No Turning Back (either to Christendom or Secularism)

[cmbl]

I haven't yet read this particular essay of Hart's yet, but I have for some time (maybe 2 years?) noted a seemingly Anabaptist turn in his thought.

Actually it goes back more than 2 years. See this essay from 2016: https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/christs-rabble.

What do you make of his concurrent turn towards universalism? Does one inform the other?

David Bentley Hart is seeing past the comforting Magisterial Protestant fantasies he writes about in "Christ's Rabble," and has been dreadfully left alone with the New Testament. When people start to see beyond these comforting explanations, they go on a journey to uncover truth and are quite willing to concurrently question other things they have received. I would not say that one turn necessarily informs the other. I think the word concurrent is apt.

I am reminded of Tolstoy's The Kingdom of God is Within You. Tolstoy saw past the comforting rite of the Russian Orthodox church to the words of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount, and read Mennonite writings on nonresistance. As part of his journey, he concurrently questioned miracles and the supernatural. The Mennonites he read were maintaining their own tradition, rather than questioning their own tradition, so had no impetus to question the supernatural as Tolstoy did.

[joey_the_ox]

David Bentley Hart is seeing past the comforting Magisterial Protestant fantasies he writes about in "Christ's Rabble," and has been dreadfully left alone with the New Testament. When people start to see beyond these comforting explanations, they go on a journey to uncover truth and are quite willing to concurrently question other things they have received. I would not say that one turn necessarily informs the other. I think the word concurrent is apt.

I am reminded of Tolstoy's The Kingdom of God is Within You. Tolstoy saw past the comforting rite of the Russian Orthodox church to the words of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount, and read Mennonite writings on nonresistance. As part of his journey, he concurrently questioned miracles and the supernatural. The Mennonites he read were maintaining their own tradition, rather than questioning their own tradition, so had no impetus to question the supernatural as Tolstoy did.

This seems plausible to me as a kind of explanation. I wonder if anyone has directly asked Hart if he thinks there is a connection.

I liked the phrase "dreadfully left alone with the New Testament." As mentioned in "Christ's Rabble," Hart has produced his own translation of the New Testament. In the introduction he puts forward the same point of view as in "Christ's Rabble," and in a sort of appendix he defends his "universalist-friendly" translation of specific passages.

[joey_the_ox]

The future may be painful in many ways, but it will also be full of the glory of God. Those who see it will be full of vision for Jesus kingdom, not yearnings for the past.

I agree with this. It doesn't take much digging into history to realize that every time period has its own faults and difficulties. True, some times and places were better than others, but there is no "golden age" to which we can return. The wisdom of the past can certainly inform and guide us, but we cannot repeat the past.

[barnhart]

I liked the phrase "dreadfully left alone with the New Testament."

I think it is a reference to Kierkegaard:

The matter is quite simple. The bible is very easy to understand. But we Christians are a bunch of scheming swindlers. We pretend to be unable to understand it because we know very well that the minute we understand, we are obliged to act accordingly. Take any words in the New Testament and forget everything except pledging yourself to act accordingly. My God, you will say, if I do that my whole life will be ruined. How would I ever get on in the world? Herein lies the real place of Christian scholarship. Christian scholarship is the Church’s prodigious invention to defend itself against the Bible, to ensure that we can continue to be good Christians without the Bible coming too close. Oh, priceless scholarship, what would we do without you? Dreadful it is to fall into the hands of the living God. Yes it is even dreadful to be alone with the New Testament.

[joey_the_ox]

I have now read the essay. I find the conclusion a bit disappointing. Hart's fundamental piece of advice seems to be the following:

Christian thought can always return to the apocalyptic novum of the event of the Gospel in its first beginning and, drawing renewed vigor from that inexhaustible source, imagine new expressions of the love it is supposed to proclaim to the world, and new ways beyond the impasses of the present.

In a sense I agree with this, but in another sense this is so broad that any number of discordant lines of thought could find a place for themselves under this mandate. Hart seems to recognize this lack of specificity:

The ultimate result, if Christians can free themselves from the myth of a lost golden age, may be something wilder and stranger than we can at present conceive, at once more primitive and more sophisticated, more anarchic in some ways and more orderly in others.

