The Ends of the Divine: David Bentley Hart and Jordan Daniel Wood on Grace

David Bentley Hart and Jordan Daniel Wood are part of a movement aiming to overcome any separation between divine and human nature, avoiding what they see as a problematic accounts of grace. As opposed to radical kenoticism which holds that God only exists or has a given character in relation to creation, Hart and Wood appeal to facts about God such that He could not act otherwise towards human beings, given His character, and thereby ground conclusions that God could not fail to create and that human beings could not be otherwise than divinized. The strategy is common to both authors, even though they differ on what it is in virtue of the fact that God could not act otherwise. I will argue such views involve serious theological and metaphysical problems, because this strategy entails – just as much as radical kenoticism – that who or what God is is constituted by His relation to creation.