Jesse, thank you for this informed summary of DBH’s work. I read his interview - what we think we know about God... - with great interest, particularly when it turned to the topic of dogma and tradition.
It seems to me that Eastern Orthodoxy for DBH is a sort of “best that we can do”. Or perhaps his disdain is for the the current dominant iteration of the tradition - neo-patristic? fundamentalist? Again, to speak personally, I am not (yet) Orthodox, and several of my hang ups seem to be in line with DBH’s critique(s).
I imagine that DBH discerns within an EO - with its minimal dogmatic formulations and its embracing of mystery - a generosity that facilitates a more syncretistic approach to the faith. I guess, as an outsider looking in - close to the periphery as a catechumen - I wonder again, how this capaciousness within patristic/orthodox thought squares with a rather rigid and proscribed tradition that sees itself - or so I have heard - in possession of the ‘full truth’.
I sometimes wonder whether one can be theologically EO and yet be working this out in a less formal historical setting.
Anyway, there’s a lot to unpack in my ramblings. I suppose my ultimate question is where does one find a manifestation of Orthodoxy that can handle the justified critiques of DBH?
Good questions with no one answer. It’s a big mess for sure, and other callings might very well make sense. Hart still rhapsodizes about the beauty and depth of Orthodox Christian worship (when talking in Australia to Protestants recently) and about the radiant transfiguration of Bulgakov on his death bed. Finding a good priest and parish these days, however, is by no means a given.
To be fair, I have one of these - a good priest, I mean. I am on my way back from a book launch of the late Met. Anthony Bloom’s lectures on Beauty and Truth, where my priest gave the introductory speech and sat alongside Rowan Williams as the key-note speaker. Wonderful stuff. I’m thankful for your writing
I was received into the Eastern Orthodox Church a few weeks ago, after a meandering journey of fits
and starts.
Regarding remaining wholly Protestant on certain areas, I don’t think I’ve ever been wholly Protestant about anything. From the outset, I found icon veneration and prayers to the Theotokos, for example, beautiful affirmations of a rich and deep incarnational theology. For me, my issues were more around exclusive claims to be the one true church etc. which I still think are ultimately misleading given the historical development of doctrine and tradition. I suppose, with that in mind, I’m in the minority camp amongst fellow Orthodox believers, but I don’t really mind. I find the account of tradition espoused by the likes of David Hart in his Tradition and Apocalypse a highly thoughtful and satisfying construal of the difference between a living tradition and an ossified traditionalism.
I think in the end I was one of the lucky ones who managed to avoid a lot of the excessive dogmatism that seems to plague American Orthodoxy; it’s in England too of course, particularly amongst disillusioned young men. My real life experience of Orthodoxy in the UK was marked by generosity and openness. What goes on online is very often a different matter entirely, but then again, Orthodoxy, in its emphasis on embodied and sacramental worship, resists such shallow and digitised
presentations of the faith.
There is far more that could be said, but i hope the above is helpful in some way.
I haven’t read Tradition and Apocalypse but it is slowly working its way up my priority list.
I do appreciate your response. It is comforting to me,in a way, to know that there are others who stay convicted on minority positions.
EO exclusivity claims and anathemas are certainly issues I need to further study, but your story gives me motivation to continue those studies. Thanks for your time!
I would like to know more about Hart's interest in Vedanta. What has he found in the Indian spiritual tradition that could not be found in the christian literature that he knows so well? What would be his introductory sources?
Hart has written that Vedanta can potentially help Christians to deepen and better articulate our theology of incarnation and our Christology just as neo-Platonist thought did in the early years of the faith. He loved Vedanta at a very young age as I recall, before becoming Orthodox Christian. I don’t know as much about this aspect of his thought, however. There is some recommended reading on the topic at the end of his Experience of God if I’m recalling correctly.
Thanks for this. On multiple occasions I’ve found myself thinking how great it would be if a publisher were to compile and edit a boxed set or series containing “The Complete Published Works of David Bentley Hart,” in a beautifully bound and packaged form, of course. I suppose this would be a challenge logistically given the many different publishers DBH has worked with and through over the years, but a man can dream.
