I thought I would end 2019 with hope: A review of the book “That All Shall Be Saved: Heaven, Hell, and Universal Salvation” by Orthodox Theologian David Bentley Hart. This book was given to me this Christmas by a dear friend who had challenged me to expand my view of God's grace and Christ's atonement back in 2005. At that time we were reading Emerging Church authors such as Brian McLaren and Rob Bell, who were flirting with the idea that Christ would eventually save everyone who ever lived. I had first encountered hints of this idea in CS Lewis and George MacDonald, but I was still a Skeptical Universalist: I believed Christ could save all, but probably wouldn't. But, upon pondering these things deeply, and learning about the doctrine of Apokatastasis found in many of the earliest Christian theologians from Origen to Gregory of Nyssa to Julian of Norwich, I became a Hopeful Universalist: Christ could save all, and probably would save all. Upon reading this book by Hart, I think I have shifted once more. I am now a Convinced Universalist: The Good News is that God will save and heal all things in Christ.
The reason why I have evolved from being skeptical to hopeful to convinced comes from the central problem that Hart's book wrestles with. And that problem centers around the vision of God we find revealed in the person of Jesus Christ:
The idea that the God revealed in Jesus Christ— the God of infinite self-sacrificial Love— would positively desire infinite and unending eternal pain for finite persons is the deepest contradiction held by many followers of Jesus. This deep contradiction provides the ideological ground to justify Christians who would hate and harm people in Jesus’ Name, as well as the central reason why many who grow up in the Christian fold later reject the faith as deeply contradictory and non-sensical. One cannot assert on one hand that the infinite, all powerful, good God loves all and can save all through Jesus Christ, and on the other hand assert that some finite people are beyond redemption and cannot be saved (or worse: God positively enjoys their un-ending pain). This self-contradiction can only be resolved in three ways: By admitting that God is not really good and doesn’t want to save all, or by saying that God is impotent to save all who God loves, or by declaring that God really will eventually save all because Christ reveals God as fully good and fully able to save all.
In the book “That All Shall Be Saved”, David Bentley Hart lays open this deep disease within Christian belief, and shows it for the cancer that it is. In an age of sound-bytes and over-simplified presentations of complex ideas, Hart reveals that the “Infernalist” idea of an un-ending hell contradicts Scripture, contradicts logic, and contradicts the strong minority position throughout Christian history that has always rejected un-ending hell as anti-Christian and anti-rational. Furthermore, Hart does this with style, eloquence, and a kind of literary swagger that one rarely finds in theological writing these days. It is true that the cost of this eloquence is run-on sentences, words and references that must be googled, and nuance that must be sifted. But the literary joy is worth the work, much like a healthy body is worth the exercise.
In the end, however, perhaps the greatest service that this book does for Gospel of Jesus Christ is that it shows that the idea of an un-ending hell is not only wrong and self-contradictory and harmful. It is just downright silly. And this by a theologian whose credentials as Trinitarian and Orthodox are impeccable and unrivaled. The truth is that Jesus Christ has come to reconcile ALL things in heaven and earth to God through himself, by dying, descending to the dead, and then rising again. The undying Love of God revealed in Jesus will eventually save all and heal all. And those that suffer the pains of hell— whether in this life or the next— do so for God’s redemptive purpose: To turn their souls from the darkness of sin to the Light of Christ, to bring them out of the bondage of selfishness into the fulfillment of Love. And so Christ will eventually draw all people to himself, even if it takes going through hell to do it. This is the Gospel of Jesus. This is Good News for all.
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