Is David Bentley Hart a Cultured Despiser of the Majority of Christians?

Part one of two with an open letter to Daniel, my admired and beloved friend

Bruce Rebold and Tony Castellanos as Quiixote and Sancho.

Daniel, yes, David Bentley Hart was a visiting professor at Providence College not far from you for a little while where he held the Robert J. Randall Chair in Christian Culture. Your incisive comment over a month ago (October 17) on one of my social media posts brought me much joy and has been on my mind a great deal. I’ve started to write a reply many times now with some of these attempts reaching astonishing lengths. Puting together a response has been a refreshing exercise as well as a complicated one because your comments and questions pulled so effectively and wonderfully at several heartstrings. This is not only a tribute to your rhetorical and pastoral powers (which are as human and substantial as they have always been) but also to the deep friendship that I remember so gratefully from the formative years of our youth and young adulthood. Your kind comment and our shared love have forced me to pause and to consider my Calvinist roots with fondness and gratitude all over again. Since our friendship reaches back across so many years and into the living faith of my entire extended family (which, given that my parents raised nine of us lively folks, is no small assembly today) as well as vast portions of my current professional network with my job serving tens of thousands of classical and Christian educators across the United States, it has felt like my attempts to consider any facet of your questions reverberates across astonishingly comprehensive realms that are as personally and professionally sensitive as they can possibly be.

You have forced me to be a little honest with myself about the reality of having walked across some real boundary lines in the past decade or so of my life. I suppose that there are two boundary lines worth identifying as such, although they are rather different in nature from each other. Your comment and questions astutely alluded to this question of a second boundary line fairly directly, so that has had to register in my ruminations on a response to you. However, before I get down to work in trying to answer your questions, it feels appropriate to note the sweet irony of the fact that the first occasion on which David Bentley Hart contacted me to comment on something that I had written was in response to an essay in which our friendship, Daniel, featured somewhat prominently.

This was a little over five years ago, on July 17, 2019, within a very short email that Hart might have regretted sending on a few subsequent occasions:

By the way, Jesse, I was given a link to your blog article about my Sloterdijk piece and the Monkey King (etc.). It was very well written and, to my great delight, gets me right.

This essay I had written was largely about the Eastern Christian tradition of the fool for Christ which I expanded to include “the likes of Ezekiel baking bread over a fire made of human dung, Diogenes of Sinope, the court jester, the troubadour and the mendicant friars.” In this catalog of foolishness, I turned, finally, to you and me and our college band of brothers:

Certain versions of this ideal are, of course, famously and indiscriminately popular. I recall seeing the Man of La Mancha during the 1998 season of Canada’s Stratford Festival with a group of young college friends. We walked the streets of Stratford for days afterward—arm in arm—singing “The Impossible Dream” at the maximum output that we could produce from ill-trained diaphragms and vocal cords.

To fight the unbeatable foe
To bear with unbearable sorrow
And to run where the brave dare not go
To right the unrightable wrong
…To fight for the right
Without question or pause
To be willing to march, march into hell
For that heavenly cause

The whimsy of which Hart speaks in the Taoist tradition of the mad monk shares something of this or so my friends and I liked to hope at least. We called our little band of college fellows the Dúnedain and even practiced communism together for one summer (opening a single bank account between the crew of us into which we all deposited the paychecks from our various summer jobs).

You heard the stories, I am sure, from that summer when Josh, Zach, Joel, and I required an elderly lady at the bank in Lawton, Pennsylvania to call her manager for help in creating a joint bank account providing equal depositing and withdrawal rights to all four of us? At one point, our employer gave a raise to Zach as he made him the foreman of our crew only to be left shaking his head when we all burst out cheering over the fact that Zach’s raise was, literally, a pay increase for all of us. You were working somewhere else that summer, as I recall, but I have some memory of sitting in the branches of an American sycamore tree with you before that summer and talking about the value of getting some experience in life as communists to the best of our ability. It all likely had something to do with our mixture of love and consternation over Dr. Mattsson-Bozé. At any rate, I am rather sure that your arm was in mine after seeing the Man of La Mancha during the 1998 season of Canada’s Stratford Festival.

