“Must he bluster so?” It’s what a Commonweal contributor wondered recently, writing about author David Bentley Hart. What if he does? In The Experience of God, this philosophical Orthodox theologian “has written a book…that overflows with dazzling insights…[with] passages of…deep passion and artistry,” Sage Journals insists. “This is a brilliant book; surely Hart’s finest to date,” the Christian Scholar’s Review agrees. “The prose is beautiful and accessible, the argument thorough and convincing.”
Not so, argues Jerry Coyne in The New Republic: “[I]t’s hardly a compelling argument for God. It is in fact a series of recycled ‘proofs’ of God couched in fancy and often arrogant language.” Certainly, the book “demands a great deal of the reader,” theworthyhouse.com reviewer allows. “It is not a book to read while distracted….”
In it, Hart points up three phenomena—being, consciousness, bliss—as being “the basis for a more philosophically refined definition of God,” Analecta Hermeneutica explains. They provide, in Hart’s own words, “a metaphysical explanation of God.” “If there is a single guiding idea in this book,” an academia.edu critic explains, “it is that God…is the ultimate ground of existence, and…the God of classical theism exists of necessity….”
The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss
By David Bentley Hart
Yale University Press, 2013
