Spring 2024 · Vol. 53 No. 1 · pp. 113–117
Book Review
That All Shall Be Saved: Heaven, Hell, and Universal Salvation
David Bentley Hart. With a new preface. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2021. 222 pages.
David Bentley Hart will not be unfamiliar to many readers of this journal. His name has popped up in the occasional Direction article, and the journal published a review of his The New Testament: A Translation (Yale University Press, 2017) in its fall 2020 issue. In the wider academic world, few theologians can truthfully say they have never heard of him. The Eastern Orthodox theologian has established a reputation as a fearless, arrogant, brilliant, and intimidating philosopher-theologian through such {114} books as The Beauty of the Infinite (2003), The Doors of the Sea: Where Was God in the Tsunami? (2005), Atheist Delusions (2009), and The Experience of God (2013). He is one of the finest academic writers around, able to elucidate complex subjects with lively and seemingly effortless prose. And he has a deep knowledge of the church fathers, which makes it challenging even for conservative opponents to dismiss him.
That All Shall Be Saved would cement his academic reputation were it not already secure. The book is a series of bold and forceful arguments against the nearly universally accepted doctrine of an unending hell (note the qualifier) and in favor of the widely rejected doctrine of the ultimate salvation of all rational beings. He himself puts things more bluntly: “[I]f Christianity is in any way true, Christians dare not doubt the salvation of all, and [dare not doubt] that any understanding of what God accomplished in Christ that does not include the assurance of a final apokatastasis in which all things created are redeemed and joined to God is ultimately entirely incoherent and unworthy of rational faith” (66).
Hart presents his arguments in the form of “meditations”—four in all—that make up part 2 of his book. The first meditation, “Who Is God,” focuses on the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo and its implications for understanding the nature of God. “Creation out of nothing,” he explains, means that God created entirely unencumbered by any influence, limit, or principle outside himself. No part of creation has a source outside of God; creation is the entirely free work of a God who is love and goodness itself. Everything created has its source in God and also its end. Now, the conclusion of a thing reveals its true meaning and simultaneously the moral nature of the God who draws it there. Christian tradition affirms that God is love, is the good. But it has also insisted that God only allows some of his creatures into his eternal presence and casts the rest into the burning flames of hell forever. Thus, God is perceived as love only to some but as evil to many more. Hart notes the traditional defense of God’s action by appeal to his sovereignty (i.e., his “pure inscrutable power”) but only to dismiss it as a vile theological distortion of the true nature of God. Not the least of its consequences is that it renders unintelligible the classic predicates of God— “good,” “just,” “merciful,” and “wise” (81). For what could they mean when applied to a God who could create rational creatures knowing he would condemn a vast number of them to suffer eternal damnation?
In “What is Judgment,” Hart’s second meditation, the scriptural basis for universal salvation and the lack of such a basis for the doctrine of eternal hell are examined. Hart acknowledges that the language of the Bible has “a certain presumptive authority” (93) but says that identifying that language is challenging. Neither the Gospel of John nor the letters of the apostle Paul explicitly refers to “eternal punishment.” Elsewhere in {115} the New Testament, the several Greek terms translated as “hell” in many English Bibles have different referents. The same is true of Greek words translated as “eternal.” Almost none have “perpetual” or “without end” as their primary meaning (120ff). And as for the book of Revelation, Hart takes it not so much as prophecy as an imaginative literary sketch of what might ultimately be hoped for. As such, its contradictions are not surprising. The “lake of fire” as the destiny of the damned is a vivid and memorable image, but at odds with the later opening of Jerusalem’s gates to those outside it (109).
Regarding the scriptural basis of the idea of universal salvation, Hart observes that the New Testament contains no less than twenty-three passages that support it (95–106). The key verse for Hart’s understanding of God’s endgame comes from the apostle Paul: “. . . then will the Son himself also be subordinated to the one who has subordinated all things to him, so that God may be all in all” (1 Cor 15:28; italics added). Paul’s vision of the final reckoning is also found in 1 Corinthians, where he speaks of two classes of people: “If the work that someone has built endures, that one will receive a reward; if anyone’s work should be burned away, that one will suffer loss, yet shall be saved, even though as by fire” (3:14–15; italics added). This passage and others suggest that the ultimate fate of the less than saintly may yet be salvation.
