That All Shall Be Saved
That All Shall Be Saved: Heaven, Hell, and Universal Salvation is a 2019 book by philosopher and religious studies scholar David Bentley Hart published by Yale University Press. In it Hart argues that "if Christianity taken as a whole is indeed an entirely coherent and credible system of belief, then the universalist understanding of its message is the only one possible."[1] Hart has described the book as a supplement to his The New Testament: A Translation published also by Yale in 2017.[2] The title is an allusion to the scriptural statement in 1 Timothy 2:4 that God "intends that all human beings shall be saved."[3] The book was published also as an audiobook narrated by Derek Perkins in 2019,[4] and a paperback edition containing a new preface was released in 2021.[5]
Content
The book consists of 248 pages and is structured in three main parts: "The Question of an Eternal Hell," "Apokatastasis: Four Meditations," and "What May Be Believed." The four meditations contained in the second part are titled as follows: "Who Is God?" "What Is Judgement?" "What Is a Person?" and "What Is Freedom?"
In the introduction, Hart states, "I know I cannot reasonably expect to persuade anyone of anything" as the thesis of the book is "at odds with a body of received opinion so invincibly well-established,"[6] but he adds, "If nothing else, this book may provide champions of the dominant view an occasion for honest reflection and scrupulous cerebration and serious analysis."[7] Hart has summarized the book's six chief themes as follows:
The first theme is the possibility of intelligible analogical language about God in theological usage and the danger of what I have called a “contagion of equivocity.” [...] The second theme is the total disjunction of meaning that the idea of an eternal hell necessarily introduces into certain indispensable theological predicates and the destruction this necessarily wreaks on doctrinal coherence. [...] The third theme is the relation between the classical metaphysics of creatio ex nihilo and eschatology. [...] The fourth theme is that of the relation between time and eternity, or between history and the Kingdom, or between this age and the next in biblical eschatology, and whether any synthesis other than a universalist one (and especially one that, like Gregory of Nyssa’s, uses 1 Corinthians 15 as a master key) can hold all of the scriptural evidence together in a way that is not self-defeating. [...] The fifth theme is that of the ontological and moral structure of personhood, and the dependency of personal identity—again, both ontological and moral—on an indissoluble community of souls. [...] The final theme is that of the nature of rational freedom and of its relation to divine transcendence, and the implications this has for the “free will defense” of eternal perdition.[8]
Hart's arguments are primarily philosophical and theological in nature, yet he also invokes biblical and historical support for his view, citing 23 New Testament texts[9] (including the teaching of Paul in Romans 5:18-19 and of Jesus in John 12:32) which he regards as "straightforward doctrinal statements" of universal salvation,[10] and referencing the teaching of various notable early church fathers (including Gregory of Nyssa and Isaac of Nineveh) which he refers to as "the Christian universalists of the Greek and Syrian East."[11]
Reception
That All Shall Be Saved has been a polarizing book since its publication, receiving high commendation from some, and no shortage of criticism from others. Favorable reviewers have lauded it as "a passionate proclamation of the absolute love of God as revealed in Jesus Christ,"[12] and "the work of a stirred and unyielding conscience,"[13] whose argument is "forceful, analytically clear, and compelling."[14] Meanwhile, various critics have characterized the book as an "attack on Christian tradition"[15] full of "vituperative verbiage"[16] and even "heresy."[17] In the book itself, Hart predicted much of this: "I suspect that those who disagree with my position will either dismiss it or (if they are very boring indeed) try to refute it by reasserting the traditional majority position in any number of very predictable, very shopworn manners."[18] Subsequently, in various publications, Hart has responded in turn to a number of his critics (see table below).[19]
| Critical Review | Response by Hart | Excerpt from Hart's Response |
|---|---|---|
| Shinji Akemi (9/16/19) | Hart's Reply (9/20/19) | "My thanks for Dr Shinji Akemi’s review of That All Shall Be Saved... The reviewer is correct that the metaphysics of creatio ex nihilo raises the question not only of the eternal dereliction of certain souls, but of every evil. But the two questions are radically different in modality. In fact, I deal with this issue on pp. 59-60 of the book." |
