Who is David Bentley Hart, and why should we look into his translation?
- David Bentley Hart
- "David Bentley Hart (born February 1965) is an American writer, philosopher, religious studies scholar, critic, and theologian. Reviewers have commented on Hart’s baroque prose and provocative rhetoric in over one thousand essays, reviews, and papers as well as nineteen books (including translations). From a predominantly Anglican family background, Hart became Eastern Orthodox when he was twenty-one. His academic works focus on Christian metaphysics, philosophy of mind, Indian and East Asian religion, Asian languages, classics, and literature as well as a New Testament translation.
- The New Testament: A Translation Paperback – October 8, 2019
- Tiff between Wright and Hart over each other’s translations:
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- Given his speaking and writing products, maybe he will, if he hasn’t yet to his own satisfaction. He’s as loquacious (and in popular demand) as David Bentley Hart. Personally, I like some things he says, but would fuss over other things.
- Take, for instance, Wright’s penchant, as it were, for “the new creation”. What is that, precisely? Sure, there are some who would have us believe that it’s a very real, physical “thing”, a “not yet, but to come” thing, “In the blink of an eye”. Others, more like me, think it’s a radical change in worldview. Worldviews, like all created things, don’t appear or change nstantaneously.
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I appreciate your questions, Terry. As important as the concept is for Wright, I would like to know precisely what he means by it. I think he gives a few hints, but I’ve not found a fuller description.
So many rabbit trails for me to follow…
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Some of my lecture 4 notes (mostly quotations) of interest so far …
Around 21 minutes in:
Because of the enlightenment split, apocalyptic references in scripture are only understood to be divine interventions visited upon us as world-ending events.
39:30:
“The gospels do not contain apocalyptic. They are apocalyptic.”
41:
The evangelists knew perfectly well that they were living in a not-yet time, of course! But as far as they were concerned, the cross whose meaning was disclosed in the resurrection and the subsequent scriptural reflection generated the ‘already’ that they were celebrating. That’s why the second-temple Jewish world-view has as its most classic characteristic: hope. The early Christian world-view has as its most classic characteristic: Joy.
Added emphasis above is mine - though I would argue is faithful to Wright’s message.
47:30
Mark is just as clear as John, though in different ways. The implicit claim by Jesus leaves no room for the temple. The shrine has done its forward pointing work. Now it is a haunt for brigands, ripe for destruction.
Stong words, those! And quite a distinction, worthy of the book of Hebrews itself to distinguish this New Covenant of Christ from the original still celebrated and maintained within Jewish tradition. I’m guessing that Wright isn’t agonizing over much these days (like many other popular religioius leaders) how currently orthodox Jewish thinkers would react to all this.
But I can’t help but reflect further then if many of those same Christian leaders might not feel the same sting - and in exactly the same way, if it was pointed out that the Protestant traditions of the Reformation may have simply relocated that divine Heaven-earth intersection from a physical temple into the pages of printed holy writ - (as somebody recently referred to it: ‘the paper pope’ of the Protestants). Do we ever reach a point where that has concluded its “forward-pointing work”? And more to the point, has it become a haunt for brigands? I’ll suggest that we never (this side of the grave) entirely leave behind our need for the pointers - especially scriptures. Perhaps now more than ever as (at least here in the U.S.) evangelicals and their leaders flock away even from such earthly shrines as the ancient printed page to prostrate themselves before the newer shinier idols that promise worldly power to them.
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I watched lecture 4.
I find Dr. Wright’s explanation of the Kingdom of God having already been initiated on earth by the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, very hopeful. But, it is a “now and not yet” scenario in regards to eschatology.
Dr. Wright mentioned Psalm 72 as a picture of the Kingdom of God on earth.
To be honest, I struggle at times with the idea that the Kingdom of God has started here on earth, with the world being in such a messed up state. This struggle is most present whenever I listen to the daily news. I think it’s good to meditate often on the Kingdom work of the church in the world throughout history. I also appreciate being involved in a local expression of the Kingdom (ie. a church) that “rolls up its sleeves” and tries to implement justice and mercy in the world.
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- Wright fans: I think you’re going to want to see this.
- Together, N.T. Wright and Michel F. Bird have written a book: The New Testament in Its World.
- First published in Great Britain in 2019, Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge www.spck.org.uk
- Published in North America by Zondervan Academic
- From its Preface:
- The idea for this book came during a conference in 2010. Michael Bird suggested to Philip Law of SPCK that someone ought to work with N. T. Wright and try condensing his massive and still incomplete Christian Origins and the Question of God series into a single volume, thus forming a kind of introduction to the New Testament. Law loved the idea and suggested that Bird himself should be the one to do it. Bird was reluctant at first – preferring to be the progenitor rather than the executor of the idea – but when Wright agreed to the project, Bird signed up enthusiastically.
