Soul Boom - Let's Go To Hell w/ David Bentley Hart

Episode Date: June 11, 2026

A deep dive into hell, God, suffering, scripture, and why so many modern ideas about Christianity may be based on bad translation, bad theology, and political power. Philosopher and theologian David Bentley Hart challenges the idea of eternal damnation, explores universal salvation, and reframes God not as an angry ruler in the sky, but as infinite love, consciousness, beauty, and being itself. Why does evil exist? What do we do with innocent suffering? And can faith survive when our image of God has to be torn apart? SPONSORS! 👇 ZipRecruiter (try it FREE!) 👉 https://ziprecruiter.com/soulboom Nutrafol ($10 OFF + FREE shipping w/ promo code: SOULBOOM) 👉 https://nutrafol.com Fetzer 👉 https://fetzer.org Rocket Money 👉 https://rocketmoney.com/soulboom ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⏯️ SUBSCRIBE!⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠👕 MERCH OUT NOW! ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠📩 SUBSTACK!⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠  FOLLOW US! IG: 👉 ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠http://instagram.com/soulboom⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ TikTok: 👉 ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠http://tiktok.com/@soulboom⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠  CONTACT US! Sponsor Soul Boom: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠[e-mail]⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Work with Soul Boom: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠[e-mail]⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠  Send Fan Creations, Questions, Comments: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠[e-mail]⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠  Executive Produced by: Kartik Chainani Executive Produced by: Ford Bowers, Samah Tokmachi Companion Arts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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That was easy. Let's go to hell because let's go to hell. This is the big whammy, isn't it? This concept that has just turned the world upside down, that there could be an all-loving creator. But by God, if you don't believe in Jesus, you're going to burn in hell for eternity. Not like for a long time, but like forever.

Eternal damnation. The notion of this place of eternal torment is not there. in the New Testament. All the arguments for those who argue, no, it means eternal suffering are all bad arguments. The earliest texts we have in the New Testament of the letters of Paul, he has no concept of hell. What happens isn't salvation from God's wrath. God doesn't come to save us from God, which would make no sense. It's that we have imprisoned ourselves in death and sin and hatred. These are all metaphors, and that's all they are, but none of them is a metaphor for God's wrath condemning you to eternal suffering. What sort of story becomes most appealing to political power?

It's going to be the one where deviation is punished most harshly. Then you confront the concrete reality of suffering. I saw a picture the other day from Gaza of a little girl wearing a little princess this dress because she loved her little dress, but she's an absolute devastation. Someone's giving her some bread, and she just has an astonished look on her face, like she hasn't tasted bread for a long time. And at that moment, I literally cursed God. I literally said, I hate you. Wow. And yet I think that's a holy impulse. It's not good necessarily, But nonetheless, I certainly hate the God who would make that happen. But that's not the true picture of God.

Hey there, it's me, Rain Wilson, and I want to dig into the human experience. I want to have conversations about a spiritual revolution. Let's get deep with our favorite thinkers, friends, and entertainers about life, meaning, and idiocy. Welcome to the Soul Boom podcast. A quick shout out to our sponsors. Please support our sponsors and help. support the show. ZipRecruiter.

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How was that? It was a little abrupt. Yeah. Okay, let me try that. A little frightening. David Bentley Hart, take one. That's nice. All right, there we go.

It's more of a caress, less of a slap. Easing on into it. We were just talking about your appearance on the Alex O'Connor podcast, within reason. Did you have a good time doing that? I did. For one thing, the questions were very intelligent, so I actually had to come up with answers. I'm not expecting that in this occasion. Oh, hey, now. Watch it, you. No, it was wonderful. Yeah. I love Alex. I think what he does is extraordinary. As a curious atheist who is kind of obsessed with the Bible and obsessed with kind of the metaphysics of consciousness. He never injects his point of view into the discussions.

He is a truly curious human being who wants to kind of get at the truth and expose different ideas to his audience. And he has a rabid audience of young followers that they're truly exploring big ideas of Christianity, consciousness. And it's a remarkably large following too from what I saw. He has a legion of 20-somethings that love him. But he's such a good-hearted, big-hearted guy for essentially a materialist. The mustache might be a problem, but otherwise I think he's a saint.

Look at us with our facial hair. Come on. Let's go to hell. We're already in South Bend. How much farther do we have to go? South Bend. It's not far from hell. South Bend is a nice town. It is.

It was an unkind remark. I'm a Marylander and so I have prejudices against the Midwest that are entirely unjustified. The Midwesterners are actually nice. Makes you want to slap them. But I do want to talk a little bit about hell because this is the big whammy, isn't it? This idea that hangs up so many people on this concept that has just turned the world upside down, that there could be an all-loving creator. But by God, if you don't believe in Jesus, you're going to burn in hell for eternity.

Not for like 47 years, not like for a long time, but like forever. Eternal damnation. And I've really poured myself into the Bible to try and understand kind of where this came from. There's a couple of phrases that seem to allude to it. and I imagine that St. Augustine saying that we're all just evil and corrupt. Well, with the late Augustine, the picture becomes darker. But the idea that we're carrying this, that we're just these sinful creatures. Yeah, I mean, the notion not just that we're sinful, but that we're born guilty and therefore hell is our condine punishment.

