On Universalism: Is God Defeated If All Are Not Saved?

I’ve stated some of my major objections to David Bentley Hart’s new book on universalism, That All Shall Be Saved, elsewhere on Scot McKnight’s blog.

But there I didn’t do much summarizing, quoting, or detailed engagement.  So I want to add that here for those who want to dig deeper into Hart’s arguments for Christian universalism.  

In a sense, these are all the notes I took on the book that didn’t make it into that other post.

Please let me know what you think.

The Book Is a Diatribe

Hart work is a diatribe against Calvinism specifically, and the “eternal conscious torment by God” view of hell generally. It is an unsystematic, loosely structured series of four meditations, although the themes covered in each spill in the others, circling back and overlapping, sometimes adding to the argument, though often just adding to the insults directed at others.  

Hart’s book is not an academic book, although it is written by someone with an incredible intellect, and requires the utmost cognitive concentration, and quite a bit of background knowledge of ancient philosophy and theology.  But it is not academic in that it has no footnotes, rarely engages with the arguments of others in direct or charitable manners, and does not seek to advance the state of research in a particular field.  I’m not stating this as a criticism.  

But if you were hoping to read Hart as a way to get up to speed on the various debates about universalism, the different options or streams involved, or a detailed review of the biblical arguments for or against universalism, you will be sorely disappointed. 

Hart’s Thesis on Universalism: 

“If Christianity is in any way true, Christians dare not doubt the salvation of all, and that any understanding of what God accomplished in Christ that does not included the assurance of a final apokatastsis [full restoration] in which all things created are redeemed and joined to God is ultimately entirely incoherent and unworthy of rational faith” (66).

Hart’s View of Hell:

“Hell exists, so long as it exists, only as the last terrible residue of a fallen creation’s enmity to God, the lingering effects of a condition of slavery that God has conquered universally in Christ and will ultimately conquer individually in every soul” (129).  

“…Heaven and hell exist within every rational nature, and that they do so in every case in a unique dynamic altering balance.  Freedom consists in the soul’s journey through this interior world of constantly shifting conditions and perspectives, toward the only home that can ultimately liberate the wanderer from the exile of sin and illusion.  And God, as the transcendent end that draws every rational will into actuality, never ceases setting every soul free, ever and again, until it finds that home.  To the inevitable God, every soul is bound by its freedom. In the end, if God is God and spirit is spirit, and if there really is an inextinguishable rational freedom in every sou, evil itself must disappear in every intellect and will, and hell must be no more.  Only then will God, both as the end of history and as the eternal source and end of beings who transcends history, be all in all.  For God, as scripture says, is a consuming fire, and he must finally consume everything” (195).  

Chapter on God:

For Hart, a truly coherent and rational contemplation of creation, from nothing, demands universal salvation. Turning to Gregory of Nyssa, Hart situations creatio ex nihilism as not just a cosmological/metaphysical claim (that God is the sole principle and provider of existence), but also an eschatological and moral claim (about the end of the world and God’s character). 

As Hart says, “In the end of all things is their beginning, and only from the perspective of the end can one know what they are, why they have been made, and who the God is who has called them forth from nothingness” (68). In other words, “the doctrine of creation constitutes an assertion regarding the eternal identity of God” (69) by which God is judged when he offers a final judgement on creation (90).

Let’s unpack that a moment.  

God makes all things at the beginning with their end in mind, for to create without a goal is merely an irrational irruption—more theogony than theophany. That God creates ex nihilio means that God is the master of the end as well as the beginning.  Indeed for Hart, following Gregory of Nyssa, all of creation is still in the process of being created because until it has reached its end it can’t really be said to have been created at all. 

In this sense, viewed from God’s temporal frame, I’m in agreement with all of these statements. 

But it is their content (or their context) that I’m not sure about.  Hart has a strictly (coherent) metaphysical view of God as the Good—and it is the transcendent calculus concerning the Good that Hart focuses on.  For him, all things must return to union with this Good, otherwise the Goodness of God in nullified.  In other words, for anything to remain evil would be the denial of God’s goodness.  It would be God’s defeat.

Concerning evil, in a passage that a Calvinist might have penned, Hart claims that “every evil that time comprises, natural or moral…is an arraignment of God’s goodness: every death of a child, every change calamity, every act of malice; everything diseased, thwarted, pitiless, purposeless, or cruel; an, until the end of all things, no answer has been given…[But] in his final divine judgment on his creatures, God will judge himself; but one must hold that by that judgment God will truly disclose himself” (72-73, italics in original).

But whereas a Calvinist will claim that God’s Goodness is vindicated in the damnation of some because of their evil, Hart says that even one that is damned invalids God’s Goodness, and therefore all shall be saved so that God’s Goodness might reign.  

