I’m having trouble extracting very much good sense from this passage at all; it seems premised on a rather egregious misunderstanding of pacifism and realism both. If the pacifism Hart’s talking about is Yoder’s, and the realism is Niebuhr’s—since those are the only names Hart mentions in the review—one could respond to these claims point-by-point like this:

• “Both accept the premise that war is by its nature evil…” Yoder and Niebuhr both would agree with this statement only inasmuch as by “evil” is meant, belonging solely to the world-in-sin. Niebuhr obviously thinks that war is sometimes a positive Christian duty, even an act of love—though surely it is a form of love that remains under the judgment of the ideal law of love, embodied in Christ’s nonresistance. Yoder believes that war is “outside the perfection of Christ,” and so alien to life in Christ, but holds that the state will sometimes have to wage war because of its (in some sense God-given) role in the rebellious world. It’s not entirely wrong to say that Yoder and Niebuhr both hold war to be evil, I suppose, if the contrasting position is that war is neutral, potentially both good or evil, which Hart himself seems to believe. Even here, though, I would doubt if the disagreement is as stark as the contrast seems to suggest. Yoder, Niebuhr, and Hart would all want to say that war’s inevitability in this world (for all would say that war is inevitable) flows directly from the world’s sinfulness, and is therefore a sign of sin and brokenness. Calling war a neutral “tool” masks this fact for the moment, and make war falsely appear on the same plane as, say, private education (which can be used unjustly, as a means of propping up racist structures, but isn’t necessarily so used).
• “…only peace is an unqualified good….” The same problem appears here. Neither Niebuhr nor Yoder would say that an unjust peace is an unqualified good. Everyone (Hart included) would agree that ultimate peace, the final peace of Christ, is an unqualified good. So what difference is Hart trying to point out?
• “…the pacifist may believe that peace (understood simply as the absence of strife) is best achieved by refusing to participate in war…” This statement, that the pacifist understands peace “simply as the absence of strife,” is so utterly inane as to be bewildering. I haven’t heard anyone accuse pacifists of being this stupid since my first year of college. It’s especially bizarre to see it attached (indirectly) to Yoder, who occasionally chastises older Mennonites for approaching this same error. Even a cursory reading of Christian pacifists of any era would reveal that the refusal to participate in war was never thought to be identical to the ultimate peace of Christ, but only a sign of it, a witness to Christ’s ultimate purposes.

• “…both [pacifists and realists] accept that the Christian never has any choice in times of war but to collaborate with evil…” Again, perfectly false, unless it’s meant in the completely trivial sense that neither Yoder nor Niebuhr—nor any other intelligent Christian thinker—think it’s possible to live without complicity in the world’s rebellion. Both think of war as a special case inasmuch as it uniquely reveals the intrinsic fallenness of human society, but neither think it impossible to act in constructively charitable way in times of war.

The main mistakes going on here seem to be two. First, Hart’s distinctions between pacifism/realism and the older orthodoxy on war are far too hasty and, as formulated, demonstrably false. There are surely legitimate distinctions somewhere within them that are worth arguing over—e.g., the intrinsic sinfulness of the act of killing—but Hart’s rhetoric only obscures the matter. Some of Hart’s distinctions actually name points of commonality between the traditions, and not any real difference at all. Second, Hart’s distortion of pacifism is paralyzingly drastic; he misunderstands Niebuhr’s Christian realism, too, but not so devastatingly.

I remember reading somewhere a vague apology for his hastiness regarding his condemnation of pacifism in The Beauty of the Infinite, saying that he had just been reading Yoder and was too riled up. Maybe this is just too incendiary an issue for Hart, and his passion has so far kept him from speaking clearly and accurately.

What’s necessary, in this context, is to distinguish different understandings of sacrifice—to allow that “sacrificial logic” isn’t the same in every context, and we have to understand the very particular way in which the New Testament applies that term to Jesus. On David Bentley Hart’s reading (in “Christ and Nothing (No Other God),” p. 11–12 of In the Aftermath), the gospel accounts pit two different ideas of sacrifice against each other. “The cross of Christ is not simply a sacrifice, but the place where two opposed understandings of sacrifice clashed.” One the one hand, the classical idea of the tragic sacrifice: that sometimes, by sad necessity, someone has to be killed in order to maintain the delicate order of the city. On the other hand, the Jewish idea of sacrifice centered on the Day of Atonement: a kind of qurban, a “drawing nigh” to God by giving oneself completely over to him. In the Jewish concept, the sacrifice in no way preserves the society’s order; only God does that, and does it gratuitously. Rather, it is the gift offered back to God in gratitude for his first, infinitely superior gift.

