I am friends with at least two people who have been influenced by Hart’s book (and I know of many others). What strikes me is that Hart’s book has launched at the perfect time in terms of the cultural zeitgeist. Everyone wants a more inclusive culture, and many desire non-punitive correction (except for those who breach #metoo level crime).

David Bentley Hart has faced the moral implications of the eternality of hell, found them wanting, and proposed that in the end, all shall be saved. At the heart of his argument lies, from his point of view, the moral hideousness of hell. 

Jason Micheli explains Hart’s moral vision well when recounting Hart’s experience of reading an article that detailed the death of a family:

The article highlighted a Sri Lankan father, who, in spite of his frantic efforts, which included swimming in the roiling sea with his wife and mother-in-law on his back, was unable to prevent his wife or any of his four children from being swept to their deaths. The father recounted the names of his four children and then, overcome with grief, sobbed to the reporter that “my wife and children must have thought, ‘Father is here . . . he will save us’ but I couldn’t do it.”

Hart wonders: If you had the chance to speak to this father in the moment of his deepest grief, what should you say? Hart argues that only a moral cretin would have approached that father with abstract theological explanation: “Sir, your children’s deaths are a part of God’s eternal but mysterious counsels” or “Your children’s deaths, tragic as they may seem, in the larger sense serve God’s complex design for creation” or “It’s all part of God’s plan.” 

This moral sensibility fills the pages of That All Shall Be Saved. Hart at once denounces the teaching of eternal conscious torment while affirming that in the end (even after a sojourn in hell) everyone shall be saved. 

Is he right? 

Influence

I am friends with at least two people who have been influenced by Hart’s book (and I know of many others). What strikes me is that Hart’s book has launched at the perfect time in terms of the cultural zeitgeist. Everyone wants a more inclusive culture, and many desire non-punitive correction (except for those who breach #metoo level crime).

The reason why Hart’s work has begun to reach so many is that Hart is, in fact, an intelligent person who gives confidence to the unconfident. He not only hopes that all shall be saved like von Balthasar, but he positively affirms that all shall be saved. The gusto, the prose, the moral indignation that Hart offers—serve to galvanize a whole contingent of hopeful universalists into, well, more than hopeful universalists. 

This is why I think evangelicals should attempt an in-depth response—or at least a somewhat in-depth response. A full response would require a book-length treatment. Still, Hart asks a central question of the Christian faith (who shall be saved?) while facing headlong the reality of hell. He is putting words to what many Christians have wondered in their minds for years. 

So I do think more of us need to engage with his argument because the stakes are high. If you haven’t met protestant universalists, you may soon. They may not tell you that they are since many are still working through the theological implications, but they exist and in some numbers. Granted, they tend to be the theologically inclined among church members. 

And yet, generally speaking, the theologically inclined inhabit teaching positions (small groups, etc.). And each small group leader influences, say, eight people. And so the influence chain expands all the way down. 

Response

So I think it is worthwhile to spend some time working out the argument of Hart, finding the truth of the matter, and answering the question, “Is he right?” In the end, I do not think Hart’s argument requires that all shall be saved, nor am I convinced that the existence of an eternal hell entails the moral repugnance of God or Christianity! 

To explain why I am not convinced, I will briefly reflect on the four meditations of Hart. In each meditation, I will summarize some basic premises of the argument to give a sense of what he says. Then I will offer some criticism and some constructive theological proposals to make sense of the doctrine of hell. Obviously, I do so in very brief and incomplete ways. As noted, a full response would require a book. I offer this response merely as an incomplete guide to grasping and responding to Hart’s argument.  

With that said, Scripture provides few details on the specifics of hell and many details on heaven. There is a reason for that. The reason is that God created us for himself, and heaven means a return to God in Christ by the Spirit. We are meant to be heavenly minded, and so God-inspired Scripture points us to himself, not to hell. So I do not expect to say very much about hell other than to say it is the end of those who do not place their trust in Jesus Christ.

