Dr. Who
November 28th, 2007, 12:25:48 PM
Since it is beyond the capacity of this format to convey a fully coherent argument, I shall try only to adequately suggest certain directions of thought that I think necessary for a proper reflection upon Jesus, the Christ. Because of its relative length, I have thought it justified in starting a separate thread, though this effort is directed towards the common discussion on the nature of Jesus. I cannot provide the scholarly apparatus of confirming texts, nor shall I attempt to make smooth transitions between discrete elements. A certain amount of execrable simplification is unavoidable. I wish mainly to draw attention to a number of areas that are likely to be mistaken in popular discourse or at least lacking in sufficient context. As I can expect a fair number of those who might peruse this effort to find the tone irritating, the rhetoric precious or fake or somehow an expression of `know-it-all’ hubris, I can only say I’ve spent a lifetime contemplating these matters and that my authorial voice is no doubt developed over time, but natural to me. Finally, no one is forcing anyone to read what is repugnant to a particular sensibility.
The mysticism of the One and the Son of God: antique religio-philosophical speculation, whether in the East or the West, tends towards a universal conclusion. The Absolute is conceived in terms of unity and simplicity. The great neo-Platonist, Plotinus, is a late example, yet the beauty of his synthesis is both alluring and in some ways a uniquely creative retrieval of previous thinkers. The One is the fount of being from which there is an `over-flow’ into degrees of lesser being, each subsequent level more diminished than the previous one. The path of human wisdom attempts to return to the compact richness of the originating One, an effort requiring an ascetic renunciation of everything that is not the One. By this mode of thinking, the unique, the particular, the historical is an impediment to true liberation; indeed, one’s very individuality is a kind of illusion that must be renounced in order to attain a return to the One.
Now certainly there is a perduring element of truth in this kind of ascesis. The modern, Western Self is founded on notions quite distinct from both classical Greek philosophy and Christian theology. I would argue that it is an illusion that needs to be renounced and so a Christian and a Buddhist, for instance, may find here a point of agreement. Nonetheless, the nature of the Christian Absolute is radically distinct from all other conceptions. The revelation of the Trinity is irreducibly a mystery – rationalists of the Unitarian or the Moslem variety cannot but understand it as a poorly disguised polytheism. Within the understanding of Christian theology, what is revealed about the Absolute is that it eternally subsists as a substantive relation. The One is not isolate, but always already, to use the language of structuralism, a dynamism of gift in which the plenitude of divine being is poured forth, received, and returned in a festivity of eternal dance and joy. The Father is always fathering and the Son is eternally born; the love between them manifest not as neutral relation, but as Itself that most mysterious and creative Spirit that Christian theology reckons the secret artisan working amongst the wreck and tragedy of timely existence to raise up a Creation flourishing and free of the sorrows and loss that blight our present experience. This entire theology depends on the truth of Christian dogma regarding the Incarnation, the assertion that Christ is both fully human and fully divine. It initiates a new and unpredictable relation between the historical and the eternal. Properly understood, the eternal is not the enemy of the novel, historical moment. One is not presented with an adamantine plenitude (Parmenides notion of being) juxtaposed against the dramatic flux of time (Heracleitos). The Absolute does not crush the Relative.
Of course, I have had to invoke metaphor in my explanation here and how one understands and interprets metaphor will determine how well or little one is likely to credit this kind of discourse. I argue that metaphor has its roots in a divine richness of being, that what we discern of fatherhood from our own, best fathers is but a pale reflection of what divine fatherhood is. It does not require a mathematical clarity and precision for one to accept this proleptic pointing towards a mysterious, eternal Source. Metaphor has its own, internal standard of correctness, but it is essentially a poetic mode of perception that grasps or perhaps better, intimates and intuits a wealth and teleological direction in being that transcends our ordinary experience. Yet this does not leave one in a state of inchoate and abstract vagueness. On the contrary, if one is caught in that state that can only reject poetic insight as meaningless, one is simply unable to perceive as the genuine poet can. (Yes, yes, one knows that one man’s insight is another man’s blindness, but one is not compelled by any authentic logic to render all judgments equivalent through a leveling egalitarianism.)
