I have some doubts about Hart...

Photo: In Nantes Cathedral

Some further thoughts on DB Hart:

Hart mounts a defence of the ‘beauty to whose persuasive power the Christian rhetoric of evangelism appeals’[1] against the charge from contemporary philosophy that this Christian rhetoric of peace is in fact inescapably violent. As Hart writes:

Christ is a persuasion, a form of evoking desire, and the whole force of the gospel depends upon the assumption that this persuasion is also peace: that the desire awakened by the shape of Christ and his church is one truly reborn as agape, rather than merely the way in which a lesser force succumbs to a great, as an episode in the endless epic of power.[2]

If the gospel is merely an iron fist, even if placed in a velvet glove, then the Nietzchean/postmodern charge – and the Tempter’s charge against Thomas – is sustained. Hart closes his book with a chapter entitled ‘The Gift of Martyrs’, in which he shows well that the Christian practice of authority contrasts markedly in form from the exercise of governmentality (to use Foucault’s term) because it is different in nature:

...theology has no choice but to cling to its own peculiar practice of persuasion, in order to resist the temptations of power (and in a history governed by sin, these temptations inhabit every moment); Christianity can only return to its understanding of peace, its unique style of rhetoric, as the sole source of accord; it must always obey the form of Christ, its persuasion must always assume the shape of the gift he is, it must practice its rhetoric under the only aspect it may wear if it is indeed Christian at all: martyrdom…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.[3]

Through its imitation of Christ’s manner of rule – which the martyrs exemplify – the Christian community shows itself to be ruled by such a servant Lord. Hart’s emphasis on the ‘renunciation of violence’ as the core meaning of the crucifixion to be imitated in the practices of the church takes the place that rightly belongs to ‘sacrificial love’.[4] However, what he rightly shows is that, in the very ‘clinging’ of the disciples of Christ to that mode of speech and life which is the only one consonant with the message of the gospel Christians are commissioned to preach, the ubiquitous temptations of power are to be evaded.

[1] Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth, p. 1
[2] Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth, p. 3
[3] Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth, p. 441
[4] I would further complain here that Hart’s language of ‘theology must…’ is a dangerous abstraction which contrasts with the concrete experience of martyrs. Who is this 'theology'?