There's a painting that has captivated my spiritual attention since 1992. It's the painting by Matthias Grunewald entitled The Isenheim Altarpiece.
The image is of the crucifixion of Jesus and John the Baptist, accompanied by a lamb with eucharistic chalice, extending a long pointy finger toward the Crucified One, with the words (taken from the Vulgate text of John 3.30), "illum oportet crescere me autem minui" ("He must increase while I must decrease"). That image, to my mind, encapsulates everything that can be said about the Christian faith.
As a pastor, I have struggled with Jesus' words in Matthew: "Or what man is there of you, whom if his son ask for bread, would give him a stone?" It's the question at the heart of theodicy: If any sinner's final destiny comprises eternal torments, can God in his essence be Justice or Love? It's the question, I observe in reading Hart's That All Shall Be Saved, to be the motivating force of his book.
Lots of people think that my universalism is driven by some sentimental hogwash that names Liberalism. But Liberalism is just too thin to survive walking through a cancer ward. When I wrote The Fire and the Rose, I was trying to set out the difference pain and suffering make for a pastor who preaches and offers pastoral care week in and week out. I was trying to bring the Gospel face to face with the pain of the Cross, the death of a man at the hands of a political and religious machinery intent on that man's destruction. Where is God when bad things happen to good people?
Answering that question is what drives my universalism.
From the start, then, it's no surprise that I agree with every word Hart has written. The word theodicy is cautiously absent from Hart's own book, but the issue is there, written just beneath every word. In which final state of affairs, hell or universalism, can God's Wisdom be said to be "justified in all her ways"?
I understand that's why my book and now Hart's book are so difficult for some folks to understand. Our line of reasoning is intelligible only to believers who accept the centrality of reason in a mature faith. I mean that for those who deny any analogy between our moral categories and God's revealed actions and character, there's simply no question of the theodicy of creation to be asked. In Hart's argument, the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo -- the teaching that from Divine infinite plenitude, and not from any lack or need, God freely creates all things with a destiny of union with him -- entails the ultimate accomplishment of God's purposes in creation. What if any part of creation should fail to reach its eternally determined goal? God, in light of divine foreknowledge of this fate, would therefore stand guilty of damning a creature precisely in the act of bringing the creature to be. The meaningfulness of the distinction between elective and permissive predestination vanishes instantly when we shift our perspective to this highest, divine, plane; God either predestines to salvation or damnation, but in the act of creation he predestines all the same. And predestination to anything other than salvation is not the work of the God Who is Love.
That, I think, is the most significant argument in That All Shall Be Saved. Confronted with Christian revelation about God's limitless freedom and love, the self-transcending human intellect -- participating as it does in God's very Logos -- cannot but seek after the whole, cannot resist asking further questions until it reaches the limit of its horizon here, namely the moral intelligibility of the act of creation itself. Only universal salvation grants intelligibility to the act of creating the universe ex nihilo. If grace perfects nature, then revelation should crown reason (Aquinas). But as Hart ably shows, to deny the question of creation's moral intelligibility by appeals to humility or apophaticism is simply to forfeit reason altogether and to flee into fideism. The revelation of God as Love in Christ may surpass the limits of creaturely reason, but it cannot lie below them. Otherwise we create evasive equivocations with respect to what exactly we mean by the Love which commands forgiveness "seventy times seven" but finds a limit to its own; which seeks desperately the last sheep out of the hundred until, well, time unfortunately runs out; which reconciles all things in heaven and on earth to itself -- virtually, of course. Granted, to know the character of a person is far more than to possess a journalist's knowledge of what she might do in the future, and so knowledge of God cannot be reduced to "eschatological voyeurism" (a phrase I borrow from Jennifer Newsome Martin). But can we really say we know someone if we cannot divine her goals and whether she will do everything in her power to achieve them? And the goal, as Scripture and Christ's example teach, is nothing less than the salvation of all people (1 Timothy 2.4). God's power, after all, is unlimited, even by the sinful will; else we should have no doctrine of operative grace. Hart accordingly poses in this book the question of fideism, apophaticism, and universalism in its starkest form: Either God is capable of revealing his salvific will to us, and our reason's openness to God's self-manifestation makes this reception of eschatological revelation possible, or we have never received in Christ any definitive revelation of God’s heart at all, and we are left instead awaiting another who is to come -- although this "other" must remain subject to the same apophatic, and ultimately fideistic, doubts as his predecessors.