You're comparing David Bentley Hart to 道濟 Daoji (also known colloquially as 濟公 Ji Gong or "Lord Ji," to use his title from Hangzhou and Peking Opera)? Jesus effin' Christ, the two have nothing in common! Unless you want to compare Daoji's Robin Hood-esque efforts to Hart's liberating candy bars from the supermarkets of northern Indiana! (A dead end, of course. Hart does this by purchasing generous quantities of sugary sustenance and not by simply swiping them while seriously intoxicated, as Daoji might have done!) What on earth do the two men share besides descent from apes? A crippling addiction to liquid water and gaseous oxygen?
Like most of Hart's fans, you probably wrote this in a fugue state of cross-cultural reference in imitation of 'the master' and, like him, thought little of the actual references. (I mean, who actually looks up Hart's references? Well, people who cease to be fans, that's who!) You can do better. You could begin by finding better philosophers!
Lively sentiments. For my part, I grew up in a rural Chinese community speaking two dialects of Chinese for the first two years of my life, and I stand by my comparison.
" I grew up in a rural Chinese community speaking two dialects of Chinese for the first two years of my life, and I stand by my comparison."
And? That doesn't add an iota of substance to your claim. I live in China, in Hangzhou, and when I ask most people about Daoji, they say, "Who?" Being a native speaker born in China doesn't make you an automatic expert on anything. (Especially with the current education system.) The fact that you couldn't list a single example or make an argument to support the wild claim shows that you just don't know. I know you assumed that saying "I speak two dialects" should shut me up, but you also know it's just a dumb claim. Plenty of native speakers of Greek have very choice words to say about Hart's translation of the New Testament, but Hart does know his Greek New Testament better than most native speakers of demotic Greek!
Comparing Hart to Daoji is like comparing Trump to the Monkey King. You are free to make any analogies you like, but some are just plain stupid.
I am looking to understand how Universalism goes together with Eastern Orthodoxy (or perhaps Catholicism).
It seems to me that in Eastern Orthodoxy one must adhere to the living tradition, which I interpret to be something akin to 'the majority (or cumulative if that's possible) opinion of the people within church', especially the saints. Also, this tradition doesn't change. From what I have picked up, the majority of the fathers were not universalists, which in this definition makes the living (or even holy) tradition non-universalist.
Has DBH written anything on this topic or is there anything you can tell me or direct me towards, so that I can learn to understand how one falls within the greater christian tradition without giving up on universalism?
Please note that I have read nothing from DBH. I tried to avoid his work, because I tried to become a non-universalist, which has made me all the more radical.
Hart is an Orthodox Christian, and they consider questions of eschatology to be almost entirely within the realm of theologoumenon. In the most recent public consideration of the universalism question among Orthodox Christians in the United States, Archbishop Alexander (Golitzin) was asked directly if universalism is a heresy, and he said that he did not know if it was or not. See here:
The Fifth Ecumenical Council is the only question for Orthodox Christians, and Hart would brush that concern aside for the kinds of reasons given here:
Hart has said many times that Paul and all (or almost all) of the New Testament authors are clearly universalist, that it is very reasonable to consider (with good evidence from Basil the Great and Augustine) that the majority of Christian teachers in the first three centuries of the church or so were universalist. As for holy tradition, Hart has written about that in his book Tradition and Apocalypse. I've written a little about that book in various places such as this:
Just a foolish joke of my own regarding a spat that has sadly taken shape over the years. Hart has grumbled about them for some time after the founding editor (Richard John Neuhaus, who Hart appreciated) passed away and Hart stepped away from his beloved and popular writing gig there of many years. Subsequently, First Things has published a rather long list of extraordinarily harsh reviews of a few books (some of which I've written a little about as being rather ignorant, see link at bottom of comment). There is also some material with First Things in recent years with a Christian nationalist bent, and Hart is vehemently opposed to such material. None of this is any of my business, obviously, but I've notice that Hart leaves First Things conspicuously unnamed from time to time when talking about material of his that they first published.
Isn’t this the guy that told people to stay away from the Gnostics for 10 years while he was working on his own gnostic novel now for sale on Amazon? Isn’t this the guy that in his own description for his own novel compares himself to Nabokov and Humberto Eco?
Don’t read the gnostics !
Buy my Gnostic novel !
