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

by David Bentley Hart

I have always found what became the traditional majority Christian view of hell—that is, a conscious state of perpetual torment—a genuinely odious idea, both morally and emotionally, and still think it the single best argument for doubting the plausibility of the Christian faith as a coherent body of doctrine or as a morally worthy system of devotion.

Christian doctrine of creatio ex nihilo is not merely a cosmological or metaphysical claim, but also an eschatological claim about the world’s relation to God, and for that reason a moral claim about the nature of God in himself. In the end of all things is their beginning, and only from the perspective of the end can one know what they are, why they have been made, and who the God is who has called them forth from nothingness.

Anything willingly done is done toward an end; and anything done toward an end is defined by that end.

First, as God’s act of creation is free, constrained by neither necessity nor ignorance, all contingent ends are intentionally enfolded within his decision.

Gaze for a while at a newborn baby, and then try to believe earnestly and lovingly in such a God. If you find you are able to do so, then your religion has corrupted your conscience.

But we can avoid affective arguments here. The claim is manifestly a contradiction in terms:

The very notion of an “inherited guilt” is a logical absurdity, rather on the order of a “square circle.” All that the doctrine can truly be taken to assert, speaking logically, is that God willfully imputes to innocent creatures a guilt they can never have really cont...

Pascal, in assuring us that our existence is explicable only in light of a belief in the eternal and condign torment of babies who die before reaching the baptismal font, shows us that there is often no meaningful distinction between perfect faith and perfect nihilism.

Calvin, in telling us that hell is copiously populated with infants not a cubit long, merely reminds us that, within a certain traditional understanding of grace and predestination, the choice to worship God rather than the devil is at most a matter of prudence.

It was not merely peculiarity of personal temperament that prompted Tertullian (c. 155–c. 240) to speak of the saved relishing the delightful spectacle of the destruction of the reprobate, or that prompted Peter Lombard (c. 1096–1160) and Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) to assert that the vision of the torments of the damned will increase the beatitude of the redeemed (as any trace of pity would darken the joys of heaven), or that prompted Martin Luther (1483–1546) to insist that the saved will rejoice to see their loved ones roasting in hell. None of these good pious souls was doing anything other than following the only poor thread of logic he had to guide him out of a labyrinth of impossible contradictions; the sheer enormity of the idea of a hell of eternal torment forces the mind toward absurdities and atrocities.

After all, 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? Some other being altogether, surely: a spiritual anonymity, a vapid spark of pure intellection, the residue of a soul that has been reduced to no one.

Here it suffices to note that, in the end, the deepest problem with such claims is not so much their logic as their sheer moral hideousness.

The most civilized apologists for the “infernalist” orthodoxies these days, as I have noted elsewhere in these pages, tend to prefer to defend their position by an appeal to creaturely freedom and to God’s respect for its dignity. And, as I have also noted, there could scarcely be a poorer argument; whether made crudely or elegantly, it invariably fails, because it depends upon an incoherent model of freedom.

But to me it seems impossible to speak of freedom in any meaningful sense at all unless one begins from the assumption that, for a rational spirit, to see the good and know it truly is to desire it insatiably and to obey it unconditionally, while not to desire it is not to have known it truly, and so never to have been free to choose it.

“And you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free” (John 8:32): for freedom and truth are one, and not to know the truth is to be enslaved. “Father, forgive them; for they do not know what they are doing” (Luke 23:34): not seeing the Good, says God to God, they did not freely choose evil, and must be pardoned.

If faith is really so devoid of evident rationality, then it is not even faith, for it possesses no intelligible content.

In the words of John Stuart Mill (in his An Examination of Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy), “To say that God’s goodness may be different in kind from man’s goodness, what is it but saying, with a slight change of phraseology, that God may possibly not be good?”

Let it be someone utterly despicable—say, Hitler. Even then, no matter how we understand the fate of that single wretched soul in relation to God’s intentions, no account of the divine decision to create out of nothingness can make its propriety morally intelligible.

And what would the mystery of God becoming a man in order to effect a merely partial rescue of created order truly be, as compared to the far deeper mystery of a worthless man becoming the suffering god upon whose perpetual holocaust the entire order of creation finally depends?

I certainly have no patience whatsoever for twentieth-century biblical fundamentalism and its manifest imbecilities.

