How can Christians affirm anything regarding the nature of the witness of Christian tradition in light of the modernist assault on such a perspective?

DBH, in DBH style, does not really have an answer. But he certainly knows how to critique the attempted answers of others.

DBH begins by assessing Newman and Blondel's apologiae for Christian tradition. He concludes Newman ends up in a tautology which Blondel may have been able to escape but ultimately did not.

DBH then attempts to reframe the conversation about tradition to see it in a more apocalyptic way, as a living thing which has a telos but which is not yet revealed. He's willing to play "devil's advocate" about matters such as, say, Arius and his perspective, to be willing to make the argument how Arius was very much within a set of traditions about the understanding of the nature of God, and was far more "conservative" than one might have imagined, and in many respects the Niceno-Constantinopolitan conclusion was less so. That dispute and its conclusion, therefore, were not entirely foreordained, and who knows what later generations might think of them.

The author is Eastern Orthodox but is quite sanguine about the challenges and limitations regarding the appeal to tradition. He would have very little patience for my posture as a Restorationist, but I think he understands the impulse. The problem he would see is how restoration cannot ever be fully accomplished and would even question if that really should be or could be the goal, for how ideal was the beginning?

Such is the inherent tension and challenge when it comes to the Christian tradition. It is completely incoherent and internally self-contradicting. But it cannot, and should not, be entirely jettisoned. An apocalyptic perspective on the living nature of tradition and humility about how dogmatic we should be regarding our perspectives on such things are appreciated.

If one can tolerate the style of DBH, worthy of consideration.

David Bentley Hart's writing style is not for the faint of heart. He can be quite dense and wordy. But in this essay he "critiques the concept of "tradition" that has become dominant in Christian thought as fundamentally incoherent. He puts forth a convincing new explanation of Christian tradition, one that is obedient to the nature of Christianity not only as a "revealed" creed embodied in historical events but as the "apocalyptic" revelation of a history that is largely identical with the eternal truth it supposedly discloses. Hart shows that Christian tradition is sustained not simply by its preservation of the past, but more essentially by its anticipation of the future. He offers a compelling portrayal of a living tradition held together by apocalyptic expectation--the promised transformation of all things in God."

Key quotes:
"What is the Gospel apart from the promise that God's truth has entered creation as a historical event whose full meaning can be known only in its entire historical unfolding? What has it ever claimed to be other than the ever fuller unveiling of things hidden from the foundation of the world? Faith, moreover, lives within and positively requires this hiddenness. It must, and can do no other. Faith is not the assurance that one possesses the fullness of truth, but is rather a fidelity to the future disclosure of the full meaning of what little one already knows." (104)

"It should never be forgotten that Christianity entered human history not as a new creed or sapiential path or system of religious observances, but as apocalypse: the sudden unveiling of a mystery hidden in God before the foundation of the world in a historical event without any possible precedent or any conceivable sequel; an overturning of all the orders and hierarchies of the age, here on earth and in the archon-thronged heavens above; the overthrow of all the angelic and daemonic powers and principalities by a slave legally crucified at the behest of all the religious and political authorities of his time, but raised up by God as the one sole Lord over all the cosmos; the abolition of the partition of Law between peoples; the proclamation of an imminent arrival of the Kingdom and of a new age of creation; an urgent call to all persons to come out from the shelters of social, cultic, and political association into a condition of perilous and unprotected exposure, dwelling nowhere but in the singularity of this event - for the days are short." (135)

This is one of my slowest reviews ever on NetGalley because it's such a rich book. Every page offers a lot to think about and you often want to look up DBH's vocabulary or Bible quotes. In an age where so much theology just says the obvious things, this is a book worth engaging with at length and thinking about afterwards.