Hell revised

Oh, back to a favourite topic - how reliably Christian is the idea of a never ending Hell, as discussed by that Eastern Orthodox theologian I have mentioned before, David Bentley Hart.  This is from a review of a book of his on the topic:

A member of the Democratic Socialists of America, hardly a radical leftist, Hart is nevertheless on the side of the angels. In recent years, he has thrown the traditionally minded into a tizzy, principally via two arguments: that hell is not eternal—that all shall be saved—and that an honest adherence to the Gospel of Jesus Christ would require Christians to be “communists,” in the strict sense given by the Acts of the Apostles (“omnia sunt communia”—a favorite verse of Müntzer’s).

 As Hart expounds in That All Shall Be Saved, it is impossible to wrest a coherent doctrine of hell from Jesus’s and Paul’s scattered and figurative references to a final judgment, or from Revelation’s fevered phantasmagoria. As the biblically literate know, since the Wycliffe Bible, which appeared in the fourteenth century, the words that English translators of the New Testament have rendered as “hell” are “Hades,” the familiar realm of the dead, and “Gehenna.” This last is the Greek form of “Ge-Hinnom,” the Valley of Hinnom, which is a real place near Jerusalem. This valley had long been associated with child sacrifice and evil gods and perhaps served as a charnel pit for burning carrion. Readers of the New Testament wishing to extrapolate the conventional picture of hell have very little to go on:

Certainly no one now can say with confidence precisely what Jesus’s understanding of the Gehenna’s fire was . . . what duration he might have assigned to those subjected to it, or even how metaphorically he intended such imagery to be taken. It is obvious that metaphor was his natural idiom as a teacher, and that he employed the prophetic and apocalyptic tropes of his time in a manner more poetic than precise.

Hart traverses this ground in order to construct a daedal and extremely learned defense of the doctrine of apocatastasis (the word means “restoration”), which is as old as Christianity itself, though it has always been a minority position. It is the belief that all souls—even Old Scratch himself—will ultimately be reconciled to God through Christ. Its proponents in the early church include Origen and Gregory of Nyssa, two of the subtlest minds in the history of Christian thought. Though they arrive at universalism by very different routes, a touchstone for both is 1 Corinthians 15, in which Paul writes that at the end of days God will be “all in all.” For these early Christians, as for Hart, the first preachers of universal salvation in the Christian tradition were Jesus and Paul. On this view, there is no eternal perdition. If hell exists, it is a state of temporary purgation. Gregory insisted that this would not be “a harsh means of correction,” as the “thoughtless” speak of it, but “a healing remedy provided by God, to restore his own creation to its original grace.”

I will skip some paragraphs then get to this:

And predestination, that pillar of Reformed theology, doesn’t enter the picture. Hart reserves his most damning rhetoric for Reformed arguments about humanity’s exposure to destruction. Would that every Christian might read Hart’s elegant exegesis of Paul’s notoriously complex language of election in Romans 9–11, often read as justifying a division of humanity into called and rejected. Unlike the Augustinian tradition’s tortured interpretations of this epistle, Hart’s reading allows Paul’s promise that God will “have mercy on all” to mean what it plainly says. Hart is similarly attentive to 1 Timothy 4, where Paul (more likely a later author writing in Paul’s name) calls Jesus “the Savior of all human beings, especially those who have faith”—all human beings, and what could that “especially” mean if only believers are saved?

I lack space to address all of Hart’s arguments for universal salvation. For me, and I suspect for many of this magazine’s readers, his book is hardly of pressing doctrinal concern anyway. But a lot of folks sure do like them some hellfire. The editors of First Things, an influential conservative Christian journal, ran no fewer than three attacks on That All Shall Be Saved, the last one accusing Hart of having committed “theological fraud.” It would be unchristian to suggest that this enthusiastic response might be related to Hart’s having broken with the journal, to which he used to contribute a frequently delectable column, because he “could not remain on good terms with a collection of editors who had embraced the politics of the alt-right.”