And none of this is incidental to my task here as I try to get back to work with earnest answers to your earnest questions from last month. At some very simple level, I am seeking to grow more idiotically demanding regarding the goodness of God in my old age than we managed to be even in those joyful college years. I have written recently that the past must be entirely redone and altered by all of us in order for this world to eventually reflect God’s will. What could be more absurd than the demand that fallen time be malleable? And this kind of thinking has come, in large part (although certainly not only), from my reading of Hart and related material. His 2019 opinion essay “Quentin Tarantino’s Cosmic Justice” in The New York Times is a great favorite and a concise summary of Hart’s merciless insistence upon goodness and beauty as the truth of things (which Hart claims is a “metaphysical disposition” of a “more ancient pedigree” than most to be found running around today):

Goodness, love and moral beauty are substantial and eternal realities that attest to themselves quite immediately to any rational nature, without the need for any edifying “contrast” to make them intelligible. No one, I think, actually learns pity from cruelty. The “ontological status” of evil (to use the jargon of the philosophers) is one of pure contingency, inevitable perhaps, but adding nothing necessary to the form and fabric of reality. After all, a good that required evil to become actual would always be only a conditional good at best, one probably not worth its price. Those who argue for the necessity of evil in the abstract, surely, would also generally lament any specific evil in the concrete, and would gladly unmake many evils of the past if only they could. But then, once one grants that it would be virtuous to undo any past evil in particular, one really cannot plausibly argue for evil’s metaphysical necessity in general. And who would be so callous or morally confused as not to want to go back and prevent the evils of the past?

...At one level, the willful, slightly perverse pretense that the past did not happen as it did may be only an impotent gesture of resentment at reality; at another, however, it is an authentically moral defiance of any “wisdom” that tries to make peace with the sheer meaningless contingency of evil. Contrary to the prudent “realism” of those who burden the world with theodicies, it is this moral longing for the counterfactual — for the total cosmic justice that history rarely embodies — that informs and animates the most truly redemptive forms of religious, philosophical and social moral yearning.

But enough grandstanding and long quotations. I should move on from cataloging foolishness of various kinds to cataloging your questions. You opened evocatively by quoting a couple of Dominican friars who were staggering out from a David Bentley Hart lecture at Providence College well before its conclusion and muttering, “I have no idea.” You then identified with this sentiment yourself as far as your own encounters with Hart’s work have gone (which you referenced under two headings: the quotes from him that you read in my social media postings as well as “the bits of his work” that you have read on your own). Searching for the specifics related to Hart on which you “have no idea” by outlining the rest of your comment, I find:

• Your suspicion that Hart thinks:

  • That there is “no hell or eternal punishment (except for bad art).”

  • And also that “God does not judge false religion (like the Taiwanese animist festival you showed me video of when we were students)” but God “does judge Calvinists.”

• Your point that you “do not think very much of intelligence, as such” given that “smart people are just better than most at coming up with reasons to act and believe as they like.”

• Your suspicion that “the only people Hart really thinks of as reprobate and beyond hope are the narrow-minded” along with your poetic parallelism while expanding upon this point (which contained my favorite bit of your comment which is now the title of this essay): “he may not be a cultured despiser of Christianity, but he sure seems to be a cultured despiser of the majority of Christians.”

• Your point that, “when it comes to final judgment, there may be more overlap between serious Calvinists and Hart's version of Orthodoxy than we think (you can correct me, but I don’t think he speaks for most of Orthodoxy)” given that:

  • “A God big enough to blame for the pain in the world is (as [Timothy] Keller used to put it) big enough to have a plan that can make it into something good” and that “what that plan is, is at least somewhat hidden from us, but it is *good* in the fullest sense of the word.”