I mean, that is an aberration, born in part, just by the way in which a certain verse, Romans 512, is translated into Latin. Tell me about that verse, because you have done your own translation of the New Testament, which I think is beautiful, and I have it at my desk, and I recommend everyone to get it. But by the second edition. By the second edition, okay, you made some adjustments. I realized that I was still not being as purely faithful to the Greek as I should have been because I was still hearing in the back of my mind. First and foremost, like, we've got to get this vision of hell and damnation and a God that would possibly do that to his creation really out of the lexicon of modern spiritual talk.

But what it says is that death and how metaphorical is this meant to be? death is unnatural, death just as, you know, death entered the world, right? And it talks about the sin of Adam. And it ends with this phrase, you know, it talks about this man, and then it talks about death coming from this man, and then this phrase in the Greek, effopontesimartal, it's whereupon all sin. Now, why that's important is because the, oh, or Ho there in the Greek is masculine. And if it refers back to anything, it probably doesn't. It's just, F.O. is probably just an idiom that just means, as a result of which, or whereupon.

But if it does refer to any noun earlier, it would refer to Thanatos, because that's the one just before it in the Greek. What is that, Thanatos? Death. Okay. When it was translated into Latin, the masculine was retained for that. last phrase, it became in quo amnes pecoerent, in whom all sin, in which, rather not whereupon, but in which. And moors in Latin, death is feminine. So what's the earlier reference that's actually masculine would seem to be Adam? So it seems to be in him all sinned. Now that's not

what the Greek says. It doesn't say that we were all already guilty of the sin. But believe it or not, that verse and that verse only is the only one ever adduced in the whole history of Christianity as meaning that we are born guilty in the eyes of God, which is a horrendous and rather revolting notion. Yeah. And it reaches a kind of pitch of psychosis in reform. Why would God possibly do that? Well, it's also, it can't be true in the sense that even God, you know, this rule of omnipotence. What omnipotence means is God can do everything that is possible. potential potencia, but even God can't make the principle of contradiction because then that would not be God, he would not be, he would not be the truth, you know, it would not be the

ground of truth. And so you can't be guilty for something that you didn't do. That's simply a meaningless claim. But the time you get to say Calvin and Calvinism in which you are, Calvin actually, when he comments on the phrase God is love, the Johannine epistles, says, oh, but that's not really a true definition of God. That's just God as directed, as experienced by the elect. To the unelect, he's hatred. You're born loathsome in the eyes of God, evil and deserving of each time. Wow.

And this is the problem. When you have a ridiculous doctrine, which has become fixed not only in doctrinal language, but in bad translations and bad exegesis of Scripture, you have two choices. We have three choices. But the two choices, one, you can just not believe it. Who's going to take that risk in a culture that's just pervasively Christian? You know, if you don't believe these things, it's not going to go well for you at the end. You can reject it as the manifest moral and logical nonsense it is.

Or you can tell your conscience, wrestle with your conscience, until you've convinced them that actually it is. And actually, it is just and fair and true. And I may not understand it fully, but I can trust God. And you end up not actually doing that. You end up with an evil God, a God who's just pure perversity, pure arbitrary will, pure power. It is interesting that this is also the period which this notion of the sovereignty of God is the only attribute, not love, not goodness. Sovereignty becomes so paramount in the early modern period especially, that this notion, that, that then becomes all that freedom means, and that begins to migrate into our understanding

of human freedom. I'm free because I have the power to choose. But the older tradition said, well, you're free when you choose well. You know, when you choose the good, that makes you freer. The truth will set you free. Yeah. Whereas. But the notion of inherited guilt goes back to the late 4th century, definitely.

And the notion of hell, whether of eternal hell or not, I can't say. is it early enough. But the hellish imagery that we're familiar with isn't from the New Testament. There is a kind of a punishing fire that can exist that you can go through that is limited and purifying, as opposed to eternal damnation. Is that what you're talking about? Right. And what's the only time the Apostle Paul talks about the fire of judgment?

It's in 1st Corinthians 3. and what is he mentions only two classes. Now, people will say, oh, well, he's just talking about among Christians, but that's not what he says. He says that whatever works we do in this life will be tested, you know, there will be those whose works stand the test and earn a reward, and there are those whose works will need to be burned away, but they will be saved as through fire. That's the only time he mentions the fire of judgment. In the teaching of Christ, there are all sorts of images of judgment, but they don't actually, none of them is a picture, a single picture, and certainly not of eternal damnation in the sense.

Some are pictures of things being burned away, you know, thrown into the furnace or tears being torn out of the field and burned off. summer images of you know when you have to, you're not going to get into the party. There's a wedding feast and you're going to be outside crying. You're not getting any ice cream. You know, if you've... Which is its own kind of hell. Yeah. If you and I were there and there was ice cream and a party, we would be...

Especially if it was... We'd be sobbing in each other's arms. Pistachio. Oh, pistachio. Yeah. Mint chocolate chip for me. Those are my two favorites. You're a good...

