Reading David Bentley Hart’s Book,
That All Shall Be Saved
In some of my recent posts (samcardillo.medium.com), I discussed how I’ve been thinking about the character of God as portrayed in the Bible. As I’ve been working through the process, it continues to be both troubling but necessary at the same time… the journey is well worth the time and effort. As a lifelong student of the Bible, I find that the most difficult problem in trying to formulate an accurate picture of God’s character is the problem of the Bible’s own presentation of God’s character — as both a God of perfect love for all humanity, and at the same time, a God who metes out the most awful and seemingly arbitrarily judgment on the innocent (defining the “innocent” as those who — for whatever reason — have not formulated a meaningful or consequential notion of God)
As I’ve tried to make sense of that phenomenon — that clear disconnection — I’ve taken the effort to read several books (and even write one) on the phenomenon of faith, as well as have many conversations with Evangelical believers who hold to a view of God that unquestioningly accepts that puzzling idea of a dualistic God’s who metes out severe and eternal punitive judgment on unbelievers.
Having held to that evangelical belief in the horrifying judgment of God for most of my adult life, I’m well familiar with that mindset that posits the idea that God is absolutely good but he is also absolutely just, and as such he has the right (not only the right, but the obligation) to treat offenders of his holy law as they deserve — with unspeakable suffering and eternal separation from God. The Evangelical mindset is conditioned to accept that picture of God as the true biblical portrayal — so that while emphasizing God’s perfect goodness and love, one is also obligated to accept that other (and absolutely opposite) side of God — a God who also “hates [sin] perfectly” so much so, in fact, that he must (out of some sort of sense of self-imposed obligation) punish the unbeliever with the most horrid and calloused form of punishment — eternal separation from Himself, and damnation in a lake of fire, never to be extinguished. This is the picture of hell that I accepted as biblical reality for much of my life.
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Having recently read David Bentley Hart’s book, That All Shall Be Saved, I am so deeply troubled (but in a good way) by Hart’s description of what must be the mindset of a Christian who believes without question in the idea of a literal hell where some people will spend an eternity of suffering.
To get right to my point, for the Evangelical Christian, it is an impossible dilemma; there seems to be no way around his or her predicament — either that Christian who believes in a literal eternal hell simply doesn’t care enough to spend every waking minute of his or her entire 24/7 life evangelizing, or he/she, in the deepest part of their being, doesn’t really believe in the reality of an eternal hell… because if they truly did, the first option (24/7 evangelization) is the only option that would make any sense. Hart puts it more bluntly (but not unrealistically in my experience): “There are… Christians who are earnestly attached to the idea of an eternal hell not just because they feel they must be, but also because it is what they want to believe. For some of them, in fact, it is the practically the best part of the story. It gives them a sense of belonging to a very small and select company…” (p.28).
I would add that it is a sense of being on the “safe” side, being on the “right team” — the team that you know will win in the end. But in order to be at peace with the prospect of attaining that eternal blissful security, the believer must also find a way to be comfortable with the fact that he/she will never be able to reach his or her “lost” orbit of acquaintances (or even his or her intimate “lost” circle of friends for that matter) with the good news of the gospel story.
It’s interesting to see how Hart deals with this seemingly impossible disconnection that represents the mindset of the believer — He insists that “most believers in an eternal hell do not really believe in it at all, but rather merely believe in their belief in it” (p.29). Why? Simply because that belief is a core element of their faith. In other words, if you abandon the dualistic idea of heaven and hell, you’re left with the only other option — Universalism; and that idea is impossible to the Christian mind because it contradicts the Christian concept of a dualistic God who, because he is both holy and just, must make a distinction between the chosen and the unchosen, the deserving and the undeserving, the holy and the profane (however you want to express that dualistic notion of opposites).
A related phenomenon is the idea of God’s “right” to do as he pleases, including the obvious disconnect in the idea that this right not only allows God to treat those who commit wrong against his pure and holy nature in a way that seems unfair to any measure of sensibility, but that it actually obligates God to do so. The obvious question here is simply this — Is God free to choose how he treats sin… or is he bound — by some external or self-imposed system of justice that he has no authority to change — to punish sin with the most unspeakable severity?
Which brings up even more questions — If in fact God is bound to punish “temporal” sins (that is, sins committed within the limited span of a human life) with “eternal” punishment, first of all, is that fair by any conceivable standard? How does the punishment (eternal damnation) fit the crime (temporal sin)? What “law” is it that binds God to do so? Is it a law of his own making? If so, is he not free to act contrary to that self-imposed law and instead, act out of mercy? And if not, does that not imply that God is not, after all, omnipotent? On the other hand, if God is omnipotent, does he not have the authority to change the rules — rules that he himself has established? And if he doesn’t have the authority to change the rules, does that not mean that He is bound by some outside standard or rule that says “you can’t change the rules”? The questions can go on and on.
Here’s how Hart presents the problem…
“Christians have been trained at a very deep level of their thinking to believe that the idea of an eternal hell is a clear and unambiguous element of their faith, and that therefore the idea must make perfect moral sense… a sufficiently thorough conditioning can make an otherwise sound mind perceive even the most ostentatiously obscure proposition to be the very epitome of rational good sense.”
