David Bentley Hart: 4 Meditations on Apokatastasis
5: The limited conditions of choice

David Bentley Hart’s book, That All Shall Be Saved: Heaven, Hell, and Universal Salvation, sets forth a powerful, passionate argument against the traditional Christian doctrine of eternal conscious punishment — that sinners wind up forever in hell — and for the belief that all shall be saved.

Thus far we have considered the concept of apokatastasis and the implications for eschatology that arise from believing that God is the good creator of all. Then we talked about some of the biblical material that Hart uses to support his case. Last time we reflected upon the nature and destiny of human beings, created in the image of God.

In our final post, we consider David Bentley Hart’s fourth meditation on the topic of “free choice.” As most of you may know, one of the most common defenses of the view that sinners will suffer eternal punishment consists of an appeal to human free will. If people choose not to respond in faith to the good news of salvation in Christ, they face an eternal destiny separated from God in the fires of hell. As it is said, “God doesn’t send people to hell, they freely choose to go there.”

Hart finds he cannot tolerate this position. After an extended rant against the very idea of hell and eternal punishment and those theologies which have developed and promulgate these teachings, he focuses in on the free will defense.

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 permanency of hell is testament only to how absolute that freedom is. This argument too is wrong in every way, but not contemptibly so. Logically it cannot be true; but morally it can be held without doing irreparable harm to one’s understanding of goodness or of God, and so without requiring the mind to make a secret compromise with evil (explicitly, at least). (p. 171)

Why does David Bentley Hart say that this argument is “wrong in every way” and cannot be logically true?

• “Freedom is a being’s power to flourish as what it naturally is, to become ever more fully what it is. The freedom of an oak seed is its uninterrupted growth into an oak tree. The freedom of a rational spirit is its consummation in union with God. Freedom is never then the mere “negative liberty” of indeterminate openness to everything; if rational liberty consisted in simple indeterminacy of the will, then no fruitful distinction could be made between personal agency and pure impersonal impulse or pure chance.” (p. 172)

• “[I]nevitably, true freedom is contingent upon true knowledge and true sanity of mind. To the very degree that either of these is deficient, freedom is absent. And with freedom goes culpability. No mind that possesses so much as a glimmer of a consciousness of reality is wholly lacking in liberty; but, by the same token, no mind save one possessing absolutely undiminished consciousness of reality is wholly free. (p. 177)

• “So, for anyone to be free, there must be a real correspondence between his or her mind and the structure of reality, and a rational cognizance on his or her part of what constitutes either the fulfilment or the ruin of a human soul. Where this rational cognizance is absent in a soul, there can be only aimlessness in the will, the indeterminacy of the unmoored victim of circumstance, which is the worst imaginable slavery to the accidental and the mindless. If then there is such a thing as eternal perdition as the result of an eternal refusal of repentance, it must also be the result of an eternal ignorance, and therefore has nothing really to do with freedom at all. So, no: Not only is an eternal free rejection of God unlikely; it is a logically vacuous idea.” (p. 178)

• “Nothing in our existence is so clear and obvious and undeniable that any of us can ever possess the lucidity of mind it would require to make the kind of choice that, supposedly, one can be damned eternally for making or for failing to make.” (p. 180)

Hart summarizes:

If we lived like gods above the sphere of the fixed stars, and saw all things in their eternal aspects in the light of the “Good beyond beings,” then perhaps it would be meaningful to speak of our capacity freely to affirm or freely to reject the God who made us in any absolute sense. As it is, we have never known such powers, and never could in this life. What little we can know may guide us, and what little we can do may earn us some small reward or penalty; but heaven and hell, according to the received views, are absolute destinies, and we have in this life no capacity for the absolute. To me, the question of whether a soul could freely and eternally reject God—whether a rational nature could in unhindered freedom of intellect and will elect endless misery rather than eternal bliss—is not even worth the trouble of asking. Quite apart from the logical issues involved, it is a question that has no meaning in the world we actually inhabit. (pp. 180-181)

David Bentley Hart: 4 Meditations on Apotakastasis
4: The ultimate reconciliation of Esau

David Bentley Hart’s book, That All Shall Be Saved: Heaven, Hell, and Universal Salvation, sets forth a powerful, passionate argument against the traditional Christian doctrine of eternal conscious punishment — that sinners wind up forever in hell — and for the belief that all shall be saved.

Thus far we have considered the concept of apokatastasis and the implications for eschatology that arise from believing that God is the good creator of all. Then we talked about some of the biblical material that Hart uses to support his case.

In his third meditation, David Bentley Hart reflects upon the nature and destiny of human beings, created in the image of God. He refers to Gregory of Nyssa and his musings about the eschatological teachings of the New Testament.

