As indicated by the wide range of topics covered in
his essays, Hart has diverse interests such as
baseball,
comparative religious studies,
Gnosticism,
metaphysics,
The Dreaming,
philosophy of mind,
theological aesthetics, and
world literature. Hart writes often about
fairies and has commented several times about his belief in them and related creatures such as
mermaids. As an outspoken advocate of
classical theism as seen, for example, in his book
The Experience of God who is also, more generally, engaged with the schools of
continental philosophy,
idealism, and
neoplatonism, Hart also affirms
monism. He said in a November 17, 2020, interview about a pre-release reading of his book
You Are Gods that "at the end of the day, I'm a monist as any sane person is" and that "we can play games with it, but any metaphysics that is coherent is ultimately reducible to a monism." In the text of
You Are Gods, Hart describes variations of both dualism and monism that he calls grim and monstrous: An absolute dualism, of course, is a very grim thing indeed; but a narrative monism unqualified by any hint of true gnostic detachment, irony, sedition, or doubt—by any proper sense, that is, that the fashion of this world is horribly out of joint, that we are prisoners of delusion, that not every evil can be accounted for as part of divine necessity—turns out to be at least as monstrous. During an April 2022 conversation with Hart about
You Are Gods, John Milbank said we "agree that in fact neoplatonism and Vedanta and Islamic mysticism are monistic" and "that, actually, an emanationism, a monotheism, these are actually the more monistic visions and that, if we've got all these things in Christianity like Trinity, incarnation, grace and deification and so on, these aren't qualifying monism." Instead, Milbank said that Hart's book
You Are Gods shows that Christianity is spelling out or expounding monism and monotheism.
Robert Lawrence Kuhn, concludes that Hart "constructs an ultimate unified monism, first by showing that consciousness/mind and being/existence are profoundly inseverable" and then by "taking consciousness and being, already one and the same, and unifying it with God, to become, all together, the ultimate one and the same." Kuhn maintains, however, that "this is not pantheism (or panentheism), but based on Hart's Orthodox Christian convictions, a Christological monism".
Biblical interpretation Hart's book
That All Shall Be Saved was published on September 24, 2019, and makes the case that
universalism is the only coherent version of the Christian faith. Although grounded primarily in arguments from Christian metaphysics and moral philosophy, the book also considers biblical exegesis, systematic theology, and historical theology (with extensive references to universalist ideas among Christian patristic figures such as
Gregory of Nyssa). Hart, with his characteristic rhetorical provocations, uses terms such as "infernalists" to describe his opponents. This grounding in Christian metaphysics, insistence on universalism being the only true articulation of the Christian gospel, and use of combative rhetoric all combine to make Hart's case for universalism more uncompromising than most previous Christian arguments, and this has led to the use of the term "hard universalism" to describe Hart's position. Hart refers to the idea of an
atemporal fall (also called meta-historical fall) in his 2005 book
The Doors of the Sea as well as in "The Devil's March:
Creatio ex Nihilo, the Problem of Evil, and a Few Dostoyevskian Meditations": The fall of rational creation and the conquest of the cosmos by death is something that appears to us nowhere within the course of nature or history; it comes from before and beyond both. We cannot search it out within the closed totality of the damaged world because it belongs to another frame of time, another kind of time, one more real than the time of death. ...It may seem a fabulous claim that we exist in the long grim aftermath of a primeval catastrophe—that this is a broken and wounded world, that cosmic time is a phantom of true time, that we live in an umbratile interval between creation in its fullness and the nothingness from which it was called, and that the universe languishes in bondage to the "powers" and "principalities" of this age, which never cease in their enmity toward the kingdom of God—but it is not a claim that Christians are free to surrender. Hart has recommended Sergei Bulgakov's 1939 book
The Bride of the Lamb as the best exposition of an atemporal fall. ==Some influences==