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

by David Bentley Hart

But, then, this is to say that either all persons must be saved, or none can be. According to the traditional picture of a dual eternity, a final division of the saved and the damned (whether the latter be tortured forever or merely forever annihilated), God could in fact save no persons at all. He could of course erase each of the elect as whoever they once were, by shattering their memories and attachments like the gates of hell, and then raise up some other being in each of their places, thus converting the will of each into an idiot bliss stripped of the loves that made him or her this person—associations and attachments and pity and tenderness and all the rest. But persons, it seems, could not be saved; they could only be damned. Only in hell could any of us possess something like a personal destiny: tormented perhaps by the memories of the loves we squandered or betrayed, but not deprived of them altogether. Is this, then, our choice after all: either a hell of eternal torment or a heaven that is the annihilation of everything that ever made us who we were? If that is so, if to enter heaven we must be reduced to anonymous essences, each indiscernibly distinct from every other, perhaps it is to hell that we should want to go. And that, as it happens, is where this part of my argument ends.