In his great treatise On the Making of Humanity, Gregory reads Genesis 1:26–7—the first account of the creation of the race, where humanity is described as being made “in God’s image”—as referring not to the making of Adam as such, but to the conception within the eternal divine counsels of this full community of all of humanity: the whole of the race, comprehended by God’s “foresight” as “in a single body,” which only in its totality truly reflects the divine likeness and the divine beauty. As for the two individuals Adam and Eve, whose making is described in the second creation narrative, they may have been superlatively endowed with the gifts of grace at their origin, but they were themselves still merely the first members of that concrete community that only as a whole can truly reflect the glory of its creator. For now, it is only in the purity of the divine wisdom that this human totality subsists “altogether” (ἀθρόως, athroōs) in its own fullness. It will emerge into historical actuality, in the concrete fullness of its beauty, only at the end of a long temporal “unfolding” or “succession” (ἀκολουθία, akolouthia). Only then, when time and times are done, will a truly redeemed humanity, one that has passed beyond all ages, be recapitulated in Christ. (pp. 139-140)

This “full community of persons” rescued by God is the true Image of God intended by the creator, which he will bring to pass, despite the dominion of Sin, Evil, and Death that has ravaged the course of human history. “Only as a whole,” Gregory said, can the humanity God created “reflect the glory of its creator.”

The divine image which humanity bears is that of Christ. The humanity God fashioned is in the likeness of the Divine Son, who became incarnate, suffered death, and rose again to reclaim his own and to ultimately fashion the entirety of humanity into the living Body of Christ, of which he is the Head.

Such is the indivisible solidarity of humanity, [Gregory] argues, that the entire body must ultimately be in unity with its head, whether that be the first or the last Adam. Hence Christ’s obedience to the Father even unto death will be made complete only eschatologically, when the whole race, gathered together in him, will be yielded up as one body to the Father, in the Son’s gift of subjection, and God will be all in all. (p. 142)

Taking his cue from Gregory, David Bentley Hart meditates on the impossibility of the truly autonomous individual.

I want to say that there is no way in which persons can be saved as persons except in and with all other persons. This may seem an exorbitant claim, but I regard it as no more than an acknowledgment of certain obvious truths about the fragility, dependency, and exigency of all that makes us who and what we are. (p. 146)

…Personhood as such, in fact, is not a condition possible for an isolated substance. It is an act, not a thing, and it is achieved only in and through a history of relations with others. We are finite beings in a state of becoming, and in us there is nothing that is not action, dynamism, an emergence into a fuller (or a retreat into a more impoverished) existence. And so, as I said in my First Meditation, we are those others who make us. Spiritual personality is not mere individuality, nor is personal love one of its merely accidental conditions or extrinsic circumstances. A person is first and foremost a limitless capacity, a place where the all shows itself with a special inflection. We exist as “the place of the other,” to borrow a phrase from Michel de Certeau. Surely this is the profoundest truth in the doctrine of resurrection. That we must rise from the dead to be saved is a claim not simply about resumed corporeality, whatever that might turn out to be, but more crucially about the fully restored existence of the person as socially, communally, corporately constituted. For Paul, flesh (σάρξ, sarx) and blood (αἷμα, haima), the mortal life of the “psychical body” (σῶμα ψυχικόν, sōma psychikon), passes away, but not embodiment as such, not the “spiritual body” (σῶμα πνευματικόν, sōma pnevmatikon), which is surely not merely a local, but a communal condition: Each person is a body within the body of humanity, which exists in its proper nature only as the body of Christ.

…We belong, of necessity, to an indissoluble coinherence of souls. In the end, a person cannot begin or continue to be a person at all except in and by way of all other persons. (pp. 153-154)

If we as persons are so intimately and organically connected to one another, “each of us…an entire history of attachments and affinities,” then, David Bentley Hart concludes, “either all persons must be saved, or none can be” (p. 155).

The illustration from Hart’s meditation which speaks most to me is that of Jacob and Esau. Paul quotes Malachi, “Jacob have I loved, but Esau have I hated” (Romans 9:13). Many who read this forget the ending of the story and thus misinterpret the heart of God (as well as the true point of Paul in Romans).

Yes, God chose Jacob at birth and not the firstborn Esau, and Jacob cunningly obtained his brother’s birthright and blessing. Esau was left out in the cold while God personally accompanied scoundrel Jacob through all his experiences as a runaway from home.

But what happened in the end? Was Esau ultimately rejected? Absolutely not! The story of Jacob and Esau reaches its glorious culmination when Jacob returns home, the two brothers tearfully embrace, and Jacob admits to seeing the very face of God in his sibling.

