An Open Letter to Fr. Aidan Kimel regarding Universalism

An Open Letter to Fr. Aidan Kimel

regarding Universalism

by Dr. David C. Ford

June 22, 2020

St. Alban of Britain

Dear Fr. Aidan,

Glory to Jesus Christ!

I do want to thank you for giving me the courtesy of letting me know ahead of time about your response to my response to Fr. Plekon’s review of David Bentley Hart’s book, That All Shall Be Saved.

And I suppose I should thank you for giving my document such close attention, despite thinking it’s “drivel”!  I guess that’s a compliment of some sort!

By way of contrast, here’s what a retired Assistant District Attorney wrote to his priest about my response to Fr. Plekon’s review:

I read Dr. David Ford’s review of the review of Hart’s book on universal salvation.
It was an excellent piece - very well written. He writes like a good lawyer.
I believe it informed me of just about everything I probably want to know about the book, and seemed to confirmed a suspicion of mine that Hart may have become too “smart” for his own good.

To address your response to my response, I’m sure we completely agree that it would be truly wonderful indeed if every single human being, and every single angelic being including every demon and even Satan himself, were to repent and beg Christ for forgiveness before the Last Judgment occurs, or even afterwards (if that proves to be possible), leaving hell utterly empty if not totally annihilated.  Those with big enough hearts may well be praying for that!  That’s the hope we all are welcome to have.

But not the certainty.  For as you well know, for all the Scripture verses and passages that might possibly be taken in a Universalist way, there are many others that strongly imply what the Church as a whole has always taught against that speculation.  And who has the authority and the certain knowledge of the future to declare unequivocally that everyone, including the Devil and all his hosts, will repent and be saved in the end?  And of those who dare to declare this as a certainty, which of them will be willing to bear all the consequences if they are mistaken – especially if they’ve misled others to the extent of their living without repentance in this life because they got convinced they could just wait and repent in the next life?

Also, I’m very sorry that you don’t seem to understand how the issue of authority is indeed at the very heart of the matter.  For no matter what any of our speculations might be, no matter how well-thought out and well-intentioned they are, if they’re not informed by, aligned with, and centered in the received Tradition of our Orthodox Church, they simply can’t be correct!  This is especially true when the issue at hand is an important one, and when it has already been decided by the Church as a whole, with virtually every Saint and Church Father and holy elder in agreement.

Either our Church, Christ’s Body, has preserved Christ’s Truth in all its fullness, or our Lord has not protected His Body from “the gates of hell” as He promised He would.  And the Spirit of Truth, Whom Christ promised would lead His Church into all the Truth, must have failed to do that very thing.

Concerning the claim that some Christians in the early centuries were apparently Universalists, if we are faithful Orthodox Christians and not crypto-Protestants, we trust our Church to have made the correct decision in eventually rejecting Universalism, even if some unknown number of Christians believed it in the early centuries.  The historical record is that the Church as a whole rejected it; and after about the middle of the 6^th century it rightly disappears, under the guidance of the Spirit of Truth Who was indeed leading the Church into all Truth – as all faithful Orthodox Christians believe. 

By that same guidance of the Holy Spirit of Truth, speaking in unknown tongues and the interpretation of tongues, though apparently endorsed by St. Paul himself (1 Cor. 14), as well as the office of the traveling prophets, also dissipated and disappeared, probably by about the beginning of the third century.  And also, the early belief, held by many rigorist Christians, that repentance and restoration to the Church were not possible even after deep repentance for those having committed the worst sins – adultery, apostasy, and murder – similarly was overturned by the Church as a whole, by the end of the 4^th century.

You’re asking our Church to view our Orthodox Faith “through Universalist spectacles.”  When I attempt to do so, I see very serious and potentially disastrous pastoral and intellectual problems.

For instance, concerning the pastoral repercussions of Universalism, through our Church's rejection of Universalism She has recognized it as a misleading speculation that could very well undermine our people's incentive to live a life of ongoing repentance, which is so important in our Orthodox spiritual life, and which has direct relevance for our future state in the next life.  For if I can just plan on repenting in the next life, what does it matter how dissolutely I live, or how blasphemously I think, or how recklessly I believe, in this life?  I’m surprised you don’t seem to recognize this very real danger.

Really, with the Universalist claim, where is the incentive to take the Last Judgment seriously, if it’s believed that God absolutely will save everyone from hell the moment they finally repent?  And why are the prayers and hymns of our Church, as well as the Book of Psalms, filled to overflowing with calls and entreaties for the Lord to save us and have mercy on us, if He’s going to do that anyway the moment hell gets too hot for us and we finally repent then?

And what about for people who are in deep depression and struggling to resist suicidal thoughts?  If they’ve become convinced that Universalism is true, what would stop them, in a particularly excruciating moment of temptation, to give in to the temptation and take their own life in the expectation that they’ll be able to repent and be saved in the next life?  It seems clear that it’s not without deep pastoral wisdom, based in deep experience with spiritual warfare, that our Church, in order to provide an additional incentive for those dealing with suicidal thoughts to resist them, has traditionally denied a full Christian funeral to those taking their own life.

In addition, how would it not be deleterious to people's life in the Church if they get swayed by Hart's rhetoric into doubting the wisdom and trustworthiness of the great Saints and Church Fathers through the centuries?  People might ask themselves, If the Fathers are wrong on this issue, what else might they be wrong about?  And I wonder, how can people venerate the Saints and Fathers and ask for their prayers with fullness of reverence, esteem, and confidence if they get convinced that the Fathers were wrong on such a crucial issue?

Concerning the Universalist logic itself, granted that it may very well be extremely well-intentioned, compelling, and driven by the highest of motivations, yet it remains another attempt to reduce the mysteries of the Faith to the level of human reasoning.  It’s another example, as we see with every heresy, of the human mind staggering at some aspect of the mystery of our Lord’s inscrutable Being and Providence. 

According to human reasoning and conceptualizing, it might very well be true that knowing that God is Pure, Divine Love is logically incompatible with the fact that there may well be rational beings, demons as well as human beings, created by Him yet existing in an eternal state of separation from Him because “men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil” (John 3:19).  Such a scenario may very well not seem to us to be something our All-Loving God could ever allow.  But we can only make such a judgment according to our own very limited definitions and concepts of what God’s love must be like. 

And the very foundations of our Faith are wrapped in logically inconsistent paradox and mystery.  How can Three be One?  How can One be Three?  How can God become man?  How can a man be God?  How can our Lord be completely inaccessible to humans, and yet simultaneously be completely accessible?  How can our salvation depend entirely upon our Lord and His saving work, and also entirely upon ourselves to freely accept that work for ourselves?  How can our Church contain the perfect fullness of Truth, yet consist of members who all fall short of being perfectly filled with Truth?  These are paradoxes, antinomies, mysteries, all of which defy human logic, with which they indeed are entirely inconsistent. 

Speaking broadly, I think it reflects a Scholastic mindset to wish to reduce the mystery, the paradox, to the level of logical consistency.  But for the Orthodox, knowing our Uncreated Lord is infinitely beyond our created capacities for reasoning, infinitely beyond the reasoning capacities of even the most intellectually brilliant among us, we calmly accept the paradoxes, the antinomies, the mysteries of our Divinely-revealed Faith.  As St. Gregory Palamas says so well, “The antinomy is the touchstone of Orthodoxy.”

I think we can say that the mysteries that permeate our Faith are in a sense intended by our Lord to defy human reasoning, as one of His ways to keep us humbly reliant upon Him in all things. 

We can also be reminded of the Orthodox understanding of the difference between the apophatic and kataphatic traditions in our Orthodox theology.  As St. Dionysius the Aeropagite says so well, God is Love and yet He is also Not-Love, because His Love is both similar to human concepts of love, yet at the same time His Love is infinitely beyond our human concepts of love.

It’s indeed admirable that Universalists are so concerned to defend and protect the understanding of God as Complete and Total Love.  But in Orthodoxy, we know this already; we’re always saying, “for He is the Good God Who loves mankind.”  I’m reminded of how the erroneous and divisive Filioque clause was added to the Nicene Creed to try to reinforce the full Deity of the Son in the face of continuing Arianism in late 6^th century Spain; but the Nicene Creed had already established His full Deity with the use of the word homoousios.  Similarly, the Universalist attempt to reinforce the fullness of God’s Love by removing the possibility of eternal separation from Him leads to divisiveness and confusion, and distrust of the Tradition as a whole.