It's why Hart and I both damn the idea of God's eschatalogical, perpetual punishment in hell. Yeah, you can distinguish between infinite and finite suffering, but that hardly gets around the problem of Ivan's little girl trying to pray.
Some try to get around this issue by saying there are no such thing as 'innocents'. That we're all under the judgment of 'original sin' and thus in that sense all suffering is merited. And in some grace-filled fashion, maybe even meritorious. But the eventual conclusion of that position is a curious one: Why does the church give one whiff about relieving the suffering of the poor, then? Even Augustine knew that and tried to make some distinctions about suffering in the early chapters of his Confessions.
In the end, Hart is right. Universalism is the only way to persevere in prayer. To pray in confidence, the confidence has to be in the God who will see to it that all of creation is reunited with him. That, I think, is the very point of the Incarnation.
The evangelical universalist cultivates a certain mood of faith, a serene confidence in the God who has a positive eschatological verdict for all the suffering we observe. Despite all earthly appearances, God is good, and that it's the heart of Christ revealed on the cross that must interpret every moment of divine abandonment, every cry of every innocent child. No Christian, in any case, thinks the character of God can be read off the face of a fallen world. On this score, Hart agrees with Catholic philosopher Brian Davies that our profound ignorance of the causes and consequences of earthly events prevents us from passing judgment on God at any particular moment. Thing is, is there ever anything the divine wisdom could tell that would make human suffering any less tragic? If God could provide a morally sufficient reason for divine inaction in the face of horrendous evil, would it not further inculpate God, especially given the reality of God's miraculous, discrete interventions in the course of salvation history? The scandal of particularity so central to Christianity makes itself felt especially in moments of human suffering, when we recognize that God is present to us at every moment in the spectacle of our suffering. But to deny that there exist any morally sufficient reasons for our concrete suffering (as Hart surely does) wouldn't obviate the problem, because divine foreknowledge never gets God off the hook. Universalism's celebratory mood thus subtly transforms into a marked ambivalence towards the silent and spectating God.
But if we take universalism seriously -- if the future reconciliation of the whole universe with God is the eschatological end -- then maybe God doesn't have anything he needs to answer for. I know quite well what it means to endure suffering in this life in the face of Divine Silence. Pastors and theologians over my forty-plus years on this earth have all said that that Divine Silence is God's way of working in and through the pain -- a kind of divine kenosis toward creation -- but I also know first hand how that really only creates a sort of spiritual trauma that makes child-like faith more difficult. From the perspective of eternity, God has spilt the universe's milk and it doesn't look like he's cleaning it up. And for victims outside the faith: Well, it necessitates they remain ignorant of the Father's character and thus ignorant of the meaning of their suffering (unless there's some divine revelation, which is, to my experience, most unlikely). As Hart captures all this: "Anyone who plays the game of life in life’s house knows that the invisible figure hidden in impenetrable shadows on the far side of the baize table not only never shows his hand, but never lets us see the stakes of the wager, and in fact never tells us the rules" (p. 180).
All this is why I say in The Fire and the Rose: My evangelical universalism isn't about some sentimental desire to make sure everyone makes it heaven. Instead, it's a theological protest of the psalmist variety. And That All Shall Be Saved is an intervention of the highest order in ecclesial and cultural circles that makes eternal conscious torment after all the conscious torment we humans endure here to be the final result of one's life (and worse, of one's life's one choice).
The human heart is constantly seeking some reprieve from that suffering. We're constantly trying to make sense of it. That's why I think the Christian Story of Jesus is the best story that could ever be told: Only because in the final analysis the question of God's character, presence, and goodness reaches its sharpest articulation in the most extreme depths of human suffering. To know the story of Jesus is to point toward it in the way John the Baptist points toward it in Grunewald's painting.