There is, it turns out, no final division between the elect and the derelict here at all, but rather the precise opposite: the final embrace of all parties in the single and inventively universal grace of election. (p. 136)

David Bentley Hart: 4 Meditations on Apokatastasis
3: What do the scriptures say?

David Bentley Hart’s book, That All Shall Be Saved: Heaven, Hell, and Universal Salvation, sets forth a powerful, passionate argument against the traditional Christian doctrine of eternal conscious punishment — that sinners wind up forever in hell — and for the belief that all shall be saved.

Thus far we have considered the concept of apokatastasis and the implications for eschatology that arise from believing that God is the good creator of all. In his second meditation, Hart reflects on some of the biblical material that supports his case.

Here are some scriptures to which David Bentley Hart points:

• Romans 5:18-19 – through one act of righteousness came a rectification of life for all human beings
• 1 Corinthians 15:22 – as in Adam all die, so also in Christ all will be given life
• 2 Corinthians 5:14 – one died on behalf of all
• Romans 11:32 – God shut up everyone in obstinacy so that he might show mercy to everyone
• 1 Timothy 2:3-6 – our savior God, who intends all human beings to be saved
• Titus 2:11 – the grace of God has appeared, giving salvation to all human beings
• 2 Corinthians 5:19 – God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself
• Ephesians 1:9-10 – the mystery of God’s will, to recapitulate all things in Christ
• Colossians 1:27-28 – that we may present every human being as perfected in Christ
• John 12:32 – when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw everyone to myself
• Hebrews 2:9 – that by God’s grace Christ might taste of death on behalf of everyone
• John 17:2 – you gave him power over all flesh, so that you have given everything to him, that he might give them life in the age to come
• John 4:42 – this man is truly the savior of the world
• John 12:47 – I came not that I might judge the world, but that I might save the world
• 1 John 4:14 – the Father has sent the Son as savior of the world
• 2 Peter 3:9 – the Lord is magnanimous toward you, intending for no one to perish
• Matthew 18:14 – your Father in heaven desires that not one of these little ones should perish
• Philippians 2:9-11 – that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend
• Colossians 1:19-20 – to reconcile all things to him
• 1 John 2:2 – he is atonement for our sins, and not only for ours, but for the whole world
• John 3:17 – God sent the Son into the world not that he might condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through him
• Luke 16:16 – the good tidings of God’s Kingdom are being proclaimed, and everyone is being forced into it
• 1 Timothy 4:10 – we have hoped in a living God who is the savior of all human beings

What about other NT texts, particularly those sayings of Jesus that seem to speak of a final division between the wheat and the tares, the children of the kingdom and the children of the evil one?

I find no warrant in that for assuming that the highly pictorial and dramatic imagery of exclusion used by Jesus to describe the fate of the derelict when the Kingdom comes—barred or locked doors, the darkness of the night outside the feasting hall, wails of despair and teeth grinding in frustration or anger or misery—corresponds to any particular literal state of affairs, or to some specific perpetual postmortem state of the damned from which there is no hope of deliverance. I am not even willing to presume that the “inexcusable” blasphemy against the Spirit, mentioned in all three synoptic gospels, is one for which an everlasting penalty must be exacted—whether that be endless torment or final annihilation—rather than merely one that necessarily requires purification instead of pardon. The texts of the gospels simply make no obvious claim about a place or state of endless suffering; and, again, the complete absence of any such notion in the Pauline corpus (or, for that matter, in John’s gospel, or in the other New Testament epistles, or in the earliest Christian documents of the post-apostolic church, such as the Didache and the writings of the “Apostolic Fathers,” and so forth) makes the very concept nearly as historically suspect as it is morally repellent. All that can be said with perfect certitude is that to read back into these texts either the traditional view of dual eternal postmortem destinies or the developed high mediaeval Roman Catholic view of an absolute distinction between “Hell” and “Purgatory” would be either (in the former case) a mere dogmatic reflex or (in the latter) a feat of pure historical illiteracy. (pp. 117-118)

…To me, therefore, it seems almost insane for anyone to imagine that such language can be distilled into specific propositions about heaven and hell, eternity and time, redemption and desolation. All it tells us is that God is just, and that the world he will bring to pass will be one in which mercy has cast out cruelty, and that all of us must ultimately answer for the injustices we perpetrate. It is a language that simultaneously inhabits two distinct ages of the world, two distinct frames of reality, neither of whose terrains or vistas it pretends to describe in literal detail: It at one and the same time announces a justice to be established within historical time by divine intervention and affirms a justice that can be realized only beyond historical time’s ultimate conclusion. It is intended, it seems obvious, to move its listeners to both prudent fear and imprudent hope. But, beyond that, only the poetry and the mystery remain. (p. 120)

David Bentley Hart: 4 Meditations on Apokatastasis
2: In the end of all things is their beginning

David Bentley Hart’s book, That All Shall Be Saved: Heaven, Hell, and Universal Salvation, sets forth a powerful, passionate argument against the traditional Christian doctrine of eternal conscious punishment — that sinners wind up forever in hell — and for the belief that all shall be saved.

