“That which is not divine is not essential to humanity.” So says the great nineteenth-century Scottish Congregational minister George MacDonald. For MacDonald as for his contemporary heir David Bentley Hart, the inverse would be no fallacy: All that is essential to humanity is divine. Although Hart does not draw explicitly on MacDonald in The Light of Tabor, this kind of thinking animates five rich but concise chapters and three equally impressive appendices, all of whose focus on Christology provides a wider vista from which to appreciate the expansive, complex, and fascinating landscape of Hart’s thought.
The book’s simultaneously wide and narrow scope is evident in various programmatic statements. “In [Christ] the tradition would come to situate the relation of creation and God … natural and supernatural, nature and grace—even, perhaps, the symbol and the symbolized, or history and myth; and hence in him also it would discover … the place where all these seeming oppositions uniquely and mysteriously achieve an ultimate indistinction from one another, joined in a single event and a single identity” (5). Language of “indistinction”—that is, Christ as a “point” (20), “moment” (55), or “instance” (77) of indistinction—runs throughout the book, as it’s Hart’s way of articulating his guiding theme “of the perfect transparency of the humanity of Christ to its divine identity” (xii).
This “transparency” is the utterly singular subject that is Jesus, the eternal Logos: Although Hart’s “monistic” Christology is not a classical miaphysitism, he does share with Severus of Antioch (et al.) both a consistent focus on Christ’s unity and a resistance to univocal use of the distinct logics of person and nature across the immanent and economic registers. Yet somewhat differently from those classical writers, Hart’s rationale for this position implicates him in broader metaphysical debates. The very possibility of such singularity, indistinction, and transparency is the deeper and more determinative “natural” unity between the human and the divine, all of which reveals the truth of being itself: “Every metaphysics that aspires to any kind of coherence must tend inexorably toward the isolation of some single unified principle more original than all others, a primordial ground or structure of logical and ontological nonrepugnancy” (77–78).
To make his case, Hart treks far and wide, first lamenting the loss of mythic patterns of speech and thought with the rise of increasingly metaphysical and historical idioms. For this loss, Hart finds at least some fault with Christianity’s own development of orthodox trinitarian and Christological grammar (chapters 1 and 2). This is not a simplistic declension narrative from Scripture to Nicaea, let alone to Chalcedon, but it does require a work of ressourcement of both the New Testament and Origen (chapter 2 and appendices 1–3). It also requires sustained engagement with contemporaries such as Rowan Williams and Jordan Daniel Wood (chapter 3) and with the modern hero of the story, Sergei Bulgakov (chapters 4 and 5). Hart finds fault with those who he thinks fail to ground Christology in the Pauline insight that human “nature” is but an act or expression of being that is only modally distinct from the divine genus (γένος) from which it is derived. Such failure, he contends, is intimately linked with an unwarranted desire to protect the integrity of human nature (e.g., Williams) or to see in humanity and divinity an otherwise irreconcilable antimony and then to look to the concept of hypostasis for their reconciliation through composite personal identity (e.g., Wood). Thorough and compelling as Hart’s argument is, one may wonder whether our nature’s “hypostasibility” (71) derives more from the “trihypostatic Person” (63) of the Trinity, singularly, or from the distinct hypostases (ὑποστάσεις) of the three Trinitarian persons, severally. One may also wonder whether Hart’s plea for Christology to conform to metaphysics too quickly passes over perennial metaphysical antinomies that a hypostatically centered Christology might help address.
The Light of Tabor may well be Hart’s most concise and sustained exposition of his broad and synthetic worldview, and for this reason alone it belongs in every library, institutional and personal. Given its relative accessibility, it will also provide for graduate students—if not also exceptionally advanced undergraduates—an excellent entry point into an oeuvre to which subsequent decades will undoubtedly return for its fruitfully insightful and provocative offerings.
