It's taken all that I have to return to Hart's little book, That All Shall Be Saved. So much has happened in the past month, such that writing and reading have taken a back seat to the rest of life. But that's not even the main reason I find it hard to return to blogging about the book. I guess readers will have figured out by now: I love Hart's book. I agree with nearly most everything he has written there. I get a little weary with his supercilious tone and too-quick dismissal of others' views -- especially Balthasar's. But that doesn't detract from the overall argument in the book.No, the reason it's been hard for me to continue to write about the book is because I've read the reviews others have written. Especially the dismal reviews. No need to name names. There were, of course, a number of solid, even stellar reviews, which illuminated Hart's book beautifully. But there were a few that were truly awful -- poorly written and even more poorly argued. Many, if not all of these reviewers, obviously failed to grasp Hart's arguments, either through negligence or incapacity, yet decided to write their reviews anyway. All that was annoying, to be sure, but that is not what bothered me, not really. Perhaps I'm being unprofessional, or simply petty. But if I'm honest, what really bothered me -- left and leaves me sick -- was that some of the reviewers seemed more than happy to go on thinking horrific thoughts about God, about the freedom God has given us, and about the evil that has arisen in defiance of God and freedom, thoughts that seem to me obviously unworthy of God and at odds with the Gospel.
(As an aside, I have to admit that I worry Hart is at risk of becoming a caricature of himself as a pugilist, and I would hate for that to draw attention away from his theology. On the other hand, however, I have to admit that I very much enjoy Hart's sense of humor, which has shown up not only in this book, like his other writings, but also in the various interviews he has done since the book has been released. And that's why at least some of what others took to be condescension I took as droll self-deprecation. That is not to say that it was all self-deprecation, however. There was definitely some other-deprecation and self-congratulation happening, too. And that I didn't enjoy very much. At one point, I found myself wondering if Hart's tone would change at all if he personally had undergone a change of mind on this issue, and knew from experience how difficult that can be. That is, after all, the primary difference between the conclusions that Hart reaches in That All Shall Be Saved and the ones I reach in The Fire and the Rose.)
Anyway, as always with Hart, there were magnificent passages, magnificent both in form and content. Like this one:
Hell appears in the shadow of the cross as what has always already been conquered, as what Easter leaves in ruins, to which we may flee from the transfiguring light of God if we so wish, but where we can never finally come to rest -- for, being only a shadow, it provides nothing to cling to (p. 129).
Or this one:
The eschatological discrimination between heaven and hell is the crucifixion of history, while the final universal restoration of all things is the Easter of creation (p. 104).And of course there were penetrating insights everywhere -- like this one: "for Paul the cross of Christ revealed the law's wrath against sin, in that it was an eminently legal murder" (p. 25); this one: "the free will defense requires ... a mythical sort of God" (p. 182); this one: "I am not even sure it is really possible to distinguish a single soul in isolation as either saint or sinner in any absolute sense" (p. 144); and this one: "We exist as 'the place for the other,' to borrow a phrase from Michel de Certeau. Surely this is the profoundest truth in the doctrine of resurrection" (p. 153). These provoked me to set the book aside to think. But perhaps best of all, there were a number of claims and observations, some of them made only in passing -- like the one about "casual callousness that is so frequent a concomitant of deep piety" (p. 11) -- that made me set the book aside to think prayerfully -- as only the best theology can do.
But there are placed in That All Shall Be Saved where Hart and I disagree. Like this: "the God in whom the majority of Christians throughout history have professed belief appears to be evil" (p. 73). I wish he'd said the majority of what Christians have professed about damnation appears to be evil, provided the emphasis was on the word "appears". What Christians as a rule have believed about hell-- or at least what they have believed that they believe -- is actually at odds with what they know to be true about God. Perhaps it is nearer the truth, then, to say the majority of Christians believe that God is good -- and feel the best they can do is somehow hold this belief in tension with what they have been told is true about hell.
I think they feel bound to hold this tension because they have been told that "God's thoughts are not our thoughts", which means we must never question what we are told about God's ways. But, as Hart intimates, this way of thinking is stupefying, dehumanizing. We don't find truth by denying the questions that arise, especially not questions about the character of God, but by living with those questions courageously and patiently. We don't find truth by crucifying our intellect, but by yielding our minds and hearts to the crucified one. The ugly fact is, however, that many people are convinced they cannot trust themselves to question what they have been taught, which, of course, they take to be authoritative. And so, instead of losing their minds, they just keep the question close, unasked and unanswered, waiting to be rescued. They are not stupid or faithless; they are confused. This is what I call "The Unasked Question".
