Hart pretends that he is simply laying out the consequences of the Christian teaching that human beings can come to know God’s very essence. In fact he completely misses precisely what is distinctive about Christianity, what makes it a middle ground between the erroneous extremes we find in other religious traditions. On the one side we have the idea of God as a remote and standoffish first principle, to be contemplated and worshiped, but with whom we can never have an intimate relationship. On the other side we have the view that we can attain perfect union with God, but only because God is all there really is in the first place, and we are merely his manifestations. One side says that because God and man are distinct, the latter can never know the essence of the former. The other side says that because we can know the essence of God, God and man must not really be distinct.
Christianity says that this is a false choice. It teaches that though God and man are by nature truly distinct, we can via supernatural assistance nevertheless attain to a communion with him that is so deep that we will know his very essence, his inner Trinitarian life. We can, by adoption, thereby become sons of God—not mere servants, as the one view holds, though also not identical with God, as the other view claims. Hart essentially chooses one of the erroneous extremes—the pantheist one that collapses the distinction between God and his creatures—rather than opting for the authentically Christian middle ground.
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