And in the end, of course, despite all its emphasis on God’s Love, Universalism always boils down not to love, but to power.  As Hart says, “Insofar as we are able freely to will anything at all, therefore, it is precisely because He is making us to do so: as at once the source of all action and intentionality in rational natures and also the transcendental object of rational desire that elicits every act of mind and will towards any purposes whatsoever” (TASBS, p. 183; his emphasis).  Besides, this claim is false because it would make God the ultimate author of every evil intention, decision, and action that’s ever occurred, and we all know that He is not the originator of evil.

Universalism staggers at the idea that any human or demonic will could ever eternally override the will and desire of our All-Powerful God for every demon and every person to repent and be saved from hell.  But that’s part of the mystery – God, in His humble Love, allows this.  He always just knocks at the door of our heart (Rev. 3:20); He never pushes open that door.  It’s this humble dimension of the way God loves that Universalism doesn’t seem to understand. 

In addition, by the logic of Universalism, if it’s morally absurd, if it’s cruel, if indeed it’s evil for God to allow demons and humans to reject His love forever and hence to experience hell forever, then it must have been morally absurd and cruel and evil for Him to have created angels and humans in the first place with the capacity to reject His will for them in anything.  For every time we sin, we reject and override His will for us to live without sin; and every time we sin, we plunge ourselves into a certain kind of hell.  Pressing the logic of Universalism to a logical conclusion, how could a fully loving God allow even one of His creatures to experience any form or degree of hell even for a moment? – for that would be cruel, according to the humanistic logic of Universalism.

But in the end, who would ever think that any 21^st century scholar, no matter how intellectually brilliant, is more trustworthy than St. Athanasius the Great, St. Cyril of Jerusalem, St. John Chrysostom, St. Gregory the Theologian, St. Basil the Great, St. Cyril of Alexandria, St. Vincent of Lerins, St. Augustine of Hippo, St. John of Damascus, St. Maximus the Confessor, St. Photius the Great, St. Symeon the New Theologian, St. Gregory Palamas, St. Nicholas Cabasilas, St. Nicodemus the Hagiorite, St. Silouan the Athonite, St. Paisius the Athonite, and countless other saints and elders? 

Is David Bentley Hart really living closer to God than they did?  Is he really more filled with God’s love and truth than they were?  Is it really possible that all those Saints were wrong about Universalism, and that you and David Bentley Hart are correct?  Do you really think the Head of His Church, Jesus Christ Himself, would have allowed His Church to go into error on this crucial point for all these centuries?  Has He really been waiting all this time for the truth to be finally discovered in the early 21^st century by a handful of intellectuals? – with David Bentley Hart even daring to imply that all these Fathers and Saints were “moral idiots” for not believing in Universalism!

Of course, we’re all free to choose whom to trust, and whom to believe.  May we all choose wisely!

So, dear Fr. Aidan, please prayerfully consider my words, even if they are not brilliant.  And let’s all remember our Lord’s sobering words about being a stumbling block to any one of His little ones: “Better for him if a millstone were hung around his neck, and he be drowned in the sea.”

With love and prayers,

Dr. David C. Ford

Professor of Church History

St. Tikhon’s Orthodox Seminary

South Canaan, PA

David Bentley Hart and Marcionism

I have long been aware of the fact that David Bentley Hart's theology was far from Orthodox, but I have become convinced -- after reading more of his writings, and listening to him speak -- that his theology cannot even be categorized as properly Christian. Especially after his recent assertion that the God of the Old Testament was mostly evil, and began as a Canaanite storm-god.

In response to DBH's recent book, "That All Shall Be Saved: Heaven, Hell, and Universal Salvation," Peter Leithart, who is a conservative Protestant biblical scholar, wrote a review, entitled "Good God?" Leithart correctly zeroed in Hart's dismissal of the Old Testament. He asked Hart whether he believes that the God of the Old Testament is good, by his (DBH's) standards. Leithart didn't use the label "Marcionite," in his review, but Hart got the point, and wrote a rebuttal, which Leithart posted in full: "Good God? A Response." In this response, he leaves little doubt on the matter, though he tries to turn the Marcionite label on his opponent:

"I often have to remind myself how great a distance separates apostolic, patristic, and pre-modern orthodoxy from modern fundamentalism; somehow it always comes as a shock to the system.  So let me say this upfront, and then return to it: fundamentalist literalism is a modern heresy, one that breaks from Christian practice with such violence as to call into question whether those who practice it are still truly obedient to the apostolic faith at all.  That is not an accusation, but it is a lament.  You may be pure, but your premises are corrupt. 

You ask if I think the YHVH of the Old Testament was “good.”  First of all, there is no single YHVH in the Hebrew corpus.  The various texts that the Second Temple redactors collated into the Torah and Tanakh emanate from various epochs in the development of Canaanite and Israelitic religion, and reflect the spiritual sensibilities of very different moments in the evolution of what would in time become Judaism.  Most of the Hebrew Bible is a polytheistic gallimaufry, and YHVH is a figure in a shifting pantheon of elohim or deities.  In the later prophets, he is for the most part a very good god, yes, and even appears to have become something like God in the fullest sense.  But in most of the Old Testament he is of course presented as quite evil: a blood-drenched, cruel, war-making, genocidal, irascible, murderous, jealous storm-god.  Neither he nor his rival or king or father or equal or alter ego (depending on which era of Cannanite and Israelitic religion we are talking about) El (or El Elyon or Elohim) is a good god.  Each is a psychologically limited mythic figure from a rich but violent ancient Near Eastern culture—or, more accurately, two cultures that progressively amalgamated over many centuries.

Judaism (as we know it today) and Christianity came into existence in much the same period of Graeco-Roman culture, and both reflect the religious thinking of their time.  Neither was ever literalist in the way you apparently are.  The only ancient Christian figure whom we can reliably say to have read the Bible in the manner of modern fundamentalists was Marcion of Sinope.  He exhibited far greater insight than modern fundamentalists, however, in that he recognized that the god described in the Hebrew Bible—if taken in the mythic terms provided there—is something of a monster and hence obviously not the Christian God. Happily, his literalism was an aberration."

Marcion's Error

One has to ask here whether Marcion's problem was indeed that he simply took the Old Testament literally, and then concluded that the God of the Old Testament was evil? The answer, from everything we know about Marcion, is that this was not the problem. Marcion was the son of an Orthodox bishop, but he was ex communicated for fornication, and later went to Rome, and joined himself to a gnostic sect that rejected the Old Testament because the God of the Old Testament was the creator of the material world, and they believed matter to be evil. They also, consequently, denied the resurrection of the body. So his problem was that he came to the Old Testament with a foreign set of philosophical assumptions, and rejected it for those reasons... much in the same way that David Bentley Hart does.

Modern Approaches to Scripture

DBH labels the approach of Protestant "fundamentalists" as a "modern heresy," but then goes on to repeat, as if they were undeniable facts, some of the conclusions of the worst of Protestant scholarship, which is certainly no less modern in origin. It is actually not a fact that the various texts and redactors of the Old Testament originated with those worshiping an evil Canaanite storm-god, or that such a God was the original subject of their writings. DBH apparently takes for granted that the Protestant historical-critical approach to Scripture is a neutral and reliable means of understanding the history and meaning of the Old Testament text, but such scholarship is far from neutral or scientific.

Certainly, there are aspects of such scholarship that provide useful and valuable information, and there are aspects of it that are more empirical than others, but this scholarship does not come free from ideological agendas. In particular, the German Biblical Scholarship that emerged after the religious wars following the Protestant Reformation had a consciously secularizing agenda. I talk about the ideological assumptions of such scholarship in my essay on Sola Scriptura, but for more on why this is the case, I would refer the interested reader to two books on the subject:

Politicizing the Bible: The Roots of Historical Criticism and the Secularization of Scripture (1300 - 1700), by Scott W. Hahn and Benjamin Wiker (New York, NY: Herder & Herder Books, 2013)

and

The Death of Scripture and the Rise of Biblical Studies, by Michael C. Legaspi (Oxford University Press, 2010).

When Rudolf Bultmann, for example, argued that Jesus was not only not the Christ, but that he did not even believe himself to be the Christ, this was not a scientific conclusion that we are bound to accept unless we wish to be anti-intellectual and deny reality. This was the expression of Bultmann's opinions, cloaked in scholarly bluster in order to make it sound scientific. His opinions were not based on any hard evidence or undeniable facts whatsoever. This is true of quite a lot of what passes for biblical scholarship today.

