Why David Bentley Hart's The Experience Of God Doesn't Work For Most Readers (And What To Do Instead)
I've read Hart's book three times now and tried to recommend it twice. Both times I went back and un-recommended it within a week. The book itself is beautifully written, but the core problem is that Hart makes an argument that assumes his audience already agrees with him. If you're coming from a secular background or even a standard evangelical one, you'll hit a wall about forty pages in. The basic thesis is straightforward enough. Hart argues that God isn't some being among other beings, not even the biggest or most powerful one. He says God is Being itself, the ground of all existence, and that this understanding was the consensus of classical theism across Christian, Jewish, and Islamic thought for over a thousand years. He traces this through Augustine, Maximus the Confessor, Bonaventure, and Thomas Aquinas, then argues that the medieval shift toward voluntarism and the later Enlightenment completely broke this framework. Here's where people run into trouble. Hart writes in dense academic prose that demands slow reading. A single paragraph can take five minutes to parse. I timed myself reading the chapter on Eastern patristic thought last month. The section that should have been two pages took me twenty because I had to reread three sentences about the distinction between God's essence and energies just to track what he was actually claiming.
David Bentley Hart The Experience Of God
Let me give you a practical approach instead of saying "just read it carefully," which is the worst advice anyone gives for this book. Start with the first chapter only. It's called "God as Being." If you finish it and your eyes glaze over, don't bother with the rest right now. The rest of the book gets progressively more technical. Chapter two on the history of the concept of God in Western thought is useful but it assumes you already find Hart's philosophical framework persuasive, which brings me to the real issue. Hart's argument has a structural weakness that reviewers rarely mention because most reviewers are philosophers or theologians who already accept his premises. He dismisses the free will theodicy in about three paragraphs and then moves on. That's a problem because the free will defense is the single most common objection people have to classical theism. By skipping past it rather than engaging it substantively, Hart leaves his book vulnerable to exactly the objection most likely to make a reader walk away. Another thing Hart doesn't address adequately is the question of religious experience itself. The title promises an account of experiencing God, but the book is almost entirely argumentative. He references mystical traditions and personal conversion, but these function as rhetorical flourishes rather than substantive engagement with the phenomenology of religious experience. If you're looking for a book that helps you understand what it actually feels like to encounter God, this isn't it.
There's also the translation issue that trips up a lot of readers. Hart frequently quotes Greek and Latin theological terms without translation or with only partial translation. Words like apatheia, theosis, and henosis appear throughout without enough context for someone unfamiliar with these concepts. I ended up keeping a dictionary open next to the book, which slowed the reading pace considerably and made the experience more exhausting than it needed to be. For people who want to understand Hart's position without drowning in the full text, I'd suggest starting with his essay collection entitled The Beauty of the Infinite, which covers similar territory with slightly more accessibility. Alternatively, Rowan Williams' On Christian Theology has a section on classical theism that gets at the same ideas with clearer prose and more engagement with counterarguments. Neither of these replaces Hart's book, but they give you the conceptual framework faster. The book does have real value if you stick with it. His reconstruction of the classical concept of God as being itself is probably the best single available summary in English. The chapters on how the medieval shift toward divine voluntarism changed theological thinking are genuinely illuminating, especially if you've never studied scholastic philosophy before. Hart makes a case that the shift from essence-based to will-based theology had consequences we're still dealing with, and he's right about that.
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But here's what I want people to know before they buy it. This is not an introductory book. It's not a pastoral book. It's a scholarly reconstruction written for an audience that already cares about these questions and has some background in philosophy or theology. The average reader will find the first hundred pages challenging and the remaining two hundred increasingly opaque. If you push through anyway, the payoff is real but modest. You'll come out with a clearer sense of what classical theism actually claims, but you won't have your objections answered or your doubts resolved. I bought a used paperback copy for eight dollars at a bookstore in Durham. It's still sitting on my shelf beside several other theology books I started and abandoned. Hart's argument is important and worth making. The way he makes it, though, reaches only a small audience and leaves most people exactly where they were before they opened the cover.