See, what bothers me about what people say when they read Hart's book (or mine) is the way in which they condemn apocatastasis (the reconciliation of God to all things in Jesus Christ). What terrifies me is the way in which they hold The Unasked Question -- with violence and rejection of sisters and brothers who hold that Question with faith and hope and love. What takes the wind out of my faith and faithful proclamation is the dismal way in which folks have read Hart (and me). How can you respond when people are willing to say we cannot really know what it means to say that God is good? Or that eternal conscious torment is exactly what people deserve for not choosing God? Or that God respects our "freedom" so much he freely determines not do everything in his power to save us from sin and death? Or that the doctrine of hell is what grounds faith and animates faithfulness? It is possible to articulate a doctrine of hell, even an infernalist doctrine of hell, without implying that God is cruel, or that our words about God are meaningless, or that our freedom is in fact autonomy.
Here's the point I want to emphasize this morning: Hart never rejects the idea of hell. (I have never rejected the idea of hell, either, if you read The Fire and the Rose closely.) There is a damnation. What Hart names -- and what I name -- is the limit of that damnation. But more importantly: We both name the limitlessness of God's loving patience, a limitlessness that defines the limits of hell. Go back and re-read The Fire and the Rose. I think, as Hart obviously does, that the doctrine of hell is absolutely necessary, for at least two reasons. First, because it's a way of remaining aware of what we have done and can do to ourselves by resisting grace, by turning from the good. Second, because without it, God's character is impugned. God cannot fail to do justice for those who were wronged, even as he has mercy on those who did the wrong. Hell, then, is not so much for sinners as it is for those who sinned against sinners, those who took advantage of others' brokenness or oppressed them in their misery. God damns the abuse, the victimizing, the violating. And he damns them both for their own sake and for the sake of those abused, victimized, and violated. No wrong can go unanswered.
But here's the thing: Every wrong has a context that only God can name and understand. As Origen rightly said, "hell" names the process by which God separates the sin from the sinner. God destroys the sins and the evil that animates them, but in a way that the sinner is purged and cleansed. Divine forgiveness both frees us from sin and restores us as the good creation. The reconciliation made possible in Jesus Christ restores us to our true selves, and in that way restores us to God. Hell is a kind of divine surgery in which God removes the cancer of sin and evil from creation as a whole -- and from each of our individual lives. That, I think, is St Paul's point in Romans 8 and John's point in Revelation 21-22.
Every impure thought, every idle word and evil deed -- they have all been created in our disobedience. But Jesus' obedience goes much further than destroying them; see St Paul in Romans 5. Everything whose source is not in God, everything that has a life outside of God is removed from our human living. That makes hell is a perfect work -- one in which all that's left is godliness. Or, put more accurately, pure creatureliness.
That's an idea I first learned in reading George MacDonald's Lillith and Unspoken Sermons. I was raised, as readers will know, as a full-blown infernalist. And I did my absolute best to defend the position even into my earliest years as a pastor. But once I became a pastor and saw the intricate ways in which sin was interwoven with suffering, I had to let something go in order to believe God was at work to reconcile us in Jesus Christ. That something was an eternal hell of conscious torment.
Hart, of course, never seemed to have that moment of conversion.
So I get why it's so difficult for readers to give Hart a clear hearing. I get why they want to be so dismally unfaithful in their response. There was a time I'd have done the same thing. Becoming an Evangelical Universalist has taught me the patience of love in Jesus Christ.
Another idea that MacDonald put forward that I haven't done much with: God is heaven and God is hell. In perhaps his most important "unspoken" sermon, "The Consuming Fire", MacDonald insists, "love loves unto purity .... Therefore all that is not beautiful in the beloved, all that comes between and is not of love's kind, must be destroyed. And our God is a consuming fire". Heaven and hell are nothing but relationships to God. Hell, in particular, is the way God relates to us so that both we and those we have sinned against are delivered from our sins.
