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

by David Bentley Hart

If he were really absolutely convinced of the things he thinks he is convinced of, but still continued to go his merry recreant’s way along the path of happy fatherhood and professional contentment, he would have to be a moral monster. But I do not think that he is a monster. So I have to think instead that, in his heart of hearts, at a level of calm conviction so deeply hidden beneath veils of childhood indoctrination that he is all but unaware of its existence, he keeps and treasures the certainty that in the end—in the words of Dame Julian of Norwich (1342–1416)—“All shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.”

Perhaps what I should really conclude is that most of those who believe they believe in an eternal hell really do believe in it after all, at the very core of their beings, but are simply too morally indolent to care about anyone other than themselves and perhaps their immediate families. It seems to me, I have to say, that a person in that condition has probably already lost the heaven of which he or she feels so assured,

Neither do I grant that anyone has ever succeeded in making an argument in favor of that belief that does not, once the mists of dogmatic commitment have cleared, turn out to be so internally contradictory as ultimately to constitute evidence for the opposition.

there could scarcely be a worse defense of the idea of an eternal hell; it makes no sense whatsoever, no matter how appealing it seems on the surface. Yet there it is, repeated again and again with surprising frequency by a number of genuinely able Christian philosophers

All I ultimately found was a somewhat greater than usual reliance on the sentimental obscurantism that so often attaches to the word “love” when it is employed by theologians. Admittedly, it is a useful obscurantism; exploited to its fullest, it turns love into so imposingly mystifying and pliant a cipher that one can safely insert it into almost any gap in one’s argument where an intelligible rationale or cogent motive has gone missing. In fact, used with sufficient suavity and dexterity, love can even serve, it turns out, as another name for what under normal circumstances would be called cruelty.

Its logic is intrinsically defective, and nothing can be done to remedy its most essential flaws. But that is also what makes the argument’s enduring popularity so significant. At least, I take it as compelling evidence that the infernalists’ will to believe what they believe they must believe is so powerful that it can totally overwhelm reason in even the wisest of them.

It can even entail, when necessary, professing two antithetical principles at the same time, and simply refusing to see the contradiction.

There is no such thing as perfect freedom in this life, or perfect understanding, and it is sheer nonsense to suggest that we possess limitless or unqualified liberty. Therefore we are incapable of contracting a limitless or unqualified guilt. There are always extenuating circumstances.

the disproportion between them is that of creature and creator, and so the difference in their relative powers, being infinite, dictates that a properly proportional justice for the former cannot exceed the scope of the moral capacities with which he has been endowed by the latter.

the character of even the very worst among us is in part the product of external contingencies, and somewhere in the history of every soul there are moments when a better way was missed by mischance, or by malign interventions from without, or by disorders of the mind within, rather than by any intentional perversity on the soul’s own part.

So no one could ever fulfill the criteria necessary justly to damn himself or herself to perpetual misery. Not even angels would have the power to condemn themselves to a condign eternity of suffering; as rational beings, they could never turn away from God entirely if they were not subject to some misapprehension regarding the Good in itself and their true relation to it, inasmuch as only the Good could ever really have the power to fulfill and satisfy their spiritual natures (though, admittedly, the dominant mediaeval theology of angels, which differed markedly from that of the early Christians, did occasionally make the entirely incoherent claim that the fallen angels had done just

At the same time, any movement of the will prompted by an entirely perverse rationale would be, by definition, wholly irrational—insane, that is to say—and therefore no more truly free than a psychotic episode.

woman who chooses to run into a burning building not to save another’s life, but only because she can imagine no greater joy than burning to death, may be exercising a kind of “liberty,” but in the end she is captive to a far profounder poverty of rational freedom.

So, yes, we can act irrationally, but that is no more than a trivial deliberative power; it is not yet true liberty. Only because there is such a thing as a real rational terminus for intentional action, which is objectively distinguishable from irrational ends, is there such a thing as real freedom.

Even the suicide is merely fleeing pain and seeking a peace that the world cannot give, though he or she might be able in the crucial moment of decision to imagine this peace only under the illusory form of oblivion; his or her fault is one only of perception, in a moment of severe confusion and sadness, and certainly not some ultimate rejection of God.

When, therefore, we try to account for the human rejection of God, we can never trace the wanderings of the will back to some primordial moment of perfect liberty, some epistemically pristine instant when a perverse impulse spontaneously arose within an isolated, wholly sane individual will, or within a mind perfectly cognizant of the whole truth of things; we will never find that place where some purely uncompelled apostasy on the part of a particular soul, possessed of a perfect rational knowledge of reality, severed us from God.

Hence, absolute culpability—eternal culpability—lies forever beyond the capacities of any finite being. So does an eternal free defiance of the Good. We are not blameless, certainly; but, then again, that very fact proves that we have never been entirely free not to be blameless—and so neither can we ever be entirely to blame.

even if one believes that Christianity makes room for the condign imposition of purely retributive punishments, it remains the case that a retribution consisting in unending suffering, imposed as recompense for the actions of a finite intellect and will, must be by any sound definition disproportionate, unjust, and at the last nothing more than an expression of sheer pointless cruelty.

number of Christian thinkers down the centuries have been sufficiently aware of this, and of the impossibility of striking a plausible balance between finite sin and infinite misery (since the imbalance is, after all, soberly calculated, an infinite one), that they have felt moved to explain the problem away by any number of cunning or desperate devices.

The most august of these is the claim that the guilt for any crime must be measured not by the intention of the criminal, but solely by the dignity of the one offended against; and this supposedly explains things adequately, because God is infinite, and infinitely good, and infinitely worthy of obedience and love, and so … well, you can fill in the rest.

