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

by David Bentley Hart

No matter how exclusive we imagine the criteria for membership in the society of the damned to be, nothing can make the idea morally coherent.

theodicy

the question of whether the saved can be happy in heaven if others are damned, which is a fatuous question: a heroin addict is happy when high, after all, and no doubt God could preserve us in an opiate ecstasy forever if he so chose; the issue is at what price that happiness is to be purchased, and whether we can actually be saved as the persons we are—or as persons at all—under those terms.

The difficulty lies in convincing some readers to relinquish their certainties regarding what they imagine they know about the text of scripture, as a result of long indoctrination fortified by misleading translations.

Absolutely nowhere, however, did he describe some place of eternal misery. In general, in fact, impartial New Testament scholars are keenly aware that neither Jesus nor Paul advanced such a picture. How it eventually entered Christian teaching—appearing as it did roughly a generation after the time of the apostles—is a matter of some debate.

Dimitris Kyrtatas, for instance, attributes much of it to the apocryphal Apocalypse of Peter. Whatever the case, though, the critical consensus is that the New Testament contains, for the most part, two kinds of language about the last judgment: one that seems to portend the final destruction of the wicked at the threshold of the restored creation in the Age to Come and another that seems clearly to promise universal salvation.

allowing themselves to be convinced that they are obliged to believe things about God that they would be ashamed to believe about all but the worst of men.

emollient

(to use C. S. Lewis’s imagery): the damned, that is, freely choose their perdition, out of a hatred of divine love so intense that they prefer endless torment; and so God, out of his fastidious regard for the dignity of human freedom, reluctantly grants them the dereliction they so jealously crave.

The truth is that all of these theological degeneracies follow from an incoherence deeply fixed at the heart of almost all Christian traditions: that is, the idea that the omnipotent God of love, who creates the world from nothing, either imposes or tolerates the eternal torment of the damned. 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. But, long before the moral issues even come into view, the logical deficiencies in such language should already be obvious: 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?

Gregory of Nyssa’s description of the progress of all persons toward union with God in the one plērōma, the one fullness, of the “whole Christ”: all spiritual wills moving, to use his lovely image, from outside the temple walls (in the ages) into the temple precincts, and finally (beyond the ages) into the very sanctuary of the glory—as one.

If God is the good creator of all, he must also be the savior of all, without fail, who brings to himself all he has made, including all rational wills, and only thus returns to himself in all that goes forth from him. If he is not the savior of all, the Kingdom is only a dream, and creation something considerably worse than a nightmare. But, again, it is not so. According to scripture, God saw that what he created was good. If so, then all creatures must, in the ages, see it as well.

Matthew 25:46,

limited term (Matthew 5:26; 18:34; Luke 12:47–48, 59). 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.

We can see that the ovens are metaphors, and the wheat and the chaff, and the angelic harvest, and the barred doors, and the debtors’ prisons; so why do we not also recognize that the deathless worm and the inextinguishable fire and all other such images (none of which, again, means quite what the infernalist imagines) are themselves mere figural devices within the embrace of an extravagant apocalyptic imagery that, in itself, has no strictly literal elements?

Romans 5:18–19: Ἄρα οὖν ὡς δι᾽ ἑνὸς παραπτώματος εἰς πάντας ἀνθρώπους εἰς κατάκριμα, οὕτως καὶ δι᾽ ἑνὸς δικαιώματος εἰς πάντας ἀνθρώπους εἰς δικαίωσιν ζωῆς· ὥσπερ γὰρ διὰ τῆς παρακοῆς τοῦ ἑνὸς ἀνθρώπου ἁμαρτωλοὶ κατεστάθησαν οἱ πολλοί, οὕτως καὶ διὰ τῆς ὑπακοῆς τοῦ ἑνὸς δίκαιοι κατασταθήσονται οἱ πολλοί. (So, then, just as through one transgression came condemnation for all human beings, so also through one act of righteousness came a rectification of life for all human beings; for, just as by the heedlessness of the one man the many were rendered sinners, so also by the obedience of the one the many will be rendered righteous.)

1 Corinthians 15:22: ὥσπερ γὰρ ἐν τῷ Ἀδὰμ πάντες ἀποθνῄσκουσιν, οὕτως καὶ ἐν τῷ Χριστῷ πάντες ζωοποιηθήσονται. (For just as in Adam all die, so also in the Anointed [Christ] all will be given life.)

