Tradition and Apocalypse: An Essay on the Future of Christian Belief

by David Bentley Hart

Faith thus understood is not a venture undertaken arbitrarily or in merely hopeful ignorance. The future that rings out within the tradition and summons believers to an end they cannot fully see is the final note of a truly compelling call already heard, already witnessed to, already partly understood.

there is good reason for the often infuriatingly terse, even minimalist form of most official dogmatic formulations. They are not really explanations of anything, so much as constraints upon certain forms of thought or (more accurately) language.

If the life of the tradition is sustained by the lure of a future yet to be fully revealed, then in a sense change is not only the life but the very purpose of tradition as a concrete historical phenomenon.

the Eden myth was originally a tale of the gods and of the chief god Yahweh, who had planted a garden containing the trees whose fruits granted those gods both their immortality and their divine knowledge of the nature and value of things (good or bad); and it tells also of how Yahweh invented a peasantry to tend that garden by crafting a man from clay and then a woman from the man’s side, and of how he kept these two pitiable serfs in ignorance of better things and lied to them by telling them that the magic trees the gods fed upon were in fact poisonous, and of how the cleverest of the animals Yahweh had maladroitly tried to fashion as helpmeets for the man (before fixing upon the scheme of fashioning one directly from Adam’s flesh instead) was the snake, and of how that snake mischievously apprised the peasants of the ways in which they were being exploited, and of how the peasants then stole from their deceitful landlord and ate of the fruit of knowledge and thereby discovered that the snake had told the truth (and that, by the way, Yahweh had not even given them any clothes), and of how Yahweh, on learning of this growing peasant rebellion, fled in panic to the other gods and told them that there was an imminent danger that the man and the woman might now eat from the tree of life as well and become immortals and ultimately displace the gods, and so they must now be expelled from the garden before the catastrophe occurred. In short, it was a fairly typical Mesopotamia...

In many ways, the myth of Eden as a myth perfectly symbolized something for which nothing but symbols were available; it became an exquisitely vivid way of describing that aforementioned immemorial loss of intimacy with the divine, the end of innocence, the unnaturalness of death for spiritual beings oriented toward eternity, the wounding of creation, and so forth; and in all these ways it could be made to testify to the final horizon of Christian hope—a restored communion with God, a restored creation, the necessity of God becoming human so that humans might become God.

it might be wise for believers with a genuine concern for the life of the tradition to start all their theological musings from a sense of awe before the vastness of the mystery that summons them in their faith, and a sense also of how far beyond conceiving or understanding that mystery still remains.

If the teachings of Christ form the indispensable standard of Christian spiritual life, then it is clear that Christianity as a historical project has been in many enormous respects a ghastly failure, and in no way more conspicuously than in many of the terms its institutional embodiments accepted as the price of alliance with empire and state.

a largely mythical consensus patrum and of some all but infallible testimony of the “holy fathers.”

Scripture, the fathers, bishops—one does not have to be dismissive of the importance of any of them to recognize the degree to which the nature of their authority is frequently understood in terms too absolute and uncomplicated to correspond to reality.

an authority based on its own authority is a tautology, and devotion to a tautology is one of the few religious comportments that it seems to me can justly be condemned as idolatry.

The Protestant fundamentalist clinging to literalist scriptural inerrancy, the Catholic traditionalist clinging to a brutally reductive concept of infallible dogmatic pronouncements, the Orthodox traditionalist clinging to the nonexistent unanimity of the fathers—all are merely clutching at whatever bits of flotsam seem to them most buoyant atop the ocean of historical contingency, following the shipwreck of Christendom.

patristic fundamentalism is every bit as ridiculous and pernicious a phenomenon as biblical fundamentalism.