Through metaphor, the poet is able to discern a real connection between the act of being embodied in a horse or a rose, for example, and some other act of being. This is not the same as simile, where one says something is like something else. Such a comparison is often helpful, but it does not rely upon a metaphysical connection that eludes a superficial kind of rationality. Metaphor points towards a dynamic openness in being, towards an upper limit of relation that can be intuited without the clarity of full comprehension. All this indicates that Christ doubtless did employ metaphor when he called himself life, light, and the door, but the use of such poetic devices does not militate against traditional Christian interpretation. As C. S. Lewis actually did point out, whether he used metaphor or not, Jesus was a bad teacher if he was unable to clarify for his closest disciples the intended meaning of that usage.
What do I mean above when I talk about superficial rationality? If one makes the rough assertion that the modern era began in Western Europe in the sixteenth-century and that we are now in a period one might call late modernity or that equally nebulous term, the post-modern, one may further assert that the concept of reason has narrowed over the course of the modern age. Today, one imbibes an uncritical scientism in the easy and unchallenged assumptions of the education machine, the media machine, the prevalent `common sense’ of those trained to accept blandly the pronouncements of those whose authority is essentially that they embody the `spirit of the times.’ What is scientism? Certainly not science, an undeniably compelling and useful method. Scientism is the ungrounded, parasitic, in fact, epistemological claim that objective truth is limited to what can be comprehended and affirmed through mathematical, experimental science. In short, it is a reductionism of the truth to that which can be verified by practitioners of the hard sciences and their associated experts in technical application. One cannot, of course, prove this limitation of the knowably real by scientific method, but adherents like to assume that the prestige of modern science in the modern world elides that lack of proof. The shame and loss involved in the acceptance of scientism is that the insights of poets and philosophers almost invariably tend to be shuffled off into the netherworld of subjective opinion. Indeed, the crucial, most fundamental questions of meaning evaporate as serious subjects in the search for truth or are dismissed as a bubble of dreaming opinion floating upon the surface of a mechanistic world consistent with a more-or-less quotidian and comfortable nihilism. The seeming endless triviality of the popular culture, indeed the majority of what considers itself high culture, is a logical deduction of modernist premises.
Yet the wisdom of antiquity and the high Middle Ages would not recognize such a poor dwarf of reason as that light that dignifies man above the lovely brutes. The merely instrumental reason of today lacks absolutely the dimension Aquinas named the intellectus and Bergson the intuition. Man’s rationality embraces that knowledge which is marked by wonder and the reverence for beauty. Deep insight that applies to all is not the product of universal method, but of unique moments of unrepeatable vision. Thus, what the artist can tell us is a legitimate apprehension of truth, just as much a product of reason as the cogitations of the scientific investigator. One might add that generally the scientist who makes the highest achievements in his field is likely to partake of the artists’ imagination. His reason expands beyond the narrow limits of a scientistic rationalism.
Much of this particular discussion is aimed at those who confidently assert that an easy historical progression has led us from the mythic-religious to the humane-philosophic to the heights of modern day science. This kind of positivist historiography is old in the tooth, but still carries a kind of dogmatic heft among those carried away by the last vestiges of an unconvincing materialist philosophy whose halcyon days are long past. One is not thereby, I caution, made ridiculous if one denies the supernatural; one simply should do so with greater critical and historical awareness than is usual, alas, from the Richard Dawkins, the Daniel Dennetts, and the Christopher Hitchens of the world. (The latter, I admit, I cannot help liking, though he is often odious and unruly in his behavior and scandalously dishonest in his argumentation. Perhaps for similar, eccentric sympathies, I am rather fond of Shiva.)
There is a Christology of sorts associated with advocates of positivist reason. The by now rather staid model for deconstructing so-called primitive Christianity into the hypothetical gap between the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith depends upon a fairly long period of gestation where the historical Jesus gradually fades into obscurity, covered over by the accretion of myth, legend, what have you that various `faith communities’ independently or through mutual cross-pollination are supposed to invest with the spurious status of truth. (In some versions of this story, they are not necessarily spurious, but more or less adequate images for an individual, subjective mysticism, this latter interpretation probably finding its canonical expression in Schleiermacher and then pushed by fellows like Bultmann and Tillich. Those who actually know theology will recognize the faint Germanic cobwebs accrued around what was once the avant-garde. Alas, the destiny of every enfant terrible is to discover his bravery superseded by some new audacity in the realm of progressive ideology.
