Speaker

David Bentley Hart

David Bentley Hart

American writer, philosopher, religious-studies scholar, critic, and theologian, working within the Eastern Orthodox Christian tradition. Author of a widely discussed translation of the New Testament and, by Tyler Cowen’s introduction, over 1,000 essays, reviews, and papers and 19 books [?] — a count taken from Cowen’s framing rather than Hart’s own statement.

His range is unusually wide even among theologians: across the conversation he covers Christian metaphysics, philosophy of mind, comparative religion (Buddhism, Vedanta, Sikhism, Jainism), classical and Asian languages, literature, and music. He reports competency, at varying levels, in French, German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Hebrew, Syriac, Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, Pali, and classical Chinese, with Japanese still in progress and some Brittonic Celtic languages besides; as an undergraduate he studied spoken Cheyenne. He has published several volumes of fiction alongside his theological and philosophical work, and writes a newsletter, Leaves in the Wind, covering literary criticism, philosophy, theology, and fiction without a fixed topic.

Core positions

Reason is, for Hart, the final court of appeal — even over faith. Faith properly understood is not blind submission to authority but a rational commitment to a path pursued for reasons; where faith and reason conflict, reason must win, or faith collapses into what he calls “epistemic nihilism.”

He locates the deepest difference between Orthodox and Catholic Christianity in the theology of grace: the West treats grace as an extraordinary gift set against nature, the East as continuous with nature, so that union with God is humanity’s natural end rather than a superadded exception. He traces his own attraction to Orthodoxy to its doctrine of deification (theosis) — the whole of creation understood as blazing with divine glory, like the burning bush, without being consumed — read partly against Heidegger’s account of a disenchanted, technological modernity, though he stops short of endorsing Heidegger’s genealogy in full.

On religious diversity, Hart argues for rethinking the modern habit of treating religions as competing systems of propositions; he prefers an older view of religion as a virtue practised, in varying degree, across humanity, and draws freely on Vedantic sources even in Christian theological work. He resists collapsing distinct traditions’ concepts into one another — Buddhist punabbhava and the Vedantic or Jain notion of a jiva are not the same idea merely because English translates both as “reincarnation.” He reads new revelatory movements such as Mormonism as continuous with the Abrahamic tradition’s built-in supersessionism, each covenant claiming to supersede the last.

He argues for Christian universalism — that all will ultimately be saved — and against the doctrine of eternal hell, the subject of his book That All Shall Be Saved. He is wary of Christianity’s institutional power being captured by nationalist projects (citing the Russian church under Vladimir Putin and reactionary figures allied with Viktor Orbán) and says the healthiest future for Christianity may involve the loss of much of that institutional and cultural power. He describes himself as a socialist.

In the wiki