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

by David Bentley Hart

A hardened heart is already its own punishment; the refusal to love or be loved makes the love of others—or even just their presence—a source of suffering and a goad to wrath.

The most effective technique for subduing the moral imagination is to teach it to mistake the contradictory for the paradoxical, and thereby to accept incoherence as profundity, or moral idiocy as spiritual subtlety.

It is hard for me to know exactly how to respond to this vision of Christianity, I have to say. In part, this is because I know it to be based on a notoriously confused reading of scripture, one whose history goes all the way back to the late 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.

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.

I suspect that no figure in Christian history has suffered a greater injustice as a result of the desperate inventiveness of the Christian moral imagination than the Apostle Paul, since it was the violent misprision of his theology of grace—starting with the great Augustine, it grieves me to say—that gave rise to almost all of these grim distortions of the gospel. 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.

Theologians are often the most cavalier in their treatment of the texts, chiefly because their first loyalty is usually to the grand systems of belief they have devised or adopted; but the Bible is not a system.

We are created, that is to say, according to a divine design, after the divine image, oriented toward a divine purpose, and thus are fulfilled in ourselves only insofar as we can achieve the perfection of our natures in union with God. There alone our true happiness lies.

This inevitably places Christian thought in the classical moral and metaphysical tradition that assumes that true freedom consists in the realization of a complex nature in its own proper good (the “intellectualist” model of freedom, as I have called it above). Freedom is a being’s power to flourish as what it naturally is, to become ever more fully what it is. The freedom of an oak seed is its uninterrupted growth into an oak tree. The freedom of a rational spirit is its consummation in union with God.

We are free not because we can choose, but only when we have chosen well. And to choose well we must ever more clearly see the “sun of the Good” (to employ the lovely Platonic metaphor), and to see more clearly we must continue to choose well; and the 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.

It was, above all, a joyous proclamation, and a call to a lost people to find their true home at last, in their Father’s house. It did not initially make its appeal to human hearts by forcing them to revert to some childish or bestial cruelty latent in their natures; rather, it sought to awaken them to a new form of life, one whose premise was charity.