Ray L. Hart

In this long-awaited work, Ray L. Hart offers a radical speculative theology that profoundly challenges classical understandings of the divine. God Being Nothing contests the conclusions of numerous orthodoxies through a probing question: How can thinking of God reach closure when the subjects of creation are themselves unfinished, when God’s self-revelation in history is ongoing, when the active manifestation of God is still occurring? Drawing on a lifetime of reading in philosophy and religious thought, Hart unfolds a vision of God perpetually in process: an unfinished God being self-created from nothingness. Breaking away from the traditional focus on divine persons, Hart reimagines the Trinity in terms of theogony, cosmogony, and anthropogony in order to reveal an ever-emerging Godhead who encompasses all of temporal creation and, within it, human existence. The book’s ultimate implication is that Being and Nonbeing mutually participate in an ongoing process of divine coming-to-birth and dying that implicates all things, existent and nonexistent, temporal and eternal. God’s continual generation from nothing manifests the full actualization of freedom: the freedom to create ex nihilo.

What kind of reality can be perceived when the core problems of theology are freed from dependency upon highly technical and arcane ways of thinking and speaking? Writing with the logical clarity and critical acumen for which he is well-known in theological circles, Julian N. Hartt demonstrates the reality of theology's problems and shows how they can be perceived as part of a divine restiveness in living. Hartt finds the demands of revelation to be most profoundly registered upon the imagination--that power of the spirit by which the shape of things to come is grasped. Sensing a great hunger for fresh approaches to fundamental theological concerns, Hartt presents a boldly original scholarly work. In it the persistent theological puzzles about method are clarified, the elements of that method are described and major historical controversies about method are critiqued. Topics discussed include: beliefs and reasons, knowing and proving God, faith and hope, authority and scripture, revelation and historical evidence. A significant contribution to theology, this book shows that theological method entails describing the ways in which faith makes sense. Doing this, it speaks about incorrigible beliefs, those convictions so fundamental that without them the very sense of life and world would disappear. Sensing that society has begun to think of theological matters as mere inventions of theologians, Hartt seeks to return to those fundamental questions that are the concrete situation of the serious-minded Christian in the contemporary world.

Unfinished Man and the Imagination is a ground-breaking foundational work in theological anthropology that was first published in 1968. Ray Hart is a highly original thinker who, using theological and philosophical categories in imaginative ways, provides a theological account of human being that may serve as the basis for an ontology of revelation.