hello everyone and welcome back to conversations with Tyler today I'm very pleased to be chatting with David Bentley Hart how to describe David Bentley Hart well the person I know whom I consider to be the best read is David Gordon and David Gordon thinks that David Bentley Hart is the best red person he knows David Bentley Hart is an American writer philosopher religious study scholar
critic and theologian he has authored over 1 000 essays reviews and papers not to mention 19 books including a very well-known translation of the New Testament the topics he writes on include Christian metaphysics Orthodox Christianity philosophy of Mind Indiana and East Asian religions Asian languages Classics literature music and more David welcome oh thank you now I have to live up to that
introduction if you could explain to me as simply as possible in which ways is Orthodox Christianity not so very millenarian well depends on what you mean by millinarian yeah I'd have to ask you to be a bit more say the Protestant 17th century sense that the world is on a on the verge of a very radical transformation that will Herald in some completely new age and we
all should be prepared for it yeah um well in one sense uh it's it's uh in the case of Christianity from the first century that it's always existed in a kind of time between times right there's there's always this sense of of being in history but always expecting an imminent Interruption of History but Orthodoxy has been around for a while you know it's it's part of an indirect culture of
uh uh grounded originally in the Eastern Greco-Roman world and you know has a has a huge apparatus of philosophy and Theology and I think just over the centuries has learned to be patient the notion uh you know the sort of the the sort of um Protestant millenarianism you speak of always seems to have been born out of historical crisis in a sense uh you know the the rise of
the nation-state the fragmentation of the western church it's always as much an effect of history as a flight from history whereas I think it's fair to say that Orthodoxy is sort of created for itself a kind of parallel world just outside the flow of History it puts much more of an emphasis on the spiritual life mysticism that sort of thing and as such whereas it still uses the language
your recognizable language of the imminent return of Christ it's not at the center of the spiritual life and how does that theological patience shape the polities of Orthodox Christian nations and regions how does that matter well it's been both good and bad to be honest I mean at its best um Orthodoxy has has uh cultivated a spiritual life that that you know nourished millions and that and that that puts an
emphasis upon upon moral obligation to others and the life of Charity and the ascetical virtues of Christianity the self-denial at its worst however it's it's often been an accommodation with historical forces that are antithetical to the gospel too I mean it's it's often been the case that Orthodoxy has been so let's say disenchanted with the millenarian expectation that it's become
a prop of the the state and you can see today in Russia in which you have a church institution now this isn't to speak of the faithful themselves but the institutional authority of the state of the uh institution rather of the church more or less being nothing but a propaganda wing of of an authoritarian uh and terrorist government so it's you know it's had both it's good
and it's bad uh consequences over the centuries um at its best as I say it encourages a true spiritual life that that can teach one to be detached from Ambitions and expectations and and and the sort of violent uh projects of the ego but at its worst it can become a passive participant in precisely those sorts of projects and those sorts of evils how would you say your study of
Heidegger has deepened your understanding of Christian Orthodoxy Heidegger well Heidegger right yeah you went quite well he's well he's one of them yeah I know the philosophers well now now there you're dealing I have to admit this question comes a little out of left field but with me I never know which aspect of my work someone might be interested in a given moment but with high degree it's very ambiguous
figure of course but he certainly was uh putting aside his own incredible moral defects for those who don't know he was a member for a while of the Nazi party as much out of cowardice as anything else but I think out of early on at least some degree of of sympathy um but when he wasn't being evil he was he was a very reflective uh philosopher on how we have arrived at
what he considered an age of nihilism uh of sort of an age of in that values the will to power the will to power over physical environment above all other things without any sense of the mystery of being the the piety of not trying to grasp and control and reduce all of reality to instrumentality and utility and he tells a very powerful story about the genealogy of Western nihilism how we
went how we arrived at what he calls the age of technology in which everything is simply a project of the will and the whole of the world is nothing but a reserve of resources to be exploited for the purpose of acquisition and for the purposes of the will now I don't agree with the whole story but as I say it makes one think about the about the genealogy of of the way we
see the world and see the world as de-sacralized and disenchanted and that much of the appeal of uh I suppose Eastern Orthodoxy to me in my youth was precisely that it that it uh was uh a Christian tradition that emphasized precisely the the sense of cosmic mystery of Christ and and the cosmic mystery of the revelation of God in all things and there's a put this great emphasis on the notion that the
the uh the heart of Christian thought is the idea of deification of Union with god of the whole creation renewed in some unimaginable way so that a very popular image goes so that the whole universe is like a burning bush you know shining with the glory of God but not consumed it's uh you know so I would say that if there is any connection there and since no one's ever asked me this before I'm