There is a general sense among most Christians that the notion of an eternal hell is explicitly and unremittingly advanced in the New Testament; and yet, when we go looking for it in the actual pages of the text, it proves remarkably elusive. The whole idea is, for instance, entirely absent from the Pauline corpus, as even the thinnest shadow of a hint. Nor is it anywhere patently present in any of the other epistolary texts. There is one verse in the gospels, Matthew 25:46, that—at least, as traditionally understood—offers what seems the strongest evidence for the idea (though even there, as I shall explain below, the wording leaves room for considerable doubt regarding its true significance); and then there are perhaps a couple of verses from Revelation (though, as ever when dealing with that particular book, caveat lector). Beyond that, nothing is clear.

Nowhere is there any description of a kingdom of perpetual cruelty presided over by Satan, as though he were a kind of chthonian god.

On the other hand, however, there are a remarkable number of passages in the New Testament, several of them from Paul’s writings, that appear instead to promise a final salvation of all persons and all things, and in the most unqualified terms.

How did some images become mere images in the general Christian imagination while others became exact documentary portraits of some final reality?

If he really believed that the alternative to life in Christ is eternal torment, it seems fairly careless of him to have omitted any mention of the fact.

do not even really think that Revelation is a book about the end of time, so much as a manifesto written in figurative code by a Jewish Christian who believed in keeping the Law of Moses but who also believed that Jesus was the Messiah. It is for the most part, as far as I can tell, an extravagantly allegorical “prophecy” not about the end of history as such, but about the inauguration of a new historical epoch in which Rome will have fallen, Jerusalem will have been restored, and the Messiah will have been given power “to rule the gentiles with a rod of iron.”

Let us consider, to begin with, the very language of heaven and hell, which to us seems so clear, but which is almost impossible to impose consistently or unambiguously upon the Greek of the New Testament. The language of scripture speaks of a restored creation, of a new Age of the world yet to dawn, and of a New Jerusalem established upon the earth; it makes no promises whatsoever about a heaven of redeemed souls. And, as regards the fate of the derelict, what the actual text of the New Testament says could scarcely be more evocatively vague.

For one thing, there is no single Greek term in the New Testament that quite corresponds—or corresponds at all, really—to the Anglo-Saxon word “hell,” despite the prodigality with which that term has always been employed in traditional English translations of the text; nor anywhere in scripture do we find a discrete concept that quite corresponds to the image of hell—a realm of ingenious tortures presided over by Satan—that took ever more opulent and terrifying mythical shape in later Christian centuries.

There is frequent mention of the realm of the dead, Hades, which is generally understood as being located under the earth (or perhaps under the waters of the seas), and which in Hebrew is called Sheol. This is where, according to venerable belief, practically all the dead await the end of time. In Luke, it is there that both the rich man and Lazarus ...

Finally, there is talk of “the Gehenna,” the Greek form of Ge-Hinnom, “Valley of Hinnom.” This is a term that appears eleven times in the synoptic gospels and then only once more in the New Testament, in the Letter of James. If there is any word in the text that comes near to having something like the meaning we tend to attach to the word “hell” today, this would be it.

Precisely why the Valley of Hinnom (or, as it was also known, the Valley of Hinnom’s Sons) had by Christ’s time become a name for a place of judgment, punishment, and purification (usually after death) is difficult to say. It is a real place geographically speaking, as it happens, lying to the south and west of Jerusalem. Its terrain is not particularly inviting, but neither is it particularly infernal. There is an old tradition that it was here that the Tophet—the site of child-sacrifice for worshippers of Moloch and Ba’al, as attested in Leviticus, 2 Chronicles, 2 Kings, Isaiah, and Jeremiah—was located.

Talk of the Gehenna was part of the common religious parlance of the Jewish world before, during, and soon after the time of Jesus, but how it was interpreted by the differing schools of theology is almost impossible to reduce to a single formula or concept. Clearly it was understood sometimes as a place of final destruction, sometimes simply as a place of punishment, and sometimes as a place of purgatorial regeneration.

The texts of the gospels simply make no obvious claim about a place or state of endless suffering; and, again, the complete absence of any such notion in the Pauline corpus (or, for that matter, in John’s gospel, or in the other New Testament epistles, or in the earliest Christian documents of the post-apostolic church, such as the Didache and the writings of the “Apostolic Fathers,” and so forth) makes the very concept nearly as historically suspect as it is morally repellant.