- In the following nine years, Bird’s idea would soar and grow in scope and expression—and not least because Wright kept producing new writings during this time. Both authors also filmed lectures throughout the Holy Land, Greece, and Rome to complement the book, while careful attention and research was given to the book’s rich visual and pedagogical features.
- The book is a whopping 992 pages. There’s an additional 176 page Workbook (for more $), 13 hours of Video Lectures (for even more $$), Audio Lecture version of the videos (in 2 parts) (for some more $$) and an ebook version (for yet more $$).
- For short versions (I presume) of the Video Lectures, head over to Zondervan Academic and watch the free stuff at https://masterlectures.zondervanacademic.com/new-testament-in-its-world?utm_source=za_blog&utm_medium=blog&utm_campaign=newtestamentinitsworld_cm
- For a short swim through what’s available, check out The New Testament in Its World: An Introduction to the History, Literature, and Theology of the First Christians Hardcover – Illustrated, November 19, 2019
- For an up close, downloadable first 61 pages of the book, click on: https://zondervanacademic.com/pages/new-testament-in-its-world/NTIW_sample_low_res.pdf.
- Together, N.T. Wright and Michel F. Bird have written a book: The New Testament in Its World.
- And don’t say I never gave you nothin’.
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I think part of the despair which comes so easily (and you’re not alone - there is much reason to long for so much to be different than it is in the world) - is that we keep wanting to flip those kingdom expectations back into political victory somewhere again. The reminders that Christ’s Kingdom is not like the kingdoms of this world is something we keep setting aside and replacing with a … well, what about now? When are we gonna see something which at least moves the needle among halls of power? But clearly the early church and apostles and Jesus himself already knew that the kingdom was present and active as Jesus teaches in Luke 17 - where he answered the impatient questioners by saying: “The kingdom of God does not come with signs to be seen. Nor will they say ‘Look, here!’ or ‘There!’ For behold, the kingdom of God is in your midst.”
Notice the present tense. The kingdom of God was already there - it began with Jesus. And obviously it wasn’t the sort that started (or ever proceeds) with political victories or acquisition of worldly power either with or against the Romans. It’s just a whole different level of kingdom entirely.
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Yes, you make good points here. I understand this intellectually. But I sometimes struggle with it emotionally. I don’t expect or even want political victories – I am looking for bottom-up Kingdom of God changes so that proud and violent rulers of nations eventually lose their followers to Jesus.
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The last of my lecture 4 quotes … for now.
50:15 The early fathers agreed. Through the 2nd century there was no problem of any “delay”. The world had changed. Apocalyptic is not some general principle about the way stuff happens in the world. It was language to describe a one-off event – the changing point in history. Came through its unique and disruptive role within the narrative of creation and covenant.
53:10 If history reached its climax with Jesus of Nazareth, then it cannot have done so with the enlightenment. A clash of titan mythologies.
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I don’t know how “high church” Wright is, but there’s a strain in the Anglican church that will tell you that the new creation can be found most clearly in/at the Eucharist, where we eat and drink Christ’s true Body and true Blood, the “medicine of immortality”. Beyond that comes the liturgy of praise, and hymns of praise, since “He inhabits the praise of His people”. And in the broader world, every time we do some good work that is contrary to our natural feelings and habits, with no thought of reward, that is the new creation poking through.
The thing is, none of us is likely to recognize the new creation breaking in any more than people in the first century recognized God the Son walking on this Earth; until the Kingdom erupts and is evident to all, Yahweh remains a God Who hides Himself.
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I once heard the Bible referred to as “angelic artillery” (I think the first word was for the alliteration). The idea was the scripture itself carries power and thus quoting it to people will cause them to change. Similar was a thing back in the 1970s where it was popular to have Bible covers with a sword sewn on in leather or cloth; it was conceived of as a weapon for attacking the ungodly, though it was never made clear exactly what that was to accomplish.
All that, IMO, took the emphasis from where it was supposed to be – building up the community of Christ – and led to introspection and magical thinking instead of good works that would make others sit up and take notice. So yeah, the “Bible only” – the strong sola that is effectively nuda – took the emphasis off the temple that is the church and put it in pages with ink.
At the time, Jesus was the Kingdom on Earth! Just as when Abram was called the people of God consisted of him alone, so in Jesus the kingdom of God consisted of Him alone.