In any event, this tired model continues to be trotted out in works of both popular and scholarly quality. The media is frequently taken in, declaring with faux or genuine surprise that now, at last, the truth about Jesus has been uncovered. As Luke Timothy Johnson points out in his work, The Real Jesus, there is always something a little self-congratulatory and frankly egotistical in these current versions of the now rather creaky formula, for invariably the historical Jesus appears as a kind of idealized sixties hippie or a more enigmatic proto-Marxist revolutionary or whatever happens to be the particular image of ideological purity held by the theologian propounding the narrative. A work of meticulous scholarship with almost boring and repetitive detail, Lord Jesus Christ by Larry W. Hurtado, practically single-handedly explodes the unfounded pretensions driving this paradigm of nineteenth-century German historicism. There simply isn’t any long historical gap between the life and death of Jesus and the key liturgical expressions of Christian faith communities. Either they were radically deluded right from the start or something radical occurred regarding Jesus, so radical as to recreate basic Jewish convictions along unexpected, though not necessarily unprepared lines of thinking.
Now, I have to say that there are always going to be published works that because they are packaged nicely and have a blurb on the back cover from someone making portentous statements about the ground-breaking value of such a work will take a fair amount of people in. Yet they remain fraudulent. In my view, all those clever tomes purporting that Jesus never existed and that he is simply an amalgam of pagan legend and Jewish apocalyptic expectation fall into this category. It’s a kind of sophistical hucksterism that uses the arcana of scholarship – footnotes and selective quotations from primary texts and secondary works to give the feeling of solid investigation and logical reasoning, though in fact one is presented with a counterfeit whose degree of persuasiveness commanded will depend upon the skill of the counterfeiter.
Unquestionably, despite the basic agreement of the Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke) and the deepening majesty of John’s mysticism, part of what makes for the unique image of Jesus Christ available through the New Testament is due to a kind of stereoscopic vision that derives from subtle differences in the portraiture. Each Gospel has a distinct audience in mind and then there is, for instance, Mark’s depiction of Christ who is given to enigmatic koans and frequently tells those he heals and who marvel at his words to keep quiet about it. This element does not show up in the other Gospels, but it undoubtedly contributes to the overall image. The question one must ponder is whether one is presented with narratives that are mutually exclusionary if taken each on its own terms or if one has a synthetic whole that transcends without substantive contradiction the particularity of each specific narrative Gospel. Ultimately, the early Church decided that the canonical Gospels were capable of such a synthetic presentation and that the various Gnostic gospels, for example, were deemed inauthentic because they involved substantive contradiction. (They are also uniformly late in the historical record and clearly reactive efforts against the `primitive Christian witness,’ though one must add that the New Testament texts themselves are informed by an apologetic against various incipient heresies. The debate about Christ surrounds him from the beginning.)
No matter what one makes of the preceding argument, compressed and limited as it is – or prolix and arrogant if you prefer – the truth of Christ will never be disclosed to a process of neutral observation and logical extension. One is free, naturally, to try such a procedure, but its result will be mainly nugatory. One can perhaps clear away some cant and efforts made in bad faith, but the truth of Jesus shall remain elusive. The figure of Virgil in Dante’s epic is meant to express the belief that reason’s final act is to transcend itself. As a believer in Christ, I try to bear witness – and I often do this poorly due to my own fallibility and weakness of character – but I do not make the mistake of thinking I can prove Christ. Jesus is comprehended under the rubric of rhetoric, not dialectic. The Gospel is proclaimed; it is a story of a Person of unique, unparalleled beauty to those who come to believe – I think any fair reception will discern this uniqueness, but there are legion that have not recognized such. There is a mystery to grace. One can fault a man for determining that two and two is five, perhaps. I prescind from judging the fellow who fails to see the convincing beauty of Christ for there are too many factors that come into play, too many false and bad Christians that muddy the picture. Jesus Christ will judge.
What I can do is invite anyone who thinks they have judged Christ and determined him merely an avatar of an ancient wisdom tradition or a clever fiction or, as Nietzsche thought, a continuing puzzle whose image was seized by those with cowardly souls in order to punish and subjugate the noble few to retreat to a space of questioning again; at least, to a place where they might hear anew a message that can only be heard through the insight of a more vital reason.