If you take the JEDP theory of how the Pentateuch supposedly came into being from the weaving together of four earlier sources (which forms much of the basis of DBH's assertions here, along with the conclusions of the history of religions school), here you have a theory based on a great deal of circular reasoning. The scholars who formulated it selectively chose the "facts" and "evidence" that suited their agenda and then proceeded, with their conclusions essentially predetermined by their basic assumptions, to apply their methods to the Scriptures. And so if you assume, for example, that any mentions of liturgical worship would be later than the time of Moses (because you're a Protestant, and see that as a later corruption), and obviously, the work of later priests, your starting assumption is how you identify the "P" (Priestly) source, and then you know the "P" source, because it matches your assumptions. The reasoning is circular, but because it is presented with confidence, by people who sound like they know what they are talking about, people too often assume there is something objective and compelling about it, when in fact, it is completely subjective. This theory is still taught only because there has not been a new theory that has gained the consensus that the JEDP theory once held in some sectors, but even among Protestant scholars it has largely been discredited.

Even better Protestant scholars have come to see that such an approach to the text of Scripture misses the forest for the trees. For example, Brevard Childs (a Yale Old Testament Scholar, who was a Protestant, but who came closer to an Orthodox approach to Scripture than does DBH), argues that we should interpret the Pentateuch as a whole, in its canonical form, not as separate sources. It is the form that the Church has received that we regard as Scripture, and not hypothetical atomized sources (see his Introduction to the Old Testament as Scripture (Philadelphia: Fortress Press,1979).

Is it possible that the Pentateuch was comprised of more than one source? It is possible. Is there any way that we could confidently know which source was which in the Pentateuch, given the information available to us today? No. But even if we knew for sure that the Pentateuch was composed of four sources, and even if we could confidently identify which source any particular portions of the Pentateuch came from, if we believe in God, and believe that the Scriptures are inspired by Him, and have confidence that the form that we have received is the form that God intended for us to receive, then the form we have received is what we should concern ourselves with.

For more on that subject, see: 

A Critical Assessment of the Graf-Wellhausen Documentary Hypothesis, by Colin Smith.

A Rigid Scrutiny: Critical Essays on the Old Testament, by Ivan Engnell. 

The Old Testament and Rationalistic Biblical Criticism, by Protopresbyter Michael Pomazansky.

Having said all of that, I would never suggest that Orthodox scholars or clergy should ignore such scholarship. In fact, I think it is very important that they be familiar with it, but like the Methodist theologian Thomas Oden, I would encourage them to apply the same hermeneutic of suspicion to that scholarship, which its practitioners so love to apply to Scripture. As Oden observes:

"Scripture criticism is more firmly captive today to its modern (naturalistic, narcissistic, individualistic) Zeitgeist than Augustinianism ever was to Platonism or Thomism to Aristotelianism. Trapped in modern prejudices against pre-modern forms of consciousness, reductionistic exegesis has proved to be just as prone to speculation as were the extremist forms of Gnosticism and as uncritical of its own presuppositions as supralapsarian Protestant scholasticism" (Agenda for Theology: After Modernity What? (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1990) p. 111).

"Historical biblical criticism has been allied with polemical concerns since its eighteenth century inception as an ideological agent of "Enlightenment." It has expressed a determined interest from the beginning in discrediting not merely the authority of Scripture, but authority in general -- all authority as such. Just read the biographies of Reimarus, Rousseau, Lessing, Strauss, Feuerbach, and of course Nietzsche (cf. Jacques Derrida, The Ear of the Other). It has operated especially as a partisan "ideology for the demystification of religious tradition"... It is astutely described as the strike force of modernity, "the Wehrmacht of the liberal Church"... The hermeneutic of suspicion has been safely applied to the history of Jesus but not to the history of the historians. It is now time for the tables to turn. The hermeneutic of suspicion must be fairly and prudently applied to the critical movement itself... One obvious neglected arena is the social location of the quasi-Marxist critics of the social location of classic Christianity, who hold comfortable chairs in rutted, tenured tracks. These writers have focused upon the analysis of the social location of the writers and interpreters of Scripture. Yet that principle awaits now to be turned upon the social prejudices of the "knowledge elite" -- a guild of scholars asserting their interest in the privileged setting of the modern university" (The Word of Life: Systematic Theology Volume Two, (New York: Harper & Row, 1989), p. 225f).

Literal and Allegorical Interpretation

Hart went on to attempt to pit the literal meaning of the Old Testament against spiritual interpretations:

In short, you want me to account for myself in a way answerable to the hermeneutical practices of communities gestated within a religion born in the sixteenth century.  But those practices are at once superstitious and deeply bizarre.  They are not Christian in any meaningful way.  They are not Jewish either, as it happens.  They are a late Protestant invention, and a deeply silly one.  From Paul through the high Middle Ages, only the spiritual reading of the Old Testament was accorded doctrinal or theological authority.  In that tradition, even “literal” exegesis was not the sort of literalism you seem to presume.  Not to read the Bible in the proper manner is not to read it as the Bible at all; scripture is in-spired, that is, only when read “spiritually.”

In fact, it is for you to account for your beliefs, since they are so incompatible with the teachings and practices of the ancient church and the New Testament regarding the reading of scripture.  And, while we are at it, please go back and read Galatians several times.  Then, in fact, read Hebrews.  If you cannot see what is going on in those texts—how much of ancient Hebrew tradition is rejected and reinterpreted even in being preserved and reclaimed—then you are not paying attention.

This is of course, complete and utter nonsense. Christians believe that there is only one God not because of allegorical interpretations of the Old Testament, but because of the literal sense of countless passages that tell us precisely that. We believe that God is the creator of all things visible and invisible, not because of allegorical interpretations, but because this is literally what is taught throughout the Old Testament.

Both Christ and St. Paul make mention of the various Ten Commandments, and we find them taking them literally. Christ also spoke about deeper implications of these commandments beyond the more obvious literal meaning, but he did not undermine those literal meanings by doing so. In fact, it was the Pharisees who used creative interpretations to try to get around the literal meaning of the commandment to honor one's parents, and Christ took them to task for doing so (Matthew 15:3-9).

DBH attempts to set the literal meaning of Scripture in opposition to its spiritual meaning, because he wishes to get around the former by means of the latter. But the Fathers do not approach the Scriptures this way. The Fathers interpreted Scripture both literally and allegorically.

Very rarely in any of the Fathers do you find them saying that something described as having happened, really did not, but that the text in question should be read as having a spiritual meaning only. Most of the Fathers never do that. But even in those instances where a Father does take such a text allegorically, and denies the literal meaning, he does not ascribe error to Scripture, or suggest that the text was the work of those worshiping a Canaanite storm-god. For example, St. Gregory of Nyssa, in his Life of Moses, does indeed say that he believed the death of the Egyptian firstborn would require an unworthy view of God and His justice, and so he sees it as having only a spiritual meaning (The Life of Moses, trans. Abraham J Malherbe & Everett Ferguson (New York: Paulist Press,1990), pp. 75–77). He believed the text was not intended to be read literally because he did not believe it was literally describing what actually happened. He did not suggest that the text was in error or that God was actually evil. And his reading of this passage is a minority opinion in any case. Blessed Theodoret, for example, wrote:

"Why did he kill the firstborn of the Egyptians? Since Pharaoh was subjecting Israel, God's firstborn to such harsh slavery -- as you recall, the Lord God himself had said, "Israel is my firstborn son [Exodus 4:22] -- God quite justly gave the firstborn of the Egyptians over to death" (The Questions on the Octateuch, vol. 1, On Genesis and Exodus, trans. Robert C. Hill, (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2007), p. 259).

St. Ephrem the Syrian likewise writes:

"The firstborn of the Egyptians died in the middle of the night, and every person in the solitude of his own house, mourned the death of his firstborn, the first of his sons. Just as the river had been filled with the firstborn of the Hebrew women, Egyptian tombs were filled with the firstborn of the Egyptian women" (The Fathers of the Church: St. Ephrem the Syrian, Selected Prose Works, trans. Edward G. Matthews, Jr, and Joseph P. Amar (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1994), p. 247f).