| Michael McClymond (10/2/19) | Hart's Reply (6/12/20) | "Two pieces by the American religious historian Michael McClymond were of much the same fabric—patently false claims about the book’s argument, illustrated with a few orphaned clauses from its pages, followed by two dozen fevered shrieks of frothing rage at all the things I had never actually said—though marked by even less philosophical sophistication." |
| Alan Gomes (10/2/19) | Hart's Reply (3/20/23) | "Gomes misread meditation one in a way that one or two other critics have—failing to note that there’s a kind of unique modal claim that goes with talking about God as omnipotent, omniscient, the creator of all things ex nihilo and how one judges that uniquely from the eschatological horizon... If Gomes wants to be true to his tradition, he should be as consistent as Calvin and simply recognize that his god is beyond good and evil altogether—which means he’s evil." |
| Peter Leithart (10/2/19) | Hart's Reply (8/30/22) | "Leithart had responded to my book That All Shall Be Saved in part by pointing out that the God of the Old Testament is not the morally impeccable 'Good Beyond Being' that the book presumes. In reply, I was explaining to him that I am not a fundamentalist, that the ancient church (like the Apostle Paul) read such texts allegorically for a reason, and that the alternative to allegory in the earliest church for any attentive reader would have been Marcionism." |
| Douglas Farrow (10/15/19) | Hart's Reply (2/14/20) | "The reason that Farrow and others cannot address the book’s real argument, but must instead indulge in flamboyant diversionary tactics and flights of frenzied polemic, is that they are incapable of answering it. Whether consciously or unconsciously, they know that it is an argument that they have already lost." |
| Benjamin Guyer (10/30/19) | Hart's Reply (6/12/20) | "Someone called Benjamin Guyer produced a review that, while spectacularly failing to follow so much as a single filament of the book’s case, heaped up a gaudy collection of fragments of the text, rearranged so as to give as false an impression as possible." |
| Barton Swaim (10/31/19) | Hart's Reply (6/12/20) | "Swaim did not even pretend to address any of the book’s arguments, but he expended enormous energy opportunistically pouncing on every seemingly damning turn of phrase that he could find in its pages, wrenching it violently out of its limited frame of reference, and then falsifying its import." |
| John Panteleimon Manoussakis (11/2/19) | Hart's Reply (11/7/19) | "I suppose I really must be grateful to Manoussakis for having at least attempted to write a serious review of the book. Given the passions that the topic of universal salvation tends to provoke, I have been obliged to endure more than a few petulant screeds scarcely bothering to disguise themselves as reviews, and so far have seen no critiques of any solvency. And so the effort to do better is greatly appreciated. That said, however, whatever Manoussakis may have intended to write, what in fact he has succeeded in producing is an engagement with arguments I have never made, while entirely failing to follow the ones I did." |
| Michael Pakaluk (2/6/20) | Hart's Reply (2/14/20) | "Pakaluk's review is at once the most violent and the most picayune of the assaults on my book to have appeared in the journal. It does, however, have the virtue of economy; it relies on a single gross misrepresentation... Pakaluk has ascribed to me assertions that as a matter of objective fact appear nowhere in my book, in order to create a counterfeit scandal that will distract readers from what the book really does say. And yet, one cannot help but notice that, even if Pakaluk had really had any case to make, it would have been one that, once stripped of the theatrically exorbitant rhetoric of fraud and satanic deception, would have concerned only a contestable exegetical point regarding a vanishingly minor matter of little consequence for the book’s argument." |
| William Matthew Diem (4/29/20) | Hart's Reply (7/26/20) | "To his credit, Diem’s is a genuine effort to offer a serious criticism of my work; his misunderstanding is not the result, as far as I can tell, of the indolence evident in Feser’s article. That said, I am not certain that Diem read the book either... His review falls into the familiar pattern: he is yet another critic who is arguing not with the case I (very precisely) make in the book, but with some other, more easily refuted case he has substituted for it." |
| Edward Feser (7/10/20) | Hart's Reply (7/21/20) | "Feser's misstatements are so bizarre and extravagant that there are only two possibilities: either he did not actually read the book, but at most skimmed bits of it in his rush to write a review he had already concocted in his mind; or he is, when reading a complex text that has not been carefully explained to him several times in advance, damned near a functional illiterate." |