When I need to pass out, I put on a David Bentley Hart lecture. His condescending dry blah is maybe the most arrogant bloviating in theology.
Oh- and he suggests Jesus is Lucifer in his NT footnotes.
The cover of his translation of the New Testament looks like a poster for the Blair witch project with his big fat stupid name on the top. I told him to take it down. He shouldn’t have his name at the top of the New Testament cover. The second printing, which you can purchase for another $30, took his name off the top of the cover but left it on the cover. The audacity is limitless.
There are more than one I’m pretty sure. It’s mentioned in the Roland in Moonlight book as well as in at least one interview (that I could probably track down if helpful).
To be clear, recommendation might be a little strong as a term. It was along the lines of “this is the kind of thing that Christians should really know more about and reflect upon.”
“There's a book by someone named Father Tiso on the rainbow body [Rainbow Body and Resurrection] in which he talks about a phenomenon within one school of Tibetan Buddhism about post-mortem experiences of resurrected, so to speak, [bodies]. [These were] lamas or teachers who had bodies that disappeared, and he tries to suggest that maybe this is what happened to Jesus. I always think that people should read books like that just for the shift in paradigm.”
[DBH, 1:03:29 to 1:04:20 from the full recording of The Christian Century interview, timestamps likely in line with YouTube.]
Jesse, thank you for this informed summary of DBH’s work. I read his interview - what we think we know about God... - with great interest, particularly when it turned to the topic of dogma and tradition.
It seems to me that Eastern Orthodoxy for DBH is a sort of “best that we can do”. Or perhaps his disdain is for the the current dominant iteration of the tradition - neo-patristic? fundamentalist? Again, to speak personally, I am not (yet) Orthodox, and several of my hang ups seem to be in line with DBH’s critique(s).
I imagine that DBH discerns within an EO - with its minimal dogmatic formulations and its embracing of mystery - a generosity that facilitates a more syncretistic approach to the faith. I guess, as an outsider looking in - close to the periphery as a catechumen - I wonder again, how this capaciousness within patristic/orthodox thought squares with a rather rigid and proscribed tradition that sees itself - or so I have heard - in possession of the ‘full truth’.
I sometimes wonder whether one can be theologically EO and yet be working this out in a less formal historical setting.
Anyway, there’s a lot to unpack in my ramblings. I suppose my ultimate question is where does one find a manifestation of Orthodoxy that can handle the justified critiques of DBH?
Thank you for your time
Good questions with no one answer. It’s a big mess for sure, and other callings might very well make sense. Hart still rhapsodizes about the beauty and depth of Orthodox Christian worship (when talking in Australia to Protestants recently) and about the radiant transfiguration of Bulgakov on his death bed. Finding a good priest and parish these days, however, is by no means a given.
To be fair, I have one of these - a good priest, I mean. I am on my way back from a book launch of the late Met. Anthony Bloom’s lectures on Beauty and Truth, where my priest gave the introductory speech and sat alongside Rowan Williams as the key-note speaker. Wonderful stuff. I’m thankful for your writing
I also find myself with an Eastern Orthodox theological perspective while remaining wholly Protestant due to EO traditions such as icon veneration.
It is a strange spiritual dilemma!
I wonder, where did you land exactly in your faith if you don’t mind my asking?
Thank you!
I was received into the Eastern Orthodox Church a few weeks ago, after a meandering journey of fits
and starts.
Regarding remaining wholly Protestant on certain areas, I don’t think I’ve ever been wholly Protestant about anything. From the outset, I found icon veneration and prayers to the Theotokos, for example, beautiful affirmations of a rich and deep incarnational theology. For me, my issues were more around exclusive claims to be the one true church etc. which I still think are ultimately misleading given the historical development of doctrine and tradition. I suppose, with that in mind, I’m in the minority camp amongst fellow Orthodox believers, but I don’t really mind. I find the account of tradition espoused by the likes of David Hart in his Tradition and Apocalypse a highly thoughtful and satisfying construal of the difference between a living tradition and an ossified traditionalism.
I think in the end I was one of the lucky ones who managed to avoid a lot of the excessive dogmatism that seems to plague American Orthodoxy; it’s in England too of course, particularly amongst disillusioned young men. My real life experience of Orthodoxy in the UK was marked by generosity and openness. What goes on online is very often a different matter entirely, but then again, Orthodoxy, in its emphasis on embodied and sacramental worship, resists such shallow and digitised
presentations of the faith.