not sure there is but if if there is then um you know that you you can see how someone who takes seriously the genealogy of nihilism that someone like hiding her unfolds might be drawn to a very robust among Christian Traditions a very robust um depiction of of a kind of uh glorified reality in which the entire Cosmos participates in the in the sacred mystery you mentioned questions out of left
field who played left field for the Baltimore Orioles in 1970. um Merv retmund uh or well see there would also be Don Buford sometimes played left I'm trying to remember Paul Blair was in Center uh still and that was the last year that Frank Robinson was in right field uh so if my memory is correct it was usually Merv rattimand or maybe the young Don Baylor was up then I'm getting
old now do you know uh I think of it as Buford you know Blair and Senator Robinson and Wright but I'm not entirely sure either well I think in left field the the Earl Weaver was one of the first really to platoon players and sometimes Buford actually played the infield he was a much more versatile player but yeah uh I think Redmond was still on the team too so so let's say you're trying to explain to
a Catholic in metaphysical terms where Orthodoxy diverges from Catholicism not the history not different views on the papacy but fundamental underlying conceptual differences on metaphysics in his few Dimensions as possible where do you see that difference in a few few Dimensions as possible well uh for one thing there's no history of the notion of inherited guilt the whole idea of of
sin is very different um the it's you know sin uh that we're sort of born into a state of alienation from God and from the world and from our neighbor is a common Christian idea but the the the in the West mostly just as a result of certain translation issues but also because of the very powerful influence of a gut the late Augustine on the development of Western theology they came there that
somehow one is born born in a state of guilt which which uh to be honest was often it was considered repugnant in these also there was no theology then of uh of predestination this is often also regarded as a and there was in Western Catholicism albeit it's it's a Doctrine without a s a strict definition it remains on the books but it's unlike Calvinism Roman Catholicism doesn't
insist that it knows what predestination means um but the real big difference I suppose then the greatest difference would be the Theology of Grace I mean that uh in in the west it became more and more the case that Grace was sort of treated as antithetical to Nature Grace was a principle over against nature it was it was uh therefore given according to a kind of purely predilective predestining will of
God where is the East that kind of opposition between grace and nature simply never took root Grace was just a word for the way God deals with creatures and it was seen as more continuous with nature that we're always already naturally oriented to Union with God and that it's a it's an unnatural impediment that separates us from God rather than a failure to receive
a super elevating Grace um Grace is how do I put at this in Western tradition Grace became a very extraordinary gift whereas in the East it remained an ordinary reality from which we were extraordinarily separated by a tragic history that had to be overcome does the relative lack of CounterPoint in Eastern Orthodox Church music correspond to anything theological or is
that just historical accident well it depends on which church you're talking about a contrapuntal polyphonic music actually has a very rich history in the West in the Russian in the Slavic tradition especially from the time of portionsky and others onward uh I don't think so no those sorts of differences those sorts of accidental differences though are the things that Orthodox
polemicists like to focus on every little difference becomes a difference of incredible magnitude for those who are looking for reasons to dislike the other camp but no I don't think there's any significant theological difference there and the Slavic tradition as I say is highly contrapuntal uh you know rachmaninoff's church music sure yeah okay how does the Orthodox Church in America avoid simply
becoming an American religion one of many others so far it seems to be failing to do that what's the reason for that failure why isn't it strong enough uh a number of reasons one there's been a huge influx of former evangelicals into American Orthodoxy but the problem is Orthodoxy doesn't have most of the communions unlike the Catholic Church doesn't have a protocol for receiving
converts that's very clear I mean they just so you come to the Liturgy you ask questions and after a year or so your your chrismated or something and the result is is that many who come into the church come with presuppositions formed in very radically different tradition I mean fundamentalist evangelicalism is a much narrower understanding of you know how much speculation is possible they're not
really prepared to look at a 2000 year history and see all the varieties you know well this is the patristic period here's the Scholastic and the Russian religious philosophers of the 19th century were very different and you know be able to recognize that that a huge variety of of views is instead they tend to think in terms of a faith statement of the sort that an Evangelical Church
but and to be honest that's become such a dominant faction and so much American Orthodoxy that much of American Orthodoxy is intellectually and temperamentally and socially and culturally just American evangelicalism plus Saints and and incense and so I would say that I don't think you know the only other way in which the Orthodox communities have successfully resisted this is also the degrees to which many
of them have remained ridouts of ethnic identity and that's not much better that too you know is a is so I I would say on the whole um uh the the uh the jury is still out I think Orthodoxy in America may very well just be another American religion uh at the end of the day another generation or two and it it it won't be any the only distinctions will be in liturgical form