It is in fact a false dilemma to pit the literal meaning of Scripture against the spiritual meaning. As St. Cyril of Alexandria, wrote:

“Those who reject the historical meaning in the God-inspired Scriptures as something obsolete are avoiding the ability to apprehend rightly, according to the proper manner, the things written in them. For indeed spiritual contemplation is both good and profitable; and, in enlightening the eye of reason especially well, it reveals the wisest things. But whenever some historical events are presented to us by the Holy Scriptures, then in that instance, a useful search into the historical meaning is appropriate, in order that the God-inspired Scripture be revealed as salvific and beneficial to us in every way” (quoted in: Dr. Mary D. Ford, The Soul's Longing: An Orthodox Christian Perspective on Biblical Interpretation (Waymart, PA: St. Tikhon Monastery Press, 2915), p. 69).

What this reveals about David Bentley Hart's Theology

DBH clearly does not regard the Scriptures as divinely inspired revelation of God to man. He sees Scripture as a record of man's search for God. Gradually, over time, smart people like DBH began to reason their way towards a higher view of God. He does not really see the Scriptures as being different from the writings of the pagan Greeks, the Hindus, or the Buddhists. If you doubt me, consider what he has said in the essay we are examining:

"Judaism (as we know it today) and Christianity came into existence in much the same period of Graeco-Roman culture, and both reflect the religious thinking of their time."

And in a subsequent reply to Peter Leithart, Hart wrote:

"Again, the myths of their war god invoked by the people of ancient Israel to justify acts of slaughter were part of the history of what became Jewish and Christian monotheism.  Just as the Homeric myths were the (frequently allegorized) prehistory of later philosophical pagan monotheism." 

So, according to DBH, just as later pagan philosophers allegorized Homer's Iliad, Christians allegorized the Old Testament. Both were equally primitive myths, unworthy of the real God, but by allegory, later philosophers were able to make good use of them, by completely reinterpreting them to mean something quite at odds with the original meaning of the text.

DBH, was asked, in an interview on the show "Closer to the Truth," how it could be that many religions can be true, despite the differences between them, and he replied:

"Well, I never take any religion as a closed system of propositions, every one of which is true, or true in the same way. And that's the way you think about religion. I mean, I think of all religions -- including Christianity -- as cultural artifacts that express truths, or fail to express them, in ways determined as much by cultural history as anything else.... Among the traditions that are serious traditions, you know, not the kind of religion you might make up, if you were trying to sell a certain product rather than the spiritual life, that yes, they can all converge upon the same truths, with all of the fallibility that every human approach to truth exhibits. The same way the different schools even in the sciences are going to diverge from one another. Now, ideally, we say, well at some point there will be a theoretical breakthrough that will either reconcile the differences in the sciences, or show that one theoretical path was sterile. Well in a sense that's true also in religious experience, I mean, but it's just not going to be within the realm of empirical investigation. But yes, no, many different religions can be true, in the sense that they are speaking of the truth in the best way that the cultural tradition to which they belong allows them to do so, while at the same time differing from one another on specific affirmations which may be right or wrong" (Closer to the Truth, 12/16/2017).

It is one thing to say that there are many truths to be found in other religions. Anyone who has done much study of other religions would generally concede that point. However, it is quite another matter to say that other religions are true, and to put them on the same level as the Christian Faith. DBH sees these many religions as having much in common in terms of philosophy and morality, but he clearly does not appreciate the fact that Christ did not come to establish a philosophy -- He came to establish a Church, which is His Body. And the Christian Faith did not arise because smart people eventually developed true ideas about God, it rises or falls on the person of Jesus Christ, and His incarnation, death upon the Cross, and His Resurrection -- and if those things didn't happen in history, then our Faith is in vain, and we are still in our sins (1 Corinthians 15:17). If "philosophical pagan monotheism" is equally true, then the martyrs died for nothing, because they could have just embraced this pagan philosophy, fit right in with everyone else, and not shed a drop of blood standing for the Christian Faith.

When I reviewed DBH's translation of the New Testament, I thought it was odd that he was so anxious to read into the Epistles of St. Paul and St. Jude a Gnostic interpretation, by positing that there were two distinct classes of Christians within the Church: those who were "psychics," and those who were "pneumatics." However, it does make sense if you realize that DBH is not far off from the Gnostics, and probably thinks they represented a true religion as well. The Gnostics could attach themselves to virtually any religion, reinterpret it, and simply appropriate the texts and terminology of that religion, sort of along the lines of a religious version of  "The Invasion of the Body Snatchers." However, the end result was a religion that had the trappings of the "host body." but a completely different substance. DBH's theology is likewise not derived from Christ, the Gospel, or Scripture, and his theology would not be seriously impacted if you took all three of them out of the equation altogether. He could do just as well with the Iliad and pagan Greek philosophers, or with Hinduism or Buddhism and their texts.

Furthermore, what this tells us is that while DBH will spend time arguing about the meaning of various texts of Scripture, it is clear that it doesn't really matter to him what the Scriptures actually mean. After all, he thinks that much of it was written with an evil Canaanite storm-god as its focus, and yet thinks it perfectly acceptable to reinterpret those texts to fit his views. There is every reason to believe he feels just as free to reinterpret the rest of it to fit his views as well, since they are merely "cultural artifacts" of one true religion among many others.

DBH ended his response to Peter Leithart by saying:

"This is not the true gospel. And one slanders the God revealed in Christ by suggesting that it is. You need to become Eastern Orthodox."

One might say the same thing to David Bentley Hart about his theology.

For More Information, See:

The Strange Theology of David Bentley Hart

The Hart Idiosyncratic Version

Christianity or the Church? 

Stump the Priest: "What About the Violence in the Old Testament?"

Review: The Unquenchable Fire: The Traditional Christian Teaching about Hell

The heresy of universalism has experienced a revival in recent years. The idea that a Holy God would hold those who reject Him accountable, and that this has everlasting consequences, does not appeal to the worldly mindset of our time. We even will soon have a new book by the "Orthodox Theologian" David Bentley Hart, in which he will no doubt repeat his expressions of disdain for the Fifth and Sixth Ecumenical Councils, proclaim Origen the greatest saint and theologian of the Church, and assure us that contrary to the clear teachings of Christ, the undying worm will die, and the unquenchable fire will be quenched. But the Truth is not subject to opinion polls, and it really doesn't matter whether we like it or not -- this is what Christians have always believed, and in fact what Christ Himself taught in the most clear and striking terms possible.

Opposing this rising tide of heresy, is the book The Unquenchable Fire: The Traditional Christian Teaching about Hell, by Fr. Lawrence Farley. Fr. Lawrence provides a thorough study of the teachings of Christ, their background in the Old Testament, the intertestamental period, as well as in the light of the rest of the New Testament, and the understanding of the early Church, and the Church Fathers. He goes into some depth on the teachings of Origen, and his subsequent condemnation by the Fifth Ecumenical Council. He explores the meaning of some of the key words and phrases that are relevant to properly understanding of Christ's teachings on this subject, and he also examines what we can learn from the hymns of the Church. He then engages the common arguments made today by those who either advocate universalism or annihilationism (the view that those who are not save simply cease to exist).

If you have struggled with these questions yourself, or want to be better equipped to answer those who either are sowing confusion in the Church, or who sincerely struggle with the questions these people have raised, this book is an excellent resource.

One might hope David Bentley Hart's bishop will read it.

David Bentley Hart and the Toll Houses

There he goes again. David Bentley Hart, the "Orthodox Theologian" who thinks he knows better than the Fifth, Sixth and Seventh Ecumenical Councils about what Orthodoxy is, has now decided to weigh in on the question of the toll houses. I don't really have any great desire to rehash this question yet again, and would have just ignored this article, had DBH not decided to call me out personally in it:

"Among a great many Orthodox scholars in the academic world (especially when they gather together in hushed colloquy among the shadows and feel at liberty to speak strictly entre eux) it is often taken as depressing evidence of how radically the public intellectual culture of Orthodoxy in America has degenerated in recent years—how, that is, it has declined from the urbane, scholarly, perhaps slightly Mandarin sophistication of the generation of Alexander Schmemann and John Meyendorff to the fundamentalist, doctrinaire, and yet deeply uneducated primitivism promoted principally by former Evangelicals in the John Whiteford mold—than the increasing respectability of the myth of the aerial toll houses."

He further attempts to dismiss this tradition as having been "at most a fragment of quaint folklore, found in this country only among marginal eccentrics, like Seraphim Rose."  Though later, he later concludes his essay with:

"Admittedly, some genuinely holy and venerable teachers of the Orthodox past have promoted the myth. But that is of no consequence. As Paul also says, “even if an angel out of heaven should proclaim to you good tidings that differ from what you received, let him be accursed”" (Galatians 1:8)" [emphasis added].

