Theological Territories

David Bentley Hart

Description

Publishers Weekly Best Book in Religion 2020

Foreword Review's INDIES Book of the Year Award, Religion

In Theological Territories, David Bentley Hart, one of America's most eminent contemporary writers on religion, reflects on the state of theology "at the borders" of other fields of discourse—metaphysics, philosophy of mind, science, the arts, ethics, and biblical hermeneutics in particular. The book advances many of Hart's larger theological projects, developing and deepening numerous dimensions of his previous work. Theological Territories constitutes something of a manifesto regarding the manner in which theology should engage other fields of concern and scholarship.

The essays are divided into five sections on the nature of theology, the relations between theology and science, the connections between gospel and culture, literary representations of and engagements with transcendence, and the New Testament. Hart responds to influential books, theologians, philosophers, and poets, including Rowan Williams, Jean-Luc Marion, Tomáš Halík, Sergei Bulgakov, Jennifer Newsome Martin, and David Jones, among others. The twenty-six chapters are drawn from live addresses delivered in various settings. Most of the material has never been printed before, and those parts that have appear here in expanded form. Throughout, these essays show how Hart's mind works with the academic veneer of more formal pieces stripped away. The book will appeal to both academic and non-academic readers interested in the place of theology in the modern world.

Sujets

• Philosophie
• Philosophie de la religion
• Religion
• Christianisme
• Christian Theology
• Religious
• PHILOSOPHY
• Philosophie et théologie
• General officer
• Theology
• General

Informations

• Publié par: University of Notre Dame Press
• Date de parution: 15 avril 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780268107192
• Langue: English

Extrait

THEOLOGICAL TERRITORIES
DAVID BENTLEY HART

University of Notre Dame Press
Notre Dame, Indiana
Copyright © 2020 by David Bentley Hart
Published by the University of Notre Dame Press
Notre Dame, Indiana 46556
undpress.nd.edu
All Rights Reserved
Published in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Hart, David Bentley, author.
Title: Theological territories : a David Bentley Hart digest / David
Bentley Hart.
Description: Notre Dame, Indiana : University of Notre Dame Press, [2020] |
Includes index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019054882 (print) | LCCN 2019054883 (ebook) | ISBN
9780268107178 (hardback) | ISBN 9780268107185 (paperback) | ISBN
9780268107208 (adobe pdf) | ISBN 9780268107192 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Theology. | Philosophical theology. | Bible. New
Testament—Criticism, interpretation, etc. | Bible—Theology.
Classification: LCC BR118 .H3646 2020 (print) | LCC BR118 (ebook) | DDC
230—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019054882 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019054883
This e-Book was converted from the original source file by a third-party vendor. Readers who notice any formatting, textual, or readability issues are encouraged to contact the publisher at [e-mail]
for
John and Laura Betz
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Introduction
PART ONE. Theology and What May Be Said
1 The Gospel According to Melpomene: Reflections on Rowan Williams’s The Tragic Imagination
2 Remarks Made to Jean-Luc Marion regarding Revelation and Givenness
3 What Is Postmodern Theology? Reflections for Tomáš Halík
4 Martin and Gallaher on Bulgakov
5 Remarks to Bruce McCormack regarding the Relation between Trinitarian Theology and Christology
6 The Devil’s March: Creatio ex Nihilo , the Problem of Evil, and a Few Dostoyevskian Meditations
7 Tradition and Authority: A Vaguely Gnostic Meditation

PART TWO. The Borderlands of Theology and Science
8 Where the Consonance Really Lies
9 Should Science Think?
10 The Illusionist: On Daniel Dennett’s From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds
11 Consciousness and Grace: Thoughts on Bernard Lonergan
PART THREE. Gospel and Culture
12 Concerning By Man Shall His Blood Be Shed: A Catholic Defense of Capital Punishment , by Edward Feser and Joseph M. Bessette
13 Further Reflections on Capital Punishment (and on Edward Feser)
14 Orthodoxy in America
15 University and Magisterium: Remarks in Response to Reinhard Hütter
16 The Story of the Nameless: The Use and Abuse of History for Theology
17 Beauty, Being, Kenosis
18 A Sense of Style: Beauty and the Christian Moral Life
PART FOUR. Literatures of Transcendence
19 The Shock of the Real: On Journey to the Land of the Real , by Victor Segalen
20 Empson in the East: On The Face of the Buddha