We're our brothers from another mother, I swear. But then there are also ones about being imprisoned and chastised, but they're all finite. They're all, you know, until the last farthing is paid. But when that last farthing is paid, it ends, right? What's often translated as hell in the synoptic gospels that we have is Gahanna, which is the Gahenom, which is a valley outside of Jerusalem, or now it's inside Jerusalem, but I mean outside the old city. And it was an image used by the prophets, not for a place of eternal suffering, but a place of judgment and of historical catastrophe.

I mean, you find this in Jeremiah and Isaiah. The notion of this place of eternal torment is not there in the New Testament. There's one verse in Matthew 25 that talks about Colossus could mean chastisement, it could mean punishment. It can mean punishment. It tended in earlier uses just to mean corrective punishment as opposed to Timoria, which is condemnation. But how it was being used legally at the time of the Gospels, it's a controvert. But what does Ionius mean?

Does it mean forever? It's always translated as eternal, but aeonius, as I would say, demonic, or for a long time, or of the age to come. These are very vague terms, but there's that one verse. and all the arguments for those who argue, no, it means eternal suffering are all bad arguments. Paul, the earliest texts we have in the New Testament of the letters of Paul, he has no concept of hell. Salvation doesn't have anything to do with, you know, again, when the word translated as hell in his letters is Hades, and that just means the realm of the dead. And he's saying the death is overthrown.

There's no place of, there's no hell you go to. What happens in Christ isn't salvation from God's wrath. God doesn't come to save us from God, according to Paul, which would make no sense. It's that we have imprisoned ourselves in death and sin and hatred, and now death has been overthrown. So nothing can separate us from the love of God, as he puts. You know, there is nothing, no height nor depth, no, no archons as well. These are all metaphors, and that's all they are.

none of them is a metaphor for, you know, God's wrath condemning you to eternal suffering. But also, what sort of story becomes most appealing to political power? If the church is now part of the structure of power, it's going to be the one where deviation is punished most harshly. Right. So there's always going to be a gravitation towards the harshest possible version of eschatology, of the last things. You know, be a good citizen,

be a good subject of the empire, or you'll burn forever, you know, and that means to confess this confession, obey these authorities. Yeah. So I think it's just as a matter of political pragmatism. It was inevitable.

But it is a grotesque distortion of the much more diffuse and far less, morally horrific picture that the New Testament actually contains. And I will point out in the New Testament, they're far more absolutely sort of unqualified statements of universal salvation than there are of any, you have dozens and dozens. Yeah.

You know, the wills that all should be saved, you know, and the so-called pastoral epistles, first and second Timothy and Titus, which are ascribed to Paul, but he wasn't really the author, at least not in that form. Actually, on social issues, they're a bit retrogressive compared to the real Paul, like Paul's view of women, apart from a verse that's forcibly inserted into First Corinthians. He was actually... You don't think Paul wrote that verse about women? I think, oh, it clearly, he clearly didn't.

It doesn't even fit about women not being able to speak into it. No, that's violently inserted right into the middle of... something else. By whom? Well, probably a scribe who borrowed it from the pastoral, borrowed the idea from the pastoral epistles that Paul didn't write. But no, Paul earlier in the same epistle when he's actually Paul, makes it clear that women do speak in the church.

He talks about the women prophesying. And they should cover their heads because hair, you know, hair can really drive men mad and angels. Apparently angels get really excited by the beautiful hair of women because it's so full and lustrous and they don't go bald. Angel hair pasta. Oh, yeah. I mean.

Yeah, well, that's where angel hair pasta got its origins, yeah. The longing of angels for the hair of women prophesying in church. It can be traced. I'm not making this up. But those epistles are just straightforwardly universalists. You know, he's the atonement, he's the at one meant, the union with God for our sins, not only for us, but for the whole of the cosmos, for the whole world. Apparently, nearly half of hiring managers say a candidate's enthusiasm about the job is the most important factor when considering them for a role, which makes sense.

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David, I just looked it up. You're a year older than me. Yeah. What did you learn in that year? Not to trust podcasters. No, no, no, no. I mean, given that I have a vastly greater experience of life than you do, I should have learned more than I did, but I'm afraid, you know, I haven't acquired nearly the wisdom that you might expect.

I mean, maybe you're just precocious. I mean, you know, a sapling of 60 years. Yes, a fresh young sampling. You wear it lightly. Well, since I discovered your work many years ago, and I'll tell the listeners, I am such a huge fan of yours. I was reading a bunch of your stuff and I just literally like Googled like David Bentley Hart in Notre Dame and somehow found your email and then wrote you.

And I think it had gone into your spam. I didn't hear back. I was like, oh, wow, he doesn't really want to talk to me or he doesn't know who I am. Or I hated the office or something. Everyone does. Or I just confused you with Dwight Shrewd. But a couple months later, I got an email back. like, oh, hey, I just found this email. And then we had a couple of lovely discussions.