As before, we are confronted by a claim that no one would seriously entertain for a moment if not for the emotional pressure exerted by the conviction that he or she must believe in an eternal hell that is somehow the work of love and justice, rather than of malice. Any logical definition of penal justice requires a due proportion between (in forensic terms) a mens rea and the actus reus—between, on the one hand, the intentions, knowledge, and powers of the malefactor and, on the o...

The only reason for their inability to make the argument clear is that the argument itself happens to be intrinsically nonsensical; it is a claim made in desperation only because no better, more plausible claim was available.

Once more, not a single one of these attempted justifications for the idea of an eternal hell actually improves the picture of God with which the infernalist orthodoxy presents us, and it is this that should be the chief concern of any believer.

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.

When all the possible paths of evasion have tapered away among the weeds, one has to stop, turn around, retrace one’s steps back to the beginning of the journey, and finally admit that, if there really is an eternal hell for finite spirits, then it has to be the case that God condemns the damned to endless misery not on account of any sane proportion between what they are capable of meriting and how he chooses to requite them for their sins, but solely as a demonstration of his power to do as he wishes.

All souls come into this world already ineluctably destined by divine decree for eternal bliss or eternal torment, and in either case not in respect of any divine favor they could ever have merited on their own, but solely as a revelation of the full range of God’s power and majesty.

In Book III of his Institutes (III.23.7, to be precise), he even asserts that God predestined the human fall from grace, precisely because the whole of everything—creation, fall, redemption, judgment, the eternal bliss of heaven, the endless torments of hell, and whatever else—exists solely for the sake of a perfect display of the full range of God’s omnipotent sovereignty (which for some reason absolutely must be displayed).

Augustine—a towering genius whose inability to read Greek and consequent reliance on defective Latin translations turned out to be the single most tragically consequential case of linguistic incompetence in Christian history.

True, the Calvinist account of predestination is unquestionably the most terrifying and severe expression of the late Augustinian heritage; but it is at least bracing in its consistency, in a way that other expressions of that tradition are not.

Calvin makes no effort to deceive either us or himself that there is some deeper kindness in the doctrine he proclaims, hidden from our sinful eyes only by our own depravity. He proclaims that God hates the damned, and in fact created them to be the objects of his hatred (see his commentaries on the epistles of John). For him, the true unadorned essence of the whole story is nothing more than sheer absolute power exercising itself for power’s sake, which therefore necessarily manifests itself in boundless cruelty no less than in boundless generosity. Calvinists, of course, will object to my phrasing it that way; but it is accurate all the same.

It is an old adage of certain streams of Reformed thought that God could have created us all for everlasting torment if he had so wished, and it would have been perfectly just for him to do so simply because it lay in his power.

theological reasoning;

Nevertheless, to me the God of Calvinism at its worst (as in those notorious lines in Book III of the Institutes) is simply Domitian made omnipotent. If that were Christianity, it would be too psychologically diseased a creed to take seriously at all, and its adherents would deserve only a somewhat acerbic pity, not respect.

If this is one’s religion, then one is simply a diabolist who has gotten the names in the story confused.

This aspect of orthodox Calvinism is for me unsurpassable evidence for my earlier claim that a mind conditioned to believe that it must believe something incredible is capable of convincing itself to accept just about anything, no matter how repellant to reason (or even good taste).

And yet I still insist that, judging from the way Christians actually behave, no one with the exception of a few religious sociopaths really believes any of it as deeply as he or she imagines.

If what the New Testament says about God is true, then it is God’s will not to repay us according to our merits, but simply to claim for himself those of his creatures who had been lost in slavery to death.

A gift made to everyone is no less a gift, and a gift that is intrinsically precious need not be rare to be an act of the highest generosity.

Our very existence is an unmerited gift, after all (unless, of course, there really is an eternal hell, in which case it is also, and perhaps preponderantly, an unmerited brutality).

If you, therefore, who are wicked, know to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in the heavens give good things to those who ask him” (Matthew 7:9–11; cf. Luke 11:11–13).

Faith thus becomes nothing but mindless submission to a collection of intrinsically unintelligible oracles arriving from an entirely hidden source.

I happen to agree with most of the basic metaphysical principles that Davies presumes or propounds, while disagreeing entirely with a whole host of the conclusions he draws from them.

We can achieve some degree of goodness, and thereby participate more deeply in real being, or we can fail to do so and gravitate instead toward nothingness, moral and ontological.

If we know what it is for an ethical agent to act in accord with moral goodness, then we have some sense, however limited, of what moral goodness is in itself, in God who is its source and substance.

So it is no error of reason for a believer to refuse to assent to a supposedly complete narrative of God and creation if that narrative severs every analogical connection between goodness among creatures and the goodness of God.

to believe solely because one thinks faith demands it, in despite of all the counsels of reason, is actually a form of disbelief, of faithlessness.

Submission to a morally unintelligible narrative of God’s dealings with his creatures would be a kind of epistemic nihilism, reducing the act of fidelity to God to a brutishly obstinate infidelity to reason (whose substance, again, is God himself). Submission of that kind could not be sincere, because it would make “true f...

We know that, logically speaking, he is not merely obliged to do good things; rather, he is himself transcendent goodness, and so cannot be the source of injustice.

So now I want to try to think through what the idea of an eternal hell really means, once one has stripped away all the traditional facile justifications and beguiling rhetoric and pious dogmatisms. What remains when one has done that, I believe, is something quite ridiculous, and quite abominable.

It is not the way of the compassionate Maker to create rational beings in order to deliver them over mercilessly to unending affliction in punishment for things of which He knew even before they were fashioned, aware how they would turn out when He created them—and whom nonetheless He created. —ST. ISAAC OF NINEVEH, ASCETICAL HOMILIES