if one draws a line down the middle of Europe with Orthodoxy to the right of that line those Nations seem to be much less Democratic or Democratic for shorter periods of time is there something causal going on there or is that just historical accident yeah I I wouldn't uh well I mean I I don't know if Orthodoxy as such is um the issue but I mean the the uh the history of those Nations uh
were radically different in any number of ways some of them in the case say of of uh of most of the Slavic Nations have simply retained habits of governance and habits of social organization that go back to to a very pre-democratic past I don't know if there's any causal relationship between the kind of Christianity because of course Western Democratic institutions tended to go hand in hand with some
degree of lasization some degree of secularization I mean for the I mean the whole point of the French Revolution would be the overthrow of the RCR regime which is both state and church you know dealing with a kind of uh absolutist Golic and Church in a sense that's that's a a wing of government so uh my suspicion is this is mostly historical accident the cultural the cultural Tendencies towards
um uh reaction in the East or mostly I just have to do with with the material conditions and the political histories and the relative material uh isolation from from the the huge period of Western European expansion expansion of wealth expansion of power and uh ferment of social change and new ideas it was you know simply the case that from Earl after the Middle Ages
early modernity Western Europe was the center of Economic and political power in in the in the western world say Poland Slovenia checkia which have a lot of Catholicism in their backgrounds they seem to be converging on Western Norms living standards much more than say the EU members to the east Bulgaria Romania well they had certain advantages to begin with too but yeah I mean better
better relations I again I don't think it has any particular because to be honest I mean polish Catholicism is basically culturally very much like Slavic Orthodoxy I mean there you're going to find that culturally Catholicism and Orthodoxy are closer to one another in many ways than Catholicism in the East is with Catholicism in the West so it's you know trying to draw trying
to draw causal uh ties between what are very complex social histories I I just think is is a mistake there's no way of saying one way or the other I mean Greek Greek democracy flourished in the modern age for a while I mean the after the after the revolute after Greek Independence in the early 19th century and Greece remains Orthodox too and it and it's even more than Poland is
committed to a kind of uh sort of real Democratic Norms in Poland there are stronger reactionary Force as at present than there are in Grace what do you think of the Book of Mormon and what is it about the Bible that so lent itself to this new spin-off or startup the book of I have no opinions about it whatsoever I've uh it's kind of silly you know that's the way it comes across to me but uh you
know I've only read it once and it uh I I think that if the Bible if you say the Bible lends itself to spin-offs I mean any any um uh religion that has Tendencies towards uh uh the collapse of the difference in significance between history and Eternity is always likely to inspire new historical projects that consider themselves I mean after all this is something of the abrahamic
religions is that they're they're sort of supersessionist in the way they perceive I mean even even within the history of Judaism before Christianity it's a one Covenant superseding another then the Christians claim that they've superseded uh the confident in some sense and then Islam is a supersession of the Revelation with yet another Revelation so this seems to be just part and parcel of
the whole western abrahamic or the whole abrahamic religious tradition so I suppose I would say that Mormonism is just another example of that kind of new revelation of the the claim of a new revelation this is a general question I have about the roles of reason and faith in theological argument so when I hear members of the Orthodox Church criticize say the papacy and ex-cathedral Doctrine
what they say makes perfect sense to me they deploy reason they have arguments of Reason against the doctrine but in other contexts religions including Orthodoxy they're quite willing to invoke faith and so we have faith in in whatever so is it reason or is it faith that determines when an argument from reason or an argument from faith is appropriate reason reason so reason's the bottom line
is to be because even if you choose Faith you're choosing to believe something for reasons even if you're not able to name those reasons yourself some sort of compelling rational intuition has worked upon you to say well I believe I can trust this Source more than that source so you may say that oh I'm having faith in what it's telling me but you're having faith in that rather than something else because at some
level maybe a tacit level that you you'd have a hard time laying out you've somehow reached the judgment and it would have to be a rational judgment if if your faith is of any meaning uh that you trust this rather than that so I would say that but you know what is Faith I mean when you create a sort of division between faith and reason you're assuming that the that faith is taking
things simply on the authority of another blindly but that's never actually been the definition that any religion I mean whether you're talking in the western when you talk about pisties in Greek or sharada in Sanskrit or or any number of other words for Faith it usually means a kind of rational commitment to a certain path for which you have reasons but that those reasons in themselves don't
necessarily arrive at a QED but that has you Advance on this path more you're hoping at least Things become clearer and clearer and you understand better whether you really believe it or not but you have to commit yourself to the path in order to find a way um you know the American philosopher William James spoke of the will to believe and he's often misunderstood is
