In Part 2 of Beauty, Hart begins by recognizing that to speak of the Christian narrative might prove an unwieldy task. He chooses in his Dogmatica Minora, to focus on what he calls the “most elementary and binding canon of catholic confession, the Nicene-Constantinopolitan symbol (in its unadulterated Greek form)…”[1] His choice of using the unaltered version of the Nicene Creed, belies clearly an ecumenical concern. The Church itself is often dragged into the enmeshments of the world, and its current division proves that. Hart’s return to a less fractured time, I think, shows a level of regard for the
He chooses four discrete “moments” in the landscape of Christian theology, so that he does not go off unbridled into the “hermeneutical open spaces.” He sets out to describe the Trinity, Creation, Salvation, and the Eschaton. He does so by means of setting forth specific theses in each moment he considers. He says at the outset of his dogmatic essay that there is no systematic or deductive sequence, however, one should not assume that there is no direction at all to this section. In fact, as it becomes clear, the analog is brilliant. Throughout Part 2, one can see that the four parts hang inextricably from one another. Themes of Trinity show up in Salvation. Creation appears in Eschaton.
Hart employs ten theses throughout his Dogmatica. After each thesis, he includes sections that help lead the reader to understand the implications of each. Some of these sections are lengthy, which should be expected, since the entire Dogmatica takes up a majority of the book. Underlying the entire the rationale for beauty and infinity is the doctrine of the Trinity. Christian understanding of love grows out of the perichoresis of love that is central to the understanding of the Trinity. Within this pericoresis, Hart finds divine fellowship and joy and immutability. That the Trinity exists in a complete shared dance among the three persons, allows for a difference that he sees as a distance. That beauty is the true form of distance means that somehow beauty is taken up into the nature of the Trinity itself. Probably from my own indoctrination into the pondering of the mystery of the Trinity, where the different was verboten, I cringe at his use of different. He is surely not saying that the three persons are separate from one another, so I grant him this use, but I just wish there was another way.
In the Creation portion of the Dogmatica, Hart places creation solely within the Trinity. In his first thesis in Creation, Hart writes, “God’s gracious action in creation belongs from the first to that delight, pleasure and regard that the Trinity enjoys from eternity, as an outward and unnecessary expression of that love; and thus creation must be received before all as gift and as beauty.”[2] The delight that God finds in created things is the basis for a Christian theology of creation. “It is delight that constitutes creation, and so only delight can comprehend it, see it aright, understand its grammar. Only in loving creation’s beauty – only seeing that creation truly is beauty – does one apprehend what creation is.”[3] If creation is delight, then creation cannot be, Hart argues, an overcoming of something. Myths of God creating by overcoming chaos are not only unhelpful, but also hurtful. If creation arises out of conflict, then violence is inherent to its structure. If creation arises out of love and delight, then violence is nowhere to be found, and then Christian evangel can indeed be one of peace. Creation ex nihilo is meant to speak of a God who gives his bounty, and not one who is at war. The creation for delight must be apprehended as gift. Hart takes to task the Nietzschean voices that would discount and dismiss the gift language. Their argument that Hart recounts is that the role of gift in society has been thoroughly reduced. A gift becomes for the Nietzschean a token of power and superiority, one that creates a “calculus of indebtedness.” What a terrible thing for God to foist upon us! The gifts of God become a way for God to control, manipulate and oppress us. Hart removes these objections by turning to love, both agape and eros. For Hart, eros is essential, because it is central to the teleological aspect of the Christian life. Hart writes,
Creation is, before all else, given by God to God, and only then – through the pneumatological generosity of the trinitarian life – given to creatures: a gift that is only so long as it is given back, passed on, received and imparted not as possession but always as grace. This is indeed a “circle” – the infinite circle of divine love – and for that very reason capable of a true gift: one that draws creatures into a circle upon which they have no natural “right” to intrude. And if creatures participate in God’s language of love – in this erotic charity of the gift – simply by being creatures, it is all but impossible for them not also to give, not to extend love to others, not to donate themselves entirely to the economy of agape: the gift must be actively withheld not to be given.[4]
