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

by David Bentley Hart

I am convinced that practically no one who holds firmly to the majority tradition regarding the doctrine of hell ultimately does so for any reason other than an obstinate, if largely unconscious, resolve to do so, prompted by the unshakable conviction that faith absolutely requires it.

All of these arguments still oblige one to believe that a benevolent and omnipotent God would willfully create rational beings destined for an endless torment that they could never, in any rational calculus of personal responsibility, earn for themselves; and to believe also that this, somehow, is essential to the good news Christianity brought into the world.

one principle that absolutely must be deduced from Christian metaphysical tradition, and from the logic of “classical theism” as a whole, is that it is precisely because God is not some finite ethical agent—precisely, that is, because he is transcendent perfection and simplicity rather than a mutable individual of variable goodness—that one can assume that all his acts must be expressive of his nature’s infinite benevolence.

it makes no sense to take a metaphysical principle as trivially true as “God is not an ethical agent” as a prohibition upon all moral interrogations of Christian teachings about God.

For what it is worth, however, I do in fact believe in hell, though only in the sense of a profound and imprisoning misery that we impose upon ourselves by rejecting the love that alone can set us free.

for many Christians down the years, the rationale of evangelization has been a desperate race to save as many souls as possible from God

("from God" was italicized in the original) What a completely ludicrous and totally true thing to say about Christian evangelism!

what is a person other than a whole history of associations, loves, memories, attachments, and affinities? Who are we, other than all the others who have made us who we are, and to whom we belong as much as they to us? We are those others. To say that the sufferings of the damned will either be clouded from the eyes of the blessed or, worse, increase the pitiless bliss of heaven is also to say that no persons can possibly be saved: for, if the memories of others are removed, or lost, or one’s knowledge of their misery is converted into indifference or, God forbid, into greater beatitude, what then remains of one in one’s last bliss?

We are presented by what has become the majority tradition with three fundamental claims, any two of which might be true simultaneously, but never all three: that God freely created all things out of nothingness; that God is the Good itself; and that it is certain or at least possible that some rational creatures will endure eternal loss of God.

the God of eternal retribution and pure sovereignty proclaimed by so much of Christian tradition is not, and cannot possibly be, the God of self-outpouring love revealed in Christ.

I am not even sure that it is really possible to distinguish a single soul in isolation as either saint or sinner in any absolute sense, inasmuch as we are all bound in disobedience (as the Apostle says) precisely by being bound to one another in the sheer contingency of our shared brokenness, and the brokenness of our world, and our responsibility one for another.

Let us go on to imagine also another child born on the same day, this one in perfect health, who grows into a man of monstrous temperament, cruel, selfish, even murderous, and who eventually dies unrepentant and thereupon descends to an endless hell. Well, no doubt this brute chose to become what he became, to the extent that he was able to do so, conscious of the choices he was making; so maybe he has received no more than he deserves. And yet, even then, I cannot quite forget, or consider it utterly irrelevant, that he was born into a world so thoroughly ruined that a child can be born one day in poverty, suffer from some horrible and incurable congenital disease, die in agony … What precisely did that wicked man, then, ever really know of the Good? And how clearly, and with what rational power over his own will? Certainly he did not know everything, at least not with perfect clarity, nor did he enjoy complete rational discretion or power over his own deeds and desires. Not even a god would be capable of that. This thought alone is enough to convince me of the sheer moral squalor of the traditional doctrine.

We cannot choose to cease to care for any soul without thereby choosing to cease to care for every soul to which that particular soul is attached by bonds of love or loyalty, and for every other soul attached to each of these, and, if need be, for every soul that has ever been—if that is what it takes to be perfectly, blissfully indifferent to the damned. No soul is who or what it is in isolation; and no soul’s sufferings can be ignored without the sufferings of a potentially limitless number of other souls being ignored as well. And so, it seems, if we allow the possibility that even so much as a single soul might slip away unmourned into everlasting misery, the ethos of heaven turns out to be “every soul for itself”—which is also, curiously enough, precisely the ethos of hell.