But I want to start with that because the book I was reading that really deeply affected me. I'd have to put it in like top 10 books that like shifted the course of my life was the experience of God, being consciousness bliss. Now, it's been a little while since I've read that book. but what I got out of it was a completely different way of encompassing the divine creator on a number of different kind of metaphysical levels as opposed to getting completely away from any kind of anthropomorphized demiurge, God on a cloud with a beard, yourself excluded, with superpowers, kind of Zeus kind of idea, and how can we separate even the Christian God away from this concept of like human father that is judgmental?

The way we think about God is often very anthropomorphic, obviously. It's based on expectations that we probably already had shaped in our early childhood. I remember that when I was a child, I was firmly convinced that God was a black man with a very white beard because when I was four, my father mentioned that the fellow we knew who did gardening and landscaping, who looked like that, looked like God to him.

And at the age of four, you're very literal. So I thought, well, that's what God looks. And he has spectacles, too. Where's glasses? And a lawnmower. Right. He is the garden of divine gardener. Yeah, no, I mean, there was also that.

I mean, I called on to that earlier, too, that, yes, he works in gardening and there's something about God walking in the garden and the things I've heard in church, you know, and things. So I could have carried that image in a somewhat more refined, but nonetheless, largely throughout life, if I just hadn't happened to be introduced to the philosophical figures, the church fathers, the medieval, scholastics, modern. And if I hadn't sort of intellectually taking a tour through Hinduism and Sufism, but it is the case that the arguments over atheism and theism are arguments over a picture, over a representation. You know, you can cling

fiercely to the notion of this wise, provident, bearded gardener in the sky. And for many people, that's a fulfilling and beautiful image. And it works. Or you can reject that angrily, you know. But if that's what you're fighting over, you're fighting over none of the actual philosophical or even spiritual claims being made by these traditions. I find Richard Dawkins somewhat insufferable, but I understand why if he thinks, you know, the picture of God that he gets

from popular apologetics or from, you know, the rather nasty side, of the traditions, the Christian, God who's just eager as anything to throw you into hell if you don't get the creed right, you can see why he rejects it, you know, or when you get very literalist readings of the Old Testament, which actually were not the norm in the early church, the allegorical tradition of reading scripture was dominant, at least at the educated levels. But when you get someone who's, you know, say, yes, God did command the genocide of a whole people, and yet somehow this is the good God of love of Jesus Christ. You can see why someone like Richard Dawkins is going to turn away from that in revulsion.

So it was actually out of a certain, despite some of the saltier remarks I make about the new atheists at times, it actually out of a sympathy for their position that that book took shape. I just thought, you've got to make this clearer what we're talking about. You talk a lot about God existing on the level of metaphorical understanding because we can't understand a creator that is beyond infinity. We can't imagine infinity, let alone some kind of force beyond infinity creating this infinite universe and perhaps an infinite amount of other infinite universes and even beyond that. So kind of wrapping our heads around God as love, around God as a force of creativity,

of art, of music, of existing on a spiritual, emotional, metaphorical level. That's as close as we can, you know, weakly grasp at the concept. A speculative level is too. I mean, philosophy does have a part to play here. But, you know, the funny thing is we do need all those modalities. It's not really the case that thinking in images and thinking and representations is inferior to thinking in abstract concepts. Because if God is truly transcendent, then none of our language is adequate in itself. But that's also why the different modalities with which we speak about the divine have to refine one another. Spinoza had a metaphysics in which the difference between God and the universe in a sense disappears altogether.

I mean, he speaks of deos, sioux, not Torah, a God, or nature. But it's not nature in the sense we would think of that as just a realm of physical interactions. It is also infinite mind, but that that substance expresses itself in all things in infinite modes. Now, this is a majestic metaphysical picture, but it's also completely impersonal, for the most part, completely deterministic. And so the experience of love or the arts, that's just one or another indifferent way in which this divine substance is expressed, but it's no different from, say, warfare or any other reality that we experience. It does not have an autological. It does not essentially more true of God than anything else in a sense. I mean, that's an oversimplification.

Well, I would say that God as experienced as love is more true than a man on a cloud who's judging people like Santa Claus and figuring out who's naughty and nice and who gets punished and who gets rewarded, I think it is closer to a reality. Right. But it's still nowhere near what the reality of God is. Yeah, well, there's a certain disproportion between the infinite and the finite. I mean, our mind's going to only go so far. Now, that doesn't mean that there's any end to how far they can go in eternity.

you know, it's important that all these different ways of talking are allowed to inflect one another, that they not be separated. The moment they are, you do fall into, well, say, fundamentalism on one side in which the pictures become literal in the modern sense of literal. In fact, that's a very modern sense that when you say literal, you mean that that's just the actual concrete fact of something. a literal reading of scripture in, say, the second or third century didn't mean that at all. It just meant attention to what the text is actually saying, so that before you give it a spiritual interpretation, you have to make sure that you get the literal level right. So if the image on the page is a rose,

you have to make sure that you're talking about a rose when you move from that to a spiritual. And if you mistake that for a tulip, you're a little bit off base. That's all that literal meant. There was no concept of what we mean, which is just documentary accounts of things that actually happened. Certain church fathers, for instance, may have believed in the flood. Some may have believed in the garden.

