David Bentley Hart on Reason, Faith, and Diversity in Religious Thought

David Bentley Hart — Orthodox Christian theologian, philosopher, and translator of the New Testament — argues to Tyler Cowen that reason, not faith, is always the final court of appeal, even inside religious commitment, and that the modern habit of treating religions as rival systems of propositions misconceives what religion is. Along the way he sets out where Orthodox and Catholic metaphysics genuinely diverge, why Orthodoxy’s centuries of theological patience have cut both ways politically, and why he thinks Christianity’s brightest future may involve the loss of its institutional power.

Key ideas

1. Reason is the final court of appeal, even for faith. Asked whether it is reason or faith that decides when each is appropriate, Hart answers flatly: reason. Faith, properly understood — in Greek pistis, Sanskrit śraddhā, or any other tradition’s term — has never meant blind submission to authority; it means a rational commitment to a path pursued for reasons, and where faith and reason conflict, reason must win.
2. Orthodoxy and Catholicism diverge on the metaphysics of grace, not on ceremony. Pressed to name the deepest difference between East and West in as few dimensions as possible, Hart identifies three: the West’s doctrine of inherited guilt (absent in the East), a theology of predestination unique to the West, and — the deepest of the three — the West’s treatment of grace as an extraordinary gift set against nature, where the East treats grace as continuous with nature and union with God as our natural end.
3. Deification is the cosmic core of Orthodox spirituality. Reflecting on Heidegger’s critique of a disenchanted, technological modernity, Hart traces his own attraction to Orthodoxy to its doctrine of theosis — deification, union with God, creation itself “renewed” — imaged as a universe that, like the burning bush, blazes with divine glory without being consumed.
4. Orthodoxy’s theological patience has cut both ways politically. A tradition that built “a parallel world just outside the flow of history” produced, at its best, a spiritual life oriented to charity and self-denial; at its worst, the same disenchantment with imminent transformation left the institutional church free to become “a propaganda wing” of state power, as Hart says it has in contemporary Russia.
5. Religious diversity requires rethinking what “religion” is. Hart’s standing theological preoccupation is relations between faiths. He wants to discard the modern, anthropological notion of religions as competing systems of propositions in favour of an older view: religion as a virtue practised by all human beings in greater or lesser degree, which is why he is willing to draw on Vedantic sources even when writing Christian theology.
6. Translating the New Testament revealed a text far less unified than doctrine assumes. His chief discovery in producing his own translation was the sheer diversity already present among first-generation Christians: not a single theology but many different reactions to one event, a diversity later committee translations paper over by choosing renderings that flatter settled dogma rather than the Greek.
7. Hart argues for universal salvation and welcomes the decline of Christian institutional power. He rejects eternal damnation as a “grotesque notion” in need of correction, and separately argues that the healthiest future for Christianity may involve the loss of much of its cultural and institutional power — precisely because that power has so often been captured by nationalist projects, from Vladimir Putin’s Russia to Viktor Orbán’s Hungary.

Content

Reason as the final court of appeal

Cowen frames the question directly: when Orthodox critics of the papacy deploy reason, and the same tradition elsewhere simply invokes faith, what decides which register applies? Hart’s answer is unambiguous — reason. Even choosing to have faith, he argues, is itself a rational judgment: some “compelling rational intuition” leads a person to trust one source over another, whether or not they can articulate the reasons. He rejects the premise that faith and reason are opposites: across traditions, the word translated as “faith” — pistis in Greek, śraddhā in Sanskrit — has never meant blind submission to authority but a rational commitment to a path pursued for reasons that may not resolve into proof. Faith, on his account, is what lets reason explore rather than what replaces it; invoking William James’s “will to believe,” he insists James never counselled arbitrary belief, only a willingness to take the path that seems, on reasoned judgment, more likely to lead somewhere rather than off a cliff. Where faith and reason genuinely conflict, he says, “always trust your reason” — otherwise faith collapses into “epistemic nihilism,” a “brute exertion of the will” that becomes “subrational and contemptible.” Pressed on whether this amounts to a Bayesian calculus about God’s existence, Hart resists the frame: rational argument about God’s existence and the venture of faith within a tradition are, for him, different registers, though both remain answerable to reason, including moral intuition — a doctrine repugnant to one’s moral reasoning is not to be believed absent very strong grounds for thinking the reasoning mistaken.

Orthodoxy and Catholicism: a metaphysics of grace

Asked to isolate the fundamental metaphysical difference between Orthodoxy and Catholicism — not history, not the papacy — Hart names three points, in ascending order of importance. First, Orthodoxy has no doctrine of inherited guilt: the idea that a person is born already guilty, which Hart attributes largely to translation choices and to the influence of the late Augustine on Western theology, was “considered repugnant in the East.” Second, Western Catholicism carries an undefined but standing doctrine of predestination that Orthodoxy lacks entirely. Third, and for Hart the deepest difference, is the theology of grace itself: in the West, grace became “antithetical to nature,” an extraordinary gift bestowed by a predestining divine will; in the East, “that opposition between grace and nature simply never took root” — grace names the ordinary way God relates to creatures, and human beings are understood as always already naturally oriented toward union with God, so that what separates us from God is an “unnatural impediment” to be overcome rather than a superadded gift withheld.

