ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses David Hartman's rare talents as an educational diagnostician, as a master of the apt analogy or as a uniquely arresting speaker. In considering Hartman's numerous remarks on the mature religious personality, one cannot help but get the impression that he is speaking of a psychologically healthy adult whose overall well-adjusted character informs his/her religious life as well. An individual cannot attain to "the capacity of love [that] is related to psychological maturity" by heroic self-disengagement from the community. Interestingly enough, Emmanuel Levinas, though many of his substantive philosophical positions are very different from those of Hartman, seems to have suggested a similar educational orientation by characterizing Judaism as a "religion for adults". On the one hand, Levinas' notion of responsibility is very different from Hartman's. Hartman, on the other hand, refuses to jettison the metaphors of intimacy offered by the tradition to characterize the quality of the divine-human encounter.