Romans 11:32: συνέκλεισεν γὰρ ὁ θεὸς τοὺς πάντας εἰς ἀπείθειαν ἵνα τοὺς πάντας ἐλεήσῃ. (For God shut up everyone in obstinacy so that he might show mercy to everyone.)

1 Timothy 2:3–6: … τοῦ σωτῆρος ἡμῶν θεοῦ, ὁς πάντας ἀνθρώπους θέλει σωθῆναι καὶ εἰς ἐπίγνωσιν ἀληθείας ἐλθεῖν. Εἷς γὰρ θεός, εἷς καὶ μεσίτης θεοῦ καὶ ἀνθρώπων, ἄνθρωπος Χριστὸς Ἰησοῦς, ὁ δοὺς ἑαυτὸν ἀντίλυτρον ὑπὲρ πάντων … (… our savior God, who intends all human beings to be saved and to come to a full knowledge of truth. For there is one God, and also one mediator of God and human beings: a human being, the Anointed One Jesus, who gave himself as a liberation fee for all …)

Titus 2:11: Ἐπεφάνη γὰρ ἡ χάρις τοῦ θεοῦ σωτήριος πᾶσιν ἀνθρώποις … (For the grace of God has appeared, giving salvation to all human beings …)

John 12:32: κἀγὼ ἐὰν ὑψωθῶ ἐκ τῆς γῆς, πάντας ἑλκύσω πρὸς ἐμαυτόν. (And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will drag everyone to me.)

(But we see Jesus, who was made just a little less than angels, having been crowned with glory and honor on account of suffering death, so that by God’s grace he might taste of death on behalf of everyone.)

John 12:47: … οὐ γὰρ ἦλθον ἵνα κρίνω τὸν κόσμον, ἀλλ’ ἵνα σώσω τὸν κόσμον. (… for I came not that I might judge the cosmos, but that I might save the cosmos.)

(For which reason God also exalted him on high and graced him with the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend—of beings heavenly and earthly and subterranean—and every tongue gladly confess that Jesus the Anointed is Lord, for the glory of God the Father.)

1 John 2:2: καὶ αὐτὸς ἱλασμός ἐστιν περὶ τῶν ἁμαρτιῶν ἡμῶν, οὐ περὶ τῶν ἡμετέρων δὲ μόνον ἀλλὰ καὶ περὶ ὅλου τοῦ κόσμου. (And he is atonement for our sins, and not only for ours, but for the whole cosmos.)

(For God sent the Son into the cosmos not that he might condemn the cosmos, but that the cosmos might be saved through him.)

And we are supposedly forbidden—by piety, by doctrine, by prudence—from attempting to decide between them.

two different moments within a seamless narrative, two distinct eschatological horizons, one enclosed within the other. In this way of seeing the matter, one set of images marks the furthest limit of the immanent course of history, and the division therein—right at the threshold between this age and the “Age to come” (‘olam ha-ba, in Hebrew)—between those who have surrendered to God’s love and those who have not; and the other set refers to that final horizon of all horizons, “beyond all ages,” where even those who have traveled as far from God as it is possible to go, through every possible self-imposed hell, will at the last find themselves in the home to which they are called from everlasting, their hearts purged of every last residue of hatred and pride.

(And, when all things have been subordinated to him, then will the Son himself also be subordinated to the one who has subordinated all things to him, so that God may be all in all.)

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. In every instance in which he names the stakes of our relation to Christ, he describes salvation as rescue from death, not from perpetual torture. I know it is traditional to take “death” here as meaning “spiritual death,” which really means not death in any obligingly literal and terminal sense, but instead endless agony in separation from God; but Paul would have had to be something of a cretin not to have made that absolutely clear if that was indeed what he intended his readers to understand.

I regard it as a supremely foolish enterprise for anyone to attempt to extract so much as a single clear and unarguable doctrine regarding anything at all from the text (in the way that these days fundamentalist Evangelicals especially like to do, but that Christians of every confession have been wont to do down the centuries). The whole book is to my mind an intricate and impenetrable puzzle, one whose key vanished long ago along with the particular local community of Christians who produced it.

chiefly falls upon patently allegorical figures like “Hades” (Death personified) or “the Beast” (Rome “brutified”),

the curiously extended coda to the book’s scenes of judgment, considered dispassionately, conforms very well to that notion of two distinct eschatological horizons that I described above: the more proximate horizon of historical judgment, where the good and evil in all of us are brought to light and (by whatever means necessary) separated; and the more remote horizon of an eternity where a final peace awaits us all, beyond everything that ever had the power to divide souls from each other.

