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

by David Bentley Hart

It is not simply that our identities are constituted by our memories—though, of course, they are, and this is crucially important—but also that the personhood of any of us, in its entirety, is created by and sustained within the loves and associations and affinities that shape us. There is no such thing as a person in separation. Personhood as such, in fact, is not a condition possible for an isolated substance. It is an act, not a thing, and it is achieved only in and through a history of relations with others. We are finite beings in a state of becoming, and in us there is nothing that is not action, dynamism, an emergence into a fuller (or a retreat into a more impoverished) existence.