is if all he was saying was it's okay to choose arbitrarily to believe something that's not what he said what he said was when you you know it's as if you're you you're in the fog saying you encounter two paths and you have a sense that one is more likely to uh lead to safety and the other to the edge of a cliff you take that path but you don't take it so credulously that you'll walk off the
edge of a cliff if you come to the cliff that that the Act of Faith is a way of engaging the Mind engaging reason so it can explore if you don't start with some sort of trust some sort of pulse of the possibility of discovering the truth then you never will seek the truth to begin with but that's that search requires a kind of combination of a degree of rational
judgment and a degree of trust and you hope that the two prove to be in harmony if there's if they're not though if you reach a point where your faith and your reason come into conflict then trust your reason always trust your reason because otherwise faith is just epistemic nihilism nihilism sorry pronouncing the word both ways today is just uh it's meaningless it's it's just a brute exertion of the will at which
point it's sub-rational and becomes contemptible always trust reason but make sure that reason is tempered not it's not Petty rationalism but it's a reason that really can see things in Broad perspective and understand in a variety of modalities don't don't don't treat reason as if it's a math equation so given that perspective does it ever make sense to think about the deity in
probabilistic or Bayesian terms because it's sounding almost Bayesian to me well the chance that God exists is 73 well you're actually God faith isn't the question of existence of God I mean that's that's not what I was talking about when I talk about faith I meant a path towards the sacred there well first of all to Define what the word existence means because because God would not exist in
the way that a an individual uh entity a finite entity exists right so any any any rational arguments you have about God are based on usually a kind of modal metaphysics of the absolute and the contingent or so on and so forth and and there I think reasons should be fully engaged uh I'm not um the question is within a tradition that's when things become a bit more
stochastic it's like you know does is this you know I can start if I don't start from the premise that that that uh when I speak of God that is that there's an absolute source and end to all things then I'm not really interested in the question of religion at all but if I if I if I believe that may be true if I have a sense of it or if reason tells me it's so that it it doesn't make sense to
believe in a pure physicalism or materialism then where faith is engaged is in trying to make rational judgments about who can point you towards a deeper understanding and relationship uh and uh I don't think that's Bayesian so much as it's not you know it's not a leap of faith in the in the vulgar sense but it is a venture of faith in the sense that you can't start with all the
you you can't start with perfect wisdom and knowledge you are making rational judgments and again rationality is not a a single uh unifical sort of thing it can also have to do with intuitions like moral intuitions if you come up Acro against a doctrine that that uh or a teaching or something that is um repugnant to your moral reasoning then that is you know significant and you you would be uh it
would be deplorable of you to choose to believe it despite the councils of your moral reasoning unless you had really good reasons to think you'd been mistaken does the concept of reincarnation make theological sense to you sure within the systems in which you know which systems are you talking about in Buddhism isn't about The Reincarnation of of a psychological ego
it's uh it has to do with a an uncontrollable set of karmic consequences that lead to new phenomenal arising so there you're dealing with one notion the the uh the versions that you find in vedanta and bhakti and other things that we call Hinduism or also in Sikhism or Jainism in which the Jiva something that is a kind of Soul passes over even that's not psychological uh self that's that but
nonetheless that that's a more substantial sense of the meaning of reincarnation uh within those systems yeah they make perfect sense um and uh but again people tend to to think they know what these terms mean and when when you actually look at the Traditions they have to be they have to be uh qualified and modified and and explained at length because you can't step out of an entire
world of presuppositions and beliefs and Concepts and just take you know one thing like that again becoming and I'm just choosing to use the Buddhist term and think you understand what's going on is if you could just transpose it into say oh I'm a presbyterian and I know what this means because uh you know you can't do that what do you think of the testimonies of
what are called near-death experiences many of those testimonies coming from Christians of course um well I mean I don't know some of them I think uh are quite compelling I mean especially the ones that uh involve you know being able to reconstruct facts about the surrounding the the moment of death death that you shouldn't have been able to know like who was out in the hallway you know things like you
can't you can't completely deny it but but I I at the same time I I think also that you're dealing with a moment of transition in which is very hard to separate the psychological from the objective so uh I I wouldn't dismiss them many of them is as I say are quite compelling but how much you can learn from them it seems like a lot more testimony than say from the apostles or in the four
gospels that if we wait testimony one is Led in many different directions including of course the Book of Mormon yeah well I mean who's test I mean come on I mean the Book of Mormon is supposedly read off from these Golden Plates that Joseph Smith was shown and able to read with magical spectacles plates that no one else ever so you know that's that's very much a kind of story if you want to believe it you can