For anyone who finds this essay at all intriguing, I would like to recommend a few books and articles. Some only tangentially touch on the Person of Christ, but in sum they provide a context for the kind of visionary reason I applaud.
Unless You Become Like This Child – a short essay by Hans Urs von Balthasar.
Equality by Default – a brilliant book by Philippe Beneton.
Christ and Nothing, an article by David Bentley Hart, as well as his contribution to a symposium on theology as knowledge. Both can be located at the following website:
http://fireandrose.blogspot.com/2007/10/index-of-david-bentley-hart-articles-at.html.
The mysticism of the One and the Son of God: antique religio-philosophical speculation, whether in the East or the West, tends towards a universal conclusion. The Absolute is conceived in terms of unity and simplicity. The great neo-Platonist, Plotinus, is a late example, yet the beauty of his synthesis is both alluring and in some ways a uniquely creative retrieval of previous thinkers. The One is the fount of being from which there is an `over-flow’ into degrees of lesser being, each subsequent level more diminished than the previous one. The path of human wisdom attempts to return to the compact richness of the originating One, an effort requiring an ascetic renunciation of everything that is not the One. By this mode of thinking, the unique, the particular, the historical is an impediment to true liberation; indeed, one’s very individuality is a kind of illusion that must be renounced in order to attain a return to the One.
Now certainly there is a perduring element of truth in this kind of ascesis. The modern, Western Self is founded on notions quite distinct from both classical Greek philosophy and Christian theology. I would argue that it is an illusion that needs to be renounced and so a Christian and a Buddhist, for instance, may find here a point of agreement. Nonetheless, the nature of the Christian Absolute is radically distinct from all other conceptions. The revelation of the Trinity is irreducibly a mystery – rationalists of the Unitarian or the Moslem variety cannot but understand it as a poorly disguised polytheism. Within the understanding of Christian theology, what is revealed about the Absolute is that it eternally subsists as a substantive relation. The One is not isolate, but always already, to use the language of structuralism, a dynamism of gift in which the plenitude of divine being is poured forth, received, and returned in a festivity of eternal dance and joy. The Father is always fathering and the Son is eternally born; the love between them manifest not as neutral relation, but as Itself that most mysterious and creative Spirit that Christian theology reckons the secret artisan working amongst the wreck and tragedy of timely existence to raise up a Creation flourishing and free of the sorrows and loss that blight our present experience. This entire theology depends on the truth of Christian dogma regarding the Incarnation, the assertion that Christ is both fully human and fully divine. It initiates a new and unpredictable relation between the historical and the eternal. Properly understood, the eternal is not the enemy of the novel, historical moment. One is not presented with an adamantine plenitude (Parmenides notion of being) juxtaposed against the dramatic flux of time (Heracleitos). The Absolute does not crush the Relative.
Of course, I have had to invoke metaphor in my explanation here and how one understands and interprets metaphor will determine how well or little one is likely to credit this kind of discourse. I argue that metaphor has its roots in a divine richness of being, that what we discern of fatherhood from our own, best fathers is but a pale reflection of what divine fatherhood is. It does not require a mathematical clarity and precision for one to accept this proleptic pointing towards a mysterious, eternal Source. Metaphor has its own, internal standard of correctness, but it is essentially a poetic mode of perception that grasps or perhaps better, intimates and intuits a wealth and teleological direction in being that transcends our ordinary experience. Yet this does not leave one in a state of inchoate and abstract vagueness. On the contrary, if one is caught in that state that can only reject poetic insight as meaningless, one is simply unable to perceive as the genuine poet can. (Yes, yes, one knows that one man’s insight is another man’s blindness, but one is not compelled by any authentic logic to render all judgments equivalent through a leveling egalitarianism.)
Through metaphor, the poet is able to discern a real connection between the act of being embodied in a horse or a rose, for example, and some other act of being. This is not the same as simile, where one says something is like something else. Such a comparison is often helpful, but it does not rely upon a metaphysical connection that eludes a superficial kind of rationality. Metaphor points towards a dynamic openness in being, towards an upper limit of relation that can be intuited without the clarity of full comprehension. All this indicates that Christ doubtless did employ metaphor when he called himself life, light, and the door, but the use of such poetic devices does not militate against traditional Christian interpretation. As C. S. Lewis actually did point out, whether he used metaphor or not, Jesus was a bad teacher if he was unable to clarify for his closest disciples the intended meaning of that usage.
