On the character of Jesus and beauty as a category of Christian thought

Peter Wehner, ‘The Reason I’m Not an Atheist Is That I Think the Philosophical Arguments Against It Are Unanswerable’, NYTimes, Apr. 12, 2026.

David Bentley Hart is one of the world’s most formidable and provocative theological minds. He is an Eastern Orthodox scholar of religion, a philosopher, a cultural commentator and a fiction writer. Dr. Hart is the author of more than 30 books spanning theology and metaphysics, philosophy, biblical scholarship and translation, political theology and linguistics, as well as his fiction and children’s novels.

I spoke to Dr. Hart about why Jesus captured his imagination, whether suffering and evil in the world calls God’s goodness into question, and why he doesn’t believe that the Bible teaches the concept of eternal conscious torment. He explained why he believes beauty is a central category of Christian thought, why moral reasoning and moral intuitions must be an essential part of biblical interpretation, and why materialists can’t adequately explain how consciousness has emerged.

Dr. Hart also shared with me why he’s become increasingly indifferent to dogmatic and institutional authority, why he believes that historically the church has been as evil as it has been good, and why he has a “burning sense of obligation” to those whom Jesus loved —— the poor, the marginalized, the strangers in our midst. What emerged in the interview is a sense that he feels compelled to defend the character of God against many of those who claim to speak for God. [...]

Peter Wehner: You’ve described yourself as a “thoroughly secular man,” one having little or no natural aptitude for religious sentiment. The Christian religion as a dogmatic and institutional reality is secondary and marginal to your faith. If C.S. Lewis was, in his words, the most reluctant convert in all of England, it seems to me you qualify as one of the more reluctant converts in all America, or maybe to be more precise, one of the most surprising converts in America. You and Lewis differ in important respects, yet like Lewis you write beautifully and powerfully about the Christian faith and about Jesus. What is it that drew you to faith and what keeps you there? Why is Christianity the story you inhabit?

David Bentley Hart: The word convert probably doesn’t suit me very well in this context. I have converted from certain things to other things. I was a high church Episcopalian as a boy and became Eastern Orthodox as a young man. But it’s true that I’ve never had the aptitude for spontaneous piety of the churchly sort. From an early age, I had a profound sense of some mystery lying beyond nature. And when I’m in natural settings, that’s when my capacity for reverence tends to kick in. But institutional claims, dogmatic claims, the demands of piety, the romance of piety have never had a hold on me by themselves.

What made Christianity compelling to me from an early age had to do with two considerations. One is that I couldn’t account for the claims made about Easter by the early Christians in the New Testament. The more I studied, too, I became more and more convinced of the extraordinary oddity of these claims as compared to what happened with other messianic movements.

Now within the context of more modern history, we’re aware of movements that can take off from a prophet claiming a certain charisma and can be fairly successful in their own terms. But this was something different. This was within the context of messianic expectations in first century Judea that simply seemed not to have come to pass. Other figures before Jesus who had been the focus of messianic movements had died. And rather than his followers simply scattering to the four winds, they soon appeared claiming to have had an experience. And just as a historical anomaly I found this experience hard to explain away psychologically or sociologically.

But that was further along in my education. The thing that always gripped me was the personality, the person, of Jesus as presented in the Gospels. I had a good classical education from an early age and was aware there was some huge epochal shift in his teachings that I’ve never been able to see simply as a fortuitous historical event.

To me, something new happened there. Many of the things that we now take to be morally appealing in Jesus were actually rather scandalous in their time. These weren’t just new principles; some of them were considered wrong. A sort of boundless degree of forgiveness was not an ideal, not even in Stoicism, not even in the prophets. Jesus also had this concern for the most abject, the most indigent people in the world.

Much later in the interview:

Wehner: I want to move from eternal conscious torment to beauty. In “The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth,” you argue for a return to beauty as a central category in Christian thought. What is it you hope to convey to people about beauty which they might not otherwise see?

Hart: Part of that relates to the question you asked at the beginning, about the moral character of God. If you’re actually persuaded of the goodness of God then you’ve committed yourself to believing that there’s some analogy between what you understand justice and mercy to be and what you’re ascribing to God. So if you get to the point where it just becomes equivocal, that you say, “It’s good that God condemns babies to hell” or “It’s good in a way we don’t understand,” what you’re saying is your faith is just nonsense. It should clue us in if the story we tell has a hideousness to it. But there’s more to it than that. I really do believe that there are transcendental orientations of any living mind, like the good, the true, the beautiful. It doesn’t mean that we pursue them avidly with full attention psychologically at every moment, but that we do have these values that provide an index for us in which we judge other things.

Why do you desire to own a painting? The reason you desire it might be purely for an investment. But if you really desire the painting for itself, it’s because you have a prior desire that’s more general and transcendental for the beautiful as such. Beauty is an ultimate value for you.

I think the beautiful is probably for us in this world the best indication of what transcendental desire is, the desire for something in itself. Every other thing that we call a transcendental, like truth or goodness, you can try to explain away in a consequentialist way. You say you love the truth, but what you mean is you love accuracy because you want to gain power over a situation. You say you love goodness, but what you’re meaning is you really want moral compliance from others. But in the case of beauty, all those explanations fall woefully short of the phenomenon. Beauty has a kind of impersonal, compelling fullness to it that we can’t reduce to simple mechanical categories.

In Christian thought I think beauty is important because there’s a certain aesthetic revolution that occurred in Christian thought.

One of the curiosities of Christian social history is a series of cultural changes in which we feel it is licit to look for beauty. You have the picture of Christ before Pilate in the Gospel of John, one of my favorite examples. I returned to it almost obsessively because as anyone who studied the ancient world knows, in everyone’s eyes at the time, this tableau would not have meant what it has come to mean for us.

It would have been obvious that Pilate enjoys a certain glorious eminence because he represents both the power and the cult of Rome. He’s an aristocrat, a patrician. There’s a scale of reality that’s the hierarchy of all things, that’s a social hierarchy that includes humanity and the divine. Someone like Pilate is closer to the divine. But that hierarchy also goes right down to the lowest of the low, the slave, and below the slave the ptōchos — that indigent, absolutely marginal human being. And yet there’s an inversion of perspective in that tableau.

We’re invited to see Christ, this slave, this peasant, this colonialized person, this convict. He’s a slave under Roman law. He has no citizenship and he’s under condemnation. So he has the status of one totally not his own. According to Roman law, Jesus is non habens personam — he has no face, he’s no person before the law.

Where you can see this more prodigal notion of the beautiful spilling out of the height of hierarchical thinking into all things, into those we’re now supposed to see as our brothers and our sisters and our kin, radiant with the beauty of God, radiant with the face of Christ, is probably the story of Peter going apart to weep when he hears the cock crow for the third time.

Erich Auerbach, the great literary critic, pointed to this correctly as a sort of strange epochal shift in the sensibility of Western literature. Before then, rustics simply were not worthy of serious tragic attention. The tears of a rustic could be an object of ridicule or mirth, or could just be an ornamental detail: Even the peasants were crying. Things were so bad that peasants, who lose children all the time, they’re just cattle anyway, were weeping. But the notion of a fisherman, poor, probably illiterate, going aside and weeping in grief at the realization that he had betrayed the love of his master in the sense of his teacher, his guide, this is something new.

And so the beautiful fascinates me, not only as a category in itself but within Christian thought as a category that went through a radical revision. Now it’s obvious to us. All of us, whether we’re Christians or not, feel this sense that we really can find this compelling beauty in the face of someone who is not.

There's much more at the link.