The first kind of sacrifice is decisively rejected in the gospels. That’s the sacrifice Caiaphas thinks he’s making when he announces that it’s necessary for one man to die for the sake of many. Ironically, it’s Caiaphas’s doctrine of the sacrificial atonement that many Christians have adopted as the true one, and it’s Caiaphas’s doctrine that’s laid to waste by the recent criticisms of sacrificial atonement. But the gospels speak of Jesus’ death as sacrificial in the second sense—and even then, only as the culmination of his whole life of self-giving love. For the classical tragic understanding of sacrifice, there’s no way for a life to be sacrificial, only death; in the gospels, it’s very precisely Jesus’ whole life that’s “sacrificed,” freely given over as a gift, to God. The resurrection is the Father’s repudiation of Caiaphas’s sacrifice (and proof that the Father did not himself sacrifice his Son in that way), and his acceptance of Jesus’ sacrifice—a life so committed to love, so committed to living humanly, that he was willing to die rather than renounce his mission.

As an aside, a re-reading of Anselm on the atonement will show that he very carefully follows the second kind of sacrificial logic.

“So, once again to clarify my perspective: To say that one can never escape from language and history, or that one necessarily starts from interests, prejudices, and premises that one cannot simply conjure away, is still not to say that one should abandon a belief in shared human rationality, or a belief in its aptitude for truth. It is to say only that our shared human rationality is always situated in a constellation of concrete particularities, and that its operations are various and complex in nature, and that the affective, the persuasive, the intuitive, the dogmatic, and so forth are all moments within reason’s primary act. Nowhere, I believe, do I advocate a reduction of all theological reflection to rhetoric and aesthetics; I argue only that the inseparability of rhetoric and aesthetics from theology is not only excusable, but entirely proper, and that there is no true form of reasoning is not similarly dependent upon these things.”

— David Bentley Hart, “Response to James K. A. Smith, Lois Malcolm, and Gerard Loughlin,” New Blackfriars 88 (Sept 2007): 612–614.

I heartily recommend this entire exchange, with the three panelists making important points about The Beauty of the Infinite and Hart responding at his most straightforward, most eloquent, and most charitable. He seems to have taken to heart the repeated complaints about his caustic style, and spends much more time here being thankful—but without dulling that edge of those candid critiques which make his writing so refreshing. He does “in large measure concede” that he has on occasion been overly polemical and fierce. More: “I do, of course, regret those moments when my tone becomes ‘wearing.’ But, if I may be frank, what I often find wearing is the faltering, apologetic, restrained, and hesitant tone of much modern theology. It is what I quite shamefully and unfairly tend to think of as ‘the modern Anglican inflection’: the sorrowful diminuendo towards embarrassed silence, by way of prolonged clearings of the throat and an occasional softly whistled tune, as one contemplates changing the subject before anyone is so indiscreet as to venture a firm opinion.”

Like I said: his most straightforward, most eloquent—and mostly charitable.

— David Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite, p. 252–253.

George Hunsinger started, as Joshua Ralston notes, with a crowd-pleasing set of criticisms. “I do not believe in the analogia entis,” he announced. “And even if I did, I think we would be obligated to ignore it.” The analogia entis is a dangerous idea, and Hart’s work falls victim to just the dangers that Hunsinger fears. Hart’s work, I say, and Hunsinger was careful to specify: his criticisms were of the implied author of this book, The Beauty of the Infinite, and he expected that David Bentley Hart the person would have other ways to avoid or allow his criticisms. He entitled his presentation “David Bentley Hart: An Attempt to Understand Him.”

Hunsinger made sure to begin with affirmations. He quite liked the book, thought it had many good things to say. He liked, for example, Hart’s way of speaking about the filioque, which gained much ecumenical ground, and he liked Hart’s criticisms of Jenson on the Trinity, and he liked Hart’s unusual (for the Eastern Orthodox) affirmation of Anselm.

It’s Hart’s metaphysics that make Hunsinger so uncomfortable, the metaphysical strand that runs through Hart’s Christology and doctrine of creation, which impels Hart towards a focus on ontology (he says) rather than a straightforward Christology. “Why does the implied author of this book talk so much about the form of Christ and the pattern of Christ as opposed to Jesus Christ himself?” But again, Hunsinger stressed, he’s really not sure if he’s understanding Hart’s argument correctly.

With the analogia entis, are we talking about an analogical interval or an analogical divide? Hart acknowledges that there’s a difference in kind between God and the created order, but there’s also an element of proportionality or continuity. The analogia entis, in other words, comes to function as a principle of mediation—but Christ is the sole mediator between God and humanity. For Barth, Hunsinger says, the connection between God and creation is mediated entirely by the sovereign will of God.