Hart's new book, the complement of decades of work on the question of theodicy, draws battle lines: Can universal salvation continue as merely another theologoumenon alongside the doctrine of eternal torments, or must the traditional picture of hell be supplanted as universalism assumes a more central place in Christian proclamation? After all, what is at stake in this debate, as Hart cogently argues throughout this work, is the very possibility of coherent speech about, and so also of graspable revelation about, God's character. But if Hart's arguments concerning the inseverable moral analogy between us and our Creator prove convincing (and they do), how can we avoid the conclusion that the Heavenly Father is responsible, at the most fundamental level, for the innocent suffering of his children? Must we not, in the end, affirm that this God who will save all is not only very good but -- in what he is willing to tolerate for the sake of our eventual, eternal glory -- also evil? The moral analogy works in both directions, the golden thread pulled so taut we might wish it to snap.
In the final analysis, it's really this simple: Without Jesus' salvation of the whole cosmos, the Christian story falls apart in the end.
The image is of the crucifixion of Jesus and John the Baptist, accompanied by a lamb with eucharistic chalice, extending a long pointy finger toward the Crucified One, with the words (taken from the Vulgate text of John 3.30), "illum oportet crescere me autem minui" ("He must increase while I must decrease"). That image, to my mind, encapsulates everything that can be said about the Christian faith.
***
As a pastor, I have struggled with Jesus' words in Matthew: "Or what man is there of you, whom if his son ask for bread, would give him a stone?" It's the question at the heart of theodicy: If any sinner's final destiny comprises eternal torments, can God in his essence be Justice or Love? It's the question, I observe in reading Hart's That All Shall Be Saved, to be the motivating force of his book.
Lots of people think that my universalism is driven by some sentimental hogwash that names Liberalism. But Liberalism is just too thin to survive walking through a cancer ward. When I wrote The Fire and the Rose, I was trying to set out the difference pain and suffering make for a pastor who preaches and offers pastoral care week in and week out. I was trying to bring the Gospel face to face with the pain of the Cross, the death of a man at the hands of a political and religious machinery intent on that man's destruction. Where is God when bad things happen to good people?
Answering that question is what drives my universalism.
From the start, then, it's no surprise that I agree with every word Hart has written. The word theodicy is cautiously absent from Hart's own book, but the issue is there, written just beneath every word. In which final state of affairs, hell or universalism, can God's Wisdom be said to be "justified in all her ways"?
I understand that's why my book and now Hart's book are so difficult for some folks to understand. Our line of reasoning is intelligible only to believers who accept the centrality of reason in a mature faith. I mean that for those who deny any analogy between our moral categories and God's revealed actions and character, there's simply no question of the theodicy of creation to be asked. In Hart's argument, the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo -- the teaching that from Divine infinite plenitude, and not from any lack or need, God freely creates all things with a destiny of union with him -- entails the ultimate accomplishment of God's purposes in creation. What if any part of creation should fail to reach its eternally determined goal? God, in light of divine foreknowledge of this fate, would therefore stand guilty of damning a creature precisely in the act of bringing the creature to be. The meaningfulness of the distinction between elective and permissive predestination vanishes instantly when we shift our perspective to this highest, divine, plane; God either predestines to salvation or damnation, but in the act of creation he predestines all the same. And predestination to anything other than salvation is not the work of the God Who is Love.