So apparently, the teaching was not limited to just a few "eccentrics" and uneducated fundamentalists, after all. But once again we run into some of the same problems with DBH's reasoning that we have run into before. Had he been properly catechized before he was received into the Orthodox Church, DBH would have learned to affirm "that the Holy Scriptures must be accepted and interpreted in accordance with the belief which hath been handed down by the Holy Fathers, and which the Holy Orthodox Church, our Mother, hath always held and still doth hold" (from the affirmations found in "The Office for the Reception of Converts," in  the Service book of the Holy Orthodox-Catholic Apostolic Church, tr. Isabel Florence Hapgood, fourth Edition, Syrian Antiochian Orthodox Archdiocese of New York, New York, 1965, p. 458).

DBH does not demonstrate why he knows better than those "genuinely holy and venerable teachers" of the Church. He does not engage anything that they actually say on the subject. He does not even mention the countless references to the toll houses that are found in the services of the Church. He in fact does not engage a single statement or argument made by anyone on the subject. He merely dismisses them all as being advocated only by "uneducated fundamentalists," and then shares his opinions on the matter, which he apparently considers to be self-evidently true, since not a shred of evidence is actually offered.

It also doesn't seem to have occurred to DBH that by citing Galatians 1:8, as he does, he is suggesting that these "genuinely holy and venerable teachers of the Orthodox past" are anathema, having preached a false Gospel.

I readily admit that DBH's academic education is far better than my own -- my family's "white privilege" debit card having been mostly exhausted a few generations before my time -- and so as much as I would have liked to have gone on and gotten a PhD., I was doing good to pay the debt accrued for my BA in Theology, which was entirely my own responsibility. However, I did learn how to read fairly well, and I can follow a reasoned and supported argument, and can spot an argument based on little more than ad hominem and gratuitous assertions. And even if someone is uneducated, that does not disprove that what they say is true... if it did, much of the New Testament would be proven false. After all, on Pentecost, we do not sing:

"Blessed art Thou, O Christ our God, Who hast shown forth the fishermen as supremely wise, by sending them to the University of Notre Dame..."

But let's consider some of the other contemporary "uneducated fundamentalists" that DBH does not deign to even engage:

1. Fr. Thomas Hopko. DBH longs for the days of Fr. Alexander Schmemann and Fr. John Meyendorff, but Fr. Thomas Hopko was first their student, and then their successor as dean of St. Vladimir Theological Seminary. What did he have to say on the subject?

"It is a very old teaching, and you will find the teaching about toll houses in practically every Church Father. You find it in St. John Chrysostom. You find it in John of the Ladder. The first development of it was in St. Cyril of Alexandria. The teaching was, and is, as far as I understand it, that when you die, you have to let go of, and be delivered from, and purified from, whatever sins and demons are holding you" ("Toll Houses: After Death Reality or Heresy?" from The Illumined Heart Podcast, on Ancient Faith Radio, September 30, 2007).

Personally, Fr. Thomas interpreted the toll houses in a largely allegorical way, but he did not dismiss the Tradition as a gnostic heresy, as does DBH. I would argue that Fr. Thomas' view is within the bounds of acceptable opinions on the subject, but DBH's view is not.

2. Jean-Claude Larchet, is thought by many to be the foremost patristic scholar of our time. He has written numerous texts on Orthodox Theology, that are highly respected, and widely disseminated, and among those texts is the book "Life after Death according to the Orthodox Tradition." He spends quite a bit of time discussing the toll houses, and among the fathers he cites as affirming the Tradition are St. Gregory of Nyssa, St. John Chrysostom, St. Cyril of Alexandria, St. Maximus the Confessor, and St. Gregory the Dialogist. Those are hardly just a random minority collection of Church Fathers -- they are among the most important of them. Nor are they the only ones that could be mentioned here, by any stretch.

See also the French Wikipedia article on Jean-Claude Larchet for more information on his academic career.

3. Metropolitan Hierotheos (Vlachos), is not often described as being an "uneducated fundamentalist" a "primitivist" or a convert from Evangelicalism. He likewise has published countless texts on the teachings of the Fathers, is highly regarded, and he also published a book entitled "Life after death." He has an entire chapter that focuses on this question, and it begins as follows:

"Also related to the foregoing is the teaching of both Holy Scripture and the holy Fathers about the taxing of souls. At this point we shall examine the subject thoroughly, as it has a bearing on the terrible mystery of death. We find this topic in the whole biblico-patristic tradition and it corresponds to a reality which we need to look at in order to prepare ourselves for the dreadful hour of death. What follows is written not in order to arouse anxiety, but to prompt repentance, which has joy as its result. For he who has the gift of the Holy Spirit and is united with Christ avoids the terrible presence and activity of the customs demons.

According to the teaching of the Fathers of the Church, the soul at its departure from the body, as well as when it is preparing to leave, senses the presence of the demons who are called customs demons, and is possessed with fear because of having to pass through customs.

Of course we must say from the start that the customs demons have no sovereignty over the righteous, those who have united with Christ. The righteous not only will not go through "customs-houses", but they will also not be in fear of that. We shall see all this better when we compare the teaching of the Fathers. The characterisation of the soul's passage through the demons as customs is taken from the tax collectors of that time. We may look briefly at this subject in order to understand why the Fathers characterise the soul's passage through the demons as customs.

In ancient times the name of tax gatherer was given to those who purchased the public taxes from the State and then collected them from the people" [48]. The tax gatherers were divided into two classes. The first class comprised the so-called "publicans ('confiscators') or tithe collectors", who were the wealthiest class and the force of authority, and the second comprised the "tax collectors". The publicans were the general public collectors, who had bought the taxes from the State, while the tax collectors were their salaried servants, who collected the taxes from the people and gave them to the publicans" (Life after death, by Metropolitan Hierotheos (Vlachos), trans. Esther Williams, Birth of the Theotokos Monastery: Levadia, Greece, 1995, p. 62f, emphasis added. This chapter can be read in its entirety, online).

If DBH wants to argue that the this tradition is not really found throughout the Fathers and the Services of the Church, something like actual arguments, with evidence, would need to be made. No one has made  any attempt to refute these texts since they were published, and that is probably because there is no argument to be made. In fact, in addition to the above referenced texts, St. Anthony's Greek Orthodox Monastery has published a very hefty tome entitled "The Departure of the Soul According to the Teaching of the Orthodox Church," and its 1,111 pages consist largely of patristic and liturgical citations that demonstrate just the opposite.

Now is it true that some have focused too much on this issue? Probably so. However, just as I would agree that one could have an unhealthy focus on the book of Revelation, I would likewise challenge anyone who argued that the book of Revelation should be removed from the Bible as a result.

When my parishioners ask me about the toll houses, I explain what the Tradition is, but I always say that they should focus on repenting of their sins, and not having anything on their consciences when they die, and then they won't have anything to worry about.

The toll house tradition is an image that is intended to teach us something about things that are beyond our normal experience. No one believes there are literal toll booths in the heavens, but it is true that if we die without repentance, we won't be successfully passing through them (however literally or figuratively you may take them).

This is certainly not the most important tradition of the Church, but dismissing a tradition found throughout the Fathers and the Services of the Church as being a gnostic heresy reflects a mindset that is not Orthodox by any stretch or measure.

For More Information:

The Strange Theology of David Bentley Hart

The Hart Idiosyncratic Version

Evidence for the Tradition of the Toll Houses found in the Universally Received Tradition of the Church

The Hart Idiosyncratic Version

David Bentley Hart Jumping the Shark

David Bentley Hart is usually referred to as an "Orthodox theologian." While he is undoubtedly a highly intelligent and well educated man, he is not an "Orthodox theologian" in any traditional sense. He qualifies as a theologian in a purely academic sense; however, his theology is hardly Orthodox. He feels free to pick and choose which Ecumenical Councils he personally accepts, to hold views that the Church formally condemns, and I have not heard or read anything that he has said that would demonstrate that his conversion to Orthodoxy has had any discernible impact on his theology. He still speaks and writes like a somewhat eccentric Anglican who has his own opinions about the Faith, and feels free to take or leave any particular teachings or traditions of the Church. In fact, were he a more conservative Anglican, he would more often come down on the Orthodox side of many of the controversial issues that he has taken a vocal position on [For specific examples of what I mean, see: The Strange Theology of David Bentley Hart].

