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

by David Bentley Hart

But finite persons are not self-enclosed individual substances; they are dynamic events of relation to what is other than themselves. And this poses a problem. For me, all attempts to imagine the conditions of God’s Kingdom over against the reality of the eternal torment of those outside its demesne irresistibly summon up a single recurrent image: that of a parent whose beloved child has grown into quite an evil person, but who remains a parent nevertheless and therefore keeps and cherishes countless tender memories of the innocent and delightful being that has now become lost in the labyrinth of that damaged soul. Is all of that—those memories, those anxieties and delights, those feelings of desperate love—really to be consigned to the fire, as just so much combustible chaff? Must it all be forgotten, or willfully ignored, for heaven to enter into that parent’s soul? And, if so, is this not the darkest tragedy ever composed, and is God not then a tragedian utterly merciless in his poetic omnipotence? Moreover, who then exactly is that parent when he or she has achieved union with God, once those memories have been either converted into indifference or altogether expunged? Who or what is that being whose identity is no longer determined by its relation to that child?