The third meditation is titled, “What Is a Person?” Here Hart begins with a reconsideration of Romans 9 to 11. The Augustinian-Calvinist interpretation of these chapters is that they show us a God graciously predestining some to eternal glory and justly predestining the remainder to eternal hell. This is profoundly wrong, says Hart. Paul’s main concern in these chapters is not to drive home the inscrutability of God’s will but to exposit the remarkable relationship between elected Israel, which has in large measure rejected Christ, and the gentile church, which has embraced him. To understand God’s intentions, Paul looks at the conflict between Jacob and Esau and notices that the story is not simply one of role reversal but of the delay of justice for the older son to allow the widening of election’s scope so that both brothers receive the blessing. In Hart’s words, Paul sees that there is “no final division between the elect and the derelict . . . but rather the precise opposite: the final embrace of all parties in the single and inventively universal grace of election” (135–36).
Hart supplements this discussion with a phenomenology of the person. Persons, he says, are their memories and close human relationships. Remove those (as would be necessary to enjoy heaven if one’s kin were burning in hell) and what is left of us? Would there be any significant continuity between the persons we were in this life and what we must become to experience bliss in the next? Ultimately, says Hart, all persons {116} are part of a web of relationships, and to such an extent that “there is no way in which persons can be saved as persons except in and with all other persons.” This bald assertion, says Hart, merely acknowledges “certain obvious truths about the fragility, dependency, and exigency of all that makes us who and what we are” (146).
The fourth and last meditation—“What Is Freedom?”—picks up the theme of the nature of a rational will. Hart weighs the idea that finite human beings are forever free to reject God (hence, eternal hell) and finds it wanting. The freedom to choose between good and evil, he says, is always partial because our wills are impaired. All manner of contingent forces, circumstances, influences, and conditions—like poor role models, negative experiences, and incomplete knowledge—can compromise our wills and lead to irrational decisions, even decisions at odds with the natural (i.e., God-given) desire of rational beings for God. Freedom rightly used will always pursue a rational will’s deepest desire, will always choose the Good. On the other hand, because no finite rational beings have a right knowledge of their true end, they are never truly free to reject God. The only “hell” Hart is willing to entertain is one in which sinners are purified of their sin and acquire a true knowledge of God, hence a hell that has an end because rejection of God would come to an end. For to know God rightly is to desire and embrace God in love.
Part 3 offers some “Final Remarks” in which Hart considers why the idea of eternal postmortem suffering might have been elevated to the status of orthodox doctrine. (Not all church fathers gave it that status.) High on his list of reasons for this elevation is the usefulness of hell as an instrument of the moral reformation of stubbornly sinful Christians. Political ends and institutional needs are not far behind. Hart acknowledges the inevitability of these developments but maintains that theologians have an obligation to speak the truth about God. This includes the truth that it is impossible that God, goodness and love itself, could be the creator of an interminable hell to which he would condemn even a single rational being.
All three Mennonite Brethren (MB) confessions of faith—the US, the Canadian, and the statement of the International Community of Mennonite Brethren (ICOMB)—affirm that “those who have rejected Christ will face eternal condemnation in hell” (the ICOMB confession and the short version of the Canadian MB Confession omit “in hell”). None of them mentions “eternal conscious torment” or the like, but most MBs would agree that this is “implied.” Admittedly, the Bible is full of references to the destruction of idolaters, the godless, the wicked, and includes references to eternal punishment for those who reject Christ. And isn’t saving people from a “Godless eternity” the motivation for MB evangelism and missions? MB critics will say that Hart can be as confident a universalist {117} as he seems to be only by consistently ignoring what Scripture plainly teaches, which is that only those who believe in Christ before they die will enjoy an eternity in God’s presence; the rest of the human race will spend eternity in hell.
The subject of the role of Scripture in the development of a theological argument is not one that Hart clearly addresses here. His focus is rather on the character of the God Christians say they worship. God is theologically a first principle. Every other principle or belief is impacted by how we conceive of God. Thus, Hart returns repeatedly to the basic theological truths that God is Good and God is Love. The mystery of God lies not in the paradox that he is both gracious and violent. The mystery lies pre-eminently in the fullness with which God is goodness and in the long-suffering love with which he elects and then graciously and patiently draws even the worst of us to the bliss of beholding God “all in all.” That mystery is the light in which other Christian doctrines should be evaluated and fashioned and, in some cases, abandoned.