  • And that “a serious Calvinist does not think he can see, beyond the shadow of a doubt, the fate of any given individual” because “salvation belongs to our God.”

• Your counterpoint that “and yet: ‘their smoke goes up forever and ever,’ and ‘their worm turns and does not die.’ ‘Those who make [idols] shall become like them.’ There are those God ‘hates,’ whom his ‘soul abhors.’”

• And your closing invitation for me to refer you “to writings (his or, preferably, yours) where the apparent contradictions between Hart's views and those of the dominant streams of Christian theology and the Bible itself are resolved” as long as I “make sure it is simple enough for a Reformed Presbyterian pastor to understand.”

In an effort to distill this down as much as possible without omitting anything, I hear you wondering:

• About who Hart would think of as being judged by God and how much this might overlap with those whom Hart himself despises (i.e. to what extent Hart is “a cultured despiser of the majority of Christians”).

• If Hart “speaks for most of Orthodoxy” or not.

• If there might be some positive “overlap between serious Calvinists and Hart’s version of Orthodoxy” that holds out something of a hopeful universalism.

• How any hope that we might hold is contradicted by “the Dominical utterances” as C.S. Lewis called them when he wished that he could join both the Apostle Paul and his beloved George MacDonald as universalists but found that he could not because of so many of Christ’s teachings.

• If I have anything I’ve written anything where “the apparent contradictions between Hart’s views and those of the dominant streams of Christian theology and the Bible itself are resolved.”

From the top, then: Who does Hart judge and despise, and how Orthodox is he? Your comment was in response to my history of sharing Hart quotes for several years now. However, specifically, you commented on this quotation: “We can rejoice that God will not unite all of history’s many strands in one great synthesis, but will judge much of history false and damnable.” This is a quote from this article in First Things that overlapped with much from a column for The Wall Street Journal that eventually grew into The Doors of the Sea: Where Was God in the Tsunami? (Eerdmans, 2005) which is the book by Hart that I most highly and unreservedly recommend to anyone. It is one of several passages that could be cited in support of the fact that Hart does believe in hell and judgment. Another that I’ve shared once or twice is from the start of his 2019 lecture on “A Different Class of the Imprisoned” at Notre Dame:

There’s a rumor going around that I don’t believe in hell. I very much do. I just believe in the version of it that you find in Origen and Isaac of Nineveh and—who’s that guy?—the Apostle Paul.

This contrasts with a recent quote from Archbishop Alexander Golitzin (a shepherd in the Orthodox Christian jurisdiction to which my family’s parish belongs): “God doesn’t create hell. God doesn’t create the punishing fire. God doesn’t punish. God doesn’t judge.” For more context, which is rather helpful, this is from “The Fire of the Divine Presence” interview with Archbishop Alexander (that I have written briefly about here).

Yes, Hart does judge bad art. He does not, however, judge Calvinists so much as Calvinism. And his harshness toward Calvinism is substantially surpassed by his harshness toward manualist or two-tier Thomism. Of course, his harshness is rather expansive. In an interview with The Christian Century in the past year, he declared:

For starters, Tillich was a joke. He couldn’t have made it as a philosopher, with his watery, middle-Schelling approach to things, and he wrote these huge, vapid books about a religion that he only barely knew anything about. And Bultmann’s attempt to reduce everything down to apocalyptic inner illumination simply because the cosmology of the first century doesn’t match the cosmology of the 20th—I mean, it’s just the Protestant principle reaching its reductio ad absurdum.