Deification and the cosmic mystery

Asked how his study of Heidegger shaped his understanding of Orthodoxy, Hart credits Heidegger’s genealogy of Western nihilism — the “age of technology” in which the world becomes nothing but a reserve of resources for the will, stripped of the “mystery of being” — while explicitly declining to endorse the whole story (“I don’t agree with the whole story”). What that genealogy clarified for him, he says, was the appeal Orthodoxy held in his youth: a Christian tradition that foregrounds “the cosmic mystery of Christ and the cosmic mystery of the revelation of God in all things,” centred on deification — union with God, the whole of creation “renewed in some unimaginable ways” — imaged in the popular figure of a universe that, like the burning bush, blazes with divine glory yet is “not consumed.” He is careful to flag that the connection between Heidegger and this attraction had not occurred to him before being asked, marking the link as a live inference rather than settled doctrine.

Theological patience, and its political costs

Hart locates Orthodoxy’s distinctiveness in its relation to millenarian expectation — the sense, present in Christianity “from the first century,” of living in a “time between times” awaiting historical interruption. Where Protestant millenarianism, on his account, tends to erupt from historical crisis (the rise of the nation-state, the fragmentation of the Western church), Orthodoxy, rooted in an older Greco-Roman culture, “learned to be patient,” building what Hart calls “a parallel world just outside the flow of history” that emphasises the spiritual life over imminent apocalypse. He presents this patience as genuinely double-edged: at its best it nourished “millions” through an ethic of charity, self-denial, and detachment from ego and ambition; at its worst, the same disenchantment with historical transformation left the church free to accommodate “historical forces antithetical to the gospel” — becoming, in the case of the contemporary Russian church, “nothing but a propaganda wing of an authoritarian and terrorist government.” Cowen presses him further, asking whether Orthodox nations’ comparatively weak or short-lived democratic traditions are theologically caused. Hart declines the causal claim: he attributes the pattern to “historical accident” — pre-democratic habits of governance, material isolation from the wealth and ferment of Western European expansion — rather than to anything intrinsic to Orthodox theology, noting that Polish Catholicism culturally resembles Slavic Orthodoxy more than it resembles Western Catholicism, and that Greece has sustained real democratic norms since the nineteenth century despite remaining Orthodox.

Rethinking religious diversity

Asked what theological problem occupies him most, Hart names relations between faiths. He wants to discard the “anthropological notion” — inherited from modernity — that religions are systems of propositions standing in competition with one another, in favour of an older view in which religion is “a virtue that all human beings practiced in greater or lesser degree with greater or lesser understanding.” This is not abstract for him: he says he is “quite happy to draw on Vedantic sources from India” even when writing Christian theology, if they illuminate a question. The same posture shapes his handling of comparative claims across the conversation. Pressed on reincarnation, he refuses to treat the term as portable: punabbhava in Buddhism is not the reincarnation of a psychological self but “an uncontrollable set of karmic consequences that lead to new phenomenal arising,” while the Vedantic, Sikh, and Jain notion of a jiva passing over is “a more substantial sense” of reincarnation — different systems, he insists, cannot be collapsed into one concept just because English supplies one word for all of them. On new revelations such as the Book of Mormon, Hart reads the phenomenon structurally rather than dismissively: the Abrahamic religions are inherently “supersessionist,” each covenant claiming to supersede the last — Judaism’s internal supersessions, then Christianity’s claim on Judaism, then Islam’s claim on both — so that new revelatory movements are “just part and parcel” of that pattern, Mormonism among them.

Universal salvation and the future of Christian institutions

Two threads round out Hart’s constructive theology. First, asked whether the future of Christianity as an institution looks brighter or darker than a generation ago, Hart reframes the question: he does not want a revived “Christendom” of the kind pursued, in his account, by reactionary figures allied with Viktor Orbán, because conflating Christianity with a particular nation or civilisation is, in his view, “a perfidious corruption.” His preferred bright future is close to the opposite of institutional strength: “the brightest future for Christianity may consist in the death of many of its institutions and of much of its cultural power.” Second, citing his own book That All Shall Be Saved, Hart names the doctrine of eternal hell as the other rethinking Christianity most urgently needs, calling it a “grotesque notion” that a return to the first century and the original texts does not support.

See also

• David Bentley Hart — speaker; Orthodox theologian, philosopher, and New Testament translator
• Tyler Cowen — host
• Mysticism — Hart’s account of deification (theosis) as continuous with nature, not an extraordinary superadded gift, gives theological mechanism to this page’s brief note that Eastern Orthodoxy treats theosis “far more permissively” than the medieval Catholic Church treated its own mystics
• Science and Religion — the wiki’s other sustained treatment of reason, faith, and the limits of naturalism, argued there through philosophy of science rather than comparative theology
• Diarmaid MacCulloch on Christianity, Sex, and Unsettling Settled Facts — companion Conversations with Tyler episode on the internal diversity and historical contingency of Christian doctrine
• Ross Douthat on Why Religion Makes More Sense Than You Think — a contrasting apologetic register, arguing from convergent religious experience rather than from the metaphysics of grace and reason