I have watched your talk on Universalism a total of 46 times and read That All Shall Be Saved 5 times. I used to be a Calvinist, and all I can say to you, Dr. Hart, is thank you. Your work saved me from absolute nihilistic despair when I was beyond depressed. Thank you so incredibly much and may God bles you.
Hi Mr. Hart, thank you for this wonderful conversation. I must confess that I have been greatly looking forward to your 2 newest books for many months and have pre-ordered them (they're so highly anticipated I'm considering booking a week off work to read them).
Your work has convinced me very much of apokatastasis, but as an Orthodox Christian, I was wondering what your thoughts are on the 3rd Decree of the Confession of Dositheus from the Council of Jassy? I know the council is not technically Ecumenical, but it is viewed as a pan-orthodox Council much like the Palamite synods, and therefore must be affirmed by the laity. There's a passage in decree 3 that seems to flat-out contradict Universalism and teaches it's complete opposite - endless punishment.
Anyways, I'm sorry if this question seems odd or foolish in any way. Thank you again for all of your wonderful works. They mean a great deal to me.
God bless and many prayers for your health and that God may continue working through you.
1. So-called pan-Orthodox synods—including both those that endorsed and those that condemned Palamas—have no authority of any kind. Those who claim they do are advancing a claim that was made up in modern times out of desperation. The ancient rule is that a synod or local council must be confirmed by an oecumenical council to carry doctrinal weight.
2. It would not matter to me if there were such a doctrine in Orthodox tradition. I would simply regard the tradition as in deep and lamentable error.
Thank you very much for your response. You've given me a great deal to think about. May I ask what your thoughts are on Gregory Palamas? In particular, The Triads where he articulates his view of God's essence and his energies. I'm excited for your book on tradition.
Also, as awkward as this may be, I just want to say an incredible thanks to you and for your works. That All Shall Be Saved is immensely wonderful and an incredible case for apokatastasis. I recently finished The Doors of the Sea, too, and it was a tremendous blessing of a read.
I’ve never been convinced that Palamas’s formulation was clear enough to call right or wrong. He was a great mystical theologian but not a precise dialectitian.
In fact, I regard Aquinas's view as simply the classical Christian view, as found in, say, Maximus, as well as the view of all classical theism. I am not in the neo-Palamite camp at all. Nor were any of the Eastern fathers.
Fascinating. Just out of curiosity, what do you think makes one an Orthodox Christian? I only ask because you seem to disagree with so many prominent views to the point where I'm curious as to how you'd define Orthodoxy?
Milbank says that "the Fall remains absolutely incomprehensible," and you concur: "Evil, like the designated hitter rule, is just a mystery that no one could penetrate . . . how this could have happened."
I guess I had imagined that its occurrence is explicable in something like the following way. Created rationality is necessarily finite, and finite rationality is necessarily capable of error, and evil is just a kind of error, namely, acting on a mistaken understanding of the good. So, Adam, Eve, the snake . . . whoever, just happened to make an error of judgment.
No doubt I'm missing something. I am a bit uneasy about the sheer chance of it all. The Fall as bad luck. It could have gone the other way, but for some reason, it just didn't.
As for the designated-hitter rule, it's perfectly explicable. Whatever the pitcher is doing with the bat, it's not baseball. It certainly doesn't look like batting, much less hitting.
Well that’s more or less the basic argument. But John’s concern is that there is something amiss in thinking of childlike innocence as not only inherently defectible, but the source of an evil or culpable choice.
As for the DH, my relative Jack Bentley (who pitched principally for the Giants) was one of the best hitting pitchers of his time. Out of loyalty to him, non serviam.
The eternal five minutes recur in baseball games in an indefinite continuity, not on a straight line, but in trajectoires. (I already limited it with the definite).
DBH also pointed out the problem of tendential language when(ever) employed in theological arguments.
In my crude paraphrase, the privileged Christian secularism was formed historically by the Catholic Latinism, as a consequential effect of its separation from the East as implied. Socio-psychological powers are then in a settlement along with politico-cultures in the institutional Christianity. Thank you for letting me say anything.
By the way, as everyone else, I am capable of.... But I don't choose it!
Hart certainly engages Psalms 82:6, from which Jesus quoted, God saying to human beings: "I said, 'You are gods, and all of you are children of the Most High.'"