Meditation 1: Who is God? 

In his first meditation, Hart argues that God is absolutely free. So when he creates the world, nothing can hinder his goodness in creation. “Yet, for just this reason, the moral destiny of creation and the moral nature of God are absolutely inseparable” (69). So when God creates the universe, he does so with a particular end in mind (or else why would he create the world?). Given who God is, he must know all possibilities and actualities in creation (70). Evil then would be a privation of God’s good creation and purposes. 

Yet this good purpose of creation runs into a problem when we consider that many people will suffer damnation. Hart explains, “Yet, 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” (82). 

So, for Hart, if hell exists in all its eternality and horridness, then it seems to follow that God at least had this possibility in mind when he created the universe as a possible end (89). If so, is there a sense in which God is evil, even if he created and allowed such evil to happen (90)? Yet God, as Hart rightly notes, saw that everything was good at creation (Gen 1:31). For this reason, he surmises that all must have a good and so salvific end by returning back to God who is both the first and final cause of all things (69; 91).

Hart’s first meditation focuses on the nature of God who is Good, and therefore who only does good. If he created everything for himself, then it stands to reason that no rational creature could have any other intended end except to return to God who is good. So hell as an endless, eternal reality cannot exist—Hart argues. Note: he does not deny hell’s existence—just the eternal nature of it. 

Meditation 2:  What is judgment? 

Meditation 2 is much simpler to understand. First, Hart lists a number of biblical passages that seem to say or suggest that all shall be saved (e.g., 1 Tim 4:10). Second, he sees hell and redemption as two phases or parts, with “one enclosed within the other” (103). Hence, hell in this scheme precedes final redemption. Lastly, he engages with the word “eternal” in the New Testament, which he argues means something like “age” rather than eternity.

Meditation 3: What is a Person? 

In this meditation, Hart argues that persons are dynamic inflections of the whole of humanity in God’s image. Following Gregory of Nyssa’s interpretation of Genesis 1 and 2 as well as 1 Corinthians 15, he affirms “the concrete solidarity of all persons in that complete community that is, alone, the true image of God” (143). 

Before he develops the argument further, Hart spends time exploring the meaning of Romans 9–11, concluding that Romans 11:32 provides a sort of key to understand the whole argument: God has wrath on all people in order to have mercy on all (137). Paul’s earlier discussion in Romans 9 about God’s election to salvation and wrath, then, functions as hypotheticals which Paul later ties together in Romans 11—or so goes Hart’s interpretation. 

This clears the way for Hart’s discussion on humans created in the image of God and whose destiny involves their return to unity with God (1 Cor 15:23–24, 28). When they do return, they return as full humans whose loves and affinities come to complete with them. 

This is why, Hart argues, it the existence of hell and loved ones there would cause grief to those in heaven; even if the memory of loved ones in perdition is erased, then the person redeemed would not be one with a continuous identify from this life to the next because our personality is made up our relationships (153). Persons “require others in order to possess all the necessary and constitutive modalities of true personal existence for ourselves” (154). In fact, Hart argues further that persons in God’s image dynamically image the one God and so belong to a corporate identity (155; here he relies on Gregory of Nyssa’s exegesis of Genesis 1). Thus, Hart averts “that all persons must be saved, or none can be” (155).

By way of summary, we can cite Hart when he writes, “I am not I in myself alone, but only in all others. If, then, anyone is in hell, I too am partly in hell” (157). 

Meditation 4: What Is Freedom?

In this last meditation, Hart argues (or retrieves) a classical understanding of the will. Any rational creature has a natural will whose source and end is God, Goodness. Hence, free will actually means having less choice than more (having the inability to sin). The deliberation between good and evil (the gnomic will) actually follows from the entrance of sin into the world and really does not represent a good faculty (it is perhaps a neutral one). The more we know the Good, who is God, the less we sin, the more unable to sin we become. Hence, true freedom is to see God clearly and so align our natural will with him who is Goodness. 

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