Mapping 'Theological Territories' from Jesus to Nietzche

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The author of Theological Territories doesn’t have much use for the way theology is usually expounded—in our present society as well as other times and places. But to digress: chapter one of David Bentley Hart’s essay collection, Theological Territories, begins with a pointed critique of an inapt performance of Tristan und Isolde at the Met as a springboard into a rumination on tragedy citing Shakespeare, Nietzche, Hegel and the ancient Greeks.

Hart is an Eastern Orthodox scholar operating from what his less imaginative coreligionists might regard as the faith’s borderlands. His interests are wide and his reading is vast but his focus is on thinking—rethinking—about God. He regards Jesus’ message as almost anarchic, a liberation “from the affairs of nation and empire,” always struggling inside of religious institutions that rely on “nostalgia, triumphalism, lamentation, resentment and fantasy.”

Jesus, he emphasizes, was troubled by social conditions and was—among many other things—an economic and political provocateur whose teachings don’t go well with cut and dried dogma, including the hosannahs of evangelicals who confused nostalgia for a make-believe American past with Christianity.

“Most of the history we read—and write—is a lie,” Hart writes, and is used as a prop for prejudices of the authors and their audiences. He doesn’t mince words anywhere in Theological Territories, demolishing the work of a Roman Catholic defender of capital punishment thus: “It is, to put the matter simply, an exorbitantly bad book, one that contains not a single compelling or solvent argument.” Hart is unfailingly provocative as he casts a different light on old arguments and tired pieties.

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