Yes. The 'divine council' interpretation is usually given to Ps 82:6 in context, but Christ in John 10:34-35 seems to give it a different twist - and, it seems to me, in conjunction with John 1:9 this passage suggests that all humans are gods in potentia. This is a more radical understanding of theosis than is often presented in popular Orthodoxy - where theosis is usually interpreted as almost a superadditum rather than a realization of what a human already is. As you wrote in a different place, humans are fallen gods, so theosis is a fulfillment more than a reconstitution of nature.
It has been your work in the past few years that's really clarified for me how radical the Christian understanding of 'nature' really is.
All that to say, I am really looking forward to your exposition of this in the forthcoming book!
Using the Milbank and "New DBH book" connection as excuses to ask this question here.
Im reading DBH's PhD (after having already read BOTI over a year ago). I was wondering if DBH would consider the RCC magisterial dogmatic apparatus to be nothing more than violence and totality? Is the Latin approach to dogma a sort of "violent rhetoric" which attempts to force catholic intellects into submission to arbitrary statements?
Also is the RCC heirarchy just a western version of a "caste system" which stretches from God, thru Christ, thru the PPope, the cardinals, the bishops, etc all the way down to the laity and then the untouchables (unbaptised, infidels, heretics etc)?
Just want to start off by saying thanks for what you do. I truly enjoy reading your writings. I don't understand most of it, but my thesaurus is getting a workout. And pass on a scritch and thank you to Roland. His quote about "learning to live is learning the art of dying fruitfully...To learn to die properly is to learn to live." Bingo. That's it. Next round of Beggin Strips is on me.
However, I did catch one major point you slipped in during your conversation with Prof. Milbank that will have an existential impact on me forever. I have 2 litmus tests I use to determine if someone's point of view, especially their world view or religion, is worth my consideration. One is learning what someone thinks happens to people who never hear of Christ. That one is pretty easy and helps weed out a good number of, um, pious, folks out. You've passed that one about 14 books ago. The other is more nuanced. Initial evidence would lead me to believe that you might fall outside of my normal boundaries of admiration. You tend to be a little divisive in conversations regarding politics and religion. You aren't shy about poking rabid bears. And you are a Baltimore Orioles fan. That last one had me worried.
But, I can only tell you that my love and admiration, infinite loyalty and appreciation have not curdled! (My wife helped me with that word) Minute 34:00 of the video nailed it for me. If there was a rapture, it surely would have occurred on April 6, 1973.
"I mean to me evil, like the designated hitter, is just a mystery that no one...how this could have happened." DBH
I think I am going to start the commission of your Icon. Just saying. Real baseball players own bats and gloves. Pretty soon they'll play 7 inning games and start runners on second base in extra innings. Blasphemy.
Well, God Bless and Happy Thanksgiving.
Sincerely,
Frank Merlock
By the way, Aloysius is my middle name. A name which sorely deserves a revival. Glad to share it with your Uncle.
And don’t get me started on intentionally walking the batter without requiring any pitches. I once saw a young Nolan Ryan throw two wild pitches on an intentional walk, advancing the runner from second to third and then advancing him to the plate for the loss. A thing of beauty.
There is a difference between the situation of "vanilla or chocolate today?" and the classic "will I choose Heaven or Hell?" Obviously someone without a gnomic will (Jesus) will always choose Heaven in the second case (and the rest of us tend to end up 'deliberating' and choosing hell in a million different ways). But what about the first case? In the case of Jesus, say - who does not suffer from gnomic deliberations - would this not be an example of libertarian freedom? What would determine whether Christ chooses chocolate or vanilla beyond his mere fancy in that moment, and from whence cometh that fancy and what would determine it? Surely this would be a cases of unimpeded libertarianism?
Again, for a healthy soul who does not suffer from the gnomic deliberations of an ego, such a soul is predetermined to always choose salvation over damnation (at least, that's my understanding of DBH's presentation in TASBS). But when such a soul is presented with a more "arbitrary" choice such as "vanilla or chocolate?"; presumably DBH would not say that there is a "correct" choice in this instance, and therefore it would be totally spontaneous, self-generated and libertarian?
Finally, to bomb the thread with some Hare Krishna stuff, supposedly Krishna has libertarian freedom in the sense of "Who will i dance with today?" or "what tune will i play on my flute today?". Arguably this would be the ontological ground of created "vanilla vs chocolate" situations. Compare with more standard classical theisms, where God's freedom does not involve "choice between options". Just thought it was interesting.
When Maximus says Christ possesses no distinct gnomic will, he means only that Christ never chooses contrary to the promptings of the natural will’s love of the Good. He does not mean that there cannot be libertarian choices between different finite ends.
