A Short Review of David Bentley Hart's Tradition and Apocalypse
With Potentially More to Follow as Time Permits
I have no critiques of Tradition and Apocalypse: An Essay on the Future of Christian Belief. Its fundamental argument—that the traditional concept of “tradition” as a metaphysical force in all surviving post-Christendom Christianities, Catholicism, Orthodoxy, and the various Protestant communities is incoherent, that a workable concept of tradition is however necessary for Christianity to be what Christians claim it to be, and that the only possible such concept will be one that is oriented primarily towards the future—is one that I already believed, but could not have put as well and would not have thought to put a contrario but also in succession to John Henry Newman and Maurice Blondel. This assent is hard-won for me. In the last decade, I have belonged, in a serious way, to every major Christian communion, especially to Anglicanism, Orthodoxy, and Catholicism; in the latter two, despite a strong desire to make them work, I found that my life in community and the real obstacles I was facing to it were both predicated on my near-perennially expressed commitment to institutions and concepts of authority that, apart from being incoherent, were simply irrelevant to the real challenges of making religion work for something other than my own ego, during the pandemic, and in the generally secularizing world of the second and early third decades of the twenty-first century. In that sense, my primary response to Hart’s book is one of gratitude for the affirmation it provides me. I confess that I have of late struggled not so much with my commitment to Christ, who remains the great love of my life, but with my specifically Christian identity. In struggling, I am only listening sincerely to the freely expressed attitudes of many of the dearest friends that I have made in the Orthodox and Catholic worlds: that my inability or unwillingness to compromise either my learned canons of critical thinking or the mental, emotional, and spiritual health and well-being of the people closest and most special to me, whose love makes life meaningful, in the name of upholding the antiquity or the orthodoxy of institutions for whom I am at best a nameless asset and at worst a nameless threat signifies that I have no real Christian conviction at all. On days where I do not think very much of myself—so, most days—those voices are profound to me; on days where I struggle, in the third year of a pandemic that has seen several changes in religious community for me and my family and that has witnessed the decline of regular attendance at liturgy for me and that is now beginning to witness a real loss of desire and energy for prayer between vocational and domestic work and the rat race of trying to sketch out a decent future for my child in the hellscape of the contemporary world, those voices are practically all that I can hear blaring in my ears when I dare to call myself a Christian. And so to read Hart’s words, mellifluous like a field doctor’s balm, reassuring me that the wending paths my intellectual and personal lives have enforced on my life of faith with Christ are not signs of divine dereliction for a lack of what St. Benedict would have called stabilitas, still less some headlong free fall into heresy as an apostate (a word I have heard uttered by friends and trusted clerics, sometimes with phlegm, sometimes with a chuckle, and sometimes both), but are, rather, appropriate, understandable, even apocalyptically tuned-in responses to what Christianity has been, is, and is becoming in our late postmodern world—well, it has me a bit emotional, honestly, and that’s saying something.
Anyway, I also do not want to spoil the argument too much. Hart is the rare writer whose nonfiction works feature rhetorical artistry and poetic prose that I would not want to deprive the ordinary reader the joy of discovering for the first time on their own. Hart’s case against fideism (the term that appears late in the book as something of a replacement for Blondel’s extrinsicism to denote those who believe for belief’s sake, or who submit to the authority of institutions uncritically on the grounds of some perceived antiquity or self-referential continuity; to some extent, this might be the ideological equivalent for this book to what infernalism was in That All Shall Be Saved) is one that the reader should follow by reading it and can only really internalize by doing so; summarizing it here would both rob the reader of the experience as well as cheapen the argument itself. If Hart’s corpus were to be compared with that of Origen’s, then Tradition and Apocalypse is easily his Book IV of the De Principiis: the articulation of a comprehensive exegetical method not simply for reading Christian texts but the fact of Christianity itself.
