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

by David Bentley Hart

For the earliest and greatest of the church fathers in general, the story of salvation was really quite uncomplicated: We were born in bondage, in the house of a cruel master to whom we had been sold as slaves before we could choose for ourselves; we were born, moreover, not guilty or damnable in God’s eyes, but nonetheless corrupted and enchained by mortality, and so destined to sin through a congenital debility of will; we were ill, impaired, lost, dying; we were in hell already.

But then Christ came to set us free, to buy us out of slavery, to heal us, to restore us to our true estate. In pursuit of those he loved, he invaded even the very depths of that hell we have made for ourselves and one another—in the cosmos, in history, in our own hearts—so as to drag us to himself (to use the actual language of John 12:32).

There is no such thing as perfect freedom in this life, or perfect understanding, and it is sheer nonsense to suggest that we possess limitless or unqualified liberty. Therefore we are incapable of contracting a limitless or unqualified guilt. There are always extenuating circumstances.

Here my particular concern is the general principle that the doctrine of creation constitutes an assertion regarding the eternal identity of God. The doctrine in itself is, after all, chiefly an affirmation of God’s absolute dispositive liberty in all his acts—the absence, that is, of any external restraint upon or necessity behind every action of his will. And, while one must avoid the pathetic anthropomorphism of imagining God’s resolve to create as an arbitrary choice made after deliberation among options, one must still affirm that it is free, that creation can add nothing to God, that God’s being is not dependent on the world’s, and that the only “necessity” present in the divine act of creation is the impossibility of any hindrance being placed upon God’s expression of his own goodness in making the world.

all that exists comes from one divine source, and subsists by the divine grace of impartation and the creaturely labor of participation: an economy of donation and dependency, supereminence and individuation, actuality and potentiality.

Precisely because creation is not a theogony, all of it is theophany.

In the words of John Stuart Mill (in his An Examination of Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy), “To say that God’s goodness may be different in kind from man’s goodness, what is it but saying, with a slight change of phraseology, that God may possibly not be good?”

We can all appreciate, I imagine, the shattering force of Vanya’s terrible question to Alyosha in The Brothers Karamazov: If universal harmony and joy could be secured by the torture and murder of a single innocent child, would you accept that price?

I certainly have no patience whatsoever for twentieth-century biblical fundamentalism and its manifest imbecilities.

there is no way in which persons can be saved as persons except in and with all other persons.

Really, on the whole, Christians rarely pay particularly close attention to what the Bible actually says, for the simple reason that the texts defy synthesis in a canon of exact doctrines, and yet most Christians rely on doctrinal canons.

Theologians are often the most cavalier in their treatment of the texts, chiefly because their first loyalty is usually to the grand systems of belief they have devised or adopted; but the Bible is not a system.

A very great deal of theological tradition consists therefore in explaining away those aspects of scripture that contradict the finely wroug...