And the more I live with that idea, the more I think it's true. St Eriugena insists that "it is not part of God's justice but wholly alien from it to inflict penalties on what he has made". Instead, God inflicts penalties, justly, on all that he has not made (On the Division of Natures V.36). That is, sin, not the sinner, evil, not the evildoer, is destroyed. Murder and abuse and rape and despotism and racism and lying, like all evils, are God-damned and forever eradicated. God does not merely "forgive" the rapist and then expect the one who was raped simply to accept that this forgiveness is just. God, somehow, consumes the sin itself, the evil that was done, so that both the victim and the victimizer are made whole. Such that the relationships which were destroyed and killed by sin are restored and human lives are resurrected into the wholeness and goodness of God's creation in a re-creation of heaven and earth.
Hart, of course, says (or at least assumes) all of that in That All Shall Be Saved.
But, here's the thing: I want to go further than what Hart actually says in his little book. It's not that I'm finding fault with what he's written. I just happen to think he didn't write enough. There's more to say than he said. I want to say that only this doctrine of hell -- hell as separation of the sinner from his sin, hell as the eternal eradication of evil and the once-for-all purgation of the created self -- can answer the problem of evil. And that problem has to be answered. Personally, I believe that this doctrine of hell as purgative teaches us, better than anything else, that God's forgiveness is not the triumph of mercy over justice but the triumph of justice in mercy. Jesus promised that those who mourn shall be comforted.
This is the point at which some the critics I've read of Hart have been asking an important question.
In his review of Hart's book, Peter Leithart challenges Hart's understanding of God's goodness:
Would a good God create a world in which even temporary apostasy from the good is a possibility, where many or most will have to suffer excruciating purgation before they are fully united to God? Wouldn't a genuinely good God have avoided all this temporal misery too? Wouldn't a God who created a world without the possibility of defection, without the possibility of cruelty, be gooder than the Christian God? Wouldn't such a being be the actual transcendent Good?This may, to some, seem like a good question. Or at least one worth asking. But knowing what Leithart is doing with it, I find it to be a deeply troubling one. I won't pretend to know how Hart would answer it, but it seems to me that the entire reason we must walk by faith and not by sight is that our experience calls God's goodness into question. And so, yes, I do think it would have been better if there had been no defection or misery or cruelty. How could I not? My hope is that when God finally fully reveals himself, he will in fact do something about the defection, misery, and cruelty -- all that went wrong with his creation. I trust that God is good, and precisely for that reason I cannot imagine accepting these horrors as somehow his work. If Leithart is right about what it means for God to be good, then we are of all people most to be pitied.
History -- including our personal histories -- have to be crucified and risen. That's what I was trying to say in The Fire and the Rose. And it's what I think Hart has been insisting in That All Shall Be Saved. This crucifixion and resurrection of history that occurs at the Eschaton is nothing less than the reconstitution and restoration of creation. In the end, all things are made new. Which, I think, means that the sins of defection or misery or cruelty are destroyed and that what's left is faith, hope and love.
I can't imagine to know what that will look like. But: I believe, even though I have no idea how it will be done, that in the end, our "works", good and bad, will be re-worked, made by grace into what they naturally were not. We give glory to the One who is able to do "far more than all we can ask or imagine" (to use St Paul's language). Whatever we imagine the end to be, whatever we might ask for it to be -- and I know what I would ask for it to be -- it will be better. "Eye has not seen, ear has not heard ..." and all that.
What makes salvation both final and saving is that we find God not only rebuking the brokenness but actually healing it. That, it seems to me, is what it means to hope Christianly.
And that, for me, is the bottom line. I've never been able to justify God's ways to humans. Theodicy is simply too fickle a process to name salvation. That's why I celebrate the God made known in Jesus Christ. I believe that he will do all the justifying for all of creation that, in the end, "every knee will bow and every tongue confess". In the end, Jesus Christ will be all and in all. Or, to put it more simply, love never fails.
First God is hell, then he is heaven. And so we sing, "O the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways! For who has known the mind of the Lord? Or who has been his counselor? Or who has given a gift to him, to receive a gift in return? For from him and through him and to him are all things" (Romans 11.36).
And that's ultimately what leaves me so sour about so many of the criticisms I've read of Hart's book. They come away thinking so much about Hart himself -- concerned with whether they like or dislike his tone, whether they agree or disagree with his arguments, whether he is a "great" theologian or not. My critics of The Fire and the Rose did it me, too.
Here's the thing: Neither Hart nor I want you to think all that much about us. We want readers to think about the God made known in Jesus Christ. Ask whether what we are saying about God is in fact worthy of him and whether what we are saying about hell is worthy of the Gspel. If we do that, we will have rightly received the gift Hart has given us, received it, in fact, with all of its faults, as a gift from God