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

by David Bentley Hart

the faith commands us to love God with all our heart, soul, and mind and our neighbors as ourselves while also enjoining us to believe in the reality of an eternal hell; we cannot possibly do both of these things at once. I say this not just because I think it emotionally impossible fully to love a God capable of consigning any creature to everlasting suffering (though in fact I do think this). I say it, rather, because absolute love of neighbor and a perfectly convinced belief in hell are antithetical to one another in principle, and because all our language of Christian love is rendered vacuous to the precise degree that we truly believe in eternal perdition. Love my neighbor all I may, if I believe hell is real and also eternal I cannot love him as myself. My conviction that one of us might go to such a hell while the other enters into the Kingdom of God means that I must be willing to abandon him—abandon everyone, in fact—to a fate of total misery while yet continuing to assume that, having done so, I shall be able to enjoy perfect eternal bliss. I must already proleptically, without the least hesitation or regret, have surrendered him to endless pain. I must—must—preserve a place in my heart, and that the deepest and most enduring part, where I have already turned away from him with a callous self-interest so vast as to be indistinguishable from utter malevolence.

This is all true, unless you love someone so much you're willing to go to hell for them. Such exceptions have to be so rare -- if they're even possible -- that they practically prove the rule. Mark Twain depicted such a thing in "Huckleberry Finn"; Huck says "I'll go to hell", but will nevertheless save his friend Jim from slavery. Profound love of neighbor can coexist with a belief in eternal hell, per Twain, but only in such an exceptional case as he depicts there.