It is hard, I know, to convince most Christians that the picture of hell with which they were raised is not lavishly on display in the pages of scripture. In part, conventional practices of translation—such as the aforementioned custom of using the single English word “hell” as a collective translation for Gehenna, Hades, and Tartarus—are much to blame for this.

His condemnations were aimed principally at the rich and powerful, and they expressed his rage against those who exploited and oppressed and ignored the weak, the poor, the ill, the imprisoned. He was a prophet of Israel who, like so many of the prophets of Israel before him, employed the ferocious imagery of a final divine reckoning for creation to denounce the injustices and follies of his age; and, as he was a first-century Jew, the language he used necessarily included much of the terrifying apocalyptic imagery and mythical topographies of Jewish intertestamental literature and early rabbinic teaching.

All it tells us is that God is just, and that the world he will bring to pass will be one in which mercy has cast out cruelty, and that all of us must ultimately answer for the injustices we perpetrate.

Admittedly, it is difficult not to admire the sheer ingenuity with which, having arrived at dogmatic commitments that no conscience not cowed by terror could abide, many of them have striven to make the abominable seem, if not palatable, at least vaguely reasonable.

They have beguiled themselves with those curious fables I have already mentioned above: they tell themselves, say, that an eternity of torment is an entirely condign penalty for even the smallest imaginable sin, the most trivial peccadillo, the pettiest lapse of plain morality, because the gravity of any transgression must be measured by the dignity of the one whom it has wronged, and God necessarily possesses infinite dignity; or they tell themselves that the revelation of God’s sovereign glory, in dereliction and redemption, is a good surpassing every other, so good indeed as to make the perpetual sufferings of rational beings somehow a happy circumstance in the optics of eternity.

But again, of course, all of this is nonsense: guilt’s “proportion” is not an objective quantity, but an evaluation, and only a monstrous justice would refuse to assign guilt according to the capacities and knowledge of the transgressor; ...

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.

Aboriginal guilt, predestination ante praevisa merita, the eternal damnation of unbaptized infants, the real existence of “vessels of wrath,” and so on—all of these odious and incoherent dogmatic leitmotifs, so to speak, and others equally nasty, have been ascribed to Paul. And yet each and every one of them not only is incompatible with the guiding themes of Paul’s proclamation of Christ’s triumph and of God’s purpose in election, but is something like their perfect inversion.

God’s wisdom far surpasses ours, and his love can accomplish all that it intends. He has bound everyone in disobedience so as to show mercy to everyone (11:32): all are vessels of wrath precisely so that all may be made vessels of mercy. As I say, not a difficult argument to follow, if one has the will to do so.

Paul is utterly and unwaveringly clear that it is precisely those not called forth, those who are not the “elect,” those who have instead been allowed to stumble, who still will never be allowed to fall.

I assume, or at least hope, that none of us is able to agree with the argument of Thomas (among others) that the knowledge of the torments of the damned will increase the felicity of the blessed in heaven (see Summa Theologiae, supplement to the third part, qu. 94)—even if, as the more irrepressibly eager of Thomas’s apologists will always helpfully observe, he means only that the saints will derive pleasure from the contrast between their beatitude and the damnation from which they were graciously spared, and not that the blessed will take sadistic delight in the spectacle as such.

the ability to find pleasure in seeing another suffering pains to which one is oneself immune is in fact what sadism is.

I recently read an Evangelical apologist for the infernalist orthodoxies argue that it is morally correct for the saved to cease from pity for the damned simply because such pity is fruitless, just as it is forgivable to avert one’s eyes from a frightful accident on the roads from which one cannot rescue the victims, and to cease to think about it entirely. This, it should be needless to say, is nothing more than a counsel of moral imbecility. Neither can my pity for a little girl dying of cancer cure her, for what that is worth; but what an atrocity of a man I would be if I ceased pitying her for that reason.

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.

But perhaps these really are the only alternatives the infernalist has to choose among: If there really is an eternal hell, where souls suffer in perpetuity, perhaps the blessedness of the saved absolutely must in some large measure consist either in callousness or in ignorance.

Now, granted, part of the absurdity of such arguments is the mundane psychologization of heaven and hell they involve, and the somewhat burlesque effects produced whenever one attempts to imagine the unimaginable in terms of the familiar. Whatever the world to come may be, it surely will not involve the souls of the saved gathering like eager tourists along steel railings above the Grand Canyon, gazing down into hell and waving impishly to their aunts and cousins among the flames.