That All Shall Be Saved – Forging Ploughshares

The Irreligious Arc of David Bentley Hart

David Bentley Hart’s recent Valentine’s Day revelation (in his Substack) of being temperamentally irreligious, not disposed to belief in his own resurrection (though he is convinced of Christ’s), and his lack of personal spiritual devotion, contained doubts and expressions of disbelief with which I am personally well-acquainted, but I suppose I have never taken my own proclivities as seriously as Hart does his. In fact, I have never considered either my capacity for belief nor my tendency toward doubt to be of primary importance. Belief is no great accomplishment, and to think it is, is precisely the problem in imagining doubt is determinative of moral engagement. Hart’s “dishonesty,” as he terms it, is not really his keeping his irreligious tendencies a secret (“no natural aptitude for religious sentiment, enthusiasm, devotion, or ritual observance”) but his abandonment of any hope in making a difference by forsaking the church and Christian identity. This failure is no revelation, however, as its unfolding is evident in the arc of his work and thought.

Given Hart’s Confessions, How Can it Be That All Shall Be Saved?

It is focus on personal salvation, going to heaven (missing hell) when you die, that Hart supposedly traded for a more expansive universal salvation in That All Shall Be Saved: Heaven Hell and Universal Salvation. He was so insistent on universal salvation, that he considered “hopeful universalism” a “timid” form of faith, and his more robust dogmatic universalism the only honest option. He can know universal salvation is the case, and hope need not enter into it.

But what can this mean for one who cannot “conceive of any kind of postmortem existence” and for whom life after death is perceived as “banal, tedious, or horrific” and who seems to prefer personal annihilation (Hart says he “could unresentfully cease upon the midnight without pain, knowing that afterward no one would bother me”)? He concludes, “Never having been fully convinced that existence is much of a blessing, I cannot think of nonexistence as obviously a curse.” Everyone may miss hell, only to go to the grave and obliteration, but what about the universal salvation upon which he was so insistent?

He abandoned hope for knowledge it seems, only to play his own game of “oddly unregenerate ‘rational’ fundamentalism” (of the sort he attributes to William Lane Craig). In light of his revelations about near total lack of belief in resurrection (which is Christian salvation), this turns out to have been mere posturing and formal argumentation (my original critique here). Hart’s tone, his entertaining arrogance, is not a side-light of his work but is gained from a perspective in which formal argumentation replaces real-world engagement in combating evil and living out the Christian life. While one might be certain of formal statements about God and salvation, does this form of certainty give rise to ethical behavior, to resistance to evil, to assuming personal responsibility, or does it in fact have the opposite effect? (Hart confesses, he has little to no interest in the church or in the practice of Christianity, which is the place of moral engagement in combating evil.)

The Problem of Evil Looms Too Large

Among Hart’s revelations is that he finds the problem of evil irresolvable and therefore admits a sort of defeat. “I have never, moreover, been able to get very far past the problem of evil when it chooses to spring up in the road before me like the Lord in the path of Moses on the way back to Egypt; nothing the staretz Zosima says provides an adequate response to Vanya’s ‘rebellion’.”

Hart has long resisted any notion of a theodicy. A position I appreciated enough that I used his Doors of the Sea in the classroom, but even then I detected he was making a weak case for the problem of evil, inasmuch as it never touched upon God. In order for God to not be implicated in the problem of evil, Hart calls upon divine apatheia, which is beyond comprehension. A book devoted to disclaiming theodicy, reverses course in the case of God so as to provide Him, if no one else, a way out through God’s transcendence. God is beyond evil and the world, and Christ does not enter into the equation (which, as I understand it, is God’s real-world answer to the problem of evil). For Hart, the Cross, rather than being an unfolding defeat of evil (as an ongoing battle) is “a triumph of divine apatheia” (p. 81).

Hart’s confident universalism and divine apatheia function in much the same way. Formal cause is protected in both instances, by dismissing the contingencies of evil as entering into the equation. He never explains the how of universal salvation, but affirms it as a formal necessity, and by the same token evil is not explained and yet God is formally free of evil. This is accomplished not by focusing on what is knowable about God in Christ, but by trusting primarily in what is apophatic, ahistorical, and ultimately unknowable. One might speak of this trust as “certain” as part of a formal argument but it is a certainty that has nothing to do with the real world-defeat of evil found in the historical Jesus. In Christ, God does not wash his hands of evil, but directly engages it.