What will the result be like? Who can say? The one thing that is certain to Hart is that it will not be Christendom:

Whether such a thing is possible or not, however, it is necessary to grasp that where we now find ourselves is not a fixed destiny. It becomes one only if we are unwilling to distinguish the opulent but often decadent grandeur of Christendom from the true Christian glory of which it fell so far short.

I get the feeling that Hart has written the final half of the essay with the specter of "integralism" looming over his head. He really does not like integralism, as evidenced by the following:

There are any number of reasons, for instance, for dismissing the current vogue of right-wing Catholic “integralism”: its imbecile flights of fancy regarding an imperial papacy; its essentially early-modern model of ecclesial absolutism; its devotion to a picture of Christian social and political order that could not be any less “integralist” or any more “extrinsicist” and authoritarian in its mechanisms; the disturbingly palpable element of sadomasochistic reverie in its endorsement of various extreme forms of coercion, subjugation, violence, and exclusion; the total absence of the actual ethos of Christ from its aims; its eerie similarity to a convention of Star Trek enthusiasts gravely discussing strategies for really establishing a United Federation of Planets. But the greatest reason for holding the whole movement in contempt is that it is nothing more than a resentful effort to reenact the very history of failure whose consequences it wants to correct.

This bears a strong resemblance to some of Hart's rhetoric against "infernalists." I think that in both cases Hart can be unfair in his caricatures.

[Josh]

This is a bit of a detour from HK’s original post, but I’ve noticed many people in a journey into Anabaptism get sidetracked into universalism.

[Soloist]

This is a bit of a detour from HK’s original post, but I’ve noticed many people in a journey into Anabaptism get sidetracked into universalism.

I think that is a connection with relativism. If you walk away from Anabaptist Conservativism, and decide that the "rules" are simply relative, then much of the teachings can also be relativized away.
Every single teaching of Jesus has been relativized away by one group or another and some of His teachings by the conservatives as well. If everyone has something wrong, then how can I say that this group is better then that group. Next stop, universalism or atheism. It seems to be very difficult to rationalize the incongruent nature of Christian hypocrisy and to see your own hypocrisy without going through a crisis of faith.

[HondurasKeiser]

This is a bit of a detour from HK’s original post, but I’ve noticed many people in a journey into Anabaptism get sidetracked into universalism.

Not a detour exactly. I’m curious as to why you think that might be?

[Bootstrap]

My reading of a lot of different Christians and their various diagnoses of the problems of late modernity/late post-modernity is the notion that this epoch is ending and something else is on the horizon though few if any are able to articulate what that might even look like.

Good thread.

I am very convinced of the part I quoted above. God is making new wine and new wineskins. I believe revival is coming. This is a very good time to watch and pray.

I'm thinking of something Russell Moore said - that people are looking for identity and meaning in politics instead of religion, and even some Christians seem to treat politics as more real and more relevant. Not because politics looks particularly compelling, but because we have failed to see and proclaim the full depth and power of Christianity.

I am praying for this to happen.

[Bootstrap]

I'd like to quote two parts of the OP that strike me as particularly true.

So, again, given these realities, what ought Christians to do?

Certainly, what they should not do is indulge in sickly nostalgias and resentments, or soothe their distempers with infantile restorationist fantasies. History’s immanent critique has exposed too many of the old illusions for what they were, and there can be no innocent return to structures of power whose hypocrisies have been so clearly revealed.

This resonates with the story of the Bible. Never were they able to go back to the last outworking of God's grace, returning to the way things were. They were always called forward to the new things that God was doing with them then. Abraham did not go back to Eden. Moses did not return to Egypt, where God had blessed Israel under Joseph. The Jerusalem of David and Solomon was never restored to its former kingdom. Once Gentiles came into the church, it did not go back to a pure Jewish church. God was always calling them to the next step.

Secularity was not imposed upon the Christian world by some adventitious hostile force. It simply is the old Christendom in its terminal phase.

Old wineskins cannot old new wine.

The new wine will still be about Jesus, the Kingdom of God, the Sermon on the Mount, the Bible. But it may look very different than what we expect.