They didn't know the theory of special evolution, but others most clearly didn't. They said... This is early on, second and third century. Oh, yeah. I mean, for instance, origin says that anyone who thinks the tree of the knowledge of good and evil was an actual tree is a little bit of a simpleton. Yeah. Not a kind remark.

That's incredible. thousand years ago. If you don't read these stories of spiritual or philosophical way, all you get are absurd myths. It's in the modern period, for instance, that the concept of the supernatural actually comes into, when we use the word supernatural very vaguely now just to mean anything beyond the ordinary. But until very late in the Middle Ages, the term didn't exist. But all that means is something that's beyond the specific nature of a particular kind of thing. So it would be supernatural for a dog to begin singing the libretto of Don Giovanni. Well, for most dogs.

I had a dog who used to do that all the time. Sure. Yeah. Roland, rest in peace. Yes. He had a beautiful tenor voice. But the notion of the supernatural as really totally ontologically, metaphysically, however you want to put it, discontinuous with the natural.

So that grace now becomes not really the fulfillment of the natural, not really just a fuller, deeper revelation of the nature of all things, but becomes super added. And the reason is because, as I say, this very fundamentalist sort of impulse that had been born in the 16th century, and that's when this notion of the supernatural really emerges in Catholic thought. Well, they had to justify the notion they thought, of a God who was quite happy to consign most of humanity to hell, and that this was no injustice,

not the thwarting of the nature of creatures, because anything supernatural, including the grace of union with God, is totally gratuitous. That is, it comes entirely from beyond the realm of nature, isn't just superimposed on it. Now, there was a great reaction against this in Catholic thought in the early 20th century. people, you may or may not have heard of like Henri de Dubach and others pointed out that this was a distortion of the tradition. But it's just very much the case that this schism between the revelation of creation. Creation is revelation and the revelation of God in extraordinary acts of grace become two separated spheres, which leaves this world a kind of dark autonomy. You know,

it can be evil and corrupt. And sometimes you have to be a realist and use evil for good ends. It becomes a justification for not expecting the supernatural within the natural. That's so well said. I hadn't thought of it in those terms because, again, for hundreds of thousands of years, humanity viewed the natural and the supernatural as completely intertwined. that's why you pray to the sun god you know which isn't entirely wrong i've stopped doing that but yes you do but it's not entirely wrong because it's the sun is the ultimate metaphor for power

light illumination growth heat warmth um healing beauty it's so natural to pray to the sun god and then have that morph into an idea of of raw or in zoroastrianism you you know, you know. Purity of light, yeah. And, you know, these concepts that are like, hey, there's a little bit more metaphysical resonance to the idea of the sun, but it's all inclusive. Yeah, no, and it's funny, this sort of solar imagery,

again, that's a constant of human experience, right? You mentioned this, the solar imagery, becoming, you know, not thinning out, but deepening toward, you know, becomes recognized as symbolic, metaphorical, pointing to a deeper spiritual truth. One of the most famous mantras in Indian tradition, the Gayatri mantra, you know, it's of Ombor buvasa, Tat Savito, Virenium, Orgo, divasya, demahi, di, or yonaprachio diet. It all starts with Savitor as sunlight or the god of light, God, radiance.

And in its original Vedic context, it probably was just a laudation of the science. as a God, but it has become so much more in Indian tradition. It's one of the deepest texts of meditation on the light of knowledge, the light of love, the light that draws you on. Even Christianity, I mean, you know, in the book of Revelation, the woman clothed with the sun becomes the image of a redeemed creation of church. I prefer symbol to metaphor because in a symbol, literally the word symboli means things thrown together, brought together. And so there's an actual union of the revelation and the and the and the and the and the and the and the metaphor it's like well once you're done with the metaphor you can kick it away

but you really can't we always have to rely on these these pictures it's again as long as we allow all the different modalities of how we talk about God to refine and inflect and and and constrain one another but also enrich one another because if if we don't we can fall into well yeah the sun is God. That's it. You know, right, right. I always think about something like fire. Like, you know, like you see the word fire, F-I-R-E, and there are these symbols on a page that, you know, if an alien saw them, they would just look like weird chicken scratches. But we see that and we think fire.

We have an image of fire. Now, when you read it, do you think of a certain fire or a certain, you just know the concept of fire, right? And then if you're asked to draw a fire, you would, you know, you would draw something like that, but that's not even close to fire. Even if you painted it yellow, you know, it could be a shrub or something like that. And then you think of a specific fire or you light a fire and look at a, at a fire. Like there's, there's, before you get to making a fire, there's kind of levels of symbology of an understanding of what fire is. And then you've got an actual fire, right? And here on this plane, as I understand it from Plato's idea, and something that I'm grasping toward is that there's also a metaphorical implication of fire, right? Heat, purity, purification,

something that gives warmth, but is also kind of dangerous. You know, it's used both ways in the scriptures of all the world's religions. It's something that can burn you, but it's something that's healing and it's something that's purifying. You melt the gold in the fire to purify the gold in the fire. And then I think if there are subsequent planes of existence that perhaps we'll get to experience the reality of fire, like even a fire in this world is not the reality of what fire is. And you can think of that in terms of the reality of water, the reality of a mountain, you know, a mountain signifies power and signifies eternity and determination, let's say. But those, again, are concepts.