but uh that's not you know that's not and maybe you can say the same about everyone's testimony I mean I just the judgments you have to make at times just no one's testimony should be taken as an absolute Authority no one's uh because no one is free from psychological limitations so even if he or she is perfectly sincere that that in itself doesn't prove anything but you can make judgments on
character you can make judgments about coherence and these are again are relative judgments they're not absolute I think that when the story becomes I don't know why you keep bringing a Mormonism I mean I have absolutely no connections I've never written about it my only connection I've met a few nice Mormons I've read the book of Mormon once I didn't find it particularly well
written but neither for that matter as most of the New Testament and I think you know it's based on historical claims that are objectively false so you know that that they're these ancient civilizations and the Americas that just didn't exist but um uh I I think the the story of of the Genesis of the Book of Mormon is a bit more incredible than say somebody in the first century writing
down what his theology is based on you know in the case of Paul obviously a person who got who whose life was turned upside down by some kind of experience see maybe he was a psychotic I don't know but uh you know it doesn't seem that way when you read it because that there's some there are some powerful spiritual apprehension that he has discovered about the love of God and the grace of
God and that that over many decades of self-sacrificing Life leading ultimately to his death he lays that out well that's compelling to me in a way that other sorts of claims that seem more incredible art in the United States has Progressive politics become the new version of a secular Christianity um well I don't know I mean I I may some in some cases yeah in some cases not I am uh
I mean it depends on what you're talking about in particular I think that that we have learned both on the I think in in America but also in the west is as such a pathological degree in America on both right and left we've learned to uh start all of our conversations from a position of moral absolutism I don't know if this has always been the case I mean there have been apocalyptic
moments in American history before I mean we had a civil war for instance but at the present it seems like both uh extremes um speak in such strident tones of moral indignation that it is tempting to think that that that they're speaking out of a dogmatic impulse rather than a rational one that you know they've that there is a kind of religious intonation in in the worst sense uh in our politics on all
sides is the future of Christianity as an institution brighter or darker than it was say 20 years ago 20 years well 20 I mean 30 years ago how about 100 Generations ago I mean you gotta you've got a I don't know I mean what would be brighter or darker I mean for me um you know what would be good what would be bad um there are people I know in fact people near here and know today
who are who are all uh terrifically intent on trying to revive a dying Christendom because they think that would be the Revival of Christianity in the west and they they align themselves to these reactionary figures like Victor Orban whereas I my idea my ideal of of what would be a brighter future for Christianity would be the final eclipse of that kind of of uh a conflation of Christianity with with
the interests of a particular civilization or culture or nation and I believe that's a perfidious corruption so bright in what way um you know uh I I would say that in many ways the brightest um future for Christianity might consist in the death of many of its institutions of much of its cultural power the TV show The Prisoner how should it have ended ah now that's an interesting question the last
episode I I will admit is a bit of a disappointment but I think I think it ended properly I mean I think Patrick mcguin made his point that that number one is the self that we we imprison ourselves before anyone else can imprison us so I I think I think the last episode would have been better had it been written as well as of the one just before it but you know you can't have everything I
I'm contented with the with with the way it went out this seems like a minor and a silly question but it is true you know they they did a remake for AMC of the prisoner some years ago and uh in the original of course uh number six he escapes now his Escape is an absolute because he goes back home and it turns out still to be in some sense The Village he is still the prisoner of
himself but he destroys the village right yes in the new version he saves the village and turns it into a kind of psychotherapeutic spa uh that that that you know some people require uh in place of the reality of this world I found that a sublimely nihilistic conclusion so so let me put it in there the way it should have ended is the way it originally ended not the way it it not
the way the Remake ended it maybe that's a kind of woke ending reflecting moral depravity that moral judgments are not complex and the self is unitary and everything is easy and you just have to pick the right side and you can set everything right again well what would be the right side and I mean well I don't think we know but I think in the the AMC remake the implication is that it's easy to pick
the right side I just got the impression that the that it shows the therapeutic over the Gnostic that is that in the original program it was consciously at times a gnostic allegory that in fact there was one episode called the dance of the Dead uh that that just explicitly sort of invokes a gnostic language of you know that somehow were imprisoned in a false reality and that
we should long for the really real at whatever cost and should seek to escape from delusion whereas the new version simply says that in a sense maybe there is no Truth at all there is no right side or wrong side there's just the need for therapy to help us deal with the sense of alienation or discontent um and that of those two options I prefer the former maybe at times gnosticism is too
