David Bentley Hart - Do Women Make Better Priests?

Note that his argument rests entirely on the tired, old anecdotal "argument", spouted by many of DBH's fellow liberal-leftists, that many women upon whose head some errant bishop laid his hand are just more naturally suited for the priesthood.   Forget about the theology of the matter.  Forget about Apostolic and Catholic precedent.  Forget about the Church:

Hart concludes his denunciation of my review with some revealing statements. He has “never been especially concerned about terms like ‘orthodoxy’ and ‘heterodoxy.’” He “was never a champion of the kind of Christianity” I believe in, creedal orthodoxy. From the first, he has been “a metaphysical monist of the Neoplatonic and Vedantic variety.” In other words, Hart has never been a man of the Church, devoted to its orthodoxy, dedicated to the emerging wisdom of the Christian community and its Great Tradition. He is an independent religious thinker who urges his readers to adopt his own private method of theological interpretation. Toward the end of Tradition and Apocalypse, he tells believers they can liberate themselves by “a peculiarly modern maxim: sapere aude—dare to be wise.” In the end, he implies, the truth about God is something that individuals must figure out for themselves. Hart is a lonely theologian, and he would leave us alone, apart from the Christian community who have thought together about redemption by the God of Israel.

I wonder what Fr. Robert Hart has to say about his brother's argument, since he is a priest of the Anglican Catholic Church, which rejects the practice of ordaining women.  After all, per Robert, his brother is the most intelligent and learned theologian Christianity has ever produced, and all his critics are therefore fools. It'll be interesting to see whether it's crickets or whether it's this standard line of "reasoning" he regularly employs.

Comments

[Gerry T. Neal]

"a metaphysical monist of the Neoplatonic and Vedantic variety"

A pagan Hindu pantheist would be another way of putting this.

The degree of Hart's departure from sound theology is a lot greater than I had previously thought if McDermott's depiciton of him is at all accurate. It is a wonder the Eastern Orthodox haven't excommunicated him.

I just noticed that he looks an awful lot like the actor David Ogden Stiers. It is most noticeable if you watch Stiers in something where he wears a beard, like the movie Doc Hollywood. This, of course, has no bearing on his theology.

[Stephen]

Gerry, Hart is on record saying that he finds the word "pantheist" to be meaningless -- also the word "heretic." Several of the words that one might want to apply to him are mysteriously on this list.