Finally I can put away the whiskey and dexies and sleep in peace <3 It might be worth appending this comment somewhere in future editions of TASBS. You more or less straight up affirmed a qualified libertarianism just now when it comes to the only actual situation where it really helps (a choice between different delightful alternatives is not determined by anything other than me and my whimsy, assuming I'm in a spiritually healthy place. While a choice between heaven and hell is a deterministic one for any healthy soul).
A wide-ranging and fascinating conversation. I look forward to reading the book, but want to thank you for the insights into the grace vs. nature debate. I am not as familiar with two-tier Thomism but am fairly certain that the same debate played out in a smaller and less philosophically sophisticated scale in Early Modern Lutheranism. In the universalist debates, one finds postmortem 'repentance' rendered impossible because no official means of grace are available to the dead. Do you see similar tensions between grace and nature also in the Orthodox tradition, or is a narrowly defined and ecclesiastically controlled notion of grace more purely a Latin phenomena?
Every tradition has its own way of trying to limit the range of grace. To be honest, for certain kinds of traditionalist, of any communion, "grace abounding" is a scandal in need of suppression.
Fair enough, though I have been pondering the ubiquitousness of grace language in the Evangelical world I grew up in. In such low church environments, notions of grace can start to apply to everything, even experiences of suffering and evils so that God becomes a straightforward author of evils. On the positive side, more reflective Evangelicals seek to discern and read their own experiences in light of God's love viewed as grace. Perhaps, any discussion of grace needs elements of discernment and wisdom to avoid the equating of every single 'natural' experience to something positively willed and desired by God.
I can't wait to read this book. But I find it so difficult to sit still for 50 minutes and listen to a conversation like this, no matter how thrilling it is to see you. I usually watch the first few minutes just to see some of it, but I'd rather just discover the book myself.
I have watched your talk on Universalism a total of 46 times and read That All Shall Be Saved 5 times. I used to be a Calvinist, and all I can say to you, Dr. Hart, is thank you. Your work saved me from absolute nihilistic despair when I was beyond depressed. Thank you so incredibly much and may God bles you.
Hi Mr. Hart, thank you for this wonderful conversation. I must confess that I have been greatly looking forward to your 2 newest books for many months and have pre-ordered them (they're so highly anticipated I'm considering booking a week off work to read them).
Your work has convinced me very much of apokatastasis, but as an Orthodox Christian, I was wondering what your thoughts are on the 3rd Decree of the Confession of Dositheus from the Council of Jassy? I know the council is not technically Ecumenical, but it is viewed as a pan-orthodox Council much like the Palamite synods, and therefore must be affirmed by the laity. There's a passage in decree 3 that seems to flat-out contradict Universalism and teaches it's complete opposite - endless punishment.
Anyways, I'm sorry if this question seems odd or foolish in any way. Thank you again for all of your wonderful works. They mean a great deal to me.
God bless and many prayers for your health and that God may continue working through you.
1. So-called pan-Orthodox synods—including both those that endorsed and those that condemned Palamas—have no authority of any kind. Those who claim they do are advancing a claim that was made up in modern times out of desperation. The ancient rule is that a synod or local council must be confirmed by an oecumenical council to carry doctrinal weight.
2. It would not matter to me if there were such a doctrine in Orthodox tradition. I would simply regard the tradition as in deep and lamentable error.
Thank you very much for your response. You've given me a great deal to think about. May I ask what your thoughts are on Gregory Palamas? In particular, The Triads where he articulates his view of God's essence and his energies. I'm excited for your book on tradition.
Also, as awkward as this may be, I just want to say an incredible thanks to you and for your works. That All Shall Be Saved is immensely wonderful and an incredible case for apokatastasis. I recently finished The Doors of the Sea, too, and it was a tremendous blessing of a read.
God bless, Mr Hart.
I’ve never been convinced that Palamas’s formulation was clear enough to call right or wrong. He was a great mystical theologian but not a precise dialectitian.
Interesting. I assume you reject Aquinas' view of absolute Divine simplicity?
In fact, I regard Aquinas's view as simply the classical Christian view, as found in, say, Maximus, as well as the view of all classical theism. I am not in the neo-Palamite camp at all. Nor were any of the Eastern fathers.
Fascinating. Just out of curiosity, what do you think makes one an Orthodox Christian? I only ask because you seem to disagree with so many prominent views to the point where I'm curious as to how you'd define Orthodoxy?