DBH's recently published translation of the New Testament (entitled "The New Testament: A Translation," but which I will refer to hereafter as the "Hart Idiosyncratic Version," or "HIV" for short) would have been vastly improved, in fact, if he had taken a few cues from his Anglican forebears. Here are some of the more important instructions King James issued to the translators that produced the King James Version:

"The names of the prophets and the holy writers, with the other names in the text, to be retained, as near as may be, accordingly as they are vulgarly used."

Which means that you should stick with the form of the names in English that are most commonly used, and thus you would not end up with a New Testament book entitled in his version "The Letter of Judas". You would stick with Jude, though you might note in a footnote or introduction that the names "Jude," "Judas," and "Judah," are all variant forms of the same name.

"The old ecclesiastical words to be kept, as the word church, not to be translated congregation."

You should keep the terms that the Church has been using, and so ekklesia should be translated as "Church," and not as "congregation" or "assembly," and so you would not end up with such monstrosities as:

"And to you I also say, You are Peter [Rock], and upon this rock I will build my assembly, and the gates of Hades shall have no power against it" (Matthew 16:18 HIV).

Now DBH argues that his readers should read the text as the early Church would read it, and so read the word "ekklesia" as a common word with no preconceived significance. But for some reason, he sticks with words like "baptism," and "baptize," which he could just as easily have translated as "immersion," and "immerse," and so he could have ended the Gospel of Matthew with a command to go and immerse all nations (Matthew 28:19). Why the difference? These are the whims you are in for when you read a translation from a single translator, who has his own axes to grind.

His axe grinding is particularly in evidence whenever the text touches on the question of eternal damnation, which he denies, in favor of the universalist heresy long condemned by the Church. And so he has the parable of the sheep and the goats ending with:

"And these shall go to the chastening of that Age, but the just to the life of that Age" (Matthew 25:46 HIV).

There is not a single commentary by a Father of the Church that would support translating this passage in this manner, nor is there a single major English translation that has translated it this way. For more on that, I would recommend Fr. Lawrence Farley's reviews of the HIV, here:

The Deep Melancholy of David Bentley Hart

Hart’s “The New Testament: a Translation”

A Brief Word about Eternal Punishment

 And here is a particularly important rule King James laid out:

" When any word hath divers significations, that to be kept which hath been most commonly used by the most eminent fathers, being agreeable to the propriety of the place and the analogies of faith."

So in other words, when a word, or a phrase could be translated in more than one way, just in terms of the rules of Greek grammar and the meaning of the words in question, we should translate them in a way that is consistent with how they were understood by the most important Church Fathers. A good example of this in action is in the case of John 5:39. DBH (and in this instance, most modern translations) translate this as saying something along the lines of "You search the Scriptures..." Which would have Christ simply acknowledging that the Pharisees were already doing this. The King James Version, however, translates this verse as a command: "Search the scriptures; for in them ye think ye have eternal life: and they are they which testify of me." Both are possible translations of the Greek. So why did the KJV translate it this way? Because that is how the most important Fathers of the Church understood it. There are a great many other errors that DBH could have avoided had he taken this approach, but we will talk about more examples shortly.

Another important aspect of the rules laid out by King James for his translators was that he established that they should do their translations in 6 teams, composed of a total of 47 scholars, with 3 general editors. And when there was an issue of disagreement, there was a system for resolving it, which often resulted in margin notes that presented the minority opinion, when consensus was not finally achieved. This resulted in not only the most beautiful English translation that has ever been done, but translations driven by individual pet peeves were weeded out, while in the HIV, pet peeves shape the entire text. This is also why every major translation has followed a similar model ever since.

DBH claims that committee translations are flawed because in such committees of scholars

"...novel approaches to the text are generally the first to perish, and only the tried and trusted survive" (HIV, p. xiv). 

And he says that like novelty is a good thing, and the tried and trusted are bad. In fact, the Fathers of the Church used the term "novelty" as a synonym for heresy. As the saying goes, "All that's old might not be gold, but if it's new, it can't be true." That's not true of technology, but when it comes to the revealed truths of the Christian Faith in general, and to the Scriptures in particular, it is certainly true.

DBH is so sure that only he has properly understood the New Testament that he asserted in an interview:

"The first thing I would say to anyone who doesn't read Greek is don't buy or read any modern translation... in English. None of them is any good" (Crackers and Grape Juice Podcast, episode 103, July 13, 2017, beginning at about the 3:00 mark).

And this advice narrows the options quite a bit, because obviously those who don't know Greek can only read the New Testament in translation, and apparently this leaves them only with the HIV as a viable option.

An Acid Test

In DBH's opinion, here is the primary problem with committee translations:

"And this can result in the exclusion not only of extravagantly conjectural readings, but often of the most straightforwardly literal as well. (A sort of "acid test" for me is Judas [or Jude] 1:19, a verse whose meaning is startlingly clear in the Greek but which no collaborative translation I know of translates in any but the vaguest and most periphrastic manner.)" (HIV, p. xiv).

DBH elaborated on what he thinks Jude 1:19 really means in an interview he did with the Crackers and Grape Juice Podcast:

"Now, every good scholar knows what... what... I mean, this is a reference to a distinction... we don't understand the distinction fully, because it's... you know... all of the early schools of Christian thought shared it in one form or another, both Orthodox or heterodox, or what we would call "Gnostics" now, but there was a distinction between the "psychical" and the "pneumatical"... between "psychics" and "pneumatics." Now, in Paul it seems... and he uses these terms too, but they get hidden from view in those translations, but you assume that the "pneumatics" are those who have been formed by, instructed by, filled by the Holy Spirit in a special way, and so therefore their spirits are now alive in God. But it's also a distinction in... you know... ranks, in a sense, or in degrees of spiritual attainment, and what the letter of Jude, or Judas, as I translate it in my translation, is that they're... you know... "psychical" men, who really... and... In every translation I can think of... that I consulted, in modern translations... Spirit then becomes the Holy Spirit -- which it clearly isn't in the original, or at least not in any straight forward way. And "psychical" is translated as... you know... as things like "men of sensual proclivity"... or "men who live according to the flesh" -- all the things it's not actually saying... it's a distinction... they know what it means. These sorts of small divergences become catastrophic at various places in the text... they alter the meaning" (Crackers and Grape Juice Podcast, episode 103, July 13, 2017, beginning at about the 4:38 mark).

So since he has declared this verse to be his acid test, I propose we apply this acid test to his own translation. And note that he begins by suggesting that all scholars -- at least all good scholars -- agree with him on this. And what he is asserting is that all early Christian groups had two levels of membership, psychics and pneumatics, but then says that this is a distinction we don't really understand, and so apparently the real meaning is lost to the Church. But as we will see, it is in fact only the Gnostic and Proto-Gnostic groups that made the kind of distinction (of a two tiered membership) that he is suggesting here.

Here is how DBH translates the text:

"These are those who cause divisions, psychical men, not possessing spirit" (Judas 19 HIV).

And he provides the following footnote to his odd, and not particularly illuminating choice of words here:

"Despite its long history of often vague and misleading translations, this verse clearly invokes the distinction between psyche and pneuma (soul and spirit) as principles of life, and between "psychics" and "pneumatics" as categories of persons. There is most definitely no reference here to the Holy Spirit: given the construction of the sentence, the absence of the definite article alone makes this certain; and the reasoning of the sentence makes it all the more so" (HIV, p. 495).

First off, just looking at the text itself here. Does it seem likely that if St. Jude saw "psychical men" as a legitimate class of members in the Church, that he would make such a sweeping statement about people of that class causing divisions in the Church? Furthermore if you look at the context of this verse in the entire epistle, it is clear that these "psychical men" are apostates to be shunned, not simply lower men on the totem pole.

And while he asserts that all good scholars agree with his understanding of the meaning of these two terms (psychikoi and pneumatikoi), and so would understand how they are functioning in this text, apparently every Greek scholar who worked on every major translation of the Bible is not a good scholar, because they clearly did not understand the absence of the definite article in this instance to mean that it cannot possibly be referring to the Holy Spirit. Obviously, how definite articles may work in one language will not always correspond with how they work in another, and I think that the many centuries of Greek scholars who have worked on translations of this passage knew Greek at least as well as DBH does.