The thrust of Hunsinger’s concern seemed to be the eclipse of Jesus Christ as the one mediator, and he went on to ask in several different contexts whether Hart was finding ways for the human ascent to God to be accomplished in other ways. Does the incarnation suggest for Hart that our souls can take on their own ascent to God? (This question came with a warning about neo-Platonism.) Is Hart replacing koinonia as the name of our relation with methexis? Does Hart suggest that church or its members can somehow reproduce the hypostatic union of God and humanity in Christ, which is unique in kind? Does conceiving salvation as a practice call into the question the completed work of Christ? Hunsinger didn’t frame all of these as questions, but all as challenges on a theme: these were the illustrations of the dangers of allowing the analogia entis into our theology, that we end up circumventing Christ or proving him irrelevant for our journey to God if we allow some other continuity of being.

Archie Spencer had to abbreviate his paper quite a bit and speak quickly besides, both conditions which made him hard for me to follow. He also had some pointed things to say to Hart, though he thought the book highly worth reading. Mainly, I think, he was frustrated with Hart’s lack of attentiveness to Aquinas paradigmatically and to the whole history that followed him. “Hart,” Spencer said, “thinks that he can read off [the early Fathers like Gregory of Nyssa] as though their reinterpretations through the history of theology matters little.” In what sounded to me like an over-identification of Hart with Milbank, Spencer accused Hart of “colonizing history” by “scouring history to find what modernity has lost.” This is what Hart does when he believes it possible to recede before Aquinas to recover the tradition of Christian ontology, as if the way that Thomas or anyone after him read that tradition was irrelevant.

Spencer didn’t leave these claims unsubstantiated; most of what I failed to follow was his attempt to demonstrate exactly what Hart missed in Aquinas and how that mattered. Still, I think this captures the core of his critique. His summary quoted Balthasar at length on careful ecumenism and listening, and demanding that we not read too quickly past Thomas or Kant or Barth in order to get back to the patristics.

Somewhere or other, Spencer also charged Hart with thinking that he could avoid the dangerous aspects of neo-Platonism while still embracing the neo-Platonic theurgic tendencies as compatible with Christian truth. (This made it seem even more like Spencer was parroting certain criticisms of Radical Orthodoxy where they completely miss Hart’s work. It’s Milbank who invokes the theurgical dimensions of neo-Platonism over and over, not Hart.)

David Bentley Hart wandered up with a tissue box and let us know that he was ill, and proceeded to keep us laughing for the first several minutes of his presentation. He had only scribbled notes and nothing formal prepared, so his lecture was somewhat disconnected though quite coherent in its individual responses. And as I said, I was too taken by his language to take many notes. So I understood him well, I think, but I can’t reproduce his comments.

His main theme, it seems to me, was to clarify the nature and purpose of the analogia entis: it does not aim to find a new mediator between God and humanity; rather, it is shorthand for “what sort of ontology would follow from the assertion that God is truly transcendent, that all being comes from him, and from the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo.” “There is no mediator between us and God but God,” he agrees, but it is insufficient to say (as Hunsinger did) that all that mediates between God and creation is God’s sovereign will, for it is vacuous not to extend that into the category of being—God’s will is what willed us into being, with a certain stamp of the divine nature. Will we simply gloss over all those parts of our Scriptures that speak of the divine image imprinted on humanity? These do say something about ontology, manifestly. “We are fortuity and grace; our nature is a gift and only a gift.” But our nature is a gift of God and bears an image of him, and this is what we mean when we say that our nature is related analogously to God’s: that there is a certain continuity, not of essence but of creation, so analogy expresses both the continuity and discontinuity that is already clear in our central doctrines.

(I’m piecing together from my memory phrases and arguments from different stages of his presentation. Correct me if I’m getting something wrong.)

In response to the charges of neo-Platonism, Hart admitted their truth unashamed. “I am not afraid of the term neo-Platonism—I am a Platonist in some sense—because I believe that Platonism has always been part of Christianity by the providential will of God.” Indeed, it has been one of the “disastrous foibles” of Protestantism to deny that heritage altogether, to deny that it is present already in the New Testament.

Finally, I should make mention of Hart’s regular insistence that his treatment of the analogia entis is an eight page section in a book over four hundred pages long. Christology was a constant theme throughout his sections on creation and salvation, where the analogia entis was a brief transition between the doctrines of Trinity and creation. There is no way that the analogia entis threatened to overcome Christ as mediator. This was no concession, since Hart truly believes in the analogia entis—and as he said at the beginning of his presentation, so does George Hunsinger—but he did want to set it in the same role of importance that he had in the book: which, next to Christology, is infinitesimal.

Hunsinger, in the end, suggested a final exchange to clarify the nature of the disagreement. For Barth, Hunsinger said, the answer to the question ‘What ontological conclusions flow from the doctrine of creation?’ is none at all. He expanded on this a bit, but I didn’t write it down and I can’t remember what he said. Hart’s basic response was, ‘of course there are ontological conclusions, whether you want to call them that or not.’