david bentley hart's new testament

I am finding David Bentley Hart's translation of the New Testament a fascinating immersion in Christianity's root texts. His attempt to translate "as if doctrine is not given" and to reproduce in English the raw and often halting prose of the Greek provides a new lens on these source documents. Particularly striking is the impact that undertaking this translation had on Hart himself ...

"Before embarking on this project, I doubt I truly properly appreciated precisely how urgent the various voices of the New Testament authors are, or how profound the provocations of what they were saying for their own age, and probably remain for every age. Those voices blend, or at least interweave, in a kind of wildly indiscriminate polyphony, as if an early Baroque vocal trio, an Appalachian band, a couple of Viennese tenors piping twelve-tone Lieder, and a jazz crooner or two were all singing out together; but what all have in common, and what somehow forges a genuine harmony out of all that ecstatic clamor, is the vibrant certainty that history has been invaded by God in Christ in such a way that nothing can stay as it was, and that all terms of human community and conduct have been altered at the deepest of levels ....

.... What perhaps did impress itself upon me with an entirely unexpected force was a new sense of the utter strangeness of the Christian vision of life in its first dawning - by which I mean, precisely, its strangeness in respect to the Christianity of later centuries. When one truly ventures into the world of the first Christians, one enters a company of 'radicals' (for want of a better word), an association of men and women guided by faith in a world-altering revelation, and hence in values almost absolutely inverse to the recognized social, political, economic, and religious truths not only of their own age, but of almost every age of human culture. The first Christians certainly bore very little resemblance to the faithful of our day, or to any generation of Christians that has felt quite at home in the world, securely sheltered within the available social stations of its time, complacently comfortable with material possessions and national loyalties and civic conventions. In truth, I suspect that very few of us, in even our wildest imaginings, could ever desire to be the kind of persons that the New Testament describes as fitting the pattern of life in Christ." (pp. xxiii-xxv)

"Throughout the history of the church, Christians have keenly desired that the New Testament affirms the kind of people they are, rather than - as is actually the case - the kind of people they are not, and really would not want to be .... To live as the New Testament language really requires, Christians would have to become strangers and sojourners on the earth, to have here no enduring city, to belong to a Kingdom truly not of this world. And we surely cannot do that, can we?" (p. xxxii)

I notice how much of the current climate in The United Church of Canada fosters a Christianity that seeks to be attractive in the marketplace of spirituality. There is not much in the way of emphasizing the oddness of life as disciples of Jesus ... an oddness that is as likely to repel as it is to attract. It seems to me that, at the very least, every sermon rooted in the New Testament must name the way in which the text confronts us by its utter strangeness. It is not a case of making the strange text relevant to our way of living. It is a case of confronting the irrelevance of our living in light of the invasion of human history by God in Jesus Christ.