pessimistic for Hollywood TV and two inegalitarian for modern progressivism so you have to jettison it and what do you replace it with well I don't know why yeah well I mean I'm not quite sure what your politics are so I have no uh so I've I have no concern one way or the other about how it's viewed in regard to um uh progressivism I mean I'm I'm a socialist so I mean I'm I'm perfectly
fine I'm not a progress I'm not a liberal but I'm definitely a socialist um and uh so uh you know my concern about it and yeah gnosticism in his classical statements to the degree there was such a thing I want to point out that in scholarly terms who knows um there's so many different schools that we've conf we've simply stuck together and called Gnostic that when you actually look at them the details
much of what we call gnosticism is just actually Pauline or Johanna in Christianity in the New Testament restated with an overlay of of myth of fabulism but um I think to be honest there's been kind of a Vogue of gnosticism in in popular culture not where you'd expect it but like you know there have been lots of films movies versus TV though it's a big difference
Matrix right The Matrix things yeah which were the you know not not my not very good films but uh The Truman Show which is just a pure Gnostic allegory Gattaca done by the same fellow um and on in television too I mean as far as I know I don't and she said I'm watch enough to know but I I I did a few years ago um uh what was the Battle Star Galactica the Sci-Fi version I actually got hooked
on that and watched it through and there are plenty of Gnostic themes in that so they ruined the ending in the final season right it's like the remake of The Prisoner no no I disagree there actually I kind of liked the the Angels turning out to be real angels and the uh um you know but but then again it's been so long since I saw I'm not sure maybe I'm misremembering how it ended
for me the best part through seasons one and two where it stays a bit dark and nasty and problematic well I'd have to go back and revisit it I I have to admit uh my memory is not that sharp um which is the best Bob Dylan song Blind Willie mctell I might say Mr Tambourine Man or Highway 61 News it all depends on which which era you're in of course there's the stuff we grew up with and so I would
have said Mr Tambourine Man up until and then then uh Blind Willie mctell is is sort of his Revival period you know infidels over it uh and then I like a lot of the stuff I know Mercy they're the man in the is it the man in the black coat so I'm afraid he's been around too long you you really have to say uh what's the best vintage Dylan what's the best middle period Dylan
what's the best Revival middle period Dylan what's the best late period you know but if I had to choose one to be played uh while my corpse is being marched in its coffin down Bourbon Street or something I would go with Blind Willie mctell why be so taken with the nation of Bhutan there was a recent U.N survey of Happiness Bhutan comes in 97 there's another recent paper ranking Nations for
negative affect you know how much stress and hardship is in your life Bhutan comes in 149 which is not well at all uh one time you wrote quote button conforms better than any other state to my criteria for National greatness why not just reject Bhutan it's a failed state well first of all that's a satirical piece that was written so long ago that I'm surprised that anyone remembers it
uh my the joke being uh that that it was a period when people were talking about American greatness this is well before Trump and everything I mean this was something else and and it was always being couched in terms of Economic Development or world power and all that so I chose the most isolated most sort of militantly rural uh the most unworldly as I now after doing that of course I had to say well
then again when I looked at it again like the treatment of Nepalese refugees in Bhutan was anything but admirable and all that but at the time I was making a joke about what constitutes National greatness and so the notion that that you have a a country that that you know didn't have any television in it uh up until like a decade ago and uh only needed one star up light and then they
in the whole country and then they removed it because it offended their aesthetic sense you know it just seemed like a funny column at the time but if you made it by really willing to go to the mat defending Bhutan against uh you know all of its critics no no that was a that was a satire what do you think of Sarah rudin's translation of the New Testament I think it's awful
why it's just very bad I just think it's it's barely literate I think it's very inaccurate and I say this not to someone I think she's done other translations that are quite wonderful I think her translation of Augustine is the best in Modern English but I I think um her insistence on on translating philologically in the sense that you know taking the meaning of words from
their Roots uh and doing other things of that sort all the way through was horribly ill-advised and I think she also just doesn't know the period very well she's a classicist in one sense but late Antiquity and certainly second temple Judaism and in her wheelhouse and they're just so many um things that she gets wrong and I just think it reads exceedingly badly I I don't know what what what she
I I agree with Luke Timothy Johnson who with all the the Goodwill in the world just described it as a mess what do you think goes wrong when that book is translated by committees this common denominator wins out and that usually means the the the tacitly approved Theology of the most um unimaginative and historically uninformed faction in the committee and there's a concern not to offend against
people's piety even even when the text itself so you get translations that are not warranted by the Greek and they're not warranted by the history of the time in which the text appeared but nonetheless are chosen because they don't offend against people theological expectations and that's simply I think true of every commit now you see the King James is an exception only because it's based