| Benjamin DeVan (11/12/20) | Hart's Reply (11/12/20) | "My thanks to Benjamin B. DeVan for his review. I have to protest, however, that he has not laid out the continuous philosophical case that the book advances. I can only assume that past experience misled him into conflating my claims with others he had previously encountered, with the result that he missed the larger 'narrative arc,' so to speak. Thus he mischaracterizes the text as a whole, and attributes to me several claims in particular that I was careful not to make." |
| Mats Wahlberg (9/9/22) | Hart's Reply (2/6/23) | "A Dominican named Wahlberg wrote an earnest but still confused and somewhat embarrassingly revealing article about the book in a recent issue of Modern Theology." |
| James Dominic Rooney (10/18/22) | Hart's Reply (1/10/23) | "Another Dominican named Rooney has launched an online campaign against the book without, it seems, having mastered either any of its arguments or any of his own... His article conflated my case for universalism with an entirely unrelated metaphysical argument I had made elsewhere regarding the language of freedom and necessity in regard to divine transcendence, made a hash of both, advanced a very ill-conceived defense of a libertarian model of rational freedom (human and divine), and then degenerated into accusations of heresy (the inevitable refuge of bad theologians)." |
| Eleanore Stump (4/13/23) | Hart's Reply (4/17/23) | "Stump's article is merely a rehearsal of arguments that have been made many, many, many times before, all of which I believe I already addressed more than adequately in That All Shall Be Saved, and all of which have been refuted fairly thoroughly and fairly often by quite a few other authors. And Stump adds nothing new to any of them—the bland assumptions regarding the justice of eternal punishment, the empirically false claims regarding the range of human freedom... (and so forth)." |
In an article regarding the various disputes surrounding the book and its thesis, Hart wrote the following:
One expects hostile reviews when one writes a book on a controversial topic; and this book in particular I knew would provoke and annoy. That was very much part of its purpose: to challenge Christian complacency with regard to the idea of a hell of eternal torment. But, in this case uniquely, a strange pattern has clearly emerged: to wit, none of its truly energetic critics in print has thus far condemned it for any claims actually contained in its pages. I do not mean that they have failed adequately to address its arguments. I mean that, to this point, none has even come close to identifying what those arguments are, let alone confuting them. Some reviews have demonstrated an almost perfect inability to grasp so much as a single thread of its reasoning, however elementary. [...] I am beginning to suspect that this particular topic has an almost magical power to provoke all sorts of ungovernable emotional volatilities in certain souls, of the sort that render them unable to absorb what they are reading. [...] Perhaps, then, the inability of certain critics to follow any of the book’s actual arguments is not just obtuseness (though a bit of that, surely), but instead reflects a temperamental incapacity on their parts for confronting any sustained assault on their own understanding of what they believe. And this, I think, is because (to adopt my language in the book) they do not really believe what they believe they believe.[20]
References
- Hart, That All Shall Be Saved, 3.
- Hart, "The Edward Feser Algorithm: How to Review a Book You Have Not Read," via Eclectic Orthodoxy, July 2020.
- Paul (or Pseudo-Paul), First Epistle to Timothy, chapter 2, verse 4. The original Greek reads "πάντας ἀνθρώπους θέλει σωθῆναι."
- Tantor Audio, 2019.
- Hart, "Two Announcements," August 2021.
- Hart, That All Shall Be Saved, 5.
- Hart, That All Shall Be Saved, 5.
- Hart, "Universalism and Infernalism...," January, 2022.
- Romans 5:18-19, 1 Corinthians 15:22, 2 Corinthians 5:14, Romans 11:32, 1 Timothy 2:3-6, Titus 2:11, 2 Corinthians 5:19, Ephesians 1:9-10, Colossians 1:27-28, John 12:32, Hebrews 2:9, John 17:2, John 4:42, John 12:47, 1 John 4:14, 2 Peter 3:9, Matthew 18:14, Philippians 2:9-11, Colossians 1:19-20, 1 John 2:2, John 3:17, Luke 16:16, and 1 Timothy 4:10. (Cited in Hart's That All Shall Be Saved, 95-102)
- Hart, That All Shall Be Saved, 94.
- Hart, That All Shall Be Saved, 123.
- A.F. Kimel, "The Polemics of Perdition."
- Jason Micheli, "David Bentley Hart’s polemic against the alleged doctrine of eternal hell," Christian Century.
- Myles Werntz, In All Things.
- Edward Feser, "David Bentley Hart's Attack on Christian Tradition Fails to Convince."
- Michael McClymond, "David Bentley Hart’s Lonely, Last Stand for Christian Universalism."
- James Dominic Rooney, "The Incoherencies of Hard Universalism."
- Hart, That All Shall Be Saved, 4.
- See also Hart's "An Interim Report."
- Hart, "In Defense of A Certain Tone of Voice."