The fault is not in the logic of the argument but the limited perspective. His dogmatic universalism plays the role of a theodicy, in that it relieves him of any personal responsibility of organized resistance to evil. Then he can paint the bleakest picture of evil, and resist any possible explanation, including the explanation that Christ is defeating evil.

I too would resist a theodicy, other than that God in Christ is defeating evil, but this is not a formal argument and does not explain evil, and it falls short of the sort of formal certainty upon which Hart depends. In fact, this may be unsatisfactory for one who demands certainty and makes no room for hope. Belief in Christ does not function as a formal argument or theory, rather there is real world resistance and hope of defeat of evil in the eschaton.

There is no Hope in the Church

Of his books, the one I appreciated most, may have been the one in which he drops the mode of formal argument. Hart painted a bleak picture of the church in Tradition and Apocalypse, suggesting there is no relation between the church of the apostolic era and the institution that took its place. The latter, he claims completely contradicts the former. There is no continuity, no “organic vitality,” no “living idea” which can possibly connect them (pp. 826-829). In this book however, the entire argument depends on the apocalyptic hope of the title bringing the kingdom to a future perfection (see my previous discussion, here).

What he did not tell us at that time, is that he has given up on the church. “I find myself now barely able to abide most hymnody, litanies, the psalter, or even (I am ashamed to say) sacrament.” His identity is no longer that of a Christian: “Most important of all, it seems to me, is the absence of any interest in ‘Christian identity’ on the part of someone with my irreligious tendencies.” Apart from apocalyptic hope, which he has apparently abandoned, this reduces Tradition and Apocalypse to a negative history without apocalyptic possibilities.

In the book Hart did not attempt to address the gaps he notes, which make later forms of the faith a contradiction of the Christianity of the New Testament and the early church. He admitted, he is offering no practical solutions and no program of action. It is now clear that he needed no answer, no program of action, because he does not identify with any church, including the Orthodox Church. He has no interest in “Christian identity” or identity with any church, most especially the Orthodox Church (he describes his particular dislike of Orthodoxy), which in his public persona he never abandoned.

I concluded a review of his book with this statement: “Mine is a more peaceful and anti-institutional inclination (while recognizing none have escaped Christendom and its seeming necessities). I presume we really should attempt to reduplicate the economy, the nonviolence, and the disempowerment of the first church and the first Christians so as to put in place the lived reality of the peace of Christ. I presume it is not enough to name the failures, without specifying their nature and striving to rid ourselves of the specific forms of violence, the oppression and contradictions which have negated and continue to negate the gospel preached by Jesus and the Apostles. Specifying the nature of this failure comes with the practical necessity of doing something about it; an imperative of which Hart remains free.”

I wonder how many have been pressed into service of institutional Christianity following Hart’s public example, not realizing his true, secular stance?

Empty Gnosticism and Neo-Platonism

Hart also confesses that he finds the Japanese Tea Ceremony preferrable to celebration of the Eucharist, and would make the Tea Ceremony the center of any religion he invented. His glorification of the East and especially of Japan, already betrayed orientalist notions (as explained by Edward Said), which scholars of Japan recognize as part of the nationalist mythologizing (Nihonjinron), to which non-Japanese are peculiarly susceptible. The irony is that the Tea Ceremony has been traced, some argue, to an imitation of the communion service, which is Said’s point: Orientalism is primarily a reification of the East undertaken by the West.

The significance of Hart’s focus on Vedantic religion and privileging of the East, and raising it to religious significance, is the end-point of his gnostic Neo-Platonism, favoring formal and rational arguments. He had previously rejected the bodily – enfleshed resurrection, arguing that Paul was a dualist, holding to a Platonist split between flesh and spirit, arguing that resurrected bodies have no flesh and that the writers of the New Testament were, indeed, denigrating the flesh and did not hold to the notion that flesh was a designation for the “sinful nature.” [1] It is no surprise he has now gone a step further, not only relinquishing the importance of the enfleshing work of Christ in the body, but giving up even on the vague survival (spiritual resurrection) he formerly espoused.

