Customer Reviews

Faith Thinking: The Dynamics of Christian Theology

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I won't provide a detailed review at this time, but just want to say that Hart's book is surprisingly good in my view. To define good more clearly: Hart communicates quite clearly and covers a lot of ground. Most of the book revolves around the relationship between faith and reason, and how that relates to the way we (should) do theology. He deals quite a bit with issues that relate to modern vs. postmodern debates about rationality (the role of faith in our knowing vs. the role of reason; where/how meaning is found in a text; the relationship between faith/reason and tradition; the contextual and provisional nature of our knowledge and interpretations of our faith). In the end I think Hart echoes many other voices in contemporary theology, including evangelicals like Stanely Grenz and James Wm. McClendon, Jr., in trying to find a way between objectivism and relativism. So I would characterize his position as a soft postmodernism, or perhaps post-critical. And I think he does a good job articulating this (perhaps it is too short to say he "defends" this position).
My greatest hesitation is with his section on where meaning is found in a text. He leans pretty heavily here toward a reader/community productive view of meaning. Though he doesn't draw specifically on Gadamer, it seems to cohere well with that outlook, and definitely rejects the approach of Hirsh - the common sense approach that meaning is to be found in the author's intentions. Here he repeats common errors of assuming we must somehow get inside the author's head to divine such a meaning, and throwing it aside because we have no absolute certainty or consensus over it. I agree with Hart that the reader has a productive role to play in understanding a text, but I think this is separable from where the meaning is to be sought. I think we can recover an author's meaning because communication is a public event based on linguistic and literary conventions. I also agree with him that understanding (though he says meaning) will always differ every time two people read a text, or even every reading by one person. We always understand differently, to some extent. Yet we should seek the meaning in it's proper place, which is usually what the author intended to convey.
Hart's overall themes/theses are that knowledge always involves faith and commitment (Polanyi) and is always contextual, never absolute. Human beings are always in a search for truth that involves a complex interaction of testing various perspectives that we encounter: the Enlightenment dream of an objective "view from nowhere" from which we can simply test things to determine their rationality and truth, is an illusion. But this doesn't mean, with the relativist, that we give up on truth: we simply pursue it in a more human, more humble, and more realistic way. His vision of theology as a community activity of testing and revising one's faith/tradition in conversation with contemporary perspectives is attractive. It rejects the fundamentalist refusal to consider change and development, as well as the liberal bias in favor of modern views which judge faith and insist that it conform to it's rational dictates. Hart believes that faith must submit to critical testing, but also that the faith which Christians profess has revelatory and prophetic content which also judges our contemporary context. Liberal approaches are too quick, in Hart's estimation, to give up crucial aspect of faith to satisfy the demands of modern rationalism.
Overall I like the balance Hart strikes between insisting on testing, criticism, and continual revision/reform, but rejecting a reduction of faith to whatever stamp of approval it can gain from reason. He rejects the idea of absolute reason as illusion, since there is faith and personal commitment at the heart of all human knowledge. I am slightly more optimistic than Hart that we can see things "as they are" from a particular perspective, but I still see his approach as pretty balanced, and not at all giving up on the pursuit of knowledge and truth.