![]() So what has he done to the New Testament, this bristling one-man band of a Christian literatus? The surprising aim, Hart tells us in his introduction, was to be as bare-bones and-where appropriate-unsqueamishly prosaic as he can. If reproduction is not a right but a social function, should any woman be allowed to bring such men into the world?” LITERAL TRAINSLATION OF TYHE NEW TESTAMENT CODERichard Dawkins, “zoologist and tireless tractarian,” has “an embarrassing incapacity for philosophical reasoning” Sam Harris’s The End of Faith is “extravagantly callow” and Dan Brown’s heretical The Da Vinci Code is “surely the most lucrative novel ever written by a borderline illiterate.” (All this from the first one and a half pages of 2009’s Atheist Delusions.) He once proposed, as a thought experiment, that bioethicists such as the late Joseph Fletcher (“almost comically vile”) be purged from the gene pool: “Academic ethicists … constitute perhaps the single most useless element in society. Unlike Chesterton-and this is how you know he’s an early-21st-century guy, someone with Wi-Fi-Hart is extremely rude. “My chief purpose,” he wrote in 2013’s The Experience of God, “is not to advise atheists on what I think they should believe I want merely to make sure that they have a clear concept of what it is they claim not to believe.” “Where an author has written bad Greek. He rehearses this argument in numberless witty variations against whichever non-God ideology happens to slouch beneath his pen: materialism, scientism, consumerism, pornographism … And he can sound a Chestertonian note. Chesterton, he has one essential argument: that God is the foundation of our being and that every human life therefore has its beginning and its end in eternity. A scholar, theologian, and cultural commentator, Hart is also a stylist or rather, the prickly and slightly preening polemical exhibition that is his style is indivisible from his role as a scholarly and theologically oriented cultural commentator. Vocabulary is not his problem, unless you think he has too much of it. It’s significant, this act of lexical surrender, because if you’d bet on anyone to come up with a fancy English word for Logos, it’d be David Bentley Hart. So he throws up his hands and leaves it where it is: “In the origin there was the Logos …”Ĭheck out more from this issue and find your next story to read. The Chinese word Tao might get at it, Hart tells us, but English has nothing with quite the metaphysical flavor of Logos, the particular sense of a formative moral energy diffusing itself, without diminution, through space and time. For David Bentley Hart, however, whose mind-bending translation of the New Testament was published in October, the Word-as a word-does not suffice: He finds it to be “a curiously bland and impenetrable designation” for the heady concept expressed in the original Greek of the Gospels as Logos. A pre-temporal syllable swelling to utterance in the mouth of the universe, spoken once and heard forever: God’s power chord, if you like. In the beginning was … well, what? A clap of the divine hands and a poetic shock wave? Or an itchy node of nothingness inconceivably scratching itself into somethingness? In the beginning was the Word, says the Gospel according to John-a lovely statement of the case, as it’s always seemed to me. ![]()
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