The Little Friar

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 ...