As I previously pointed out (here), Hart is wrong in presuming that it is Protestants who have innovated the notion that Jesus was raised and ascended in a fleshly body (it is the overwhelming position of the early Church) and he is wrong in presuming that Paul’s contrast between spirit and soul (in I Cor. 15) is typical of the ancients. But Hart is bent upon making his Platonism Christian by reading the New Testament in the context of contemporaneous thought, presuming Paul and John are mostly reflecting and not critiquing the received understanding found in Plato and the Gnostics.

Hart has long argued for a standard rationality, inclusive of Christianity which, as with his own thought, does not challenge the pagan worldview. He presumes there is a given understanding (knowledge of God as creator and law giver) available to all persons (whose capacity for reason remains largely intact in spite of sin) and that salvation does not pertain to epistemology. For him, flesh means being mortal and not sinful. As he puts it, “In the New Testament, ‘flesh’ does not mean ‘sinful nature or ‘humanity under judgment’ or even ‘fallen flesh.’ It just means ‘flesh,’ in the bluntly physical sense. . ..” This means death is a natural outworking of creation, and salvation is deliverance from what God calls good (a “shedding of flesh”).

However, when Paul describes the “body of death” and connects it to the working of the flesh, he certainly does not mean that this flows naturally from what God has created or that sin is an inevitable result of creation. In presuming Paul is just an extension of his time (more of the same), Hart misses the deep nature of the Pauline critique of human wisdom and he falls into the very dualism constitutive of this wisdom.

Conclusion

The justice enacted in Christ, deals in the realm of human history and human experience, and allows for human understanding of the finite kind and not the transcendent reason of formal argumentation (Hart’s focus). Christians might refer to certainty, but it is a certainty in progress, working itself out in history, and engaged not in terms of an absolute philosophical certainty but the “hopeful” certainty of faith. The former need not take into account the realm of evil or the contingencies of history. The latter, is a humble “hopeful” certainty which deals in the reality of human perspective and the existential fact of suffering and evil. It is not clear Hart has shifted or abandoned a belief he might have once had, rather it is doubtful that he ever adhered to a humble, hopeful, faith centered on the historical work of Christ. His recent confessions indicate the end point of the trajectory traceable throughout the course of his work.

[1] David Bentley Hart, “The Spiritual Was More Substantial Than the Material for the Ancients,” in Church Life Journal (July 26, 2018), https://churchlifejournal.nd.edu/articles/the-spiritual-was-more-substantial-than-the-material-for-the-ancients/

Does Hart’s Dogmatic Universalism Miss the Real World Engagement of Christian Hope?

David Bentley Hart, in That All Shall Be Saved, arrives at an unquestioning universalism which he poses against the “hopeful” but “timid” universalism of Swiss theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar and concludes that to be timid simply springs from being muddled. Either everyone will be reconciled to God through the work of Christ or some human beings will never be reconciled – both cannot be true. If Hart’s argument has a target audience, beyond those who already agree with him, it must be to nudge the hopeful universalists toward his dogmatic universalism. Hart blends philosophical and biblical argument and concludes that the notion of “tension” between two irreconcilable positions is simply a way of eliding “contradiction” and, the ultimate Hartian insult, this timidity is just giving way to a “post-Hegelian dialectical disenchantment, as well perhaps as a touch of disingenuous obscurantism” (p. 103). It is his blending of modes of discourse which I want to question: Is biblical certainty of the same order as philosophical certainty and do these modes of discourse position us differently in regard to the work of Christ, history, and most especially the problem of evil?

It is not that philosophy and theology are absolutely discreet, but the incremental difference between “hopeful” and “certain” universality pertains to tone and perspective. That is, Hart’s tone, his wonderfully entertaining arrogance, is not a side light of this work but is gained from a perspective he would have everyone adopt. Here we have not so much to do with the hard work of explaining how justice can possibly be meted out or how evil can be resolved. This tone of certainty smacks more of the perspective of a philosophical transcendence, which need not bend to the limited perspective of a mere human. The categories are dealt with, the formal causes and problems engaged, while there is really no comprehension of how this really works. I certainly believe in a final justice but the comprehension that this is so is far different than understanding how it is going to be made the case. The justice enacted in Christ, the revelation of God in Christ, by way of contrast, deals in the realm of human history, human experience, and allows for human understanding. This too is a certainty, but it is a certainty in progress, working itself out in history, and engaged not in terms of an absolute philosophical certainty but the “hopeful” certainty of faith. The former need not take into account the realm of evil or the contingencies of history. The latter is a humble “hopeful” certainty which deals in the reality of human perspective and the existential fact of suffering and evil.