21 David Jones: The Forgotten Modernist
22 An Introduction to Léon Bloy’s The Pilgrim of the Absolute
PART FIVE. The New Testament
23 The First Radicals
24 Paul’s Theology Was Rather Different from What We Think
25 What It Says, Not What It Means
26 The Spirit of the Text
27 A Prayer for the Poor
28 Different Idioms, Different Worlds: Various Notes on Translating the New Testament
Index
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My thanks to all the persons and institutions (recorded in the Introduction below) who originally provided the occasions for—and usually the topics of—these pieces. My gratitude also to the Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study and its four permanent denizens over the three years of my association with it—Brad S. Gregory, Donald Stelluto, Carolyn Sherman, and Grant Osborn—for granting me the time and space in which to pursue my work and to join in a great many of the conversations that generated a number of these pieces; and many thanks to the McGrath Institute for Church Life for a semester’s hospitality during my tenancy at Notre Dame. I am grateful as well to Roberto de la Noval for preparing the index to this volume, a task for which I am temperamentally and probably morally unsuited.
INTRODUCTION
The large preponderance of the pieces gathered here are texts of live addresses delivered in various settings, and so have never before been published. The few that remain have appeared in print previously but are given here in alternative (and more authoritative) form, restoring material that originally had to be omitted for reasons of space; their claim to a place in this collection is that they, like the others, were written as occasional meditations, on topics usually assigned by others, without footnotes, and almost all of them were also at various points delivered as lectures or private talks; and yet, curiously enough, they fill in certain crucial dimensions of my thinking over the past several years. Like most scholars who have been at their work for any appreciable stretch of years, I find that I have committed a great many of my ideas—even some of the better ones, I think—only to public lectures, or to public remarks on the work of other scholars. In many cases, moreover, those ideas are expressed more concisely and with greater clarity than they might have been in the context of a large written text. A single address written to be delivered live belongs to a special genre, one that imposes certain exigencies on its author. One does not enjoy the liberty of extending one’s exposition beyond the scope of, say, an hour (or forty-five minutes, if one is merciful), but neither can one curtail one’s remarks before reaching some kind of satisfying conclusion. It is a usefully severe discipline, especially if one hopes to say anything of consequence in the time allotted. The result, if one succeeds in one’s aims, can be a degree of economy and lucidity that the greater freedom of a longer text might actually discourage or thwart. But for the pitiless relentlessness of the clock on the wall, one might never strive for the kind of crystalline exactitude that becomes necessary when one can say no more than what must be said to communicate one’s meaning within an unforgivingly fixed span.
All of this having been noted, the first chapter in this collection was in fact written initially as an essay and was published as an article in a symposium on Rowan Williams’s darkly scintillating book The Tragic Imagination , in Modern Theology (April 2018), in a somewhat shorter version than the text given here; only in a revised form was it delivered as a public lecture (at Canisius College in Buffalo, New York, in March 2018). I like to think that it is a fairly accomplished piece, structurally and stylistically at least, and that it makes an argument of some subtlety. That does not mean, however, that I can claim that its argument has proved quite as clear to every reader or listener as I might have hoped. In general, this has been my experience whenever I have addressed this topic. When I wrote on the relation of tragedy and theology in my first book, some years ago now, I found myself on more than one occasion being accused of disliking tragedy as a dramatic form. In point of fact, I am, if anything, excessively attached to it. My objection to “tragic theology,” back then and in this present piece, is partly the result of my belief that this style of theology has the effect of distorting and even obscuring something strange, crucial, and unprecedented in the Christian story; but it is no less the result of my indignation at the ways in which some of the tragic theology I have encountered in the past has almost invariably (as far as I can see) stripped tragic art of its true mystery, variety, and beauty and contracted it to a banal set of platitudes regarding hope despite uncertainty, hope despite suffering, hope despite the impenetrable darkness, hope despite . . . Happily, Williams’s book breaks from that reductive pattern. Like everything he writes, it is marked by an extraordinary degree of tact and penetrating intelligence. My essay is in one sense a reaction to his book, and partly to certain mild remarks it directs toward my earlier writing on the matter (as well as remarks not quite as mild made by Williams in a public lecture that I watched online); but it is more essentially a larger meditation on the nature of the Christian story, and on the relevance of tragic art to our understanding of that story. My approach to the matter might be said to be more or less the opposite of Williams’s, but I prefer to think of it as complementary. As I say in my essay, my concern is not so much to contest his claims regarding what tragedy has the power to reveal about reality but rather to ask whether he neglects adequately to consider what tragedy has the power to conceal. And, I confess, his sympathy for Hegel’s reading of Attic tragedy is one I cannot share; I have always found Hegel’s treatment of, say, Antigone deeply depressing, for the admittedly petty reason that it spoils the play for me, by turning it into what looks to me like a bourgeois morality tale, and thus robbing it of its terrifying pagan grandeur (but I deal with that in the essay).
I should note, by the way, that Williams offers some responses to my essay—and to several others also concerned with his book—in that same issue of Modern Theology ; his remarks are well worth consulting and are probably wiser than my cavils regarding his argument. Here I will mention only that he arraigns me for perhaps falling prey to a certain “essentialism” regarding tragedy. He may be right. As a rule, that would not be a charge that would bother me very much, since it is one that can usually be deflected with little more than a languid wave of the hand and a surly tu quoque ; anything to which we apply a general name—anything we situate in a particular category—is likely to be something we identify by certain essential qualities, and none of us can wholly escape his or her own generalizations. As far as I know, however, apart from some specific obse