That All Shall Be Saved: Heaven, Hell, and Universal Salvation by David Bentley Hart
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Of Heads and Brick Walls

I like David Bentley Hart’s Christianity. He gets rid of much of the faded superstition and residual clericalism that pervades most discussion of the religion by its protagonists. But it is certainly David Bentley Hart’s Christianity, not anything like an interpretation that sticks with orthodox views. One is compelled to the conclusion that Hart is trying to change Christianity, or at least the Eastern Orthodox segment of it, from within. This leads to an i\important question: Why on Earth bother?

That All Shall Be Saved is a repudiation of an ancient and consistently held Christian doctrine: Some will be saved and some will be damned forever in eternal torment. There has never been a serious deviation from this principle throughout dogmatic history. It is one of those ‘tensions’ or contradictions in the teaching of Jesus that no one has ever been able to unravel. How his life ‘shed for all’ and ‘redeeming all of creation’ excludes some portion of humanity is one of the Christianity’s arcane mysteries, the secret of which is known only to theologians.

And according to most Christians, that portion of the damned is indeterminately large. The Jehovah’s Witnesses reckon only 144,000 will make it to the heavenly promised land. Catholics are a bit more generous but are still sure that unbaptised folk are doomed; and even those officially licensed into the club will have to measure up to behavioural standards. Some theologians like to stretch the point by including ‘anonymous Christians,’ that is, folk who act as if they were even though they’re not, in the final tally. But still, entry into the Kingdom is conditional upon getting rid of the stain of one’s sins here on Earth. Mormons are more into outreach and like the idea of baptising the dead retrospectively one by one as long as they can get their names on file. And certainly very few Christians will admit to wanting to encounter Hitler, Caligula, or Charles Manson on the other side.

Hart doesn’t agree with any of this. He thinks that all this stuff about Jesus’s unconditional love and infinite divine mercy means what it says on the tin: we’re all bound for glory. But he’s got a problem beyond dogmatic tradition. The originary documents of Christianity are pretty clear about the matter. The gospels hint strongly at the doom that awaits the stiff-necked. Pauline fire and brimstone has been the foundation for much of the later interpretations. And the mysterious but almost pornographic description of the everlasting torments of unbelievers in the Apocalypse is very clear (as is the limit on the number of the saved to 144,000).

And, of course, Hart has an even bigger problem when it comes to that mighty figure of the God of the Old Testament, purported to be the loving father of Jesus. This vengeful psychopath blows hot and cold on the whole idea of Creation as well as his decision to allow the existence of self-conscious beings capable of independent thought and action. This is a deity who demands only one thing - absolute obedience. And if he doesn’t get it, he is not averse to wholesale, indiscriminate slaughter. While the intellectual breakthrough to the concept of eternal damnation hadn’t been made by the ancient Hebrews, it was there in nuce waiting to grow into Christian fruition.

Hart does his best to bob and weave through this quagmire of theological principles and scriptural sources. But he knows that his is not just a minority view, it is also probably heretical. He acknowledges this explicitly: “I find it a very curious feeling, I admit, to write a book that is at odds with a body of received opinion so invincibly well-established that I know I cannot reasonably expect to persuade anyone of anything, except perhaps of my sincerity.” Then why the effort and sufferance of the expected criticism in writing such a book?

The answer seems to be that Hart is desperately trying to square the circle of Christianity. The infliction of punishment, eternal or not, is not a consistent part of the job description of the God of the Beatitudes. If virtue is its own reward, why is not evil it’s own penalty? If an omnipotent, omniscient, divine entity intended to either create or re-create a world with fewer design flaws, why has this God proven so consistently incompetent? Reasonable questions from any reasonable person. Mostly they are answered with platitudes or an appeal to divine inscrutability.

But there is a rather broader issue that Hart implicitly raises but dare not touch. If, in his considered opinion, Christianity has been distorted by the doctrines of punishment and damnation, what other traditions and interpretations have been similarly distorted and so similarly “have created in the minds of most of us a fundamentally misleading picture of a great many of the claims made in Christian scripture?” What is the real ‘content’ of Christianity after it has been stripped of its political, mythical, and fictional elements? Indeed how are these elements even to be distinguished in the historical melange of Christian thought?

As a doctrinal system of belief, once one element in that system is removed the entire structure of Christian belief shatters. The system does not offer a buffet from which to choose at random. It is, of course, possible to select elements to which one is amenable - heretics, reformers, and dissidents have done so since the religion’s inception. But such selection then involves the creation of a new dogmatic system, a sect, which is equally vulnerable to heresy, abuse, and dissent as the original.

As I said: why on Earth bother?

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