The Union of Humanity and Divinity
A Review of
The Light of Tabor: Toward a Monistic Christology
David Bentley Hart
Hardcover: University of Notre Dame Press, 2025
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Reviewed by Jamie A. Hughes
As a graduate student, a teacher, and an editor, I’ve spent years working with difficult texts. I relish the challenge of a dense argument that requires highlighters, pens, pencils, and a dictionary close at hand. But David Bentley Hart’s The Light of Tabor: Toward a Monistic Christology was something altogether different. Reading this book felt like playing dodgeball with an octopus. Just when I thought I’d grasped one of his arguments, three more appeared from unexpected angles, each more challenging than the last.
Hart, an Orthodox theologian, tackles one of Christianity’s oldest and most difficult questions in this work: How can Jesus Christ be both fully God and fully human? He offers a vision of the incarnation and salvation that illuminates familiar biblical texts in new ways and connects to themes we appreciate in writers like C.S. Lewis. Most Christians, if asked to explain how Jesus can be both God and human, would probably say something like: “Jesus is God and human at the same time—two natures in one person.” It’s the answer we learned in Sunday school, rooted in the Council of Chalcedon’s fifth-century formulation that Christ exists “in two natures, without confusion, without change, without division, without separation.”
But Hart sees a problem. If we think of the incarnation as two separate things—divinity and humanity—somehow being joined together, we create impossible questions. How can two utterly different natures unite without mixing or changing? If God and humanity are fundamentally separate realities, how does the incarnation actually work?
Hart’s answer is both simple and radical: Divine and human were never meant to be separate in the first place.
His central claim is that humanity was created for union with God from the very beginning. Adam was made in the image of Christ—not the other way around. Christ didn’t become human to fix a problem after the Fall; he revealed what humanity was always meant to be. Human beings aren’t just creatures waiting for God to add divinity from outside. The capacity for union with God is built into what we are from creation. Christ shows us the fully realized version—what we’re meant to become.
This means, as Hart puts it, that “humanity possesses no principle in itself that was not originally imparted out of that very divinity.” We’re created as participants in God’s life. However, sin has obscured our true nature and prevented us from becoming what we already potentially are.
Consider 1 Corinthians 13:12: “Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known.” Paul says we’ll eventually know the way God knows. For Hart, this isn’t God giving us something foreign to our nature. Rather, it’s the fulfillment of how we were always meant to know—completely, the way God knows. Sin fractured that capacity; Christ restores it.
Or take Galatians 2:20: “It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.” Paul’s identity isn’t erased or replaced. Rather, he’s discovering that the “I” he’s becoming is the “I” Christ always was—fully human, fully alive, fully himself precisely through union with God.
Hart’s most controversial move comes when he describes his view as “monistic.” Everything that exists, he argues, exists within God—not as identical to God (which would be pantheism), but as God’s self-expression. Creation doesn’t happen “outside” God in some neutral space because, well, there is no outside. As Acts 17:28 puts it, “In him we live and move and have our being.”
This is what Hart means by calling his Christology “monistic.” When we speak of Christ’s two natures, we’re not talking about two separate realities that need to be reconciled. We’re talking about the one reality of God’s self-giving love, perfectly expressed in the person of Jesus. The human in Christ isn’t something alien that gets united to divinity. It’s the fulfillment of what humanity always was—the image of God actualized completely.
If Hart is right, it shifts how we think about many things. For instance:
Instead of asking “How do we fit God and human together in one person?” we ask, “How does Jesus reveal what humans were always meant to be?” The incarnation is a revelation of our own nature and destiny.
Instead of thinking primarily in terms of legal forgiveness—getting our sins pardoned so we can go to heaven—we see salvation as becoming fully human through union with Christ. We’re not just pardoned criminals. We’re incomplete people being healed and fulfilled, growing into what we were created to be.
And, on a personal level, instead of “I’m just a human being who got saved,” we can say, “I’m becoming what Christ is—fully human, fully alive, fully myself.” That’s the paradox that Hart emphasizes: the closer we get to God, the more ourselves we become, not less.
This last point might sound familiar to readers of C.S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce. Lewis shows the damned becoming less substantial, more ghostly, less themselves as they withdraw from God. Meanwhile, the blessed become more solid, more real, more themselves as they draw near to him. Hart gives us the theological architecture for what Lewis showed narratively. We become more ourselves through union with God because our selves were always meant to exist in that union. Sin doesn’t make us more human; it makes us less. Grace doesn’t erase our humanity; it fulfills it.
I won’t pretend this book is easy. Hart’s language is dense, his claims are bold, and his vision of salvation will feel unfamiliar if you grew up in evangelical churches like I did. There were moments reading this deceptively slim volume when I wanted to throw up my hands and find something easier. But I’m glad I didn’t. By wrestling with Hart’s arguments, I gained a different approach to passages like 1 Corinthians 13:12, a deeper sense of what Paul meant by being “in Christ,” and a renewed wonder at the incarnation itself.
For Hart, salvation isn’t just about escaping this world or having our sins forgiven, as crucial as those things are. It’s about becoming fully human, which means becoming like Christ. And becoming like Christ means growing into the union with God for which we were always created. As Hart puts it, we’re not merely human creatures who got saved. We’re “always yet becoming persons”—incomplete, fragmented, searching—until we find ourselves fully in the One who is fully God and fully human. The incarnation isn’t Plan B. It’s the revelation of what we were always meant to be.
That’s a vision worth wrestling with.
Jamie A. Hughes
Jamie A. Hughes is a writer/editor living in Atlanta, Georgia with her husband, two sons, and a pair of needy cats. She has written for Christianity Today, The Bitter Southerner, CT Women, Comment Magazine, Ink & Letters, Fathom Magazine, The Perennial Gen, You Are Here Stories, and Restoration Living.
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