That All May Be Saved

DAVID BENTLEY HART’s book That All Shall Be Saved has been creating quite a stir.¹ And understandably so. In it he makes an all-out case in favor of universal salvation. Dissatisfied with the efforts of Hans Urs von Balthasar and others who speak half-heartedly of our hope that all may be saved, that “Christians may be allowed to dare to hope for the salvation of all” (66), he states outright that all humans will in fact be saved. Theologians have struggled with the issue time and again, and have seldom come up with such a clear-cut answer as Hart offers. Of course, if the thesis is right, it would change the dynamic of Christian life considerably. Hart has been accused of mistranslating and misinterpreting Scripture, of presenting a dictator God who obliges everyone to keep company with him for ever and ever, of making a good God of our imagination morally superior to the God revealed in Scripture, of neglecting the power of human free will to the point of trivializing human acts, of taking it for granted that most Christians delight in the pains of the condemned, of obscuring the value of temporal life, and of being a pugnacious and determined adversary.² Nevertheless he argues his case cogently and with depth.

I. Four Meditations

Hart presents his position through four meditations, preceded by an ample introduction and with a final conclusion.

The first meditation goes to the core of the matter, which Hart considers to be the goodness of God who creates the world ex nihilo (65–91). If God created the world without presuppositions of any kind—every last thing, every single atom, every last person, and so on—then how can we say that even one such person or creature could be lost forever? To do so, Hart says, we would have to deny God’s ultimate attribute, which is his goodness. Yet Scripture teaches unequivocally that God is good, indeed that God is Love. Christ proved this beyond all doubt by dying on the Cross, as did the Father by raising him from the dead. Hart notes that according to Gregory of Nyssa creation ex nihilo is not merely a protological issue (referring to the beginning), but also an eschatological one, for God creates the world with an end, a purpose, a design. If the end is defective, so too must be the beginning. For Gregory (as well as Maximus the Confessor), “protology and eschatology are a single science” (68). God is “the beginning and end of all things” (69). Ultimately, “all causes are logically reducible to their first cause” (70).

If God has made everything, then evil can never be considered as “something” that might oppose God autonomously, especially if it endures forever. Rather evil is always and only a privatio boni, the privation of the good in a particular being, which can always be supplemented or overcome by God’s creative or saving action. This was the consistent position of Christian theologians as they opposed different kinds of Gnosticism, dualism, and spiritualism. God is involved in no “dialectical struggle with some recalcitrant exteriority” (71). God acts in “an inexhaustible power wholly possessed by the divine in peaceful liberty in eternity” (ibid.). “God does not determine himself in creation” (72), as Hegel had suggested he did. Hart recognizes that for some people divine “goodness” obeys a logic different from what we find in created goodness, and so they propose that eternal condemnation might be the fruit of God’s “goodness.” Hart insists however that a certain analogy, or mutual recognizability, between the two should be possible (74).

Hart concludes in this first meditation that

if both the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo and that of eternal damnation are true, that very evil is indeed already comprised within the positive intentions and dispositions of God. . . . He has willed a tragedy, not just a transient dissonance within creation’s goodness . . . but as that irreducible quantum of eternal loss that . . . still reduces all else to a merely relative value.

(82f.)

The temporal punishment that leads...