That, I think, is the most significant argument in That All Shall Be Saved. Confronted with Christian revelation about God's limitless freedom and love, the self-transcending human intellect -- participating as it does in God's very Logos -- cannot but seek after the whole, cannot resist asking further questions until it reaches the limit of its horizon here, namely the moral intelligibility of the act of creation itself. Only universal salvation grants intelligibility to the act of creating the universe ex nihilo. If grace perfects nature, then revelation should crown reason (Aquinas). But as Hart ably shows, to deny the question of creation's moral intelligibility by appeals to humility or apophaticism is simply to forfeit reason altogether and to flee into fideism. The revelation of God as Love in Christ may surpass the limits of creaturely reason, but it cannot lie below them. Otherwise we create evasive equivocations with respect to what exactly we mean by the Love which commands forgiveness "seventy times seven" but finds a limit to its own; which seeks desperately the last sheep out of the hundred until, well, time unfortunately runs out; which reconciles all things in heaven and on earth to itself -- virtually, of course. Granted, to know the character of a person is far more than to possess a journalist's knowledge of what she might do in the future, and so knowledge of God cannot be reduced to "eschatological voyeurism" (a phrase I borrow from Jennifer Newsome Martin). But can we really say we know someone if we cannot divine her goals and whether she will do everything in her power to achieve them? And the goal, as Scripture and Christ's example teach, is nothing less than the salvation of all people (1 Timothy 2.4). God's power, after all, is unlimited, even by the sinful will; else we should have no doctrine of operative grace. Hart accordingly poses in this book the question of fideism, apophaticism, and universalism in its starkest form: Either God is capable of revealing his salvific will to us, and our reason's openness to God's self-manifestation makes this reception of eschatological revelation possible, or we have never received in Christ any definitive revelation of God’s heart at all, and we are left instead awaiting another who is to come -- although this "other" must remain subject to the same apophatic, and ultimately fideistic, doubts as his predecessors.
***
Ultimately, my universalism (and Hart's) is the struggle to find out what it means to pray to the Father.
The notion of the eternal torment of hell pretty much cancels the idea that God is Father. The picture of the God to whom we are taught to pray in the Lord's Model Prayer explicitly forbids that God would predestine some of his creation to the eternal torments of separation from God in hell. If you want to pray to God, how do you do so knowing that men and women suffer and die in this world. When confronted by the death of a spouse or child, how do you carry on praying to God?
There's no real short cut to praying as John prays in the Altarpiece. Theology exists in the daily practice of men and women observing the crosses upon which the powers and principalities of this world would sacrifice us, or it's useless. Theology exists in the service of the ordinary believer who looks to heaven and
attempts that most terrifying and meaningful of human activities,
prayer. To which God does the believer pray: To the Heavenly Autocrat
who has ordained the world so that a select number perish for the sake
of God's glory, to the Heavenly Sufferer who, despite his best efforts,
failed to save every creature, or to the Heavenly Father who has
destined the salvation of all his children? If any doctrine prevents
prayer to the Heavenly Father, that teaching should accordingly fall
under Christian suspicion, if not outright censure.
But it's precisely at the point of prayer that Hart's own book becomes the victims of so much criticism.
I think, for example, of the chapter "Rebellion" in Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov. Can anyone conceive of telling Ivan's little girl -- trapped in the
outhouse, abused by her parents, beating her breast while crying out to "dear God" -- that this God is her Father, and that, though she begs for
bread, he is not in fact, at that very moment, stoning her?
That is a passage Hart beautifully writes about in another book, The Doors of the Sea. He says:
I don't know anyone who would say that God wills suffering. Yet God obviously permits evils, even temporary ones, and sometimes those temporary evils become the horrendous ones. Ever walk into a child's cancer ward and try to pray with the family? I have, as a pastor. And I know the rocks upon which so many prayers break in those moments.For somehow the most vital and urgent thing to know about the God revealed in the Gospels is that (for instance) the tears of that little girl suffering in the dark of whom Ivan speaks are not a reflection of the divine will or a necessary moment in the dialectical unfolding of history -- according to God's 'great plan' -- toward the 'kingdom' that awaits it as a kind of immanent cosmic telos. God may permit evil to have a history of its own so as not to despoil creatures of their destiny of free union with him in love, but he is not the sole and irresistible agency shaping that history according to eternal arbitrary decrees (p. 87).
It's why Hart and I both damn the idea of God's eschatalogical, perpetual punishment in hell. Yeah, you can distinguish between infinite and finite suffering, but that hardly gets around the problem of Ivan's little girl trying to pray.
Some try to get around this issue by saying there are no such thing as 'innocents'. That we're all under the judgment of 'original sin' and thus in that sense all suffering is merited. And in some grace-filled fashion, maybe even meritorious. But the eventual conclusion of that position is a curious one: Why does the church give one whiff about relieving the suffering of the poor, then? Even Augustine knew that and tried to make some distinctions about suffering in the early chapters of his Confessions.