The argument for humility may sound like a niggling critique, but it makes all the difference in terms of the problem of evil. We can, in portions of Hart’s argument, momentarily set aside the real-world overcoming of evil in the Cross of Christ – the engaged position of those responsible men and women called to action in the face of evil[1] – as we our now given a God’s eye view above all of the sound and fury. It turns out that the weight of God’s action is in the future, far removed from real-world engagement with evil, beyond history and on the other side of death. Isn’t the danger of this absolutely confident universalism that, like infernalism, it so weights future categories so as to empty out the necessity of the Cross and our taking up the Cross?

The objection is not that Hart does this permanently or all the time. He is too good of a theologian for that, but the entire argument is geared toward adopting a tone warranted, not so much by a Christocentric perspective as by arguments from formal cause. Both may give rise to what we call “certainty” but the former brand of certainty is an engaged certainty, which looks to the gradual triumph of the work of Christ and the Cross. The latter certainty can skip over all mere historical, known categories, and invest its trust in an incomprehensible future. For example, purging fire (a perfectly sound idea) is as metaphorical as punishing fire. How either works is beyond comprehension. Unlike the Cross, which we can ascertain, comprehend in part, and witness to, the certainty imbued by this future work is made of the same stuff as purely formal analytical arguments (of which Hart is so critical).

Hart’s confident universalism functions in this book much in the same way that divine apatheia functions in The Doors of the Sea. In order for God to not be implicated in the problem of evil, the mode of rescue is through an apatheia beyond comprehension. A book spent on disclaiming theodicy reverses course in the case of God so as to provide Him, if no one else, a way out. The Cross in turn, rather than being a real world unfolding of the defeat of evil (as an ongoing battle) is “a triumph of divine apatheia” (p. 81). Hart’s formal cause is protected from evil, in both instances, by formally dismissing the contingencies of evil as entering into the equation. This is accomplished not by focusing on what is knowable about God in Christ, but by trusting primarily in what is apophatic, a-historical, and ultimately unknowable. One might speak of this trust as “certain” as part of a formal and flawless argument but it is a certainty that almost certainly has nothing to do with the real world-defeat of evil found in the historical Jesus. The fault is not in the logic of the argument but in the perspective it affords.

The Christocentric perspective, as with the evil which it takes into account, primarily deals in the concrete and specific and is not aimed at protecting formal arguments nor an abstract understanding. While one might be certain of one’s formal statements about God, does this form of certainty give rise to ethical behavior, to resistance to evil, to assuming personal responsibility or does it, in fact, have the opposite effect?

As with the discourse of the friends of Job, the heirs and guardians of infallible arguments, their knowledge is dispensed from a height which could lord it over the evil that plagued their poor, muddled thinking, friend. Their knowledge is pure and positive and does not rely upon taking into account momentary evil. While their thought takes flight from the world, Job’s hope is that God would show up in the midst of the world.

“This I know: that my Defender lives, and he, the Last, will take his stand on earth. After my awakening, he will set me close to him, and from my flesh I shall look on God. He whom I shall see will take my part: he whom my eyes will gaze on will no longer be a stranger” (19:25-27).

There is a certainty in Job’s statement, but it is not the certainty of his friends in their apprehension of formal cause. It is a hopeful certainty that takes into account his present suffering. It is not through denying or turning away from suffering that we see the presence of God in Christ; it is by entering into the truth of these realities that we best apprehend God.

