These pages breathe an atmosphere of weary resignation. Hart depicts himself as a lonely battler for the truth of universalism—which hardly seems to be the case, given that many academic theologians today share his views. Here’s another oddity: the total absence of joy in this book. Someone who is genuinely convinced that everyone is finally saved (including the misguided Calvinists!) should show happiness and peace at the prospect of heaven for all. If Hart’s argument is truly correct, then he should be gladly anticipating his final vindication—before God and before all humanity. But this book exudes bitterness and rancor, so much so that one wonders whether the author is convinced by his own arguments.

For those not already acquainted with him, David Bentley Hart of the University of Notre Dame is widely regarded as one of the two most influential academic theologians in the English-speaking world today (along with John Milbank of Nottingham University). Hart’s output is prodigious, and his range of intellectual interests—in the literature of various languages—is staggering. His published PhD dissertation, The Beauty of the Infinite (2004), caused reviewers to regard him, young as he was, as a leading Christian theologian.

Though Hart no longer has possession of his personal library of some 20,000 volumes, he seems to have read most of it and not to have forgotten much. Had he been born earlier, he’s the sort of scholar who might have sat beside C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, and the other Inklings at The Eagle and Child pub in Oxford, and not only have grasped their exchanges on English literature, Western history, world mythology, and Christian theology, but also have taught them a thing or two. Those who think this must be hyperbole should examine the essays contained in three recent collections: A Splendid Wickedness and Other Essays (2016), The Hidden and the Manifest (2017), and The Dream-Child’s Progress (2017). These and other volumes by Hart I gladly commend.

Yet Hart’s new book, That All Shall Be Saved: Heaven, Hell, and Universal Salvation, on my view, doesn’t merit the same commendation, and lacks the argumentative acuity and literary beauty of the earlier works. Film buffs might call it the “Godfather III” of Hart’s oeuvre—not quite up to snuff. Even the master sometimes misses. Adding to the disappointment for me, and I’m sure for many other readers, is that Hart is no longer countering unbelief—as in Atheist Delusions (2010)—but is now in all-out war with fellow Christians believers who hold to traditional views on heaven and hell.

The title states the thesis: all creatures who have sinned against God will finally be saved. And Hart maintains his thesis not as a possible or probable claim, but as indubitably certain. He has no patience for “hopeful universalism”—a view often attributed to Karl Barth and Hans Urs von Balthasar, that remains open to salvation for all but asserts that the matter can’t be definitely affirmed or known in advance. Hart’s book might be a signal that universalist tentativeness is now out, while assertiveness is in.

My own debate with Hart on the question of universal salvation stretches back to fall 2014, when Hart joined the department of theological studies at Saint Louis University, where I teach, and where Hart spent a year as a visiting professor. Our early exchanges foreshadowed the later arguments in his new book, and of my own work of last year, The Devil’s Redemption: A New History and Interpretation of Christian Universalism (Baker Academic, 2018). I should forewarn readers that his book and mine are wholly different. His work is a personal statement of 214 pages, without footnotes or source citations, and with minimal reference to the complex historical debates over universalism. My work runs to 1,325 pages, cites more than 3,000 sources, and contains some 3,500 footnotes. Douglas Farrow of McGill University suggests that those interested in universalism should read both books. I hope so.

Though Hart often wields the whip of intellectual controversy, I received no tongue-lashing during my time with him, but I was present when he took a younger Thomist philosopher at our university to the woodshed. I then became aware that notions of divine sovereignty—Thomistic or Calvinistic—are anathema to Hart. He sparred in a local pub with one of my own PhD advisees regarding the biblical command for the destruction of the Canaanites. My student interpreted these passages as referring to historical events, while Hart clearly did not; he understood the texts symbolically.

In spring 2015 I went off to teach at Birmingham University in England, while David remained in St. Louis, and he and I debated universalism with heightened fervor by email exchange. At that time I remarked to Hart, as an Orthodox theologian, that the overwhelming majority (perhaps 10-to-1) of the early Christian authors—Greek, Latin, Syriac, and Coptic—were not universalists. In an email response, David wrote that he was more concerned with truth itself than with precedent or authority—though he believed that at least some authorities supported his views. He added that if an eternal hell were a necessary part of Christian teaching, then for him this would mean that Christianity itself would be self-evidently false. What was to become one of the central arguments in That All Shall Be Saved became evident to me then. Biblical exegesis is of course a pivotal aspect of the universalist debate, and Hart’s The New Testament: A Translation (2017) is an integral part of his argument for universalism, as he indicates in the new book (3).

In what follows, I will examine Hart’s rhetoric or style of reasoning, his arguments or substance of reasoning, and his exegesis or biblical foundation for reasoning. At the end I will consider the question of practicing or living out one’s eschatology.