In DBH's postscript he elaborates further on this verse:

"Precisely how Jude or his readers would have understood this distinction ["psychics" and "pneumatics"] is uncertain, but it is there in the text all the same. Today we tend to think that such divisions among persons, or even among Christians within the church, were among the more exotic eccentricities of the para-Christian or "gnostic" movements of the second century and after. But, even if the word "gnostic is useful as a general designation for groups outside of the ecclesial maintstream, their language on this matter was in continuity with language used by early Christians of just about every stripe. Jude may not have conceived of such a distinction as some sort of ontological division between different kinds of human beings, but he certainly did see it as a division between different states of sanctification or "spiritual" progress, and he may well have believed that "spirit" is a special property acquired by progressive sanctification. (And, frankly, we cannot be certain that all the so-called gnostics saw the matter much differently.) (HIV, p. 562f). 

I could go on with quoting his comments, but suffice it to say that he continues to make the case that early Christian thought and gnostic thought were far closer than the Church has acknowledged, and that St. Jude is not distinguishing between immoral heretics and Christians, but between different levels of sanctification among Christians within the Church.

Let's look at what a very prominent New Testament scholar, Richard Bauckham (also an Anglican), has to say in his commentary on the Epistle of St. Jude, verse 19:

"ψυχικοί, Πνεῦμα μὴ ἔχοντες, "who follow mere natural instincts, and do not possess the Spirit." ψυχικός (pertaining to ψυχή, "soul" or "life" is used in 1 Cor 2:14; 15:44, in a contrast with πνευματικός (pertaining to πνεῦμα, the Spirit"): it refers to merely physical life, the life of this world, without the eschatological gift of the Holy Spirit. In Jas 3:15 (the only other NT occurrence) ψυχικός has a similar but even more sharply negative sense: the God-given wisdom "from above" is contrasted with the wisdom that is "earthly unspiritual, devilish" (ἐπίγειος, ψυχική, δαιμονιώδης).

Although Paul's use of πνευματικός and ψυχικός in 1 Cor 2:14-15 is widely, though not universally, regarded as echoing the terminology of his opponents at Corinth, no fully convincing source for this terminology has yet been demonstrated. The second-century gnostic use of πνευματικός and ψυχικός (B. A. Pearson, The Pneumatikos-Psychikos Terminology in 1 Corinthians [SBLDS 12; Missoula, MT: Scholars Press, 1973] chap. 6) derives from their exegesis of Paul (Pagels, Paul, 59, 163-64).

Hellenistic-Jewish Wisdom theology is a more promising source (Pearson, Pneumatikos-Psychikos), but not only is the terminology πνευματικός and ψυχικός itself unattested; there is not even a regular anthropological distinction between πνεῦμα ("spirit") as the higher element and ψυχή ("soul") as the lower element in man (R. A. Horsley, "Pneumatikos vs. Psychikos," HTR 69 [1976] 270-73, criticizing Pearson). Although some Hellenistic anthropology did distinguish the ψυχή ("soul") as a lower element from the νοῦς ("mind") as the higher element, the devaluation of ψυχή  ("soul") by comparison with πνεῦμα ("spirit") must result from the early Christian belief in the Spirit not as a constituent of human nature, but as the gift of God to the believer.

Since the background to Paul's use of πνευματικός and ψυχικός is so uncertain, we cannot draw firm conclusions as to Jude's relationship to it: whether that Jude borrowed the term ψυχικός from Paul, or that Jude's opponents borrowed it from Paul, or that Jude's opponents shared it with Paul's opponents. It is safer to interpret Jude's words in their own context.

Clearly Πνεῦμα μὴ ἔχοντες (not possessing the Spirit") explains ψυχικοί: the false teachers do not posses the Spirit of God, but live purely at the level of the natural, earthly life. As most commentators recognize, it is likely that Jude here contradicts his opponents' claim to possess the Spirit. Probably they connected this claim with their visionary experiences and the revelations they received in their visions (v 8). The Spirit of prophetic inspiration inspired them, and as men of the Spirit they claimed to be free from moral restraint and superior to moral judgments. Jude's denial of this claim rests on their immoral behavior, which shows that they cannot be led by the Spirit of God, but merely "follow their own desires for ungodliness" (v 18). Such people are merely ψυχικοί, devoid of the Spirit. Whether ψυχικοί was the false teachers' own term for other Christians, who did not share their charismatic experience and moral freedom, is less certain. It is possible that Jude turns the tables on them in this way, but equally possible that ψυχικοί is simply his own judgment on them" (Word Biblical Commentary: Jude - 2 Peter, vol. 50 (Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 1983), p. 106f).

St. Bede, an Orthodox Englishman who predated Baukham by twelve centuries, had this to say about this verse:

"The condemned separate themselves this way from the lot of the righteous, they are physical, that is they follow the cravings of their own soul, because they have not deserved to have the Spirit of unity by which the Church is gathered together, by which it is made spiritual. Therefore they spread apart, because they do not have the glue of charity" (Bede the Venerable: Commentary on the Seven Catholic Epistles, trans. Dom David Hurst O.S.B., Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publication, 1985), p. 250f).

You have less detail here, but an entirely compatible interpretation with Richard Baukham.

St. Augustine has this to say:

"The enemy of unity has no share in God's love. Those who are outside the church do not have the Holy Spirit, and this verse is written of them (Letters 185:50, quoted in Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture: New Testament, Vol. XI, Gerald Bray, ed. (Downers Grove, IL: Intervarsity Press, 200) p. 256).

And let's look at what several Greek speaking Fathers (who knew Greek far better than DBH) had to say about this passage:

"These are people who separate believers from one another, under the influence of their own unbelief. They cannot distinguish between holy things on the one hand and dogs on the other (St. Clement of Alexandria, Adumbrations, quoted in Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture: New Testament, Vol. XI, Gerald Bray, ed. (Downers Grove, IL: Intervarsity Press, 200) p. 256).

"The Nestorians are sensual men, not having the Spirit, because they divide the one Christ and Son and Lord into two sons... For they pretend to confess one Christ and Son and say that his person is one, but by dividing him into two separate hypostases they completely sweep away the doctrine of the mystery (St, Cyril of Alexandria, Letters 50, quoted in Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture: New Testament, Vol. XI, Gerald Bray, ed. (Downers Grove, IL: Intervarsity Press, 200) p. 257).

 "Here we see yet another crime which these awful heretics have committed. Not only are they perishing themselves; they have raided the church and taken people away from it, which means that they have taken them outside of the faith into their own assemblies, which are dens of thieves. Such people behave as as if they were animals according to the pattern of the world and the demands of their instincts" (Oecumenius, Commentary on Jude, quoted in Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture: New Testament, Vol. XI, Gerald Bray, ed. (Downers Grove, IL: Intervarsity Press, 200) p. 257).

It is rather obvious that none of these fathers read Jude 19 as DBH does. None of them think St. Jude is speaking merely of different levels of sanctification within the Church, but rather of people who are heretics, who live according to the flesh, and who are outside of the Church, not having the Holy Spirit.

Obscuring the Text for the Sake of Political Correctness

In 1 Corinthians 6:9, there are two types of people (among several others) that St. Paul tells us will not inherit the Kingdom of God: the malakoi and the arsenokoitai... and so knowing who these types of people actually are is a rather crucial point. DBH translates these two types of people as "feckless sensualists" and "men who couple with catamites". These translations sounds rather "vague and periphrastic" to me.

With regard to his translation of malakoi, he provides a footnote which says:

"A man who is malakos is either "soft" -- in any number of opprobrious senses: self-indulgent, dainty, cowardly, luxuriant, morally or physically week -- or "gentle" -- in various largely benign senses: delicate, mild, congenial. Some translators of the New Testament take it here to mean the passive partner in male homoerotic acts, but that is an unwarranted supposition" (HIV, p. 327).

DBH is simply wrong here. Let me cite Anthony C. Thiselton's highly respected commentary on 1 Corinthians:

"[Robin] Scroggs allows [in his book The New Testament and Homosexuality] that while μαλακός may mean unmanly in general terms, more characteristically it is used of "the youth who consciously imitated feminine styles and ways." This all too readily slips into "passive homosexual activity" whether for pleasure or for pay.  From the classical period to Philo extreme distaste is expressed in Greek and hellenistic literature for the effeminate male who uses cosmetics and the coiffuring of the hair, for which Philo sometimes uses the term ανδρόγυνος, male-female (e.g. De Specialibus Legibus 3.37). These Issues lie behind the astonishing array of English translations in our versions.