Milbank says that "the Fall remains absolutely incomprehensible," and you concur: "Evil, like the designated hitter rule, is just a mystery that no one could penetrate . . . how this could have happened."
I guess I had imagined that its occurrence is explicable in something like the following way. Created rationality is necessarily finite, and finite rationality is necessarily capable of error, and evil is just a kind of error, namely, acting on a mistaken understanding of the good. So, Adam, Eve, the snake . . . whoever, just happened to make an error of judgment.
No doubt I'm missing something. I am a bit uneasy about the sheer chance of it all. The Fall as bad luck. It could have gone the other way, but for some reason, it just didn't.
As for the designated-hitter rule, it's perfectly explicable. Whatever the pitcher is doing with the bat, it's not baseball. It certainly doesn't look like batting, much less hitting.
Well that’s more or less the basic argument. But John’s concern is that there is something amiss in thinking of childlike innocence as not only inherently defectible, but the source of an evil or culpable choice.
As for the DH, my relative Jack Bentley (who pitched principally for the Giants) was one of the best hitting pitchers of his time. Out of loyalty to him, non serviam.
To Bradford Blue and DBH:
The eternal five minutes recur in baseball games in an indefinite continuity, not on a straight line, but in trajectoires. (I already limited it with the definite).
DBH also pointed out the problem of tendential language when(ever) employed in theological arguments.
In my crude paraphrase, the privileged Christian secularism was formed historically by the Catholic Latinism, as a consequential effect of its separation from the East as implied. Socio-psychological powers are then in a settlement along with politico-cultures in the institutional Christianity. Thank you for letting me say anything.
By the way, as everyone else, I am capable of.... But I don't choose it!
Lovely! Thank you.
More please.
So succinct on such an important matter!
Hart certainly engages Psalms 82:6, from which Jesus quoted, God saying to human beings: "I said, 'You are gods, and all of you are children of the Most High.'"
I am really looking forward to this book! The title alone is extremely suggestive . . .
As is the use of the phrase in John’s gospel.
Yes. The 'divine council' interpretation is usually given to Ps 82:6 in context, but Christ in John 10:34-35 seems to give it a different twist - and, it seems to me, in conjunction with John 1:9 this passage suggests that all humans are gods in potentia. This is a more radical understanding of theosis than is often presented in popular Orthodoxy - where theosis is usually interpreted as almost a superadditum rather than a realization of what a human already is. As you wrote in a different place, humans are fallen gods, so theosis is a fulfillment more than a reconstitution of nature.
It has been your work in the past few years that's really clarified for me how radical the Christian understanding of 'nature' really is.
All that to say, I am really looking forward to your exposition of this in the forthcoming book!
Using the Milbank and "New DBH book" connection as excuses to ask this question here.
Im reading DBH's PhD (after having already read BOTI over a year ago). I was wondering if DBH would consider the RCC magisterial dogmatic apparatus to be nothing more than violence and totality? Is the Latin approach to dogma a sort of "violent rhetoric" which attempts to force catholic intellects into submission to arbitrary statements?
Also is the RCC heirarchy just a western version of a "caste system" which stretches from God, thru Christ, thru the PPope, the cardinals, the bishops, etc all the way down to the laity and then the untouchables (unbaptised, infidels, heretics etc)?
Hello Mr. Hart,
Just want to start off by saying thanks for what you do. I truly enjoy reading your writings. I don't understand most of it, but my thesaurus is getting a workout. And pass on a scritch and thank you to Roland. His quote about "learning to live is learning the art of dying fruitfully...To learn to die properly is to learn to live." Bingo. That's it. Next round of Beggin Strips is on me.
However, I did catch one major point you slipped in during your conversation with Prof. Milbank that will have an existential impact on me forever. I have 2 litmus tests I use to determine if someone's point of view, especially their world view or religion, is worth my consideration. One is learning what someone thinks happens to people who never hear of Christ. That one is pretty easy and helps weed out a good number of, um, pious, folks out. You've passed that one about 14 books ago. The other is more nuanced. Initial evidence would lead me to believe that you might fall outside of my normal boundaries of admiration. You tend to be a little divisive in conversations regarding politics and religion. You aren't shy about poking rabid bears. And you are a Baltimore Orioles fan. That last one had me worried.
But, I can only tell you that my love and admiration, infinite loyalty and appreciation have not curdled! (My wife helped me with that word) Minute 34:00 of the video nailed it for me. If there was a rapture, it surely would have occurred on April 6, 1973.
