural interpretation.

Here's something I will grant from your friend's critique: I think Hart's training in religious studies (as well as his 19th-century Romantic sensibility) leads him to romanticize pagan religions because of their fairy-friendly worldviews. People who don't have first-hand experience with animistic religions often don't realize how preoccupied they are with the manipulation of spiritual power, and just how terrifying it is to live in a world where nymphs and satyrs curse your children and ruin your crops instead of just dancing daintily to the pipes of Pan by gently flowing streams. It's entirely possible that Hart would be perfectly willing to grant all that, and I know he doesn't take kindly to people critiquing his lack of equal time for problems he doesn't think are equally threatening (are Taoist animists debating turning America into a theocracy?), but I'm willing to back your friend up on this one. I think Christians owe ethical monotheism at least a little partisanship, even if we shouldn't resort to demonizing other religions.

Here's something else I'll grant: what Hart believes is definitely incompatible with what most conservative American Christians believe about God and the Bible. He doesn't believe Scripture is inerrant, he doesn't think Tradition is inerrant (although he obviously thinks that it got a lot of things right, just not eternal damnation), and he's waaaay more syncretistic than most Christians are comfortable being. He's doesn't do biblical interpretation according to the historical-grammatical method, he doesn't think the Bible is free of contradictions, and he doesn't mind borrowing concepts from other religions if he thinks they are true. But, I think he's right that all of these positions would have been much less objectionable in early centuries of Christianity than they are today. There was simply a more adventurous spirit in the church's early centuries, and we'd benefit from bringing that back.

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Steven Berger's avatar

Perhaps, for good reasons. However, he may hold some personal opinions via a vis Orthodoxy that might be questionable.

We should certainly ask those questions while at the same time earnestly seeking the ‘Catholic Consciousness’ of the Church.

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