And in the next world, will we keep saying the next world? I don't know how else to put it, but in a... In the age to come. Alamhabah, that's the Hebrew phrase. In another plane of understanding that's purely on a spiritual realm, And perhaps we will see the form of mountain and the form of fire. How does that relate to both Plato's writings? Where do you think his concept came from?

And do you see a spiritual truth in that? Well, there's definitely a spiritual truth in it. The allegory of the cave, for instance, is one of the great, not only philosophical, but spiritual texts of Western tradition. We don't understand with full clarity the secret teacher. We're aware that there were secret teachings of the Platonists, and also there are things not written down, the things not conveyed by Aristotle, too. This was a common enough practice. Behind Plato is a Pythagorean tradition, though, that definitely sees in the order of the world images and certifications and

of a divine spiritual truth. And of course, Plato really talks in just the way you speak of, is seeing the forms in their hyper-uronium, their super celestial reality, knowing that by comparison, not in an ultimate sense, but by comparison to that higher truth, what we know in this world is as yet only shadows. You get this image in the New Testament, of course, Paul. Now we see us in a glass darkly. then we will see face to face.

You know, I will know even as I am known. But what I find sort of interesting about the way you put it is, we are symbolic creatures. That is how we engage with all of reality. It may be that reality is, in a sense, a hierarchy of symbols, that it's just an eloquence, a divine eloquence, a language that's speaking to us in every different possible register. And so that passing from, you know, the lexime fire on the page, you know, to the concept,

or from the signifier to the signified, if you're using language of structuralism, which I know you like to do all the time. You're a Cessurian, I understand. So Cicerian. Yeah. And a Cesarian. Yeah. And from that, you're always moving towards that towards which it points.

But that's what a symbol is. You know, it's always, and if we're conscious of that, if we're aware that we're engaged in a commerce of symbols with reality, then everything, the more we're, everything traveling along this hierarchy from the most remote shadowy version of that thing, a scroll on a piece of paper, to the fire there or the fire in the sun. There's a transcendent fire.

and then beyond that, so what is the, you know. That's a great safeguard, again, against the sort of fundamentalist reductionism. You realize that we're never taking leave of the symbolic. Plato, you know, it's very hard. When you're dealing with Plato, how he's using myth, how he's using metaphor, how literally he wants you to take things,

is always very subtly positive. Yeah, or even in a sense, veiled. You know, you can glimpse it, but he doesn't come out and state many things, except sort of obliquely, elliptically, by way of a dialogue about talking about symbols. But I think the notion of the forms in Plato, whether, I mean, you know, modern philosophers are just interested in epistemology and theories of knowledge. So all they think about quite often, especially in the analytic world, is always talking about are universals that are in the mind, and we know those, and then we understand experience

from knowing those. There's a much greater spiritual context, obviously, for Plato. It really is about the purification of the soul. Moving from a realm of illusion and, in a sense, willful illusion, the chains that hold people in the cave are, as one famous commentator in late antiquity, said, always self-for, always forged by the one who wears them. Wow, that's called. There is a real spiritual aspiration there. How do you think of the sun of the good, which is the highest of the forms, the form of all the forms, just the good that pours forth? In later Platonism, middle and neoplatonism, it's often

spoken of the bonum, the good, using the Latin term, bonum diffusive em sui, the good that just naturally overflows from itself into all things, just as the sun naturally irradiate. Wow. Yeah. And that is Greece again. Grace but contained in the natural world. Right. It's nature all the way up and grace all the way down, which is, to be honest, again,

as I say, before this early modern division of the supernatural from the natural into an absolutely discreet category, to which you gained admittance purely, not by natural means at all without any real continuity of nature, but entirely by this sort of election by God that drops out of heaven and imparts to you something, the loomengloree, the light of glory, that enlightens your mind in a way that nature is impotent to do. This is really just the tacit understanding of not only of Christian tradition, but, you know, all the great traditions that there is a continuity here. between natural apprehension and supernatural revelation, or divine revelation.

I don't even want to use the term supernaturally. But in Plato, yeah, you should see this as a spiritual testament, as a story about the assent of the soul towards the truth of the divine. This episode is brought to you by Fetzer. You know, there's this tendency in modern life to believe that every problem has a material solution, more technology, more productivity, more money, more apps reminding you to breathe While you ignore the fact that your soul feels like a raisin, but the folks at the Fetzer Institute believe something deeper,

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Well, since I have you here, and now we've hit a couple of big topics, metaphor and spiritual teachings, hell, I mean, I've got you on the clock for another half an hour. I'm going to throw another big one at you, Theodicy. Why is there suffering? How can there be a all-loving God when you have babies born with bone cancer? Yeah. What is the nature of suffering? Lay it on me, baby.