What do I mean above when I talk about superficial rationality? If one makes the rough assertion that the modern era began in Western Europe in the sixteenth-century and that we are now in a period one might call late modernity or that equally nebulous term, the post-modern, one may further assert that the concept of reason has narrowed over the course of the modern age. Today, one imbibes an uncritical scientism in the easy and unchallenged assumptions of the education machine, the media machine, the prevalent `common sense’ of those trained to accept blandly the pronouncements of those whose authority is essentially that they embody the `spirit of the times.’ What is scientism? Certainly not science, an undeniably compelling and useful method. Scientism is the ungrounded, parasitic, in fact, epistemological claim that objective truth is limited to what can be comprehended and affirmed through mathematical, experimental science. In short, it is a reductionism of the truth to that which can be verified by practitioners of the hard sciences and their associated experts in technical application. One cannot, of course, prove this limitation of the knowably real by scientific method, but adherents like to assume that the prestige of modern science in the modern world elides that lack of proof. The shame and loss involved in the acceptance of scientism is that the insights of poets and philosophers almost invariably tend to be shuffled off into the netherworld of subjective opinion. Indeed, the crucial, most fundamental questions of meaning evaporate as serious subjects in the search for truth or are dismissed as a bubble of dreaming opinion floating upon the surface of a mechanistic world consistent with a more-or-less quotidian and comfortable nihilism. The seeming endless triviality of the popular culture, indeed the majority of what considers itself high culture, is a logical deduction of modernist premises.
Yet the wisdom of antiquity and the high Middle Ages would not recognize such a poor dwarf of reason as that light that dignifies man above the lovely brutes. The merely instrumental reason of today lacks absolutely the dimension Aquinas named the intellectus and Bergson the intuition. Man’s rationality embraces that knowledge which is marked by wonder and the reverence for beauty. Deep insight that applies to all is not the product of universal method, but of unique moments of unrepeatable vision. Thus, what the artist can tell us is a legitimate apprehension of truth, just as much a product of reason as the cogitations of the scientific investigator. One might add that generally the scientist who makes the highest achievements in his field is likely to partake of the artists’ imagination. His reason expands beyond the narrow limits of a scientistic rationalism.
Much of this particular discussion is aimed at those who confidently assert that an easy historical progression has led us from the mythic-religious to the humane-philosophic to the heights of modern day science. This kind of positivist historiography is old in the tooth, but still carries a kind of dogmatic heft among those carried away by the last vestiges of an unconvincing materialist philosophy whose halcyon days are long past. One is not thereby, I caution, made ridiculous if one denies the supernatural; one simply should do so with greater critical and historical awareness than is usual, alas, from the Richard Dawkins, the Daniel Dennetts, and the Christopher Hitchens of the world. (The latter, I admit, I cannot help liking, though he is often odious and unruly in his behavior and scandalously dishonest in his argumentation. Perhaps for similar, eccentric sympathies, I am rather fond of Shiva.)
There is a Christology of sorts associated with advocates of positivist reason. The by now rather staid model for deconstructing so-called primitive Christianity into the hypothetical gap between the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith depends upon a fairly long period of gestation where the historical Jesus gradually fades into obscurity, covered over by the accretion of myth, legend, what have you that various `faith communities’ independently or through mutual cross-pollination are supposed to invest with the spurious status of truth. (In some versions of this story, they are not necessarily spurious, but more or less adequate images for an individual, subjective mysticism, this latter interpretation probably finding its canonical expression in Schleiermacher and then pushed by fellows like Bultmann and Tillich. Those who actually know theology will recognize the faint Germanic cobwebs accrued around what was once the avant-garde. Alas, the destiny of every enfant terrible is to discover his bravery superseded by some new audacity in the realm of progressive ideology.
