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

by David Bentley Hart

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?