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

by David Bentley Hart

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

This occurred to me also some long time ago.

reason, the moral destiny of creation and the moral nature of God are absolutely inseparable.

Moreover, the end toward which he acts must be his own goodness; for he is himself the beginning and end of all things. This is not to deny that, in addition to the “primary causality” of God’s act of creation, there are innumerable forms of “secondary causality” operative within the created order; but none of these can exceed or escape the one end toward which the first cause directs all things. And this eternal teleology that ultimately governs every action in creation, viewed from the vantage of history, takes the form of a cosmic eschatology. Seen as an eternal act of God, creation’s term is the divine nature for which all things were made; seen from within the orientation of time, its term is the “final judgment” that brings all things to their true conclusion.

precisely because God in himself is absolute—“absolved,” that is, of every pathos of the contingent, every “affect” of the sort that a finite substance has the power to visit upon another—his moral “venture” in creating is infinite. One way or another, after all, all causes are logically reducible to their first cause. This is no more than a logical truism. And it does not matter whether one construes the relation between primary and secondary causality as one of total determinism or as one of utter indeterminacy, for in either case all “consequents” are—either as actualities or merely as possibilities—contingent upon their primordial “antecedent,” apart from which they could not exist.

He could not be the creator of anything substantially evil without evil also being part of the definition of who he essentially is; for he alone is the wellspring of all that exists.

God has no need of the world; he creates it not because he is dependent upon it, but because its dependency on him is a fitting expression of the bounty of his goodness.

the story Christians tell is of creation as God’s sovereign act of love, neither adding to nor qualifying his eternal nature, and so it is also a story that leaves no room for an ultimate distinction between the universal truth of reason and the moral meaning of the particular, or for any distinction between the moral meaning of the particular and the moral nature of God. Precisely because God does not determine himself in creation—precisely because there is no dialectical necessity binding him to time or chaos, no need to shape his identity in the refining fires of history—in creating he reveals himself truly.

Nor am I speaking of a few marginal, eccentric sects within Christian history; I mean the broad mainstream: particularly, I suppose it pleases me to say, but not exclusively, in the West. Let us, briefly, dwell on the obvious. Consider (to begin with the mildest of moral difficulties) how many Christians down the centuries have had to reconcile their

consciences to the repellant notion that all humans are at conception already guilty of a transgression that condemns them, justly, to eternal separation from God and eternal suffering, and that, in this doctrine’s extreme form, every newborn infant belongs to a massa damnata, hateful in God’s eyes from the first moment of existence. Really, no one should need to be told that this is a wicked claim: 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.

darn skippy he's right!

Who, that loves his brother, would not, upheld by the love of Christ, and with a dim hope that in the far-off time there might be some help for him, arise from the company of the blessed, and walk down into the dismal regions of despair, to sit with the last, the only unredeemed, the Judas of his race, and be himself more blessed in the pains of hell, than in the glories of heaven? Who, in the midst of the golden harps and the white wings, knowing that one of his kind, one miserable brother in the old-world-time when men were taught to love their neighbour as themselves, was howling unheeded far below in the vaults of the creation, who, I say, would not feel that he must arise, that he had no choice, that, awful as it was, he must gird his loins, and go down into the smoke and the darkness and the fire, travelling the weary and fearful road into the far country to find his brother?—who, I mean, that had the mind of Christ, that had the love of the Father? (Unspoken Sermons, Series I: “Love Thy Neighbour”)

Exactly! George MacDonald was always on a roll.