There are various ambigua or aporiai the work raises for me—an earlier draft of this review had, for example, a rather extended section on the historical Jesus and the question of how, given what we can reasonably say about who Jesus was on the basis of what data we have about his life, a futurist orientation towards the apocalyptic meaning of tradition affects not only our delayed sense of eschatology but even more basic concepts like what it is for Jesus to be messiah, a category that was a live one in his own day but, in the 21st century, has theological purchase with an absolute minority of world Jews; I had also intended some comments about the ecclesiological virtues of Christian communions like, say, Anglicanism which are committed to the idea of eventually disappearing as discrete structures into a supervening ecumenical unity in the future, and the possibility Hart treats towards the end that Christianity itself might find its inner rational coherence better explained by contextualization in another religious tradition altogether, or minimally with other religious traditions—but they are possibilities that proceed from this basic sympathy with its argument and probably distractions on the whole from the real crux of the matter, which is that you should read the book. Frankly, it is only something like Hart’s take on tradition that allows for ambiguity, exploration, discovery, and nuance in theology at all, since it is only a notion of tradition that is based on the concept of ongoing, unfolding revelation consummated in the eschatological future that can broker the possibility that Christianity’s ultimate meaning is not straightforward or obvious, especially as considered historically, only intelligible from the vantage of the theandrocosmic love that is its endgame.
And in our day, when various Christianities are dying or doubling-down on institutionalisms, ideologies, and in some cases autocracies, all while hemorrhaging people, a vision of what it is to be Christian continually drawing forward to the future with the present’s priority placed on people and not on ideas will be fundamental. I will not give away what Hart sees as “the future of Christian belief,” but I will say that whatever the structure of that belief has been, we are facing and will continue to face the prospect of yet more seismic change to the Christian form in the course of postmodernity, in which we will need all the help we can get to figure out what Christianity will and should be in such a setting, provided it will survive and flourish; some of us are already living through at the microscopic level the very processes of deconstruction, reconstruction, repetition, and diaspora that at the macroscopic level Christianity as a whole has demonstrated throughout its history, raising the question of how it might be a single tradition at all. But my hunch is that those same people, stoked into compassion by their own lives as strangers and exiles, may generally be who is left at the end of this century’s promised tumult to keep the apocalyptic dream alive.
Thank you, David, for this reflection. My copy of this book just arrived, and I'm eager to read it.
As an Episcopal priest with friends and colleagues who have left the Episcopal Church to join the Orthodox Church, the Anglican Ordinariate, and ACNA, I'm familiar with the voices which loudly proclaim that any pastoral and/or intellectual openness, at least around certain contested theological questions, is a sure sign of timidity and unbelief. Like you, I've wrestled with a fair amount of self-doubt, but I've always been pulled back to center by the people I love and serve. I see the Spirit at work in their lives, and I see Christ's grace and mercy showing up consistently like springs of water in hard, dry places. As I slouch towards forty, this means far more to me than it once did.
Because David Bentley Hart freely admits to not having a "pastoral bone in his body," I'm curious to see whether he reflects upon the ways in which Christian tradition, at least when well-curated and held with an open hand, can bring incredible blessing and richness to people's lives. It's easy for some individuals to create rich worlds of religious meaning and purpose, but for most of the people I know, the Church is absolutely essential to resisting the emptiness, busyness and superficiality of daily life in the secular West. My parish has burned out ex-Evangelicals and skeptical half-Buddhists who have found themselves unexpectedly fed and held by a prayerbook liturgy and preaching rooted in a thoroughly Nicene understanding of the Bible. DBH might doubt the intellectual pedigree of such tradition, but at the very least, the lives of the faithful testify to an experiential coherence within Christianity that is both real and life-giving.
Nevertheless, your point is well-taken. There is much to be said for an institutional Christianity that places less faith in itself and in its own story and more faith in Jesus Christ's uncanny ability to transfigure every self and to resurrect every story. Let's hope David's new book serves to further that blessed conversation.
Had to come back and read this review. This is one of the most challenging and Life changing books I’ve read. I feel like it helped me lay to rest any residual clinging to “infallible authority” that I had left in me. I genuinely wonder what it will take for Catholicism to rethink its own concepts of authority. It can be such a mental prison to have to hang on every word a pope says.