"I mean to me evil, like the designated hitter, is just a mystery that no one...how this could have happened." DBH
I think I am going to start the commission of your Icon. Just saying. Real baseball players own bats and gloves. Pretty soon they'll play 7 inning games and start runners on second base in extra innings. Blasphemy.
Well, God Bless and Happy Thanksgiving.
Sincerely,
Frank Merlock
By the way, Aloysius is my middle name. A name which sorely deserves a revival. Glad to share it with your Uncle.
And don’t get me started on intentionally walking the batter without requiring any pitches. I once saw a young Nolan Ryan throw two wild pitches on an intentional walk, advancing the runner from second to third and then advancing him to the plate for the loss. A thing of beauty.
And you said you didn’t have a pastoral bone in your body. Preach!!
Related question on "choices" and "freedom":
There is a difference between the situation of "vanilla or chocolate today?" and the classic "will I choose Heaven or Hell?" Obviously someone without a gnomic will (Jesus) will always choose Heaven in the second case (and the rest of us tend to end up 'deliberating' and choosing hell in a million different ways). But what about the first case? In the case of Jesus, say - who does not suffer from gnomic deliberations - would this not be an example of libertarian freedom? What would determine whether Christ chooses chocolate or vanilla beyond his mere fancy in that moment, and from whence cometh that fancy and what would determine it? Surely this would be a cases of unimpeded libertarianism?
Again, for a healthy soul who does not suffer from the gnomic deliberations of an ego, such a soul is predetermined to always choose salvation over damnation (at least, that's my understanding of DBH's presentation in TASBS). But when such a soul is presented with a more "arbitrary" choice such as "vanilla or chocolate?"; presumably DBH would not say that there is a "correct" choice in this instance, and therefore it would be totally spontaneous, self-generated and libertarian?
Finally, to bomb the thread with some Hare Krishna stuff, supposedly Krishna has libertarian freedom in the sense of "Who will i dance with today?" or "what tune will i play on my flute today?". Arguably this would be the ontological ground of created "vanilla vs chocolate" situations. Compare with more standard classical theisms, where God's freedom does not involve "choice between options". Just thought it was interesting.
When Maximus says Christ possesses no distinct gnomic will, he means only that Christ never chooses contrary to the promptings of the natural will’s love of the Good. He does not mean that there cannot be libertarian choices between different finite ends.
Finally I can put away the whiskey and dexies and sleep in peace <3 It might be worth appending this comment somewhere in future editions of TASBS. You more or less straight up affirmed a qualified libertarianism just now when it comes to the only actual situation where it really helps (a choice between different delightful alternatives is not determined by anything other than me and my whimsy, assuming I'm in a spiritually healthy place. While a choice between heaven and hell is a deterministic one for any healthy soul).
Exciting!
A wide-ranging and fascinating conversation. I look forward to reading the book, but want to thank you for the insights into the grace vs. nature debate. I am not as familiar with two-tier Thomism but am fairly certain that the same debate played out in a smaller and less philosophically sophisticated scale in Early Modern Lutheranism. In the universalist debates, one finds postmortem 'repentance' rendered impossible because no official means of grace are available to the dead. Do you see similar tensions between grace and nature also in the Orthodox tradition, or is a narrowly defined and ecclesiastically controlled notion of grace more purely a Latin phenomena?
Every tradition has its own way of trying to limit the range of grace. To be honest, for certain kinds of traditionalist, of any communion, "grace abounding" is a scandal in need of suppression.
Fair enough, though I have been pondering the ubiquitousness of grace language in the Evangelical world I grew up in. In such low church environments, notions of grace can start to apply to everything, even experiences of suffering and evils so that God becomes a straightforward author of evils. On the positive side, more reflective Evangelicals seek to discern and read their own experiences in light of God's love viewed as grace. Perhaps, any discussion of grace needs elements of discernment and wisdom to avoid the equating of every single 'natural' experience to something positively willed and desired by God.
I can't wait to read this book. But I find it so difficult to sit still for 50 minutes and listen to a conversation like this, no matter how thrilling it is to see you. I usually watch the first few minutes just to see some of it, but I'd rather just discover the book myself.
Fine. You convinced me. I shall buy the book.
Buy three or four copies. Six and you could use them as coasters.
Don't forget the infinite possibilities of door stops and propping up wobbly tables...
All joking aside, I also wanted to mention how much I have enjoyed Atheist Delusions and The Experience of God over the years.
It is one of Odilon Redon’s many paintings on the theme of Phaethon.
https://www.odilon-redon.org/
I think…