There is far more that could be said, but i hope the above is helpful in some way.
I haven’t read Tradition and Apocalypse but it is slowly working its way up my priority list.
I do appreciate your response. It is comforting to me,in a way, to know that there are others who stay convicted on minority positions.
EO exclusivity claims and anathemas are certainly issues I need to further study, but your story gives me motivation to continue those studies. Thanks for your time!
Thanks!
Thank you for this! Will use often.
I would like to know more about Hart's interest in Vedanta. What has he found in the Indian spiritual tradition that could not be found in the christian literature that he knows so well? What would be his introductory sources?
Hart has written that Vedanta can potentially help Christians to deepen and better articulate our theology of incarnation and our Christology just as neo-Platonist thought did in the early years of the faith. He loved Vedanta at a very young age as I recall, before becoming Orthodox Christian. I don’t know as much about this aspect of his thought, however. There is some recommended reading on the topic at the end of his Experience of God if I’m recalling correctly.
Quite wonderful summary and reading list
Thanks for this. On multiple occasions I’ve found myself thinking how great it would be if a publisher were to compile and edit a boxed set or series containing “The Complete Published Works of David Bentley Hart,” in a beautifully bound and packaged form, of course. I suppose this would be a challenge logistically given the many different publishers DBH has worked with and through over the years, but a man can dream.
You're comparing David Bentley Hart to 道濟 Daoji (also known colloquially as 濟公 Ji Gong or "Lord Ji," to use his title from Hangzhou and Peking Opera)? Jesus effin' Christ, the two have nothing in common! Unless you want to compare Daoji's Robin Hood-esque efforts to Hart's liberating candy bars from the supermarkets of northern Indiana! (A dead end, of course. Hart does this by purchasing generous quantities of sugary sustenance and not by simply swiping them while seriously intoxicated, as Daoji might have done!) What on earth do the two men share besides descent from apes? A crippling addiction to liquid water and gaseous oxygen?
Like most of Hart's fans, you probably wrote this in a fugue state of cross-cultural reference in imitation of 'the master' and, like him, thought little of the actual references. (I mean, who actually looks up Hart's references? Well, people who cease to be fans, that's who!) You can do better. You could begin by finding better philosophers!
Lively sentiments. For my part, I grew up in a rural Chinese community speaking two dialects of Chinese for the first two years of my life, and I stand by my comparison.
" I grew up in a rural Chinese community speaking two dialects of Chinese for the first two years of my life, and I stand by my comparison."
And? That doesn't add an iota of substance to your claim. I live in China, in Hangzhou, and when I ask most people about Daoji, they say, "Who?" Being a native speaker born in China doesn't make you an automatic expert on anything. (Especially with the current education system.) The fact that you couldn't list a single example or make an argument to support the wild claim shows that you just don't know. I know you assumed that saying "I speak two dialects" should shut me up, but you also know it's just a dumb claim. Plenty of native speakers of Greek have very choice words to say about Hart's translation of the New Testament, but Hart does know his Greek New Testament better than most native speakers of demotic Greek!
Comparing Hart to Daoji is like comparing Trump to the Monkey King. You are free to make any analogies you like, but some are just plain stupid.
Goodbye, and good luck!
I love a long list of similarities between Hart and Daoji.
So make one! Who's stopping you?
Hello Jesse,
I am looking to understand how Universalism goes together with Eastern Orthodoxy (or perhaps Catholicism).
It seems to me that in Eastern Orthodoxy one must adhere to the living tradition, which I interpret to be something akin to 'the majority (or cumulative if that's possible) opinion of the people within church', especially the saints. Also, this tradition doesn't change. From what I have picked up, the majority of the fathers were not universalists, which in this definition makes the living (or even holy) tradition non-universalist.
Has DBH written anything on this topic or is there anything you can tell me or direct me towards, so that I can learn to understand how one falls within the greater christian tradition without giving up on universalism?
Please note that I have read nothing from DBH. I tried to avoid his work, because I tried to become a non-universalist, which has made me all the more radical.
