That All Shall Be Saved: Heaven, Hell, and Universal Salvation

Abstract

The author is widely regarded as one of today’s leading theological thinkers. This book glows with a kind of erudition and intellectual sophistication for readers with enough patience to bore through its often gnarly locutions. But the case it sets forth is hardly novel, nor will it be compelling for readers who privilege the Bible’s consistent representation of God, humans, eternal life, and everlasting judgment over the opinion of many theologians in recent generations that a loving God and an eternal hell are logically incompatible.The story is wearingly familiar, though from a pastoral viewpoint heart wrenching. As a youth, David Bentley Hart became skeptical toward the dominant historic Christian understanding of the Bible’s teaching on heaven and hell. He came, almost immediately it seems, to doubt that it is morally permissible “to love an omnipotent and omniscient God who has elected to create a reality in which everlasting torture is a possible final destiny for any of his creatures” (p. 13). This book is an extension of that doubt, phrased as a brave (and not always accurate) assertion that from the beginning Christian universalists were dominant in the church, and that those who are not universalists today are rejecting both the Bible’s teaching and the necessary conclusions of logic.The Bible’s true teaching on this subject, in Hart’s reading, is found in texts isolated from their immediate and whole-Bible contexts, such as 1 Tim 2:3–4 (“Our savior God … intends that all human being shall be saved and come to a full knowledge of the truth,” quoted on the back of the dedication page). Or it is found by negating Jesus’s frequent and harrowing pronouncements on the subject, often by urbane trivialization: “I am quite certain that, while Christ employed all sorts of imagery regarding final judgment, and spoke of a discrimination between the righteous and the wicked, and spoke also of the dire consequences for the latter of their actions in this life, none of it should be received as anything other than an intentionally heterogenous phantasmagory, meant as much to disorient as to instruct” (p. 119, emphasis added). Many Christians affirm the perspicuity of Scripture and regard Jesus as the consummate truth teller. Here, Hart presents him as intentional deceiver. Of course the reader has Hart to supply the antidote for Jesus’s (or at least the Gospel writers’) intentional “heterogenous phantasmagory.” Since the physical features of a mythic world with a real heaven and real hell have disappeared for Hart, he opines that “perhaps it is past time that we considered whether the spiritual structure of that vanished cosmos, at least in some its more garish details, could disappear as well without any great damage to our religious imaginations” (p. 207).For my money, our religious imagination is less important than the testimony of Scripture, affirmed by a vast array of interpreters from ancient times down to the thousands of martyrs annually at present, who lay down their lives in the sure hope of eternal life and with the deep consolation that God’s (and therefore the faithful martyrs’) enemies will not escape their just end. Hart’s world seems far removed from the sweat and the terror but also the brave faith of Christian saints facing Boko Haram, Hindu nationalists, Shiite militias, and the like. His sweeping solipsistic conclusion (pp. 208–9) that there will be eternal punishment for no one stands in stark contrast to majority Christian conviction through the centuries, and proudly so: Hart’s “conscience must not abide by the rule of the majority … the authority of a dominant tradition or of a reigning opinion has no weight whatever. And my conscience forbids assent to a picture of reality that I regard as morally corrupt, contrary to justice, perverse, inexcusably cruel, deeply irrational, and essentially wicked” (p. 208).Readers who concede Hart’s animating premises, which are evident from the start, may find his arguments persuasive. For a very different reading of Hart’s universalist outlook, one more tethered to church-historical fact and confessional logic and therefore supportive of a hermeneutic more likely to grant Scripture the say it deserves in this discussion, I recommend the terse essay accessible by searching for “Michael McClymond, opiate of the theologians” on Google.