I watched a video back about Christmastime where an Orthodox scholar examined the prophecy of Fatima that the church in Russia would be renewed. He examined the words of the prophecy and concluded that it wasn’t talking, as so many believed, about the Roman Catholic church suddenly thriving in Russia but to a turn by the Russian Orthodox away from the desire for worldly wealth and power to seeking the Kingdom. I would love to see that happen, with the people throwing out the traitorous Kirill (he was a KGB agent who betrayed fellow priests to the KGB) and demanding a new patriarch!
I was just watching a video where it was said that there are two types of apocalyptic: one that starts where you are and says “X happened, so here we change course!” and one that says “Y is going to happen, let’s aim for it!” I think the above fits with the first type.
Before the thread gets shut down, I need to post three of my favorite lines in the entire Lecture series, all that come from Lecture 4:
When we read a text saying the Sun and hte Moon will be darkened and the stars will be falling from heaven, we should know as a matter of literary genre that the next line will not be, “The rest of the country will have scattered showers and sunny intervals.” (20:05)
Fourth Ezra reinterprets Daniel with the messianic lion attacking the Roman eagle nobody today and nobody then thought that Daniels four sea monsters in chapter seven were the sort of things that David Attenborough might display on blue planet. (20:26)
[I]f the day of the Lord meant the collapse of the space-time universe you don’t expect to be informed of this by a letter. (25:34)
Ok. To my notes. I MUST pull some thoughts together in the next few hours.
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Wright’s overall concern about the eschatology that came out of 19th century German biblical scholars fascinates me, because it it so similar to the kind of pretrib dispensationalism I’ve lived in for most of my life (and which is so widely reflected in popular Christian culture in the U. S.). I’ve always found it mind-bogglingly complicated and entirely confusing regarding what one may regard as literal vs figurative, so that I mostly ignored “end times” teaching. But I’ve never spent much time looking at other views.
The little I’ve read “outside” was similar to the view Wright expresses – that in the 1st Century ME apocalyptic literature used the language of catastrophy to refer to actual, this-worldly, political events (that happened at that time), (which do not involve biblically unknown or future countries like the U.S or Russia). This simplifies and clarifies so much both biblically as well as regarding current events, etc. And it demonstrates again the importance of really learning the thinking of the time and culture that one studies.
I need to remember the way Wright includes the temple in his discussion as well, as a microcosm that symbolizes the joining of heaven and earth. This brings a very different significance to the temple and its destruction, than losing the designated place to carry out sacrifices and religious ritual. “Early Christians believed in the cosmology reflected in the temple and the sabbath that heaven and earth, future and present and past, were designed together to overlap and interlock” (17:40).
I like that Wright addresses “the problem” of NT passages that seem to indicate an imminent end of the world, and his two questions:
- Do any early Christian texts speak of an actual cosmic catastrophe?
- How did first C. Christians themselves understand the sayings which did have a specific time table?
I appreciate his emphatic explanation that they are not about destruction but radical transformation, renewal. Renewal was always sort of hinted at (in my churches), or confused into a timeline of apocalyptic destruction that always baffled me. How could both occur? If a dispensational understanding were true, what would be left to renew?
Wright’s explanation of the concept of “already - not yet” is helpful. It’s not a modern apologetic invention, but rather part and parcel of the thinkng reflected in the NT texts.
All of this indicates to me that there is no such thing as an “innocent reading” or “plain reading” of the biblical texts, or a neutral, or objective one. And the way we read makes a great deal of difference in the way we understand, and where we go from there.
Really a tangent:
It struck me the other day (finally) how similar Wright’s description of the Enlightenment split that Merv mentioned ("Discerning the Dawn: History: History, Eschatology and New Creation" by N.T. Wright - #268 by Mervin_Bitikofer) is to the ethical sphere of life (based in Hegel’s philosophy) that is described in Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling. It is the sphere into which all of a society is absorbed, and which functions, if needed, as a basic ground-of-being type God, which requires no actual faith, or with which one can have any kind of relationship. If one is to exercise faith, one must exist outside the ethical sphere in direct relationship with God.
Whether this view is equivalent to Kierkegaard’s is unclear from F&T. But he and Wright recognize at least one similar concept of the ethical sphere, or post-enlightenment world.
More material to get to tomorrow.
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I found this item interesting:
Hart criticizes New Atheism for being “as contemptible as any other form of dreary fundamentalism” because it “consists entirely in vacuous arguments afloat on oceans of historical ignorance, made turbulent by storms of strident self-righteousness.”
That’s such a great description!
Great article – it makes clear something that is extremely difficult to get through to beginning students of any language but often especially of ancient languages whose worldviews are more than a little alien to modern minds.