on the Tyndale translation it wasn't really a committee project the committee simply um dotted the eyes cross the tears fixed a few things did some good and and but but that was first and foremost the work of an individual genius even then the King James should not be used for theology it should it's great literature it's great liturgy it's better than many later translates far more accurate say than
than a piece of rubbish like the new international version but it's still a lot of its translation is based on later Christian doctrine rather than on what the Greek actually says what's the most important thing you learned about the New Testament by translating it uh that we've we we're fools if we think we understand uh it but but I think even though I knew this um
more than ever I came to appreciate the sheer diversity even in the first generation of Christians I mean this is not a unified text it doesn't reflect a unified theology what it reflects is many different reactions to an event of extraordinary mystery and power for those who are writing about it at least especially when you're dealing say with the pole line literature which is very early in the gospels too are
drawn from earlier strata of of Christian literature I mean some of the later stuff like second Peter there you're already well into a period of heartening factions but I think I think the thing that I came away with is that every attempt to ground absolute Doctrine fixity of Dogma in the text is an absurd project because it's simply not there it does not it is not that kind of book it
is not an index of propositional content what was the most difficult word of importance to translate um uh well that's a question or fails god with the uh with with the article as opposed to thales but that's not the only one they see there's a cluster of words here panathma the spirit in the sense that there you're dealing with a word that in different contexts
can just mean life or breath or the spirit or the spirit of God or the spirit in you and sometimes is used to mean all those things at once because the very concept of spirit and later Antiquity especially in when there was an influence of systoic metaphysics uh was of a kind of element that it one on the one hand was intellectual and another was physical you know it was like the wind really um
can be called pineva without it necessarily meaning something drastically different from Spirit when we're speaking of intelligence or mind and uh also because when you actually get to the way it's used in the New Testament mysteriously Say by Pole um it's not clear that he makes the distinction that later traditionally in fact he doesn't he clearly doesn't that is the Divine spirit in human
Spirit are absolutely separate realities they're not in Paul they often are one in the same or only slightly differentiated or differentiated within a prior unity and you see this picked up in very early theology like someone like irenaeus for whom the human spirit is just the Divine Spirit you know I mean there's there's no difference really to speak of between human and divine spirit
and then the way later translations dealt with this was again and again to make decisions so here's spirit means the Holy Spirit which we understand as in later Nicene terms as one of the co-equal persons of the Trinity here spirit means human Spirit here and that and so the translations capitalize and or add holy to you know and when you go back to the Greek it's simply not there
it's not talking that in that clear and precise way with all those distinctions in place it's a much more mysterious word and is very difficult to put it in context from verse to verse to verse and in some place it places you know that the plural meanings are intended you had I had to use footnotes who's your favorite post-war European composer broadly in the classical tradition
post post-war the music that everyone else hates of the 20th wait well they see now that's very unfair because of the late 20th century the second after the 20th century was a period of no particular style so they're they're composers who are neoclassical or neo-romantic as well as the you know the The Cutting Edge of a guard I don't have a single favorite I love I love Stravinsky I love Ray Vaughan
Williams you know I mean I I think it's a wonderful period for music I think it is too a period of extraordinary riches I love uh takamitsuturo you know I love I I think the wonderful thing about the 20th century was it was age of Global Music it was an age which composers were allowed to draw on the past and at the same time working in New idioms I you know like Benjamin Britton would write
Leo classically he would write uh he would even wrote some cereal pieces you know a 12 12 tone row he would write eight only all sounds like Benjamin Britton it's all wonderful and um and or then he would draw for the prince of the pagodas he would draw on Javanese gamalan you know I I love that I love the music the great uh composers of the 20th century there were some rubbish I
mean you couldn't pay me to listen to stroke house and but but I mean and they're all these wonderful composers that get overlooked because of the decline of the cultural centrality so you know figures like Nico Scott contos and others and Greece or Feinberg and in Russia hence Germany no I I uh I don't have a single favorite composer I Messier I would be wondering I love God
a lot yeah and for more recent church music what would you look to more recent church music in the last 50 years yeah Dave Brubeck good which is your favorite recording of the Beethoven symphonies um I said I don't have a single one for um uh I mean there's the I think the second Deutsche Grandma phone series with carrion for modern instruments for um the 78 series not the 63. right very
good okay uh for original instruments if the recording were better I I I like actually believe it or not the Roy Goodman performances um they're just too many I mean there you're dealing with a repertoire that's been recorded so many times that the you the virtues of different recordings we have to choose something a bit more richer shade like um but uh among among the uh I mean
