Abstract
This latest offering from the American Orthodox scholar comprises 20 chapters, most of which are previously published journal articles. Also included are the texts of two public addresses and a previously unpublished article entitled ‘Thrift’. The collection spans, in time, the period from 2000 to 2015, and, in material content, most of the key theological loci that have occupied the author’s attentions during the course of his career.
Those familiar with Bentley Hart’s writings will not be surprised to find in this volume ample evidence of his distinctive style. He is passionate, combative, probing and rhetorical, and he draws upon a vocabulary that will require, for the majority, a good dictionary ready to hand. He is an outstandingly able scholar in possession of an ability to make his readers think again. There is both profundity and clarity in his writings, which are likely to cause those who engage with them to reconsider even settled theological convictions.
In the preface to the book, Hart identifies himself as a ‘kind of’ Christian Platonist with ‘a few Aristotelian inflections’ (p. x). In the essays that follow, a fuller understanding of the meaning of this self-designation emerges. Hart is, unashamedly, a metaphysical theologian, much influenced by the Cappadocian Fathers, and by Gregory of Nyssa in particular.
It is not hard to intuit Hart’s particular theological concerns as he returns to them time and again. It is to the book’s credit that, while there is considerable reinforcement of positions advocated, there is little repetition of argumentation.
As an Orthodox theologian, he is concerned to expound a Christian metaphysics – and this is a concern that runs all the way through the book. In several of the articles, and in the chapter ‘The destiny of Christian metaphysics’ in particular, he shows how Christianity of the fourth century challenged the dominant metaphysical understandings that arose out of the Classical Greek period. In the chapter ‘No shadow of turning’, there is a beautifully clear argument for the impassibility of God, offered against the flow of dominant theological trends. Another of the book’s recurrent themes is that the theological disagreements cited as the source of the division between the East and the West are overdrawn (and, in particular, the supposed tension between ‘Latin’ essentialism and ‘Greek’ personalism). In this regard Hart’s contribution is both ecumenical and irenic.
Hart is a universalist, and in this the influence of Gregory of Nyssa is again evident. The final chapter, ‘God, creation, and evil’, addresses the themes of divine creatio ex nihilo and theodicy, and concludes: ‘the God of eternal retribution and pure sovereignty proclaimed by so much of the Christian tradition is not, and cannot possibly be, the God of self-outpouring love revealed in Christ’ (p. 350).
There is much of weight and merit to be found in this volume. It is a veritable theological feast and to be commended, enthusiastically, but with the proviso that, to borrow words from the marriage service, it must not be undertaken carelessly or lightly.