Hart is an Orthodox Christian, and they consider questions of eschatology to be almost entirely within the realm of theologoumenon. In the most recent public consideration of the universalism question among Orthodox Christians in the United States, Archbishop Alexander (Golitzin) was asked directly if universalism is a heresy, and he said that he did not know if it was or not. See here:
https://copiousflowers.substack.com/p/a-slow-and-generous-conversation
The Fifth Ecumenical Council is the only question for Orthodox Christians, and Hart would brush that concern aside for the kinds of reasons given here:
https://afkimel.wordpress.com/2024/08/13/apokatastasis-origenism-fifth-ecumenical-council-with-a-dash-of-theophilus/
Hart has said many times that Paul and all (or almost all) of the New Testament authors are clearly universalist, that it is very reasonable to consider (with good evidence from Basil the Great and Augustine) that the majority of Christian teachers in the first three centuries of the church or so were universalist. As for holy tradition, Hart has written about that in his book Tradition and Apocalypse. I've written a little about that book in various places such as this:
https://copiousflowers.substack.com/p/what-of-harts-tradition-and-apocalypse
I've written about all of this in various places here on Copious Flowers. Here's the most recent:
https://copiousflowers.substack.com/p/can-the-apparent-contradictions-between
Amazing, thank you so much. This is something I have struggled with for a while.
You are not alone!
Thank you so much for this, Jesse!!
Why is First Things unnameable?
Just a foolish joke of my own regarding a spat that has sadly taken shape over the years. Hart has grumbled about them for some time after the founding editor (Richard John Neuhaus, who Hart appreciated) passed away and Hart stepped away from his beloved and popular writing gig there of many years. Subsequently, First Things has published a rather long list of extraordinarily harsh reviews of a few books (some of which I've written a little about as being rather ignorant, see link at bottom of comment). There is also some material with First Things in recent years with a Christian nationalist bent, and Hart is vehemently opposed to such material. None of this is any of my business, obviously, but I've notice that Hart leaves First Things conspicuously unnamed from time to time when talking about material of his that they first published.
https://copiousflowers.substack.com/p/mcdermotts-ignorant-slander
Isn’t this the guy that told people to stay away from the Gnostics for 10 years while he was working on his own gnostic novel now for sale on Amazon? Isn’t this the guy that in his own description for his own novel compares himself to Nabokov and Humberto Eco?
Don’t read the gnostics !
Buy my Gnostic novel !
When I need to pass out, I put on a David Bentley Hart lecture. His condescending dry blah is maybe the most arrogant bloviating in theology.
Oh- and he suggests Jesus is Lucifer in his NT footnotes.
The cover of his translation of the New Testament looks like a poster for the Blair witch project with his big fat stupid name on the top. I told him to take it down. He shouldn’t have his name at the top of the New Testament cover. The second printing, which you can purchase for another $30, took his name off the top of the cover but left it on the cover. The audacity is limitless.
For a moment, I consider replying to a point or two here, but I am not really finding much to engage with in this odd tantrum.
Perfect example of condescending Virtue posting*
What's the source for DBH's recommendation of Tiso's Rainbow Body book, if you recall?
There are more than one I’m pretty sure. It’s mentioned in the Roland in Moonlight book as well as in at least one interview (that I could probably track down if helpful).
To be clear, recommendation might be a little strong as a term. It was along the lines of “this is the kind of thing that Christians should really know more about and reflect upon.”
Just reread the Roland in Moonlight passage which is typically hilarious and a gem.
Found it, thanks! If you could turn up the interview, that'd be great, but no worries if not.
Great! And here’s an interview example:
“There's a book by someone named Father Tiso on the rainbow body [Rainbow Body and Resurrection] in which he talks about a phenomenon within one school of Tibetan Buddhism about post-mortem experiences of resurrected, so to speak, [bodies]. [These were] lamas or teachers who had bodies that disappeared, and he tries to suggest that maybe this is what happened to Jesus. I always think that people should read books like that just for the shift in paradigm.”
[DBH, 1:03:29 to 1:04:20 from the full recording of The Christian Century interview, timestamps likely in line with YouTube.]
https://davidbentleyhart.substack.com/p/an-interview-with-ross-allen-of-the