In that interview, he also dismissed “Schillebeeckx’s notion, where everybody gets together after the crucifixion and discusses it and Easter becomes salvation through group therapy.” Some of his most scathing criticisms have been reserved for the ideas of New Atheism, Donald Trump, and anyone unable to recognize that reading about how “water spirits and magical marine beings of every kind are real and numerous and, in certain circumstances, somewhat dangerous” comes with a “real moral imperative in not dismissing such tales as lies or delusions” (The Lamp: A Catholic Journal of Literature, Science, the Fine Arts, Etc., 2020). But this is a hopeless task. Hart is scathingly critical of a preposterously long (almost endless) list of ideas, and his criticisms do occasionally cross the line into personal attacks despite his frequent protestations that he is seeking to eviscerate ideas and not people.

I’m at an advantage in seeing Hart’s humanity and even humility having watched him drive away in an old minivan (bedecked with a small Maryland state flag in the space for the front license plate) after a delightful afternoon and evening together in person where I got to watch him interact with a high school student, high school teachers, and two members of a camera crew. I might also turn to his writing such as his book Roland in Moonlight where we follow him through sickness and the loss of both his parents as they finished their lives under the care of Hart and his family. Hart is not shy about some of his own failures and struggles: “Thoughts of suicide became frequent and, frankly, deeply appealing.” Or when he admits that he again “slipped back into habits of despair, anger, and insomnia” and found that his dog was his wife’s best ally in life. But to try to stay focussed, there is even some evidence of Hart loving flesh and blood Calvanists. He recently spent several days with a host of Calvinists in Australia and very much enjoyed it. It delighted him that he was asked to speak at a chapel service for a Presbyterian girls high school with several hundred young Calvinists in attendance.

Anyway, your specific points were just illustrative, of course, and the impression you have is certainly widespread and prevailing. Moreover, it is more than justified from any occasional foray into Hart’s writings. Separately, you go on to wonder if Hart would judge “false religion (like the Taiwanese animist festival you showed me video of when we were students).” He has shared stories of demon possession that he experienced personally among acquaintances within extended family circles as a young man. He has forthrightly declared the realities of spiritual evil more exhaustively and directly than any other living writer that I’ve found. I could give many examples, but this hopefully makes the point:

I know three African priests—one Ugandan and two Nigerian—who are immensely educated and sophisticated scholars (linguists, philosophers, and historians all) and who are also unshakably convinced that miracles, magic, and spiritual warfare are manifestly real aspects of daily life, of which they themselves have had direct and incontrovertible experience on a number of occasions. All three are, of course, creatures of their cultures, no less than we are of ours; but I am not disposed to believe that their cultures are somehow more primitive or unreasoning than ours. It is true they come from nations that enjoy nothing like our economic and technological advantages; but, since these advantages are as likely to distract us from reality as to grant us any special insight into it, that fact scarcely rises to the level of irrelevance. Truth be told, there is no remotely plausible reason—apart from a preference for our own presuppositions over those of other peoples—why the convictions and experiences of an African polyglot and philosopher, whose pastoral and social labors oblige him to be engaged immediately in the concrete realities of hundreds of lives, should command less rational assent from us than the small, unproven, doctrinaire certitudes of persons who spend their lives in supermarkets and before television screens and immured in the sterile, hallucinatory seclusion of their private studies.

Yes, Hart is a scholar of religion and considers many great human wisdom traditions to have much to offer in helping Christians to more and more fully expound and express the truths of Incarnation and Pentecost (just as in the case of Neoplatonism when it became a rich stream within Christian theology as it was overthrown early in the story of Christianity). However, this does not make him unable to judge false religions. He has condemned much that is false in many religions, and I admire the fact that he is, arguably, most critical of his own religion.