In general there is broad (but not unanimous) agreement that μαλακοὶ in 1 Cor 6:9-10 denotes "the passive... partner... in male homosexual relations" (Barrett), but whereas Scrogg argues that it refers to the call boy who prostitutes his services to an older male, usually for pay, many others tend to regard the evidence for restricting the term to pederasty linked with male prostitution as at best indecisive and at worst unconvincing. Scroggs depends for his view on the background of pederastic practices in Graeco-Roman society (whether voluntary, or for payment) and the impact of this culture for the pejorative reactions in hellenistic Judaism (especially Philo)"  (The New International Greek Testament Commentary: The First Epistle to the Corinthians (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmanns Publishing Company, 2000) p. 448f).

Robert Gagnon's book, The Bible and Homosexual Practice: Texts and Hermeneutics, (which was endorsed by both Brevard Childs and Bruce Metzger (certainly among the most influential scholars in their fields (Old Testament and New Testament, respectively)), after discussing the conclusions of other scholars on this word, says this:

"In my own reading, the meaning of malakoi in 1 Cor 6:9 probably lies somewhere in between "only prostituting passive homosexuals" and "effeminate heterosexual and homosexual males." Because the word has a broad range of meaning in Greek literature, what it specifically means for any given writer will vary. However, here, Paul places this vice alongside a list of offenses that lead to exclusion from the kingdom. This suggests he refers to an offense more serious than simply a "limp wrist" (contra Martin).... Immoral sexual intercourse, then, would appear to be an identifying mark of the malakoi. Furthermore, the epithet "soft" itself suggests males playing the female role in sexual intercourse with other males" (The Bible and Homosexual Practice: Texts and Hermeneutics (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 2001), p. 307f, he discusses the term extensively, especially in pp. 306 -312).

And so there is more than a little bit of warrant for understanding this term to be in reference to feminizing males engaged in homosexual acts, the debate is more a matter of the exact context and circumstances in which this group of people engaged in such behavior, but the general idea is fairly clear.

With regard to his translation of arsenokotai, DBH provides a footnote which says:

"Precisely what an aresenokoites is has long been a matter of speculation and argument. Literally, it means a man who "beds" -- that is "couples with" -- "males." But there is no evidence of its use before Paul's text. There is one known instance in the sixth century AD of penance being prescribed for a man who commits arsenokoiteia upon his wife (sodomy, presumably), but that does not tell us with certainty how the word was used in the first century (if indeed it was used by anyone before Paul). It would not mean "homosexual" in the modern sense of a person of a specific erotic disposition, for the simple reason that the ancient world possessed no comparable concept of a specifically homoerotic sexual identity; it would refer to a particular sexual behavior, but we cannot say exactly which one. The Clementine Vulgate interprets the word arsenokoitai as referring to paedophiles; and a great many versions of the New Testament interpret it as meaning "sodomites." My guess at the proper connotation of the word is based simply upon the reality that in the first century the most common and readily available form of male homoerotic sexual activity was a master's or patron's exploitation of young male slaves" (HIV, p. 327f).

DBH translates this word with the phrase "men who couple with catamites" Now "catamite" is not a word you run across every day, but it means "a boy kept for homosexual sex." If that were the real meaning of the term, there is a perfectly good English word for men who have sex with boys, and that would be "pederast," but that would raise the question of why St. Paul did not use the Greek word that "pederast" comes from (παιδεραστής), because if that was what he meant, that would have been the logical word to use. As DBH points out, the term arsenokotai has no prior non-Christian or non-Jewish usage, and it is clear that word was coined from the Septuagint text of Leviticus 18:22 ("καὶ μετὰ ἄρσενος οὐ κοιμηθήσῃ κοίτην γυναικός· βδέλυγμα γάρ ἐστιν." "You shall not lie with a male as with a woman. It is an abomination"). This term is paralleled in a phrase from rabbinic literature: "mishkav zakur" ("lying with a male"), which is "the term most often used to describe male homosexuality" (Scroggs, p. 107f, quoted in Thiselton, p. 450). Robert Gagnon also discusses this term extensively, in pages 312-336 of his book.

Neither of these words are mysterious. The Greek speaking Church has used them since the time of St. Paul, and there is no real doubt about them. If the words were mysterious, the Greek Fathers that comment on this passage would have felt a need to explain what they thought they meant, but I have not seen any that did not assume the meanings of these words to be obvious.

Note also that DBH is using what Gagnon calls "the new knowledge argument," which is that the people of St. Paul's time did not understand homosexuality to be what we understand it to be now. This is a common argument made by homosexual apologists, but in the following video, Robert Gagnon takes that argument apart, in great detail:

For more on this issue, I would recommend Robert Gagnon's book, as the most thorough treatment of the subject available in print.

So in short, while DBH claims that his translation presents us with the unvarnished meaning of the text, here, for some reason, he goes to great lengths to obscure and explain away the clear meaning of the text.

Holy Ground

One could write several volumes on all the problems with this translation, but rather than to continue to cite examples of bad translations, I will simply close with the observation that DBH shows no signs of an appreciation of the holy ground that he is trespassing on here. If you listen to his entire interview on the Crackers and Grape Juice Podcast (Crackers and Grape Juice Podcast, episode 103, July 13, 2017), you will hear him speak of the bad writing of the New Testament authors -- a judgment made in comparison with classical Greek usage. This is an entirely anti-Orthodox way of approaching the text of Scripture.

We should consider for a moment what we believe about the inspiration of Scripture. We believe that God inspired the Scriptures, but we do not believe that he dictated them to the human authors, but rather that the Holy Spirit spoke through them, and used their own dialect and manner of speaking to convey divine Truth. And so if God had inspired a Louisiana Cajun to write Holy Scripture, we would not expect Thurston Howell III's voice or style to be the result, but rather that we would have a text written in the Cajun dialect of the author. Likewise, God spoke through Jewish apostles who spoke Greek in a Semitic dialect, and so we should not expect to read Homer... we should expect a text written in the dialect of these Jewish authors. and unless you are an elitist, you should not assume local dialects are somehow inferior to more common or more standard dialects in any case. In fact, we should expect that the God who "hath put down the mighty from their seats, and exalted them of low degree" (Luke 1:52) might prefer Louisiana Cajuns and Jewish fisherman over many of the more sophisticated alternatives.

Now in terms of translation, the Church has translated these texts into elevated forms of the languages they have been translated into, but so long as these translations faithfully convey the meaning of the text, there is no violence to Truth in doing so. This is in fact a way of showing reverence for the text. I would suggest that using elevated translations is the best way possible to substitute for the experience of reading the very words of the Apostles as they actually wrote them, and hearing their voices in a more direct way -- a privilege reserved for those able to read it without translation.

You never hear any of the Fathers denigrating the texts of Scripture, or mocking their style. They may sometimes note the simplicity in the style of some authors, but not in a way that is disrespectful, because it is the rich truth of Scripture that is conveyed that is important,  not how close various authors may or may not have come to writing in classical Greek or the style of Homer.

Conclusion

So to sum things up, save your money, and do not buy this text, or encourage anyone else to do so. In fact, I would not have bought a copy myself, just based on what I had seen from previous reviews, however, someone sent me a free copy, and asked me to write a review. So having fulfilled my obligations to the donor, I will now place this text next to my Jehovah's Witness Bible, and probably not use it again, unless the sudden need for a door stop should come upon me.

Update: Someone drew my attention to this howler of a translation:

"And we have the still firmer prophetic word of which you do well to take heed, as to a lamp shining in a dreary place, till day should dawn and Phosphoros arise in your hearts" (2 Peter 1:19 HIV).

As Bauckham points out, "as a substantive φωσφορος [phosphoros] normally refers to the morning star, Venus (TDNT  9,312); Spicq, Lexicographie 954), which accompanied the first glimmerings of dawn and could therefore be thought of as introducing daylight into the world" (Word Biblical Commentary: Jude - 2 Peter, vol. 50 (Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 1983), p. 225). Bauckham goes on to point out that most commentators agree that there is an allusion to Numbers 24:17 ("there shall come a Star out of Jacob"), which was understood as a Messianic prophesy by Jews and Christians alike.

As DBH translates it, what is fairly clear in just about any other translation, is obscured, and conjures images of phosphorus grenades, rather than what the word is actually intended to convey.

For more information, see:

An Orthodox Look at English Translations of the Bible

The New Testament in the strange words of David Bentley Hart, a review by N.T. Wright (an Anglican Bishop who is also an actual Biblical Scholar of some note)