The Little Friar

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 -- poo...

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...

According to Hart: [T]he keener consciences among believers have always recognized that the Christian story of creation, redemption, and cosmic restoration ... is a claim about the revelation of God's nature as a goodness that truly is infinite love, essentially and irreducibly.  Hence, the only defense of the infernalist position that is logically and morally worthy of being either taken seriously or refuted scrupulously is the argument from free will:  that hell exists simply because, in order for a creature to be able to love God freely, there must be some real alternative to God open to that creature's power of choice, and that hell therefore is a state the apostate soul has chosen for itself in perfect freedom, and that the permanence of hell is testament only to how absolute this freedom is.  This argument too is wrong in every respect, but [unlike the Augustinian and Reformed understanding of limited election] not contemptibly so ( That All Shall Be Saved , p. 17...

In The Fire and the Rose I made much in the opening pages about the distinction between a "hopeful" universalism and a "dogmatic" one.  The dogmatic path rests upon two distinct New Testament themes that many find difficult to harmonize:  The theme of Christ's total victory and triumph over sin and death, on the one hand, and that of God's wrath and judgment of sin, on the other.  David Bentley Hart thus points out that, according to the Swiss theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar, these two distinct themes represent "two kinds of absolute statements, both indissoluble in them­selves and each seemingly irreconcilable with the other.  And we are supposedly forbidden -- by piety, by doctrine, by prudence -- from attempting to decide between them" ( That All Shall Be Saved , p. 102).  Evidently, then, we are being asked to hold together two theolog­ical claims, even though they might appear to us as flatly inconsistent; we are to hold them together ...

I've now read David Bentley Hart's That All Shall Be Saved:  Heaven, Hell, & Universal Salvation .  Over the course of the next few days, I want to lay out my response to what he says there. Hart is, first and foremost, an accomplished classicist and expert in the Greek language, one whose previous publications include an important translation of the New Testament.  And one of his purposes in this translation was to restore "certain ambiguities" that, so he believes, are "present in the original texts" but have been lost in later translations.  He thus writes, "I am firmly convinced that two millennia of dogmatic tradition have created in the minds of most of us a fundamentally misleading picture of the claims made in Christian scripture" (p. 3).  He traces much of that misleading picture, most notably the doctrines of limited election and limited atonement, "back to the late Augustine -- a towering genius whose inability to re...

I ordered my copy of David Bentley Hart's That All Shall Be Saved:  Heaven, Hell, & Universal Salvation today.  It's been about five years since Hart announced that he subscribes to the doctrine of apokatastasis and hoped to write a book on the subject.  The revelation quickly spread through Twitter, Facebook, and the theological world.  Few scholars generate the kind of buzz that Hart does.  And so we waited ... eagerly ... impatiently ... anticipatorily. Finally, Hart has given us the book those of us in the theology world have been anticipating.  That All Shall Be Saved hasn't been touted as the definitive treatise on apoka­tastasis.  You won't find detailed exegesis of the hell passages in the New Testament nor extended discussion of the Church's dogmatic statements that (on the surface) condemn the greater hope. That All Shall Be Saved is, instead, a very timely and personal reflection about a critical topic.  It will bring ...

Currently, the most popular way of defending the notion of an eternal torment is an appeal to creaturely freedom and to God's respect for its dignity, but there could scarcely be a poorer argument -- whether it's made crudely as by William Lane Craig or elegantly by Eleonore Stump, it is going to fail. It wouldn't if we could construct a metaphysics or phenomenology of the will's liberty that was purely voluntarist, purely spontaneous, though even then we would have to explain how an absolutely libertarian act, obedient to no rationale whatsoever, would be distinguishable from sheer chance or mindless organic or mechanical impulse, and so any more free than an earthquake or embolism. But on any cogent account, free will is a power inherently purposive, teleological, primordially oriented towards the good and shaped by that transcendental appetite to the degree that a soul can recognize the good for what it is. No one can freely will the evil as evil. One c...