In our first post we introduced the concept of apokatastasis, which Paul writes about in Ephesians 1:9-10 —

He made known to us the mystery of His will, according to His kind intention which He purposed in Him with a view to an administration suitable to the fullness of the times, that is, the summing up of all things in Christ, things in the heavens and things on the earth. (NASB, emphasis mine)

Hart understands Jesus and the New Testament writers to teach that there is a coming judgment upon human sin, but that this judgment is not the final word. Beyond that, “even those who have traveled as far from God as it is possible to go, through every possible self-imposed hell, will at the last find themselves in the home to which they are called from everlasting, their hearts purged of every last residue of hatred and pride” (p. 104). DBH sees universal salvation as the only logical conclusion to the Christian story.

As far as I am concerned, anyone who hopes for the universal reconciliation of creatures with God must already believe that this would be the best possible ending to the Christian story; and such a person has then no excuse for imagining that God could bring any but the best possible ending to pass without thereby being in some sense a failed creator. (p. 66)

And that brings us to Hart’s second meditation, on God as Creator.

•

It is not the way of the compassionate Maker to create rational beings in order to deliver them over mercilessly to unending affliction in punishment for things of which He knew even before they were fashioned, aware how they would turn out when He created them—and whom nonetheless He created.

• St. Isaac of Ninevah, Ascetical Homilies (quoted, p. 64)

Hart testifies that he learned from Fathers such as St. Isaac, Origen, Gregory and Maximus that “protology is eschatology.” What we understand about God as Creator informs our understanding of the world’s relation to God and his ultimate design for it. “The end of all things is their beginning.”

[T]he cosmos will have been truly created only when it reaches its consummation in “the union of all things with the first Good,” and humanity will have truly been created only when all human beings, united in the living body of Christ, become at last that “Godlike thing” that is “humankind according to the image.” (p. 68)

God created toward an end, and if that end includes the damnation of people created in God’s image (in some theological traditions — the vast majority of people), then what shall we say of God’s goodness? And what shall we make of such scriptural claims as “Where sin increased, grace abounded all the more, so that, as sin reigned in death, even so grace would reign through righteousness to eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord” (Romans 5:20-21).

And what does the eternal punishment of sinners say, Hart asks, about Christ’s sacrifice and the real cost of saving only a remnant of humanity? “[W]hat would the mystery of God becoming a man in order to effect a merely partial rescue of created order truly be, as compared to the far deeper mystery of a worthless man becoming the suffering god upon whose perpetual holocaust the entire order of creation finally depends?” (p. 85)

In either case—eternal torment, eternal oblivion—creation and redemption are negotiations with evil, death, and suffering, and so never in an absolute sense God’s good working of all things. (p. 87)

However, David Bentley Hart argues, this cannot be.

If God is the good creator of all, he must also be the savior of all, without fail, who brings to himself all he has made, including all rational wills, and only thus returns to himself in all that goes forth from him. (pp. 90-91)

David Bentley Hart: 4 Meditations on Apokatastasis
1: Introduction

David Bentley Hart’s book, That All Shall Be Saved: Heaven, Hell, and Universal Salvation, sets forth a powerful, passionate argument against the traditional Christian doctrine of eternal conscious punishment — that sinners wind up forever in hell — and for the belief that all shall be saved.

One argument that I shall make in this book is that the very notion that a rational agent in full possession of his or her faculties could, in any meaningful sense, freely reject God absolutely and forever is a logically incoherent one. Another is that, for this and other reasons, a final state of eternal torment could be neither a just sentence pronounced upon nor a just fate suffered by a finite being, no matter how depraved that being might have become. Still another is that, even if that fate were in some purely abstract sense “just,” the God who would permit it to become anyone’s actual fate could never be perfectly good…. (p. 18)

Hart has been accused of being “unrelentingly pugilistic,” in this book, beating “down opponents through cheap shots and emotional appeals” (Holsclaw, at McKnight). And, indeed, the writing is sharp and militant. At one point, Hart calls the traditional view of hell “degrading nonsense—an absolute midden of misconceptions, fragments of scriptural language wrenched out of context, errors of translation, logical contradictions, and (I suspect) one or two emotional pathologies” (p. 25).