In his deployment of creation ex-nihilo Hart notes, “God does not determine himself in creation—because there is no dialectical necessity binding him to time or chaos, no need to forge his identity in the fires of history—in creating he reveals himself truly.”[2] While God does not determine himself in creation, is it the case that this is sufficient revelation for his human subjects? Contrast this with Luther’s critique of scholasticism:

Thesis 19: ‘He is not rightly called a theologian who perceives and understands God’s invisible being through his works. That is clear from those who were such ‘theologians’ and yet were called fools by the apostle in Romans 1:22. ‘The invisible being of God is his power, Godhead, wisdom, righteousness, goodness, and so on. Knowledge of all these things does not make a man wise and worthy.’
Thesis 20: ‘But he is rightly called a theologian who understands that part of God’s being which is visible and directed towards the world to be presented in suffering and in the cross. That part of God’s being which is visible and directed towards the world is opposed to what is invisible, his humanity, his weakness, his foolishness…For as men misused the knowledge of God on the basis of his works, God again willed that he should be known from suffering, and therefore willed to reject such wisdom of the visible, so that those Who did not worship God as he is manifested in his works might worship him as the one who is hidden in suffering (I Cor. 1:21). So, it is not enough and no use for anyone to know God in his glory and his majesty if at the same time he does not know him in the lowliness and shame of his cross. Thus, true theology and true knowledge of God lie in Christ the crucified one.’[3]

Barth’s and Bonhoeffer’s critique of theological liberalism, which mostly served the Nazi cause, took its strength from their engaged form of Lutheranism. For Bonhoeffer, the foundation of ethical behavior is how the reality of the world and the reality of God are reconciled in the reality of Christ (Ethics, p. 198). To share in Christ’s reality is to become a responsible person, a person who performs actions in accordance with reality and the fulfilled will of God (Ethics, p.224). Hart’s form of certainty stands in danger of foregoing the necessity of reconciling the two forms of discourse he engages and thus produces a philosophical certainty in place of the hopeful assurance of faith. The formal realities of God known through creation take precedence, in his dogmatic universalism, over the hopeful universalism of faith in Christ. The danger is in missing the prime reality of the world engaged by Christ; the basis for a responsible ethical overcoming of evil.

[1] In Bonhoeffers description.

[2] David Bentley Hart “God, Creation, and Evil: The Moral Meaning of creatio ex nihilho, in Radical Orthodoxy: Theology, Philosophy, Politics, (Vol. 3, Number1 (September 2015): 1-17) p. 5

[3] Gerhard Forde’s On Being a Theologian of the Cross: Reflections on Luther’s Heidelberg Disputation, 1518.

Hell and Universal Salvation

If one has never questioned infernalism (the belief that some or many will experience eternal torturous punishment in a future after-life), David Bentley Hart’s That All Shall Be Saved: Heaven Hell and Universal Salvation is probably too large a pill to swallow. On the other hand, those who have never questioned infernalism are probably not the target audience of the book, which is part of the problem and Hart’s opening point; “I know I cannot reasonably expect to persuade anyone of anything, except perhaps of my sincerity” (p. 4). Those who follow the argument will simply agree that it “successfully expresses their views,” while those who disagree will either dismiss his argument out of hand or presume to leverage the same old tired counter-arguments. “The whole endeavor may turn out to be pointless” (p. 4). The feeling of futility may be peculiarly irksome as the gravity of eternal torturous punishment pulls every other doctrine into its orbit, even and most especially the doctrine of God. If God is eternally angry (in spite of the Biblical teaching that he is not), if eternal torture of finite humans is part of his plan and necessary to his ends, and if it is by this means that God demonstrates his sovereignty, one might become suspicious, Hart argues, that Satan has taken the place of God and that worship of one or the other is an arbitrary choice.

The problem is, if one pulls out the infernalist thread, then atonement theory, anthropology, and doctrine of God, in the common Western understanding will also unravel. Hart’s hard-hitting volume raises the question, given “the sheer enormity of the idea of a hell of eternal torment” and the “absurdities and atrocities” it entails (p. 78), whether we are still dealing with the same God and faith as that of the New Testament? Given the “moral hideousness” (p. 79) of infernalism, given that like God one will be required in eternity, according to Tertullian, to learn to relish “the delightful spectacle of the destruction of the reprobate,” given that, according to Martin Luther, “the saved will rejoice to see their [former] loved ones roasting in hell” and that according to Thomas Aquinas “the vision of the torments of the damned will increase the beatitude of the redeemed (as any trace of pity would darken the joys of heaven)” (p. 78), given all this (and more) do we still have to do with the religion of love of the New Testament? Hart does not put the question exactly like that, but this gets at the enormity of the shift for which he is arguing. In short, eternal hell distorts the character of God, changes the nature of salvation, puts human will at the center of eternity, creates a feeling of elitism, diminishes the value of the vast majority of humanity, and shifts the focus of the New Testament and the work of Christ away from salvation from sin and death to salvation from eternal torturous existence.