The theme of gift continues as Hart moves on to salvation. While the entire work is impressive, this section needs to be held up as a generally brilliant part. Hart maintains a thoroughly trinitarian scheme of salvation while also being thoroughly Christological. Again, this awe at Hart’s work here might simply be a novice’s wonder at the adept, but it seems to me that the Salvation section of the Dogmatica is the gem of the whole treatise. Jesus Christ, the God-man, is the one who brings about the restoration of the human image. Christ is the eternal image of the Father after whom humanity was created in the beginning. The restoration then of humanity is to the original beauty. Which of course, seems to play right into the hands of the Nietzscheans as they see in the cross only more violence; Hart is forced to once again ask the question of the book. Hart asks, “Does the language of sacrifice within Christian thought, inextirpable from Scripture, make of the gospel a tale that defeats itself in the telling, the beauty of whose rhetoric proves in the end to be another – and particularly meretricious – variant of the glamour of violence?”[5] Hart’s answer is a resounding “No!” Hart turns away from the use of the crucifixion as particularly salvific, but rather to the sacrifice that Christ makes. The violence that happens is the response of the powers and principalities, which Hart dubs the totality. Hart sees the sacrifice of Christ not as one of violence, but one of oblation, offering, gift. Hart wrestles with Anselm’s theory of the atonement, Cur Deus Homo, and all the baggage that it has collected along the way. Hart retells Anselm that moves away from violence, but remains embedded in sacrifice. Christ offers his life to God as a gift, which is utterly trinitarian in nature. Hart writes,
…the story of Christ’s sacrifice belongs not to an economy of credit and exchange but to the trinitarian motion of love, it is given entirely as gift – a gift give when it should not have needed to be given again, by God, at a price that we imposed upon him. As an entirely divine action, Christ’s sacrifice merely draws creation back into the eternal motion of divine love for which it was fashioned. The violence that befalls Christ belongs to our sacrificial order of justice, an order overcome by his sacrifice, which is one of peace; for though totality seeks to convert Christ into an abstract credit, in order to preserve itself as an enclosed circle of stable exchange between the life of the particular transgressor and the universal dispensation of civic stability, the donation that Christ makes of himself draws creation into God’s eternal “offering” of himself in the life of the Trinity.[6]
Hart’s argument is based on the claim that for Anselm, the redemptive element in Christ’s death is not his suffering, but instead his innocence. This retelling of Anselm is sure to find many critics, but it is intriguing. Thankfully, there is no one dogma of the atonement.
Hart closes his Dogmatica by examining the Eschaton, which really is for him brief. Unlike the other three points, the Eschaton is almost an afterthought. This section is unbelievably terse. The Eschaton is the vindication of a particular story, affirms the created goodness, and exposes other stories as false and damnable.
Finally, in his concluding remarks, Part 3, “Rhetoric without Reserve,” Hart wrestles with how we avoid persuading others. The Nietzscheans see persuasion as a veiled form of violence. Our evangelism must not become, as it too often has in the past, coercion. We must as a people find ourselves drawn into the place of the crucified one, seeking conformation to Christ’s image. Hart writes,
Theology must, because of what its particular story is, have the form of martyrdom, witness, a peaceful offer that has already suffered rejection and must be prepared for rejection as a consequence. In resisting the myth of a hermeneutical neutrality that can govern persuasions from without, theology perhaps summons the specter of holy war, of the chaos of endless persuasion and repersuasion; but the only answer Christian though can pose over against this apprehension is its own way of the inversion of violence, God’s vindication of the crucified over against the orders that crucify, and its own urging to the world of the model of peace that Christ offers. Against the violence of rhetorics, it can do no more that offer a rhetoric of peace. The cross is not an ending, merely marking the closure of all metanarratives, awaiting translation into a speculative Good Friday more radical than even Hegel contemplated; rather, it inaugurates a world, the true world restored to itself, whose particular nature binds Christians to occupy, if they must, within this war of persuasions, the place of the warred against, the excluded.[1]
Only in enduring the wounds of Christ in our body may we show the way of beauty and peace.
[1] Ibid, p. 153
[2] Ibid, p. 249
[3] Ibid, p. 253
[4] Ibid, p. 268
[5] Ibid, p. p. 349
[6] Ibid, pp. 371-372
