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

by David Bentley Hart

So, suffice it here to say that there are moments when I find it difficult not to think that Christianity’s chief distinction among theistic creeds is that it alone openly enjoins its adherents to be morally superior to the God they worship.

the eternal damnation of unbaptized infants, the

Consider, for instance, the ninth through the eleventh chapters of Romans, which for Augustinian tradition provide the locus classicus of its theology of “grace.”

who then are you, O man, to reproach the God who made you?

solely as a display of divine might; God’s faithfulness is his own affair.

disobedience

must

For Gregory, then, there can be no true human unity, nor even any perfect unity between God and humanity, except in terms of the concrete solidarity of all persons in that complete community that is, alone, the true image of God.

And this, in itself, creates any number of problems for the majority view of heaven and hell.

want to say that there is no way in which persons can be saved as persons except in and with all other persons.

because we are, as persons, the creatures of our loves.

And so, as I said in my First Meditation, we are those others who make us.

Each person is a body within the body of humanity, which exists in its proper nature only as the body of Christ.

there can be no brake upon our desire to include those still outside the company of the redeemed.

For the whole substance of Christian faith is the conviction that another has already and decisively gone down into that abyss for us, to set all the prisoners free,

If what we do now is to make no difference in the end, then all the

seriousness of life is done away with.

As for Wittgenstein’s animadversions on Origen’s views, they are nearly spectacular in their facile crudity.

not to judge

Christians rarely pay particularly close attention to what the Bible actually says, for the simple reason that the texts defy synthesis in a canon of exact doctrines, and yet most Christians rely on doctrinal canons.

but the Bible is not a system.

all the real scriptural language of salvation is about a corporate condition of sacramental, moral, and spiritual union with the “body of Christ”?

consist mostly in ridiculous attempts to explain why the texts in question mean not what they say, but precisely what they deny.

Gregory of Nyssa. And, to be honest, I know of no interpreter of the New

nature of sovereignty and the logic of rational freedom.

Gregory—removed though he was by three centuries from the time of the Apostles—understood the original Greek terms of the Bible better than do most modern Christians,

We should also ask why his theology was so thoroughly universalist.

The first is that he clearly believed universal salvation in Christ to be the true testimony of scripture, and the only theological position that could adequately account for every dimension of the New Testament’s principal theological claims.

there was his understanding of the nature of humanity, as related to Christ and as bearing the image and likeness of God, and of the whole of humanity as enfolded within God’s eternal intention of ...

in Christ, God’s victory over evil and de...

and that this triumph will be fully realized only when God is “all in all”—in the sense both that God will be “over all things” and...

was his belief that the punishments of the life to come are (as Paul suggests in 1 Corinthians 3) merely the final, purgative completion of this act of rescue and restoration,

the harsh but necessary means for bringing about the ultimate purification of every soul—

there was his metaphysical—but also biblical—conviction regarding the inherent finitude of evil, the infinite fullness of God’s goodness, and the irrepressible dynamism of the moral life of rational spirits.

And he believed, of course, that God alone is the infinite plenitude of being and goodness that every soul seeks, by union with whom the soul is transformed into an eternally expanding vessel of divinity,

This is unfortunate, inasmuch as the argument is in fact absolutely correct.

it is a tale that seems to me to reduce all of existence to a cruel absurdity.

an eternal hell of torment would seem to lie wholly outside any order of the good that is—as the eternal vision of God supposedly must be—wholly sufficient in itself.

To begin with, there is something inherently silly about the notion that God—the infinite wellspring of all Goodness, Truth, Beauty, and Being—would not be sufficient in himself to communicate the perfect knowledge

The goodness of the divine essence, as known by a created spirit, would thus always be a relative value, and always parasitic upon the substantial difference between heaven and hell.

even more degrading in the notion that creatures fashioned in the divine image might justly be reduced to an instrumental means to a didactic end—and this by way of unremitting suffering and despair.

Christian is more or less obliged to believe that there is such a thing as an intrinsic nature in rational spirits:

The freedom of a rational spirit is its consummation in union with God.

more we are emancipated from illusion and caprice, and the more our will is informed by and responds to the Good, the more perfect our vision becomes, and the less there is really to choose.

the truest liberty of all, that of being entirely “unable to sin”

Anything you might willfully choose to do for the purpose of doing something arbitrary would not, in fact, be arbitrary.

true freedom is contingent upon true knowledge and true sanity of mind.

free will defense of eternal torment an especially absurd one

the question of whether a soul could freely and eternally reject God—whether a rational nature could in unhindered freedom of intellect and will elect endless misery rather than eternal bliss—is not even worth the trouble of asking.

can God be merely one option among others, for the very simple reason that he is not just another object alongside the willing agent or alongside other objects of desire, but is rather the sole ultimate content of all rational longing.