Absolute evil. This is something else that's an old... I'm not going to pretend I have a good answer for you because this is the one thing that I've always admitted I have the thinnest claims to make. If it weren't for the other side of my experience of love and life and beauty and all that, I would just think the conditions of our existence

being what they are, the condition, the suffering of children, the sufferings of anyone, the sufferings of animals, the innocent. But the funny thing is the New Testament doesn't justify them either. If you're going to go back to what the earliest Christians believed, they have a kind of provisional dualism. They have a world that's been fractured. Theodicy was a practice, again, in early modern and then later modern, especially later modern, not late modern in the sense of now.

17th, 18th century. Theodicy was a practice of trying to prove that suffering is, on the one hand, good as part of the greater purposes of God and necessary, given what it was God's whole to accomplish in creatures. So, you know, Leibniz, when he says, this is the best of possible worlds, he doesn't mean that this is the happiest world imaginable. Right. He means this is the world in in which the framework of this world is the best possible for the creation of souls. For the growth of souls. And I mean, there's some value of that, that I suppose if you don't see it as being all about the providential plan for suffering, so that the Lisbon earthquake is the work of God trying to, you know, or bringing about a certain plan.

That's not the way the New Testament talks. I mean, there is a provisional dualism. there. There's a reason why... You say provisional dualism, what does that mean? Well, that this world really is under... It is like Maya. It really is in some sense of false reality as well, and it's under the rule of real malign or fallen powers. Paul is always talking about powers and principalities on high. We tend to think he's talking about the political leadership,

you know, Rome. And to some degree, there's a continuity there, but he's actually very specifically meaning spiritual powers that have become... alienated from God. He's also the Pauline corpus talks about them being reconciled with God in the end. So again, it's not the later picture of just there's the devil. He's the bad. But nonetheless, the New Testament does not try to make suffering good. It makes it this this terrifically catastrophic tradition, condition that has occurred because of human freedom, because spiritual freedom is a dangerous thing to give the monkeys, you know, or wherever you are, to give. To give to us, but that while we can make something good of suffering, the suffering in itself is not

good or necessary or part of the divine plan. It's part of divine permission. And it's a horrible truth that has to be overthrown. Now, whether that's adequate or not again, you know, that's a matter of moral discretion and judgment. One of the most powerful, one of the most powerful, you know, the sort of confrontation with, the struggle with, that kind of view of things is in the Brothers Karamazov, the chapter called Rebellion, Dostoevsky's, in which Ivan Karamazov says, you know, under these conditions,

the suffering of a little girl in the night, the price is too high. I hand back my ticket to the kingdom. I don't want admission. And it's an incredibly powerful argument. Wow. It's all one I've wrestled with all my adult life. What do you think about the argument that I posed in Soul Boom, which is kind of a, I don't know, what do you call it in philosophy, a kind of a reverse argument? What would people want from this world? A world in which there is no pain and no conflict and no struggle and no suffering that women's vaginas open up and babies come in smiling without any crying. There's never skinned. Well, that's how I was born.

I don't know about you. And the angels were singing. I never gave my mother any trouble. But that we, everyone dies at 100. No one gets cancers. There's no natural disasters. That there is just this kind of physical paradise without any suffering. I mean, that it's an argument at absurdum, of course.

But it's like, is that what people would want from an all good God in a world without suffering because that to me doesn't make any sense and it and it also doesn't align with the natural laws of of science and the kind of physical plane that we live in yeah no i mean i i think it's a good argument but no argument is wholly sufficient sure you have to not become complacent because then you confront the concrete reality of suffering i saw a picture the other day from Gaza of a little girl. I mean, she was maybe three or four, wearing a little princess dress because she loved her little dress, but I mean, she's in absolute devastation. Someone's giving her some bread and she just has an astonished look on her face like she hasn't tasted

bread for a long time. And at that moment, I literally cursed God. I literally said, I hate you. Wow. And yet I think that's a holy impulse. It's not. It's not. not good necessarily, but nonetheless, I certainly hate the God who would make that happen. But that's not the true picture of God. The book I wrote on this years ago called The Doors of the Sea is that the thing that I find most beautiful in the New Testament on this issue is that it grants that freedom, struggle. I mean, you find that in the New Testament. And I'm, you know, Paul talks about trying to finish the race.

He's fought the good fight. He's finished the race and all that. And I don't think that he just means that his ministry has been, and his ministry was one of constant tribulation and vexation. I think he's talking about more than that, the struggle of this life as having a spiritual meaning. But at the same time, when you see the suffering of a little girl, the message of the, the New Testament as a whole is this is the thing that God regards as his ultimate enemy to be overthrown, the reign of death and cruelty and violence. There's an enmity to it. It's not just some sort of providential, necessary thing to be affirmed. It's also an evil to be struggled against

not only by God's eternal grace, but also in this life. We have to struggle against it. But I think that's a bad example because I think a better example is like an earthquake or a volcano and the same little girl in the princess dress because the war that's happening in the Middle East is an abomination in God's eyes that the people of the Hebrew Bible and the people of the Quran fighting in the way that they are when bombing each other in hatred, when shalom means peace and Islam means peace and submission is horrific. And that has to do with human choice and misinterpreting spiritual writings. We're part of nature too. So human nature for all its perversity is an expression of created nature. We are in part what we are made. Sure. And what we make ourselves.