***
In the end, Hart is right. Universalism is the only way to persevere in prayer. To pray in confidence, the confidence has to be in the God who will see to it that all of creation is reunited with him. That, I think, is the very point of the Incarnation.
The evangelical universalist cultivates a certain mood of faith, a serene confidence in the God who has a positive eschatological verdict for all the suffering we observe. Despite all earthly appearances, God is good, and that it's the heart of Christ revealed on the cross that must interpret every moment of divine abandonment, every cry of every innocent child. No Christian, in any case, thinks the character of God can be read off the face of a fallen world. On this score, Hart agrees with Catholic philosopher Brian Davies that our profound ignorance of the causes and consequences of earthly events prevents us from passing judgment on God at any particular moment. Thing is, is there ever anything the divine wisdom could tell that would make human suffering any less tragic? If God could provide a morally sufficient reason for divine inaction in the face of horrendous evil, would it not further inculpate God, especially given the reality of God's miraculous, discrete interventions in the course of salvation history? The scandal of particularity so central to Christianity makes itself felt especially in moments of human suffering, when we recognize that God is present to us at every moment in the spectacle of our suffering. But to deny that there exist any morally sufficient reasons for our concrete suffering (as Hart surely does) wouldn't obviate the problem, because divine foreknowledge never gets God off the hook. Universalism's celebratory mood thus subtly transforms into a marked ambivalence towards the silent and spectating God.
But if we take universalism seriously -- if the future reconciliation of the whole universe with God is the eschatological end -- then maybe God doesn't have anything he needs to answer for. I know quite well what it means to endure suffering in this life in the face of Divine Silence. Pastors and theologians over my forty-plus years on this earth have all said that that Divine Silence is God's way of working in and through the pain -- a kind of divine kenosis toward creation -- but I also know first hand how that really only creates a sort of spiritual trauma that makes child-like faith more difficult. From the perspective of eternity, God has spilt the universe's milk and it doesn't look like he's cleaning it up. And for victims outside the faith: Well, it necessitates they remain ignorant of the Father's character and thus ignorant of the meaning of their suffering (unless there's some divine revelation, which is, to my experience, most unlikely). As Hart captures all this: "Anyone who plays the game of life in life’s house knows that the invisible figure hidden in impenetrable shadows on the far side of the baize table not only never shows his hand, but never lets us see the stakes of the wager, and in fact never tells us the rules" (p. 180).
***
All this is why I say in The Fire and the Rose: My evangelical universalism isn't about some sentimental desire to make sure everyone makes it heaven. Instead, it's a theological protest of the psalmist variety. And That All Shall Be Saved is an intervention of the highest order in ecclesial and cultural circles that makes eternal conscious torment after all the conscious torment we humans endure here to be the final result of one's life (and worse, of one's life's one choice).
The human heart is constantly seeking some reprieve from that suffering. We're constantly trying to make sense of it. That's why I think the Christian Story of Jesus is the best story that could ever be told: Only because in the final analysis the question of God's character, presence, and goodness reaches its sharpest articulation in the most extreme depths of human suffering. To know the story of Jesus is to point toward it in the way John the Baptist points toward it in Grunewald's painting.
Hart's new book, the complement of decades of work on the question of theodicy, draws battle lines: Can universal salvation continue as merely another theologoumenon alongside the doctrine of eternal torments, or must the traditional picture of hell be supplanted as universalism assumes a more central place in Christian proclamation? After all, what is at stake in this debate, as Hart cogently argues throughout this work, is the very possibility of coherent speech about, and so also of graspable revelation about, God's character. But if Hart's arguments concerning the inseverable moral analogy between us and our Creator prove convincing (and they do), how can we avoid the conclusion that the Heavenly Father is responsible, at the most fundamental level, for the innocent suffering of his children? Must we not, in the end, affirm that this God who will save all is not only very good but -- in what he is willing to tolerate for the sake of our eventual, eternal glory -- also evil? The moral analogy works in both directions, the golden thread pulled so taut we might wish it to snap.
In the final analysis, it's really this simple: Without Jesus' salvation of the whole cosmos, the Christian story falls apart in the end.