Ikonostasis, Orthodox Monastery, Birchdale on Kootenay Lake BC – David Burrows photo
Extract from an interview in Sunday’s New York Times between David Bentley Hart and Peter Wehner – The complete interview is worth a careful read
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.
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.
The above is one part of a much larger interview found here.
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