David Bentley Hart offers an intense and thorough reflection upon the issue of the supernatural
in Christian theology and doctrine. In recent years the theological-and more specifically
Roman Catholic-question of the supernatural has made an astonishing return from seeming
oblivion. David Bentley Hart's You Are Gods presents a series of meditations on the vexed
theological question of the relation of nature and supernature. In its merely controversial
aspect the book is intended most directly as a rejection of a certain Thomistic construal of
that relation as well as an argument in favor of a model of nature and supernature at once
more Eastern and patristic and also more in keeping with the healthier currents of mediaeval
and modern Catholic thought. In its more constructive and confessedly radical aspects the book
makes a vigorous case for the all-but-complete eradication of every qualitative ontological
or logical distinction between the natural and the supernatural in the life of spiritual
creatures. It advances a radically monistic vision of Christian metaphysics but does so wholly
on the basis of credal orthodoxy. Hart one of the most widely read theologians in America
today presents a bold gesture of resistance to the recent revival of what used to be called
two-tier Thomism especially in the Anglophone theological world. In this astute exercise in
classical Christian orthodoxy Hart takes the metaphysics of participation high Trinitarianism
Christology and the soteriological language of theosis to their inevitable logical
conclusions. You Are Gods will provoke many readers interested in theological metaphysics. The
book also offers a vision of Christian thought that draws on traditions (such as Vedanta) from
which Christian philosophers and theologians biblical scholars and religious studies scholars
still have a great deal to learn.
