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

by David Bentley Hart

then, finally, there was his metaphysical—but also biblical—conviction regarding the inherent finitude of evil, the infinite fullness of God’s goodness, and the irrepressible dynamism of the moral life of rational spirits. He accepted, naturally, the definition of evil as a purely privative reality, with no substance or nature of its own, since God alone is the source of all being and “in him there is no darkness at all.” He believed also that finite natures are necessarily dynamic realities, constituted as much by change as by formal stability, and that a finite rational being exists only in its act of moral and ontological desire for the Good, ever in motion. And he believed, of course, that God alone is the infinite plenitude of being and goodness that every soul seeks, by union with whom the soul is transformed into an eternally expanding vessel of divinity, an infinite capacity for love and knowledge transfigured forever—again, as Paul says—“from glory to glory” (2 Corinthians 3:18).