And this brings me to your key point in your opening remarks as you suspect that Hart is “a cultured despiser of the majority of Christians.” I find it a little frustrating but understandable that almost everyone I know would entirely agree with your assessment. Why is it that G. K. Chesterton receives adoration when he dismisses all of us Christians as abject failures while Hart is condemned for doing much the same? There is no other conclusion than our patheticness when Chesterton quips: “The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried.” Yet no one hates Chesterton for it. Of course, Hart is far more relentless and expansive and specific (and hysterically on the mark) with his bombastic tirades. He also has a grasp of history that is terribly unflattering to Americans specifically. In his 2017 lecture entitled “Orthodoxy in America and America’s Orthodoxies” at Fordham University, Hart had a few positive notes within what was, generally, a devastating critique:

To be American is to be the deracinated child of some other land or people or several other lands and peoples. Our own national identity is quite often a sort of bright, garish, fabulous surface that we spread thinly over forgotten depths. Our national narrative is essentially an idea, never fully realized, of course, but able to keep us born aloft above an abyss of immense historical oblivion. To be truly American in the most extreme way would be to be a kind of Proteus, capable of becoming just about anything. And that may amount to a kind of cultural genius. I’m not criticizing it.

...America was born in a flight from the Old World’s thrones and altars, the corrupt accommodations between spiritual authority and worldly power, and the confusion of reference for God with servility before princes. As a political project in its own right, the United States was the first Western nation explicitly founded on principles requiring no official allegiance between religious confession and secular government. We tend to forget, we’re the first laicist nation.

Even if this had not been so, the ever greater religious heterogeneity of America over the course of its history would surely sooner or later have made such an alliance absurdly impractical, and so in fact America was established as the first truly modern nation, consciously the first to dissociate its constitutional order from the political mythologies of a long and disintegrating Christendom and the first predominantly Christian country to place itself under, at most, God’s general providential supervision but not under the command of any of His officially recognized lieutenants. The nation began, one could argue, from a place that other nations had not yet reached, and yet, when one considers the results of this odd apocalyptic liberty from history, it’s rather astonishing because, though it arose out of the end of Christendom, it somehow avoided the religious and cultural fate of the rest of the modern West. Far from blazing the trail into the post-Christian future, America went quite a different way, down paths that no other Western society would even tread or even know how to find. Whereas European society, in a varying speed but fairly uniformly, experienced the end of Christendom simultaneously as the decline of faith—as the church went, so one’s belief—in America the opposite happened. And here the paucity of institutional mediations between the transcendent and the imminent went hand in hand with the general, largely formless, and yet utterly irrepressible intensification of faith: rather than an exhaustion of religious longing, it’s revival, rather than a long nocturnal descent into disenchantment, a new dawning of early Christianity’s elated expectation of the Kingdom.

...It’s a nation, more constructed than cultivated, built around a political and social project always somewhat in flux but also more or less relentlessly oriented toward a future generated out of its own native ideals and values rather than out of any traditions it might have inherited from the past lines that its peoples left behind in coming here. Moreover, it intends the future not only for itself but also, in a distant and inevitable sense, for peoples everywhere. This is the great experiment of a democratic Republic. And in that sense America is not only an ideology but something, at times, for some, approaching a religion with its own sacred writ, its founding fathers, its radiant eschatological visions, its hymns and prayers and benedictions. And it has its special national values, many of which, ...being essentially Libertarian in form (in the American sense of Libertarian), are at times rather hard to reconcile with aspects of the gospel that seem fairly foundational. But it’s a stupendous and beguiling reality as well—enormous and seductively grand and gloriously improbable.

...In a sense the great dream or romance of America is the prospect of a people without a history. A humanity that has, as none before it ever did, escaped the prison of memory. Hence, though there is nothing like a distinctive American civilization, perhaps. There definitely is a distinctive American Christianity. It tends to be something fluid, scattered, fragmentary, fissile, either mildly or exorbitantly heretical. But it can nevertheless justly be called the American religion, and it’s a powerful creed. It’s for one thing a style of faith lacking admittedly in beautiful material forms or coherent institutional structures not by accident but essentially. Its inexpressiveness in the civic form, I mean of just beautiful civic spaces, is a consequence not simply of cultural privation or frontier simplicity, of modern utilitarianism or some lingering Puritan reserve toward ecclesial rank and architectural ostentation but also a profound and radical resistance to outward forms. It is in its purest form—which we’ve seen flare up at various times in the history of the country—its Great Awakenings so to speak—a religion of the book, private revelation, oracular wisdom, even emotional rapture, sometimes wonderful emotional rapture. It’s not one of tradition, hierarchy or public creeds.

