On the Logical Impossibility of Hell
Review: That All Shall Be Saved by David Bentley Hart
Universal salvation, argues David Bentley Hart, is more than wishful thinking. It is the conviction, expounded in his latest work, That All Shall Be Saved: Heaven, Hell, and Universal Salvation, that no human being will be confined to hell forever, and that all persons will be finally reconciled with God.
Always a minority among the Christian faithful, universalists from the beginning have been accused of trading intellectual rigor for the whims of emotion. Augustine dismissed the idea of universal salvation as mere sentimentalism. The “merciful-hearted,” as he condescendingly dubbed them, believed that all sinners will be saved simply because they wanted to believe it.
Hart certainly wants to believe it. In That All Shall Be Saved, the eminent Eastern Orthodox scholar and cultural critic frankly admits that he is instinctually impelled to embrace universalism. The doctrine of eternal hell, writes Hart, is a morally abhorrent idea, one so inimical to a proper understanding of the Gospel “that it cannot even be stated in Christian theological terms without a descent into equivocity so precipitous and total that nothing but edifying gibberish remains.”
To the majority of Christians, or at least to those in the West, Hart’s assertion that there is no eternal hell is at best naively misguided and at worst a pernicious heresy. Finding himself in such a small minority, with the force of over a millennium and a half of Christian tradition standing against him, a different author might have felt pressured to write an inoffensively dry and diplomatic tome.
That All Shall Be Saved is thankfully not that kind of a book. Like most of Hart’s books, it is more akin to an extended essay, written in the first person and filled with numerous personal anecdotes. There is no dry prolegomena on definitions, nor stale theological genealogies. It is characteristically polemical in tone; Hart pulls no punches in his indictment of the doctrine of eternal hell — what he wryly calls “infernalism.” He lambasts infernalism as “ridiculous,” “abominable,” and “degrading nonsense.”
Some readers will no doubt object to Hart’s stern rhetoric. But it is precisely his aggressiveness that makes him the perfect messenger for universal salvation. Much like the revival preachers of yore who laid bare the harsh “reality” of hell in order to scare their congregants into repentance, Hart turns the tables, demonstrating that it is the very harshness of hell that ought to make us question its place within a loving God’s creation.
Hart is at his most persuasive when he asks the reader to honestly examine the implications of infernalism. For example, infernalists teach that hell is the just punishment for sin. But if there is no possibility of redemption after death, even if one repudiates his or her sinful past, then what purpose does such punishment serve? As Hart writes
A father who punishes his child for any purpose other than that child’s correction and moral improvement, and who even then fails to do so only reluctantly, is a poor father. … And one who surrenders his child to fate, even if that fate should consist in the entirely “just” consequences of his child’s own choices and actions, is an altogether unnatural father — not a father at all, really, except in the most trivial biological sense.
And then there is the chilling problem, a problem from which infernalists often shy away (perhaps because they cannot bear to think about it), of what the saved will know of their eternally-damned loved ones. For how could one fully experience the perfect bliss of heavenly paradise knowing that one’s spouse, father, mother, sibling, or friend is suffering in hell? Can we really believe, as Thomas Aquinas and scores of other philosophers did, that witnessing the “righteous” punishment of the damned will increase the beatitude of the saved?
Or perhaps, as more modern and gentler infernalists prefer to argue, heaven’s denizens will be indifferent to the torments of their loved ones; or better yet, that the memories of the damned will simply be wiped from the minds of the blessed, as though they never existed. “So, it seems,” concludes Hart, “if we allow the possibility that even so much as a single soul might slip away unmourned into everlasting misery, the ethos of heaven turns out to be ‘every soul for itself’ — which is also, curiously enough, precisely the ethos of hell.”
Uncomfortable as these reflections may make us, the indefatigable infernalist would retort, the logic of theology demands that unrepentant sinners be consigned to hell forever, and so we are obligated to believe it. As one negative reviewer has suggested, Hart cannot see the cold hard truth because he has allowed the strains of his private conscience to obscure his intellectual judgment. Which is to say, he’s being a softy.
Hart cannot resist the temptation to psychoanalyze his opponents in return. He speculates that the infernalists hold fast to the idea of an eternal hell because it makes them feel like winners. And for them to be winners, others must necessarily be losers.
This may or may not be true for some infernalists, but it is not a necessary part of Hart’s thesis. It is a rather weak argument and only serves to make would-be converts to universalism feel defensive about what motivates their belief in what for most modern Christians is a doctrine they’ve been taught since childhood.
But perhaps what will put off readers the most is Hart’s constant refrain that universalism is “obviously” true. “We should all already know that whenever the terms ‘justice’ and ‘eternal punishment’ are set side by side as if they were logically compatible,” he writes in one passage, “the boundaries of the rational have been violated.” Elsewhere Hart asserts that it is just so obvious that infernalism is morally empty. The word “obvious” is used so often, in fact, that it deserves its own index entry.
Even the most sympathetic of Hart’s opponents must recoil at the suggestion that they, along with millions of other Christians down through the ages, have been missing such “obvious” truths. One might be forgiven for believing that Hart was implying that these Christians are imbeciles for being unable to see what he sees. But his explicit explanation — that they have merely been brainwashed — will not provide much consolation.
Ultimately though, these psychological speculations can distract from Hart’s substantive philosophical reflections. That is a shame because Hart provides four strong and succinct arguments for universalism: (1) that the Christian doctrine of creatio ex nihilo (creation from nothing) necessarily entails universal salvation; (2) that an eternal hell “is not lavishly on display in the pages of scripture”—on the contrary, it is universalism that scripture teaches; (3) that infernalism presents an incoherent picture of personhood; and (4) that it is logically impossible for an individual to freely and knowingly reject God.
Readers looking for an introduction to the philosophical issues surrounding universalism will not find it here, but those familiar with the debate, whatever side they may be on, cannot help but be compelled by Hart’s arguments.
Brief as the book is, Hart masterfully articulates his case against a doctrine which seems interminably entrenched within Christian theology. With That All Shall Be Saved, he delivers a definitive and intellectually satisfying answer to the curious Christian who, like Hart himself, feels a natural aversion to the idea that an infinitely loving God could forever turn his back on any of his children.
