Description:
In The Light of Tabor, award-winning theologian David Bentley Hart proposes an approach to the nature of Christ that is profoundly radical yet deeply classical.
For centuries, Christian theology has rested on a paradox. Beginning with the Council of Chalcedon in the fifth century, the major Christian traditions have held that Jesus Christ combines two distinct natures: he is fully God and, somehow, fully human. Yet this tenet has traditionally invited irresolvable metaphysical contradictions. David Bentley Hart delves deeply into the seemingly irresoluble tensions, providing the first theological attempt to show how the logic of the earliest churches' angelomorphic Christology is continuous with later Chalcedonian orthodoxy. Hart draws on theologians from every epoch of Christian thought, from Origen to Sergei Bulgakov, while making free use of concepts from other spiritual traditions, such as Vedanta.
The Light of Tabor proposes an approach to Christology that is thoroughly monistic, both as regards Being and as regards nature. Hart argues that the only coherent reading of the figure of Christ is one that fully embraces the essential unity of all things divine and natural through him, proposing an approach to Christology that affirms classical doctrine without retaining the dualistic presuppositions that have haunted theology since the age of the great councils.
Brief description:
David Bentley Hart is a writer, religious studies scholar, philosopher, cultural commentator, and writer of fiction. He is the author and translator of twenty-three books, including the award-winning You Are Gods.
Review Quotes:
"This is quite an extraordinary book from David Bentley Hart, both for its theological content and also for its brevity, clarity, openness, and generosity. It makes sense of the deepest parts of the Christian theological tradition in ways which are both properly traditional and highly original." --John Behr, author of John the Theologian and His Paschal Gospel