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That’s one for which I hit pause in order to write it down. It’s extra funny to me because the “next line” is reminiscent to the punch line on an old bit of humor that ends with, “Weather tonight, dark, with widely scattered stars, giving way to increasing light in the early morning hours”.
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I once saw a poster that charted all the different views of the End Times that were or had been popular. To use the word “poster” is misleading, though, without clarification: it was three feet high by six feet long with most of it in 12-point font size. To me it was sufficient evidence to conclude that spending time studying the issue would not be well spent.
It also convinced me that all such interpretations required taking things as literal or figurative not on the basis of the text but on the basis of how a writer wanted it to come out.
Quite true! I recall a late-night discussion on whether anything that happened in the Temple after Jesus announced “Tetelstai!” (it is finished) had any meaning at all – and I argued that the Temple may have become irrelevant the moment of the Annunciation since Jesus, the Living Temple, had arrived.
Dispensationalism has bad Christology.
IIRC it shows up in Irenaeus, among others.
You’ll need a different thread to demonstrate that unsubstantiated claim.
A bit more that I’ve been working on all day. I want to come back to the inaugurated kingdom soon, but may not have time this evening.
It has been hard to sustain discussion in this thread. @St.Roymond has tried hard. I know I have failed. I’ve looked over past posts and am afraid I’m often repeating things that were said before, just throwing up my notes. I’d like to review the previous posts for Lecture 4, but I hope other folks will, too. And reply to them.
Friday we start on Lecture 5.
My post for today:
I spent more time today going over the lecture with an eye to better understanding what Wright is getting at with apocalyptic and to see if I could find any clarification for questions that @Terry_Sampson , @Andy7 and I (and maybe others) expressed about the “already” aspects of the Kingdom of God.
Wright’s explanations of “apocalyptic” are straight-forward:
• a literary form and use where writers intend to denote what we call “this-worldly” realities and to connote theological meaning.
• Uses the language of cosmic catastrophe to refer to actual political events.
• “[Jesus] was talking about something that was happening and would happen once and for all on earth as in heaven. He was using language that would invest that “something” with theological significance.” (History and Eschatology p. 134 – the book that came out of these lectures.)
• NT apocalyptic writing refers to the coming of God.
It was helpful to me that Wright gave extrabiblical examples of apocalyptic writing. It’s not something unique to the Bible and more mysterious, but was widespread in its use for the same purposes that Wright includes in his informal definition of apocalyptic. These give us contemporary readers demonstrations of how this type of literature was used and understood by the people who wrote it, and that without the feel of “high stakes hermeneutics” associated with the Bible.
Again, I actually enjoyed Wright’s discussion of new creation as part of his discussion of the evangelists’ use of and understanding of apocalyptic language. In speaking of Romans 8, Wright says: “Paul uses Exodus language. What God did for Israel, and what God did for Jesus at Easter, God will finally do for the whole creation.” Paul links this to the final resurrection envisaging an actual transformative event, not simply an existential experience. Romans 8 does not describe a cosmic disaster. The present creation will not be destroyed; it will be set free from thora decay. It will be more truly itself when, in the end, God will be all in all.” (23:32 to 24:07)
And again to the quip (but with what follows): “If the day of the Lord meant the collapse of the space-time universe, you don’t expect to be informed of this by a letter. Paul was describing transformative events within the ongoing space-time world, not the destruction of that world and its replacement with a purely spiritual existence nor supernatural.”
This is magnificent, isn’t it? This is not the “Left Behind” or “A Distant Thunder” boogieman I’m used to.
Around 33:31 Wright States that “The Gospels do not contain apocalyptic in the first century sense; they are apocalyptic. They are describing how the coming of God took place.”
A number of us have pointed out this correction, but I think it’s important to look at why Wright says they are apocalyptic. They aren’t just talking about what Jesus did (denoting events) but giving those actions theological significance.
Wright boldly states a few minutes later: “The way the evangelists told the story of Jesus was as the story of a potential messianic claimant in whose actions and ultimate fate they discerned in retrospect the presence of Israel’s God.” I imagine this view that gives credence to hind-sight might be rejected in some camps. But it deals reasonably with the delay of the writings after Jesus’ resurrection, as well as with their genre or form and even stated goals: “that you may believe,” for example. Which is different from Action News Reporting.
Finally, related to the coming of God, Wright mentions about 36:34 “That’s how the old mythological narratives work; you defeat the dark powers and then you build the place where God or the king or both is going to come and rest. And we see such images or references involving Jesus all over the new testament. Once the king is seated, there will then be a rest for God’s people with him.