Hart’s Rhetoric

One cannot consider Hart’s arguments for Christian universalism apart from the ethos and pathos of his prose. Willis Jenkins speaks of Hart’s “adjectival petulance,” while Douglas Farrow calls him “an intellectual pugilist who floats like a butterfly and stings like a bee.” For better and for worse, Hart’s verbal pyrotechnics are as obvious as a bomb blast in a reading room. In That All Shall Be Saved, he claims that his intellectual opponents and their views are “viciously vindictive” (11), “exquisitely malicious” (11), “specious reasoning” (12), “inherently incredible” (12), “morally obtuse” (12), “ostentatiously absurd” (18), “extravagant absurdities” (18–19), and reflective of “[an] intoxicating atmosphere of corroborating nonsense” (19). This list is by no means complete. These are merely the first few insults; in total the book contains no less than 118 derogatory denotations of his opponents, their theological views, their God, and their understanding of hell.

Farrow calls Hart’s language the sort of “copious trash talk normally reserved for pre-fight hype,” that “all but exhausts the world’s stock of insults.” One strains to think of another theological work of the past or present that so concentrates its venom. The golden frog of the Colombian rainforest measures little more than a centimeter, but contains enough poison to kill 10 people. Hart’s volume too is dainty yet deadly. Was that Hart’s purpose in writing—not to disprove his adversaries, but to dispose of them?

The extraordinary profusion of put-downs in That All Shall Be Saved is not without significance. Yet the significance is not, I think, what Hart’s fans and followers might think it is. It’s not an indication that victory is at hand for the universalist cause. Hart’s vituperative verbiage deflects readers’ attention away from his line of logic and toward the colorful epithets themselves—and so fails to advance Hart’s own position. The hyperbolic language is a sign of weakness, not strength. This book feels desperate. In these pages Hart seems to be a cornered man—a literary fellow and word-weaver who lashes out in the only way he knows. Someone secure in his intellectual position and confident in his argument doesn’t need to interject a hundred or more insulting phrases into his writing. People do that when they sense they’re just about to lose their case, and Hart admits as much in the introduction: “I know that I cannot reasonably expect to persuade anyone of anything,” though “I intend to play it to the end” (4).

These pages breathe an atmosphere of weary resignation. Hart depicts himself as a lonely battler for the truth of universalism—which hardly seems to be the case, given that many academic theologians today share his views. Here’s another oddity: the total absence of joy in this book. Someone who is genuinely convinced that everyone is finally saved (including the misguided Calvinists!) should show happiness and peace at the prospect of heaven for all. If Hart’s argument is truly correct, then he should be gladly anticipating his final vindication—before God and before all humanity. But this book exudes bitterness and rancor, so much so that one wonders whether the author is convinced by his own arguments.

A clue to the deeper significance of Hart’s book lies in the stark alternatives he sets up in his conclusion: either universalism or unbelief. In the final paragraph he writes:

I have been asked more than once in the last few years whether, if I were to become convinced that Christian adherence absolutely requires a belief in a hell of eternal torment, this would constitute in my mind proof that Christianity should be dismissed as a self-evidently morally obtuse and logically incoherent faith. And, as it happens, it would. (208)

In its unbounded rage against historic Christian teaching, Hart’s book reads mostly like a “new atheist” book by Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens. As for the atheist authors, so too for Hart, the “God” preached and taught by the church through the centuries is “inventively sadistic” (23), “theatrically grotesque” (23), a “heartlessly capricious gamester” (45–46), and so a “monstrous deity” (167).

That All Shall Be Saved could thus be read as a “new atheist” argument—but with a universalist happy ending tacked on at the end of the cosmic narrative to escape the otherwise-compelling conclusion that the Christian God does not exist. The universalist eschaton is Hart’s deus ex machina—in a literal sense—inasmuch as the world as Hart sees it today doesn’t show much evidence that there is any loving God who cares for us. Hart’s back is to the wall and he battles fiercely, because he’s fighting for a kind of theological Alamo—a last stand, as he conceives it, for Christian theism, or at least for a faith that makes sense to him.

Hart’s Arguments

Once the verbal clouds and smoke of battle have scattered, what arguments for universalism remain visible in Hart’s book?

That All Shall Be Saved offers three major lines of argument for universalism. I will refer to these as the “responsible Creator argument” (that divine creation itself implies universal salvation), the “choosing good argument” (that the creaturely will can never fully or finally reject the goodness that God is), and the “human solidarity argument” (that all human beings are united and so must all be saved or else not saved at all).

1. Responsible Creator Argument

Hart first publicly presented his first argument in 2015, in a lecture at Notre Dame on “God, Creation, and Evil.” Essentially he argues that God, in creating the world, from that moment onward became fully responsible for any and all evil in the cosmos if it were to remain as a final outcome. “The salvation of all,” Hart writes, is “a claim that follows more or less ineluctably from any truly coherent contemplation of what it means to see God as the free creator of all things ex nihilo” (66–67).

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