preterist view of much of this language—that is, the view that a great deal of the gospels’ talk about a coming tribulation and judgment is most properly understood as referring principally to the fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Temple, and therefore to events that are (for us) already long past, even though it is all expressed in the venerable prophetic tropes of a coming epoch of divine wrath and mercy—enjoy an almost unassailable hermeneutical advantage over all other interpreters.

jeremiads—that is to say, it is Jeremiah in particular, more than any other of the prophets, whose voice seems at times to be resumed and amplified in the voice of Christ. And just as Jeremiah—specifically in chapters 7, 19, and 31 to 32 of his book—invoked the language of divine judgment and of “the Gehenna” to prophesy the imminent destruction of Jerusalem, followed by its divine restoration and preservation “unto the Age” (31:40), so also Jesus warns in the gospels of a ruin every bit as imminent and as terrible as the one Jeremiah foresaw, also succeeded by a mysterious restoration.

whenever one catches a glimpse of the specific doctrinal commitments sustaining that despair, the picture begins to lose its enchanting pathos and to become instead something noisome, morbid, even a bit diabolical.

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;

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.

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,

How can the promised Messiah of Israel fail to be the savior of, quite specifically, Israel?

His is a much more general question concerning the two communities of Israel and of the church, and the answer at which he ultimately arrives is one that he draws ingeniously from the logic of election in Jewish scripture. He begins his reflections, it is true, by limning the problem that torments him in the starkest terms imaginable; but he does so in a completely and explicitly conditional voice.

For his own ends, Paul continues, God hardened Pharaoh’s heart. He has mercy on whom he will, hardens whom he will (9:15–18). And if you think this unjust, who then are you, O man, to reproach the God who made you? May not the potter cast his clay for purposes both high and low, as he chooses (9:19–21)? So, “then, what if” (εἰ δέ, ei de) God should show his power by preserving vessels suitable only for wrath, keeping them solely for destruction, in order to provide an instructive counterpoint to the riches of the glory he lavishes on vessels prepared for mercy, whom he has called from among the Jews and the gentiles alike (9:22–24)?

purely conditional: that “what if … ?” must be strictly observed. For, as it happens, rather than offering a solution to the quandary in which he finds himself, Paul is simply restating that quandary in its bleakest possible form, at the very brink of despair.

contrary to his own warnings, Paul does indeed continue to question God’s justice; and he spends the next two chapters unambiguously rejecting the provisional answer (the “vessels of wrath” hypothesis) altogether, so as to reach a completely different—and far more glorious—conclusion. And, again, his reasoning is based entirely upon the language of election in Jewish scripture.

Throughout the book of Genesis, that is to say, the pattern of God’s election is persistently, even perversely antinomian: Ever and again, the elder to whom the birthright properly belongs is supplanted by the younger, whom God has chosen in defiance of all natural “justice.” This is practically the running motif uniting the whole text, from Cain and Abel to Manasseh and Ephraim. But—and this is crucial—that pattern is one not of exclusion and inclusion, but rather of a providential delay and divagation in the course of the natural “justice” of primogeniture, as a result of which the scope of election has time to be immensely widened, so that ultimately it takes in not only the brother originally and “justly” excluded by the law of primogeniture (Jacob, for example), but also the brother (Esau, for instance) who had been “unjustly” pretermitted by God’s subversion of custom. There is, it turns out, no final division between the elect and the derelict here at all, but rather the precise opposite: the final embrace of all parties in the single and inventively universal grace of election. This is why Esau and Jacob provide so apt a typology for Paul’s argument. Esau, we must remember, is not finally rejected in the story of the two brothers; he and Jacob are reconciled, to the increase of both, precisely as a consequence of their temporary estrangement. Indeed, when they are reunited, it is Jacob who says to Esau (not the reverse), “Seeing your face is like seeing God’s.” And...

it turns out that they have been elected not as the limited number of the “saved” within Israel, but as the earnest through which all of Israel will be saved (11:26); they ar...

For the time being, true, a part of Israel is hardened, but this will remain the case only until the “full entirety” (πλήρωμα, plērōma) of the gentiles enter in.

Temporarily excluded (like Esau) for the sake of “the world’s reconciliation,” they too will at the last be restored to God’s grace; and this will be nothing less than a “resurrection from the dead” (11:11–12, 15).