Inner Life, Talks and Thoughts You Are Gods by David Bentley Hart. Reflections on Vedantic Christianity
0:00 Vedantic Christianity in the Bible, as the gospel
7:58 The natural is already supernatural, our desire is for the infinite
18:26 The Trinity and nondualism as the circle of glory
23:07 Jesus and the Incarnation
29:08 Salvation as theophany
33:34 Paul and the Spirit of God within us
36:58 Creation is in eternity, returning in time
40:32 More on how we might know these things
45:03 Worship as beauty, reverence, longing, delight
47:43 Suffering and living in a violent world
55:22 Eschatology as our eternal Yes to God
57:58 The immanence of transcendence in Christian life
1:05:57 Guarding against inflation and emergent notions of God in history
1:16:05 Judgment, action and freedom
A set of reflections liberally drawing on You Are Gods by David Bentley Hart (Notre Dame Press, 2022).
Bentley Hart says that the book could equally have been subtitled, Studies in Vedantic Christianity, which I take as a lead.
What might traditional Christian themes such as God and Jesus, Salvation and Spirit, Creation and Grace, Worship and Judgment look like within such a perspective?
A summary might be that the gospel is the discovery and realisation that, as Jesus puts it, You are gods. And that the kingdom is not here or there, but within.
As Bentley Hart puts it himself: “We are nothing but created gods coming to be, becoming God in God, able to become divine only because, in some sense, we are divine from the very first.”
But what might that mean, what does that look like, how can we know?