everything after they got over the the uh ponderous overly romantic style of Toscanini and Fort foundler and all that got back to uh Carion made it more genuinely classical and then the new the uh the original instruments approach where they actually used um who's I'm trying to think uh how the British conductor who did all those wonderful recordings thank you thank you doing the actual
using the actual metronome markings of Beethoven absolute Revelation you know hearing the music realizing that yeah it has all of the Grandeur and fire and power of Beethoven but also has the lightness of Mozart you know the the the the quickness the agility you know um so uh there are a lot of great recordings of Beethoven but I I am really glad we got over the the you know the almost
wagnerian approach to Beethoven that was that was in place well up through the 1950s final segment of our conversation the David Bentley heart production function how did you learn all those languages you know I I just I just studied them I know some I see the thing is I know better linguists than myself in the sense that I know people who can learn to speak a language in like a few
months and speak it as if they were Native I I'm because of the way my brain is constructed I have to learn the grammar first do it you know I I learned the syntax I I'm much uh and then learn it on paper and then learn uh to speak it uh I mean except for like the things I got early in school I mean you go to French class in Spanish class you you and you speak it before you
really immerse yourself in the in the grammar but but my approach to most like which is like the approach I had to Latin and Greek as a kid I learned the Grabber so I think that um whatever the case um I have a talent for languages but I don't have I Still Envy those who can just somehow absorb it without having to master the grammar first and then speak it like a native I've known I knew a
felon like that at Cambridge who now still alive has like 32 languages Which languages do you know or quite a few do you have time you can tell us well um you know with varying degrees of Competency Western and Eastern uh my my son is English but of course French German Spanish Italian uh not bad at Portuguese I let's see I mean I'm I'm allow I'm lousy but competent in Russian I had to study
Hebrew Syriac uh in theology I had Greek and Latin from early on I studied and I don't consider myself a master of but I I can read now among Asian languages Sanskrit Pali classical Chinese although I find it so no Mick at times it's hard to uh to uh be sure that you get the meaning right it's amazing how many really variant readings you can get at the same say Chinese poem by Levi you know the
same line comes out completely differently for different and I'm still working at my Japanese um no I know some protonic Celtic languages kind of um I don't know if I'm forgetting anything or not um I when I was an undergraduate thought I might be doing Native American studies I I worked on spoken Cheyenne to be precise uh but that's pretty Rusty how do you construct your media diet
what do you consume you wake up you want you want inflow what do you do oh books I mean I'm still I still pretty much live in in a different Century in that regard I uh you know I I do well I mean I will pretend I don't watch television ever I do I um um I was fairly hooked on Better Call Saul for instance and and Breaking Bad before that um and um but you know it's mostly books I don't
uh I don't have a lot of subscriptions to magazines I don't I don't like the I don't like social media at all I don't like the internet even though I have a sub stack newsletter but but I see that as just a subscription magazine oh digital form rather than print um [Music] how can they subscribe to you what's the name of your sub stack oh it's called leaves in the wind how would you
summarize it in a sentence well all the things I write about I write about there it's not about one thing in particular over the years I've built up a readership that's literary criticism philosophy theology fiction you didn't mention that at the beginning I've also published five or six volumes of fiction uh so sometimes short stories show up on it um and this year I've been recording
conversations with other writers and you know so it's it's uh it's for people just like to read without necessarily knowing what the topic is going to be in the next post what's the outstanding theological problem that you think about the most relations uh with other faiths you know I I think that we need radically to rethink the very category of religion that we've inherited in the Modern Age
um the sort of anthropological notion that these are systems of propositions opposed to one another rather than as the ancient view would be religion was a virtue that all human beings practiced in greater or lesser degree with greater or lesser understanding um but you know for instance I don't write much theology anymore uh but when I do I I draw you know even if it's Christian
theology I'm quite happy to draw in fedantic sources from India if they illuminate a question for me and I and I think we we do have to rethink or what exactly it is we're talking about when we talk about religion the other thing I guess because I published that book a couple years ago that all shall be saved is radically re Christians radically need to rethink and
go back to the original text and go back to the first century and rethink this grotesque notion of an eternal hell yes you have a whole book on that which I like very much final question what will you do next um well what I'll do now I I have several projects going on at any given time I've got some I've got a volume of short stories coming out at some point I've got to finish her
second uh a sequel to a children's book I wrote with my son we're writing this Eagles all of a sudden I have a book on philosophy of mine that's almost finished it's coming out from Yale so I never I'm never just doing one thing at a time because I'm too jittery if I concentrate on just one one task at a time I get depressed David Bentley heart thank you very much well thank you for having me