i can't work a cute reference to 'Hart' into the title...

     I know little enough of James K A Smith, except that he's at Calvin College and writes books on vaguely philosophical topics. To be completely open here, I've never been able to read more than a paragraph by the man without drifting into a fitful sleep punctuated by bad socialist dreams.

     I also have little concern with staying within the Reformed tradition. Of course, whether the positions taken by those at Calvinist International are fair representations of the Reformed Tradition in its fullness is debatable. In any event, they have of late gotten into what was at first an amusing tangle with one David Bentley Hart, a tangle in which they have the losing part. As a result, one Peter Escalante has doubled down repeatedly as he tries with more and more obvious vanity to win a rhetorical and philosophical battle that is beyond him. 

    I will not take up Hart's defense. Suffice it to say, I don't always agree with Hart, but in this case I think he has the better part. In fact, it's not clear to me that Hart isn't having some fun with this tempest in a thimble. He has obviously baited his opponents, offering the most exaggerated statements mixed in with his more cogent arguments, and those guys have just as obviously taken the bait. Escalante in particular seems to be witlessly and pointlessly misreading Hart.  
     Does Escalante really imagine that Hart would assert 'that apocalyptic theopanies are somehow required in order to understand that jumping off a bridge is a bad idea'? Or that jumping off a bridge is, in terms of discernment, the same as making judgments about fraught moral matters amongst communities that have received decades of false catechesis? (Make no mistake, one needn't go to any kind of church to receive catechesis in matters of morals and what we might loosely call theology, inasmuch as all people have their gods, whatever they call 'em). 

     Oh well. I offer the following rambling yet mercifully brief reflection on this now tedious affair.

     It's not so obvious that a narrowly construed Aristotelian-Thomist understanding of natural revelation, and thus natural law, is representative of the larger catholic tradition of thought in these matters. (Note well that I didn't say anything specific about Thomas or Aristotle; we're dealing with a specific school of interpretation here, one that is myopic and philosophically daft.) 

     This is relevant because the mission of Calvinist International implies that they seek to offer the broadest possible consensus in matters of doctrine and philosophy. Again, they explicitly assert that the Reformed tradition, at its best, represents this 'mere Christianity', a catholic consensus capable of uniting diverse Christians through an irenic approach to matters often made divisive. 

     Of course, it remains to be demonstrated by anything they've said or done that the Reformed tradition, and the particular construal of it they find convincing, is itself that consensus, that 'mere Christianity' all of us need. As an assumption it hardly holds water; it must be demonstrated through both historical and dogmatic argument. Without such an argument, folks like me who stand outside the Reformed tradition in general, and CI's particular place within that tradition, have no reason to listen to 'em. 

     Of course, here we get at the crux of their polemics in this running skirmish - on what ground of consensual 'reason' can we meet to hash this out? I don't agree that 'natural knowledge' and 'reason' are quite what CI makes 'em out to be. But of course, that's because I'm being unreasonable. Perhaps I'm even a Kierkegaardian who imagines that all truth is ultimately subjective (for the Dane, that was an attempt to salvage particular subjectivity from the ravages of the Hegelian system; whether he succeeded is another matter), and therefore an inward something not subject to public scrutiny and argument. Perhaps I delight in imaginary apocalypticalist phenomenologies. Maybe I believe in faeries in the forest. Certainly I deny the givenness of the transcendentals of being, Beauty, Truth, and Goodness, and their convertibility. (The fact that I, like Hart, have spent years writing about that can not be allowed to play any part in the skirmish at hand.) 

     Perhaps I'm overdoing it, but I doubt it, because it's precisely such nonsense that has dominated the essays on CI.

     The fact is that Hart's position grows out of a larger construal of the truly catholic than the folks at Calvinist International seem able to grasp. This does not make Hart always and ever right in all his particulars; again, I would never say that. It does mean, however, that the assumptions and inferences and arguments he offers have sailed right past Escalante in particular. For example, at the end of Hart's latest piece, one can discern a deeply contested sort of Eastern Orthodox understanding of the relation between the creature and its Creator. 

     You see, there is more to the catholic tradition than is dreamt of by the editors of Calvinist International. Were they as truly interested in forging a consensus, a kind of mere Christianity that could unite more than it divides, they would have to reckon with this, however uncomfortable it made 'em. Instead, they attack it from a position poised on the most narrow kind of Reformed theology and philosophy. Again, that is their prerogative, but to build on that foundation is not to return to classical sources of Christian wisdom; it is to burnish a particular tradition that reads selected classical sources such as the Summa and the like in a particular, not to mention peculiar, manner.