God could have made us all perfect angels on this planet of making only the good and noble choices. Or could he actually? You see, that's the question. You see, the greatest 20th century theologian to my mind. mind was a Russian named Sergei Bulgakov. And he has some very powerful arguments. Master and Margarita. No, that's Mikhail Bulgakov. A distant cousin, though. They were both the sort of aristocratic family that had bishops and priests, priests marry in the Eastern Church. So there's so something, yeah. But yes, Sergei and Mikhail were distant cousins. Okay. And Mikhail's a bit more fun to

read of grand. But Sergei was quite brilliant. He was one of brilliant minds. that Christian thought ever produced. But he has some very powerful arguments for why the creation of free spiritual beings. He doesn't just mean that, you know, in the conditions of this world, we have liberty of choice. He means that we come into being as already assenting to our own freedom. Why he couldn't really create rational creatures that could be in union with God who were just angelic without any possibility. But okay, let's talk about the the earthquake, because of course, that's the famous poem that Voltaire wrote on the earthquake in Lisbon in response to Leibnizian optimism, or what he thought was optimism, this is the best of all

possible worlds. And he's not naive. He doesn't, you read Candide and you might think that he just thinks that this is a happy, clappy sort of thing. But Voltaire was sophisticated enough to understand that what it meant was there was the necessary balance of good and evil in this world to achieve the spiritual ends. But he looks at the earthquake in Lisbon and says, you know, it's absurd for me to think that these people crushed under fallen roofs, these children crushed, are part of the great pattern plan and necessity, the chain of necessity that reaches down to the contingencies of history and nature up to the throne of God. Let's be honest, the tradition,

Christian tradition, but also in different ways, other traditions of the book, see, creation itself is wounded and broken by death, that the full of spiritual creatures is also the marring of creation. Now, when and how this happened, you know, if you're not

a fundamentalist, you don't think it literally had to do with a talking snake, but that a different frame of time, a different reality, a different kind of possibility was rejected and that this wounded all of creation. Another of the great Christian thinkers of the patristic era, the late patristic era, was Maximus the confessor. Again, one of the most brilliant minds in Christian theological tradition. And for him, the mystery of Christ is the reuniting of all those things broken and divided. So it's not just individuals,

save from their sins. It's the union of all persons with one another, the overcoming of the division between men and women, between us and creation between creation and paradise. It's a complete, and the cosmic restoration, of course, is also the language of the New Testament. All of reality is involved in this, not just, you know, it's a new creation. There are animals and plants and Paul in Romans chapter 8 is all creation is groaning for the glory to be revealed that will redeem it and recreate it. for them, you know, this evil, even the evil of earthquakes, they don't want to affirm it simply, the New Testament writers don't want to affirm it simply as part of the greater purpose.

Its possibility and its actuality come about because of the nature of spiritual life and spiritual freedom, perhaps, or of the relation of creation to God through the priesthood, the Mithorios is what Maximus, as the mediating figure of humanity, which is supposed to be the priesthood of creation, offering everything up to God and conveying the light and love of God to creation, we failed that role, and it broke everything, you know, somehow. Spiritual creatures failed that role. They still want to say that there's something ontologically wrong in this that is to be overthrown, not just affirmed, but overthrown by the love of God.

And to me, that's necessary. I cannot, I could not accept a pure theodicy in which, well, it's all part of the good plan. Yeah, your children were killed by the tsunami, but it's okay. God has a purpose. To me, that's a moral idiocy, too, to put it that way. Now, I will admit that I think God has a greater purpose in the sense that he can unite all that is broken and find all that is lost. He, she, God, Godself, yeah. But I need that interval of moral disjunction, that, that provisional dualism of the New Testament of an alienation that has to be overcome in which, in some sense, the earthquake is not natural in the full sense.

It's what's natural as in a glass darkly. But couldn't the answer be, speaking of a glass darkly, couldn't the answer also be in the fact that, This physical plane is so, so brief. You know, we have 90 years. It's illusory. There's countless worlds of eternity on the other side that... Again, that's a good answer. But I'm afraid I don't want anyone,

any one answer to be mistaken for a fully sufficient answer. Right. Because you still have a suffering of a four-year-old girl in whatever circumstances and you can't go up to her and say, well, this is... Yeah. You're in an illusory world. Suck it. It'll end sooner.

Amir, you know. Yeah. David Bentley Hart, David Bentley Shrewd, brother from another mother. Just love your mind and love your heart. And just continued best of luck with your pursuits. I understand maybe you might be headed to the UK for a stretch. Yeah. My wife's English and we're planning to relocate to the UK.

Okay. And to grow old there. Okay. Yes. Oh, wonderful, wonderful. Well, this is such a pleasure that I got to come see you in South Bend, Indiana. And what a beautiful discussion I always get so much out of speaking with you. Thank you.

That's good to see you again, too. All right. Thanks. The Soul Boom Podcast. Subscribe now on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and wherever else you get your stupid podcasts. Performance Auto Group's 37th annual sale event is back. Now for three days. Lease or finance from 0% plus loyalty incentives and maximum trade in value.

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