Hart is considering a story that overlaps a good bit with my studies at Saint Andrews University in Scotland of the history behind our nation’s founding, and I really appreciate Hart’s drive to situate America and American Christianity historically. It is not a criticism of everyday Christians or of Americans, but it does give a strong feeling of being against “the majority of Christians.” Still, regardless of the discomfort, some understanding of this story has the potential to give all that is best about America back to us. I wrote very recently that we are a nation founded after the Enlightenment that came to exist amid a mixture of deists and supernaturalists: those who thought of God as irrelevant (or even harmful) to our national purpose versus those who thought that God has intervened in history to establish a new nation with the potential to be a great blessing and a light in the world. I said as well that this all relates to how our nation was conceived after the end of civilizational Christianity at the Peace of Westphalia in October 1648 when the West replaced its increasingly voluntarist misconception of God with a voluntarist misconception of the state—both of which confusions have been increasingly hidden in subsequent years beneath a voluntarist misconception of the autonomous human person. The idea that we are functions of our wills instead of our vision has a lot to do with our idea that God is a maker of rational machinery, and that our humanity essentially consists in our capacity to make independent decisions. At the Peace of Westphalia, as the dying Christian West invented the secular nation state, we replaced the age-old networks of sacred authorities who sought together for visions of divine life (and who were found in all human societies concretely as extended family networks, guilds of craft and learning, religious traditions, and various governing classes) with the theoretically collective rational will of autonomous individuals embodied by the singular will of the nation state. It seems clear that this rather desperate maneuver was a mistake, and a mistake that will eventually require either a bottom up or a top down realignment of much of the legal and economic structures to which it has given rise worldwide.

This is a bleak and melodramatic account. However, it is one I find helpful, and it is in the light of this history that Hart makes his very blunt and belligerent comments about Christianity in America:

I’m not sure Christianity will ever reach these shores, but, if it does, it’s going to find a very intractable people here, very hard to convert. [Interview shared here from 2018.]

Contrary to conventional wisdom, Christianity has never really taken deep root in America or had any success in forming American consciousness; in its place, we have invented a kind of Orphic mystery religion of personal liberation, fecundated and sustained by a cult of Mammon. [Essay published here from 2020.]

It is my conviction that Christianity never really reached America. [Video interview from 2021.]

Christianity never succeeded in America. Most Americans think of themselves as Christians. But the only religion in America that ever flourished was America. And it twists everything into its own image. [Interview printed here from 2021.]

America uniquely is the land where Christianity went to die, and the proof that it died here is that it could be so easily supplanted by a completely different religion called “Christianity,” and yet no one noticed the absurdity of it. [Interview printed here from 2022.]

Hart would be far more helpful to everyone if he would explain himself more fully when making such comments. However, as I think about the greatest Christian witnesses in American history—found in books such as A Fire in the Bones (1995) by Albert J. Raboteau or The Hidden Wound (1970) by Wendell Berry—and I consider that such a difficult message may very well be the most patriotic one that we as Americans can share as well as the greatest means that we have of recognizing the light of Jesus Christ that America has been and may continue to be to the world. Time and again, I find tremendous resonances between Hart’s accounts of Christian history and the accounts found in other authors that I love such as Robert Louis Wilken’s The Myth of Christian Beginnings (Notre Dame, 1971) or Sergei Bulgakov’s The Bride of the Lamb. It is a difficult step from the vision of Christian history that I grew up with into that of Wilken’s The Myth of Christian Beginnings, but it is far more in line with the very Christian view of history that I think C.S. Lewis expounds in his much-hated essay “Historicism” (1950) or that we see in Hart’s statement: “What is history other than exile from paradise?” (Which probably only makes complete sense within a meta-historical conception of the human fall such as that defended by Hart as I have expounded upon here.)