Several pages of the book are given over to simply listing those New Testament passages which seem to describe an unqualified universality. The opening epigraph sums up the idea of some 25 passages Hart deals with: “Our savior God. . . intends that all human beings shall be saved and come to a full knowledge of the truth” (I Timothy 2:3-4, Hart’s rendering). Hart’s translation of the New Testament, which he considers the required starting point (he sees the book as a companion to his translation), at a minimum, “restores certain ambiguities” (p. 3) read by the early Church as entailing universal salvation. The evidence indicates, “that the universalist faction was at its most numerous at least as a relative ratio of believers, in the church’s first half millennium” (p. 1). This did not rule out belief in hell, rather; “to them hell was the fire of purification described by the Apostle Paul in the third chapter of I Corinthians” (p. 1). Hart maintains, “There have been Christian universalists . . .since the earliest centuries of the faith” but the theological influence of Augustine has given rise to two millennia of misunderstanding in the West (“if only he had died twenty years earlier,” Hart laments elsewhere).

A significant part of the book is spent refuting the notion that the integrity of free will requires belief in infernalism. Hell allows some to be in eternal rebellion while others use their free will to choose God. In either case, the main thing is the integrity of human will (unblighted by coercion or by circumstance). Hart’s point is that this entails a faulty view of free will. Is free will total freedom from any constraint, any authority, any tradition, so that nothing constrains? What would total lack of constraint look like, presuming it a possibility? We might describe someone who jumps off a bridge or who runs into a burning building for the sheer fun of it as exercising their unconstrained freedom. Maybe the individual wants to feel the freedom of flying off the bridge or maybe they want to experience the exhilaration of being burnt alive. This person may be exercising a kind of liberty, but it seems they are slaves to delusion, that they are experiencing a poverty of rational freedom. Pure choice, free of purpose, and free of a goal is simply “brute fact” and has nothing to do with free will.

Our choices (or will) are always exercised on the basis of some rationale and this reason depends upon circumstance. In the Bible, humanity is depicted as deluded, held captive by a lie, enslaved to sin. This means understanding and knowledge are bent by circumstance and will is deluded by sinful contingencies and capacities. Sin is a marring of reason, an obscuring of the truth, and a perversion of reason. Jesus tells us the truth will set us free, so that freedom requires truth. To imagine that free will is at work in the state of sin is to misunderstand both the nature of free will and sin, as well as salvation

Salvation is the exposure of the delusion and the displacement of a lie with the truth so that one puts on her right mind by having the mind of Christ. The more one is in her right mind, the more she is conscious of God as Goodness that fulfills all beings. The more she recognizes that human nature can have its true completion and joy only in him, to that degree she throws off the fetters of distorted perception and is freed from deranged passions. Seeing the good in God is simultaneously a reshaping of the will, so that rightly understanding and rightly willing are synonymous with total freedom. Liberated from crippling ignorance and emancipated from the impoverished condition of sin, the rational soul can freely will only one thing – its own union with God. Seeing the good, the true, the beautiful in God, draws us inevitably toward God. As John depicts it, “When I am lifted up, I will drag all men to myself” (John 12:32). God’s will is being enacted in creation, in history, in all of our lives culminating in universal worship: “Every knee shall bow and every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord” (Philippians 2:10-11).

The compelling necessity of the light is not a constraint on freedom, as demonstrated in the truly human one. The “integrity of Christ’s humanity entails that he possesses a full and intact human will, and that this will is in no wise diminished or impaired by being ‘operated’ . . . by a divine hypostasis whose will is simply God’s own willing” (p. 189). True freedom in no way necessarily entails the possible choice of rejecting God, as Christ could not have been fully human. This lack of choice is no constraint upon the freedom of the will. It is simply the consequence of possessing a nature produced by and for the transcendent Good; a nature whose proper end has been fashioned in harmony with a supernatural purpose. God has made us for himself, as Augustine would say, and our hearts are restless till they rest in him.

Hart’s dogmatic universalism raises the question of focus (is it, like infernalism, weighted heavily toward the future) and balance (where is justice to be found), which I will address next week.