But I think those who criticize him here are missing the point. Who, in his or her right mind, discusses the eternal punishment in hellfire of fellow human beings with cool detachment or as an academic matter of theology? In my view, Hart is absolutely right to pour his heart as well as his mind into fighting this battle. There is more than enough intellectual rigor here to debate, but it would not be at all seemly if one did not call out those who have promulgated these teachings for failing to feel the emotional and visceral nature of them and to acknowledge with pathos the toll these teachings have taken upon real human beings over the centuries.

Nevertheless, I leave most of that to David Bentley Hart. I would like to take some time here to examine his four meditations upon apokatastasis, his reasons for believing that, in the end, “all shall be saved.” The Greek word apokatastasis comes from Ephesians 1:9-10 —

He made known to us the mystery of His will, according to His kind intention which He purposed in Him with a view to an administration suitable to the fullness of the times, that is, the summing up of all things in Christ, things in the heavens and things on the earth. (NASB, emphasis mine)

Hart translates the key phrase, “the recapitulation of all things in the Anointed.” He lists Eph. 1:9-10 as one of a number of texts that promote the idea of universal salvation. He is not unaware of other texts that seem to advance the idea of eternal judgment and hell, and he wonders why the tradition chose to uphold those while ignoring or explaining away the apokatastasis texts.

To me it is surpassingly strange that, down the centuries, most Christians have come to believe that one class of claims—all of which are allegorical, pictorial, vague, and metaphorical in form—must be regarded as providing the “literal” content of the New Testament’s teaching regarding the world to come, while another class—all of which are invariably straightforward doctrinal statements—must be regarded as mere hyperbole. (p. 101)

He also rejects the “hopeful universalism” approach taken by those like Hans Urs von Balthasar, who sees these two apparently contradictory sets of texts as irreconcilable, advocating that we hold them in tension with one another, respect the mystery of our inability to resolve that tension, and hope for the best — “to wait on God in a salutary condition of charity toward all and salubrious fear for ourselves—of a joyous certitude regarding the glorious power of God’s love and a terrible consciousness of the dreadful might of sin” (p. 103).

Hart’s own solution to the seemingly contrary eschatological expectations in the NT is to see them as “two different moments within a seamless narrative, two distinct eschatological horizons, one enclosed within the other” (p. 103). There will be a judgment upon human history and sin, but this is not the ultimate judgment. That will occur when all creation — and thus, all humanity — is finally reconciled to God.

In this way of seeing the matter, one set of images marks the furthest limit of the immanent course of history, and the division therein—right at the threshold between this age and the “Age to come” (‘olam ha-ba, in Hebrew)—between those who have surrendered to God’s love and those who have not; and the other set refers to that final horizon of all horizons, “beyond all ages,” where even those who have traveled as far from God as it is possible to go, through every possible self-imposed hell, will at the last find themselves in the home to which they are called from everlasting, their hearts purged of every last residue of hatred and pride. (pp. 103-104)

He likens this to the Cross and Easter Sunday. “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 he finds support in the words of Paul in 1 Corinthians 15: 22-28 —

For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ all will be made alive. But each in his own order: Christ the first fruits, after that those who are Christ’s at His coming, then comes the end, when He hands over the kingdom to the God and Father, when He has abolished all rule and all authority and power. For He must reign until He has put all His enemies under His feet. The last enemy that will be abolished is death. For He has put all things in subjection under His feet. But when He says, “All things are put in subjection,” it is evident that He is excepted who put all things in subjection to Him. When all things are subjected to Him, then the Son Himself also will be subjected to the One who subjected all things to Him, so that God may be all in all. (NASB)

David Bentley Hart sees here “three distinct moments, distributed across two eschatological frames, in the process of the final restoration of the created order in God (p. 104).

1. First, the exaltation of Christ
2. Second, the exaltation of those united to Christ (at Christ’s coming, at history’s end)
3. Third, “the full completion at the end of all ages,” when the Kingdom is given to the Father

Note, there is no mention in Paul’s scheme here of any who will be cast into eternal damnation. “All things,” to Hart, means “all things” in heaven and on earth. In order for “all” to truly mean that “all” will be saved, Hart references Paul’s picture of the judgment in 1 Corinthians 3, where two types of people will be “saved” — those whose works withstand the fire and those whose works are burned up in the fire — though they themselves are saved. In other words, though David Bentley Hart believes that all will be saved, that does not mean that people will miss having to pass through purifying judgment.

Next time: Hart’s first argument for apokatastasis.