At any rate, Hart is heart-rendingly patriotic. He writes that “love of country is most ennobling, I think, when it is most concrete, and when it rises up out of local loyalties, particular experiences, and natural customs.” He goes on in this essay to list a stirring collection of such particularities, and all of his obsessions with America and American Christianity evince a great love for both.

With all this, however, I suppose that I’ve still not given a straight-forward answer to the concern that Hart is “a cultured despiser of the majority of Christians.” I don’t think he is. We correspond the tiniest bit now and then by email, and I have enjoyed a Divine Liturgy and a meal in person as well recently with his older brother, Addison, who just received chrismation this past week as an Orthodox Christian. I don’t think that Addison would have that particular concern either about his little brother although he would likely agree with you to some degree regarding how “smart people are just better than most at coming up with reasons to act and believe as they like.” Part of the challenge with the idea of being a cultured despiser of the majority of Christians, also might be that Orthodox Christianity tends to be fairly dismissive of their own everyday piety as well as being the typical disgruntled minority with a bit of a chip on their shoulders I suppose. We’re kind of an ornery little crowd in some sense that I mostly find endearing (as well as somewhat familiar having grown up within the Orthodox Presbyterian Church which is even more of an insular minority on the American landscape perhaps although not as outlandishly foreign).

But I realize that I’m now at ten single-spaced pages and I’ve only covered one of the five bullet points that I derived from your comment. This is ludicrous and inhuman of me. Before I wrap up for now, however, allow me to make quick work of the second bullet point: the question of if Hart “speaks for most of Orthodoxy” or not. He does not. He’s been declared a heretic on the topic of universalism by several Orthodox priests (I can count three off the top of my head, and I’ve written a bit here about two of them). In his defense on this topic, there has only been a public statement mentioning Hart by name positively from the Archbishop Alexander Golitzin who I mentioned above. Despite this, Hart is not unique in Orthodox circles by any means. Hart has declared Sergei Bulgakov to be “the greatest systematic theologian of the twentieth century.” Of course, Bulgakov is also a controversial figure on more than one topic including as a very thoroughgoing and outspoken universalist (in addition to his famous or infamous Sophiology). There are many admirers of Bulgakov and of universalism in Orthodox Christian circles, however, so it’s not “beyond the pale.” Hart does combine his universalism with a fervent support for female ordination and several other topics (such as this) that do make him a distinct minority overall among Orthodox theologians, even worldwide, but most definitely within American Orthodoxy which tends to be filled with traditionalists escaping the erosion of faith and practice within other church traditions. Still, I could list a sizable number of American Orthodox theologians and writers who would be very much in the same boat as Hart generally speaking. A few would be: Bradley Jersak, Aristotle Papanikolaou, George E. Demacopoulos, Scott Cairns, and Fr. Aidan Kimel. Still, your point is, simply put, a valid one. Hart’s thought is not typical of most Orthodox Christian thinkers in several ways, and this is worthy of much consideration and care on my own part as I deeply love and appreciate the Orthodox Christian faith within which I and my immediate family have been so blessed to find ourselves.

However, I will leave off here and try to make much shorter and more efficient work of your much more ponderous and impossible final queries that I have condensed above into these last three bullet points:

• If there might be some positive “overlap between serious Calvinists and Hart’s version of Orthodoxy” that holds out something of a hopeful universalism.

• How any hope that we might hold is contradicted by “the Dominical utterances” as C.S. Lewis called them when he wished that he could join both the Apostle Paul and his beloved George MacDonald as universalists but found that he could not because of so many of Christ’s teachings.

• If I have anything I’ve written anything where “the apparent contradictions between Hart’s views and those of the dominant streams of Christian theology and the Bible itself are resolved.”

To be continued... [Updated: see here.]