In any event, this tired model continues to be trotted out in works of both popular and scholarly quality. The media is frequently taken in, declaring with faux or genuine surprise that now, at last, the truth about Jesus has been uncovered. As Luke Timothy Johnson points out in his work, The Real Jesus, there is always something a little self-congratulatory and frankly egotistical in these current versions of the now rather creaky formula, for invariably the historical Jesus appears as a kind of idealized sixties hippie or a more enigmatic proto-Marxist revolutionary or whatever happens to be the particular image of ideological purity held by the theologian propounding the narrative. A work of meticulous scholarship with almost boring and repetitive detail, Lord Jesus Christ by Larry W. Hurtado, practically single-handedly explodes the unfounded pretensions driving this paradigm of nineteenth-century German historicism. There simply isn’t any long historical gap between the life and death of Jesus and the key liturgical expressions of Christian faith communities. Either they were radically deluded right from the start or something radical occurred regarding Jesus, so radical as to recreate basic Jewish convictions along unexpected, though not necessarily unprepared lines of thinking.
Now, I have to say that there are always going to be published works that because they are packaged nicely and have a blurb on the back cover from someone making portentous statements about the ground-breaking value of such a work will take a fair amount of people in. Yet they remain fraudulent. In my view, all those clever tomes purporting that Jesus never existed and that he is simply an amalgam of pagan legend and Jewish apocalyptic expectation fall into this category. It’s a kind of sophistical hucksterism that uses the arcana of scholarship – footnotes and selective quotations from primary texts and secondary works to give the feeling of solid investigation and logical reasoning, though in fact one is presented with a counterfeit whose degree of persuasiveness commanded will depend upon the skill of the counterfeiter.
Unquestionably, despite the basic agreement of the Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke) and the deepening majesty of John’s mysticism, part of what makes for the unique image of Jesus Christ available through the New Testament is due to a kind of stereoscopic vision that derives from subtle differences in the portraiture. Each Gospel has a distinct audience in mind and then there is, for instance, Mark’s depiction of Christ who is given to enigmatic koans and frequently tells those he heals and who marvel at his words to keep quiet about it. This element does not show up in the other Gospels, but it undoubtedly contributes to the overall image. The question one must ponder is whether one is presented with narratives that are mutually exclusionary if taken each on its own terms or if one has a synthetic whole that transcends without substantive contradiction the particularity of each specific narrative Gospel. Ultimately, the early Church decided that the canonical Gospels were capable of such a synthetic presentation and that the various Gnostic gospels, for example, were deemed inauthentic because they involved substantive contradiction. (They are also uniformly late in the historical record and clearly reactive efforts against the `primitive Christian witness,’ though one must add that the New Testament texts themselves are informed by an apologetic against various incipient heresies. The debate about Christ surrounds him from the beginning.)
No matter what one makes of the preceding argument, compressed and limited as it is – or prolix and arrogant if you prefer – the truth of Christ will never be disclosed to a process of neutral observation and logical extension. One is free, naturally, to try such a procedure, but its result will be mainly nugatory. One can perhaps clear away some cant and efforts made in bad faith, but the truth of Jesus shall remain elusive. The figure of Virgil in Dante’s epic is meant to express the belief that reason’s final act is to transcend itself. As a believer in Christ, I try to bear witness – and I often do this poorly due to my own fallibility and weakness of character – but I do not make the mistake of thinking I can prove Christ. Jesus is comprehended under the rubric of rhetoric, not dialectic. The Gospel is proclaimed; it is a story of a Person of unique, unparalleled beauty to those who come to believe – I think any fair reception will discern this uniqueness, but there are legion that have not recognized such. There is a mystery to grace. One can fault a man for determining that two and two is five, perhaps. I prescind from judging the fellow who fails to see the convincing beauty of Christ for there are too many factors that come into play, too many false and bad Christians that muddy the picture. Jesus Christ will judge.
What I can do is invite anyone who thinks they have judged Christ and determined him merely an avatar of an ancient wisdom tradition or a clever fiction or, as Nietzsche thought, a continuing puzzle whose image was seized by those with cowardly souls in order to punish and subjugate the noble few to retreat to a space of questioning again; at least, to a place where they might hear anew a message that can only be heard through the insight of a more vital reason.
For anyone who finds this essay at all intriguing, I would like to recommend a few books and articles. Some only tangentially touch on the Person of Christ, but in sum they provide a context for the kind of visionary reason I applaud.
Unless You Become Like This Child – a short essay by Hans Urs von Balthasar.
Equality by Default – a brilliant book by Philippe Beneton.
Christ and Nothing, an article by David Bentley Hart, as well as his contribution to a symposium on theology as knowledge. Both can be located at the following website:
http://fireandrose.blogspot.com/2007/10/index-of-david-bentley-hart-articles-at.html.