To reinforce his point, Hart words like “absurdity” (p.18) … phrases like “intoxicating atmosphere of corroborating nonsense”; “long tradition of error” that comes to be accepted “through ceaseless repetition” (p.19)… that leads to “excruciating despair” (p.21)… “a terrible paradox of the faith” (p.22); “… divine deeds reduced to a human scale of action”… “degrading nonsense” (p.25); “sheer moral wretchedness as a vision of the gospel…” (p.200). He says that “the most effective technique for subduing the moral imagination is to teach it to mistake the contradictory for the paradoxical, and thereby to accept incoherence as profundity, or moral idiocy as spiritual subtlety… If this can be accomplished with sufficient nuance and delicacy, it can sustain even a very powerful intellect for an entire lifetime…” Granted, strong language; but on and on he goes; he asks “What could be more absurd than to claim that God’s ways so exceed comprehension that we dare not to presume even to distinguish benevolence from malevolence in the divine?” (p.21).
So as not to prolong his vividly colorful expression of the problem longer than necessary, Hart does get to his main point; He spends most of the book detailing his contention that such an awful view of God is simply inaccurate because it is due to a long tradition of misreading and mistranslation of the scriptures. And here is where I find his presentation to be so convincing. Hart’s main point is very simply that through centuries of Christian mistranslation of the Bible, false notions of God’s character or God’s “behavior” (for lack of a better word) gradually took root, to the point where, the mainstream Christian understanding of God became hopelessly distorted.
In a short post like this, I can’t possibly do justice to Hart’s meticulously well-reasoned presentation of the history underlying his argument. Suffice it to say that as a lifelong student of Scripture in the Evangelical tradition, I find his reasoning to be beyond question; the book goes far in correcting my lifelong deeply-rooted idea of a dualistic God who (by any humanly-conceivable measure) arbitrarily chooses whom to save and whom to condemn to eternal damnation (or as an evangelical Christian would put it more mildly “whom to pass by, which essentially amounts to the same thing, does it not?). In short (and here’s where I feel that I’ll hopelessly lose any remaining Evangelical reader who might have made it to this point without tossing my post aside as sacrilege) — Hart is a Universalist (as his subtitle indicates).
I wish I could go through his argument, but having neither the skill to do it justice, nor the time to spend on such a venture, I would simply refer anyone interested (or brave enough) to at least read what I consider the most convincing part of his book: pp. 94–102, where he quotes multiple biblical scriptures that cannot possibly be read in any way other than declaring a universalist view of God. Near the end of the book, Hart summarizes his argument by saying that the misinterpretation of scriptures that has pervaded biblical interpretation over the centuries “rests on catastrophic misreadings of scripture, abetted by bad translations and anachronistic assumptions regarding the conceptual vocabularies of the authors of the New testament.” (p.200). Hart has certainly done his homework, so that statement should be taken seriously. To give you a sense of Hart’s core message, here are a few of his comments that he makes in summary at the end of the book:
“… it must be a wicked thing to give one’s intellectual assent to something one cannot help but fund morally repugnant…” (p.199)
“When the very principles of moral logic are called into doubt… then one can, I imagine, have faith in anything, be it ever so atrocious… If ‘justice’ means anything at all, it cannot be that. If ‘love’ means anything at all, it cannot be that. (p.203)
“… we certainly cannot properly imagine an eternity of misery erected upon a temporal span that is, by comparison, scarcely more than nothing, and then actually convince ourselves that such a thing is morally possible… (p.204–205)
“To say that, on the one hand, God is infinitely good, perfectly just, and inexhaustibly loving, and that on the other, he has created a world under such terms as oblige him either to impose, or to permit the imposition of, eternal misery on finite rational beings, is simply to embrace a complete contradiction…” (p.202–203).
And I can’t help but agree wholeheartedly with the logic of Hart’s final words regarding the “dominant tradition” (that is, the belief in a hell of eternal torment) —
“…my conscience forbids me to assent to a picture of reality that I regard as morally corrupt, contrary to justice, perverse, inexcusably cruel, deeply irrational, and essentially wicked. (p.208)
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Now I’m not naïve enough to understand that my staunch Evangelical friends will have at least two reactions to what I’m saying: First, they will instinctively condemn it as heretical (and even condemn me as a heretic). I would have had the same reaction in the past; after all, the stakes are high. If Hart is right, Evangelicals would have to rethink their whole theological framework since all this goes against the most basic tenets of their theology. And I would submit that most, if not all, Evangelical Christians would see that prospect as too much to handle.
Secondly, my Evangelical friends would have no choice but to bring up the usual arguments to contradict Hart’s universalist reading of these texts (basically the argument that says “it’s right there in the Bible…” But that’s fine. Again, Hart’s whole premise is built on the fact that it is certainly not in the Bible, and he masterfully builds his case about historical mistranslations, etc. to prove just that (Again, at the very least I would simply refer you to the biblical citations that he presents on pp.94–102).
At the very least, my hope resonates with Hart himself: “If the reader should happen to find any of my arguments convincing after all, I ask also that he or she consider whether that might be the result of some intrinsic merit in them.” An ambitious and somewhat frightening thought for sure, but considering what’s at stake — a correct view of God — surely well worth the debate.
