David Bentley Hart on the problem of evil, the resurrection, and the nature of reality: Hart, a theist and translator of the New Testament, considers the suffering of the innocent the most powerful and honestly unanswerable argument against a benevolent, omnipotent God. He rejects standard theodicies and refuses to defer justification to an eschatological future, while still holding theistic belief because he finds the evidence of reason points that way. The conversation then moves to why he finds the resurrection experiences in 1 Corinthians 15 uniquely compelling, how Stoic metaphysics illuminates Paul’s language about the spiritual body, why the New Testament contains no unified theology, how John 1:1 does not straightforwardly assert that Jesus is God in the later Trinitarian sense, and how intentionality in consciousness, life, and language resists materialist reduction and points toward a Neoplatonist vision of reality.
The problem of evil and the limits of theological comfort
Hart treats the suffering of the innocent as the decisive objection to conventional theism: “as long as a single child has died of diphtheria in the history of the human race, the preponderance of the power of the argument is not one that favors the theistic, or at least theistic platitudes.”
He explicitly rejects the move to justify present suffering by appealing to a future good, echoing Ivan Karamazov’s argument that deferring justice does not make the present cost morally bearable.
He admits he has no solution and that the problem leaves him unable to settle into “firm and fervent and contented faith.”
His own chronic pain has made him less glib about suffering and more aware of how easy it is to treat others’ suffering as an abstract intellectual problem until it touches him directly.
The resurrection as a historical enigma
Hart identifies the central event behind the New Testament as the experience of the risen Christ described in 1 Corinthians 15, which he finds uniquely credible because:
These are the earliest accounts, predating the gospel empty-tomb narratives.
They have a “plain documentary quality.”
Paul claims 500 people at once had this experience, and later reports his own encounter.
Other messianic movements typically collapsed after the founder’s death; this one took deeper root and spread.
Many early believers were willing to die rather than deny the experience.
Historians such as Wolfhard Pannenberg have treated this as a concrete historical datum that is difficult to explain away, even without accepting theological conclusions.
Stoic metaphysics and Paul’s spiritual body
Hart argues that Paul’s language about the resurrection body in 1 Corinthians 15 reflects Stoic metaphysical categories more than later Christian ideas of “resurrection of the flesh.”
Key distinctions:
Paul denies that “flesh and blood” can inherit the kingdom of heaven.
“Flesh” (sarx) for Paul is an intrinsically mortal, animal constitution.
The resurrection body is “a body composed entirely of spirit,” not a disembodied ghost.
In late antique thought, spirit is not immaterial in the modern Cartesian sense; it is a higher, more supereminent kind of matter, like what angels are composed of.
Paul uses the seed analogy: a psychical body is sown, a spiritual body is raised, implying continuity and transformation, not a simple exchange of bodies.
Hart notes that later translations often obscure these distinctions by forcing Paul’s language into conformity with later theological expectations.
The New Testament’s theological plurality
Hart insists the New Testament is not a unified theological system but a collection of varied responses to an extraordinary mystery and power.
He warns that forced readings and translation conventions suppress the actual Greek and create a false impression of uniformity.
The value of recognizing this plurality is twofold:
Intellectual honesty: Paul means what he says, and his language does not match much later Christian theological language.
Intellectual hygiene: it guards against both fundamentalism and dogmatic certainty by showing that the event has never been captured in a single exhaustive model.
How to weigh different New Testament texts
Hart does not treat earlier texts as automatically more reliable; for example, Mark frames the narrative but lacks the sayings material found in Matthew and Luke.
John is a theological commentary rather than a historical narrative in the same sense as the synoptics, and its Jesus is less attractive as a moral teacher than the Jesus of Matthew and Luke.
For Hart, 1 Corinthians 15 stands out as uniquely credible within the New Testament because of its early, documentary character and the historical puzzle it presents.
John 1:1 and the subordinationist tradition
Hart argues that the standard translation of John 1:1 (“the Word was God”) smooths over ambiguities in the Greek.
The absence of the article before “God” in the phrase “the Word was God” does not straightforwardly assert co-equality with God the Father.
In late antique usage, “god” could be applied more broadly to angels, saints, and exalted beings without implying full identity with the Most High.
Hart describes an early, broadly “orthodox” subordinationist strain in which:
God proper is the Father.
The Logos is a secondary god, the “angel of mighty counsel,” the highest of angels, who leads the heavenly liturgy and mediates between God and creation.
He notes that Arius was not a strange anomaly but an extreme expression of a view that had long been regarded as orthodox by many.
The Nicene party introduced new language, including the term homoousios (“consubstantial”), which was not in Scripture or earlier Christian usage.
In John 20, Thomas addresses the risen Christ as “my Lord and my God,” which may be an extraordinary honorific rather than a clear statement of eternal identity, and the Gospel itself contains both distinction language and unity language.
Intentionality, consciousness, life, and language
Hart argues that life, consciousness, and language all exhibit the same intentional structure: they are directed toward meanings, ends, or objects that cannot be reduced to material processes.
Intentionality means that when we think or speak, the beginning and end of a statement are co-present in a “noetic space” where semantic intelligibility determines material expression.
He claims that:
Language cannot be a purely emergent phenomenon from pre-linguistic origins.
Scientific method itself relies on teleological reasoning (“what was this good for?”) even when it denies teleology ontologically.
Neoplatonism becomes a natural reflex of the mind once intentionality is taken seriously, because it posits a unified noetic realm and a supreme source (“the One”) that holds all things together.
He rejects strong emergence: consciousness does not emerge from the pre-conscious but “descends” or “super-intends,” and as soon as there is life, there is already some form of mind and consciousness.
Consciousness and self-awareness
Hart defends the Brentano-style view that to be conscious is always to be conscious of being conscious.
He denies that this produces a real infinite regress, because that problem only arises if consciousness is treated as a composite material mechanism rather than a simple, self-reflexive act.
He is skeptical of Buddhist claims about states of awareness without self-awareness, arguing that even in flow states or “the zone,” a reflexive consciousness remains, even if the psychological self recedes.
God, being, and consciousness
Hart ultimately identifies being, consciousness, and God as one: finite existence, consciousness, and intentional longing are participations in the one God who is being, consciousness, and bliss.
He draws on the Sanskrit term Satchitananda and analogously on Augustine’s understanding of the Trinity to express this unity.
Hope, love, and why belief matters
Hart says he continues to believe not only from intellectual conviction but for the sake of those he loves: “If it were only ourselves at stake, it really wouldn’t matter very much.”
He cites Paul’s triad of faith, hope, and love, and says love is what makes hope and faith worth persisting in.
He describes his daily striving, under chronic pain, as simply trying to continue to believe even when confronted with personal reasons for doubt.
