Abstract
David Bentley Hart’s That All Shall be Saved is, at times, a hard book to place. Whilst clearly informed by decades of thought and study, it does not follow the conventions of academic texts and in making its argument it is clear that it does not want to. It has thus been described as a polemical rather than an academic text, and whilst it is a rhetorical tour de force, the polemic stems from a heartfelt emotional, rather than logical, reaction to what it truly means to believe in an eternal hell. Thus whilst it is polemical, rhetorical, and erudite, stemming from his study of early church texts and his recent translation of the New Testament, what this book is, is unimpeachably honest.
Aside from a mention of George MacDonald, the text remains largely within the early church. Taking as his authority the universalist vision of Gregory of Nyssa, Hart argues for his vision of both God and humanity against the deeply logical but, as he argues, inhumane position of Augustine. In its honesty the text notes that if one accepts Augustine’s vision of the world then a belief in an eternal hell is a coherent one, but it comes at a cost to its Creator. Calling those who argue for this belief infernalists, Hart goes through the arguments that are raised in support of it, and finds them all morally repugnant. It is moral repugnance with a God who could demand an eternal hell that drives Bentley Hart’s arguments, which then is seen as a God that is all too human in the worst sense of the word. Whilst these arguments may be utterly watertight and coherent within themselves, the telos of these arguments is one that is completely opposed to Hart’s understanding of the Good. Any God who condemns anyone to an eternal hell is a God that is not Good, or Love, or beyond this world. Whilst Hart’s argument tends more towards demolition than construction, in his Four Meditations on Apokatastasis there are statements of the positive programme of God and humanity that stands in contrast to the God and the humanity of the infernalists.
It is here that his argument is at its more dense and also at its most speculative. There are clear assumptions about humanity and its search and desire for the Good that undergird Hart’s argument, just as there are understandings of God and humanity that infernalists will cling to. This vision of human nature may be, as he acknowledges, somewhat optimistic. Yet for Hart the alternative is so morally bankrupt as a position that in seeking to maintain the goodness of God in terms of harm and justice, it instead enshrines cruelty rather than love.
At its heart, this a book that grapples with a dialectic set up between love and logic, and whilst the rhetoric of the book appears to come down firmly on the side of love against the cold logic of the infernalists, there is method in it. Whilst dismissive of the ontology behind the dialectic that informs von Balthasar’s hopeful universalism, Hart remains within his own dialectic. This is an interesting, powerful book, but the position it advances and with regards to how it is advanced, ironically remains rather singular.