It is curious the Hart faults Calvinists for making God the author of evil, and letting evil remain (in hell, forever).  And yet Hart just a “coherently” claims that God is the author of evil, but that every evil will be brought to a good end (in union with God).  Rather than moving in a different direction, it seems Hart just inverts the Calvinist claim.  

Other traditions claim with seriousness that evil is not from God, but a potentiality of God having made a free and personal creation. Hart never seriously grapples with the problem of evil. He dodges it through claims of transcendental cogency and divine union.

Chapter on Judgment:

This chapter seems more aspirational than achieved, or possibly the title was given by an editor.  I say this because Hart never really talks about divine judgment or wrath.  

Hart reviews all the possible universalist passages, dismisses the literalists views on hell as just springing from Jesus’s poetic expressions, dismisses the entire book of Revelation as “an intricate and impenetrable puzzle, one whose key vanished long ago”, spends a bit of time on what Gehenna might be, and ends with a reflection on how “eternity” and “eternal” in the Bible is not what “infernalists” think it is.  

For what this chapter does, this is my favorite chapter.  Hart does show how selective one must be to find support for “eternal conscious torment by God” in the Bible, how clearly metaphorical/poetic passages must be taken in a woodenly literal way, and how clear dogmatic statements claiming salvation for all must be distorted as mere conjecture or wistful thinking.  Most who wonder wether “eternal conscious torment by God” is in the Bible agree with his assessment of these passages.  

The problem for Hart is the while he does land serious blows again the “eternal conscious torment by God” view, he doesn’t really discount other options concerning hell: that is made by us instead of God (quarantine zone for all those bent on self-love rather than love of God and love of others [the C. S. Lewis view, roughly], or annihilationism (that we will ourselves out of existence). 

And as I said, this chapter does not engage in an investigation of what God’s judgment is. This is true pretty much for the entire book, outside of proclaiming outrage at the moral injustice of certain views of God’s justice. 

Chapter on Humanity:

Following Gregory of Nyssa, Hart claims that “the making and redemption of the world belong to that one great process by which God brings to pass he perfect creation that has reside from everlasting in he divine will, conceive and intended by him before all ages” (139).  

This means that creation is a two-fold process. 

The first act is the eternal idea or intension of God, with the total end in mind. The second act is the creative act in its temporal extension as the actual creation of the cosmos—which is throughout all time, not just “in the beginning.” 

Similarly, Hart claims that Gregory of Nyssa sees a two step process in the creation of humanity.  The image of God in humanity is first conceived in the divine mind, and then the entire proliferation of humanity is the unfolding of that conception—every single human throughout time.  Accordingly, it would be impossible for God to declare that humanity is very good, if even one were to be condemned for eternity as evil—for this would mean that God’s creation was not perfectly good in its end. 

For this reason, if even one is lost then all are lost.  Or conversely, “all persons must be saved, or none can be” (155).  

Hart has wonderful statements about the disease of sin and the victory of Christ over death.  But they only add up to universalism if prior agreement about God’s purposes in creation and Gregory’s vision of a two-step creation are granted. Otherwise, the “hell of our own making” and “annihilation” are still open options.  

Chapter on Freedom:

I’m kind of running out steam doing summary work.  This chapter is really just an extension of the previous argument along the lines of human freedom—that a free rational nature (humanity) will only be free when in union with its greatest good, which is God.  So for Hart, the argument that God’s sends to people to hell as a way of respecting their freedom is nonsensical because to choose hell is exactly to choose against one’s own good, and no one will freely do this forever (indeed, Hart’s hell/purgatory is designed to help people overcome such irrationality).  

On Judgement, not Life

It is curious, however, that Hart marks the lines of debate around justice and freedom (very Western loci if there ever were any), rather than persons, life, and presence (the supposedly more Easter values).  

To Create Evil

Hart is adamant that one evil thing remaining in creation destroys God’s goodness.  

But it seems that God’s goodness in creation was to create humans (and maybe angels) so that could contribute this cosmos.  

Universalism (and salvation for that matter) is not about God’s goodness or human freedom (the terms on which Hart, and many infernalists, set the debate).  It is about persons laboring with God or against God.  

If humans are co-creators and co-rulers with God, then this changes all of Hart’s arguments.  

God didn’t just come to save us from the disease of sin, or to destroy death (which it true).  God also came to restore humanity a co-laborer in the kingdom, creative contributors to God’s cosmos.  

Hart demands that all be saved or God is not good.  But this demand destroys the respect and dignity that God gave humanity—to create something, to add something to God’s creation that wasn’t there.

And obviously humanity (and angels) created evil.  And the rest is history, and hell (as the place of one’s own choosing or annihilation) seems to be part of that continuing legacy of humanity, as horrible as it might be.

More On Faith

More could be said about Hart’s book.  And if time allows in the next week or so I would like to explore how universalism destroys faith. Usually universalism is criticized for destroying grace, but I think it is faith that we should be most concerned about.