Unfinished God

The critical essays constituting the first book-length examination of Ray L. Hart’s contribution to modern religious thought, address seminal aspects of Hart’s speculative philosophical theology. Circumscribed by Unfinished Man and His Imagination (1968) and God Being Nothing (2016), Hart’s work enacts an original alternative to contemporary radical orthodoxy and death-of-God theologies and opens up new horizons in ontology, theological phenomenology and hermeneutics. The book concludes with a response from Ray Hart. The contributors to this volume examine how Hart builds on Böhme and Schelling to think through what Heidegger cryptically named a ‘more originary’ beginning. More specifically, Hart’s retrieval of Böhme’s understanding of nonbeing as the ground of being breaks open classical Parmenidean ontotheologies and constructs instead an ever-developing meontotheology. It is demonstrated that Hart carries Heidegger’s lament over the forgetting of being further than Heidegger himself by unveiling the oblivion of the nothing by onto-theology. Hart is understood here to have thus fulfilled the task of rehabilitating speculative metaphysical and mystical theology after Heidegger, reconciling what Hart calls ‘the fragility of coherence’ and ‘the vanity of certainty’. Throughout the present volume, Hart’s speculative theology emerges as the ars subtilis of infinite reflection that constitutes unfinished human life in the image and likeness of an unfinished God.