By Patrick Schmadeke
Evangelization in the world today
I’ve been reading “That All Shall be Saved: Heaven, Hell, and Universal Salvation” by David Bentley Hart. Released in 2019, the book has had no shortage of critics from a variety of Christian corners. Through previous experience, Hart anticipates this criticism and pulls no punches in the book. His resourcing of Christian history, exegesis of Scripture and probing of common philosophical and theological assumptions are a delight to see as they unfold. His writing style is a true cherry on top, having achieved a perfect blend of form and function.
By creed, Hart is Greek Orthodox. By trade, he is a scholar of religion, a philosopher, writer and cultural commentator. In terms of his level of tolerance for theologies that harm people and minimize the grandeur of God — hell hath no fury.
His position in the book, in summary, is this: “if Christianity is in any way true, Christians dare not doubt the salvation of all, and that any understanding of what God accomplished in Christ that does not include the assurance of a final apokatastasis in which all things created are redeemed and joined to God is ultimately entirely incoherent and unworthy of rational faith” (66). See: no punches were pulled in the composing of that sentence.
The certainty his position holds goes beyond what is “in-bounds” for Roman Catholics. The furthest our Roman Catholicism has gone is that Christians can hope hell is empty. Hart’s certainty is different than Roman Catholicism’s hope. It is worth peeling back some layers here.
Hell has a notable history in Christian thought. Augustine (354-430) theorized that by virtue of original sin, a guilt inherited at conception, we are worthy of eternal conscious torment and the masses of humanity are consigned to this fate. The hell of Dante’s (1265-1321) “Divine Comedy” has nine circles, chock-full of the unrepentant who suffer the most unusual and gruesome of punishments. As if to not to be outdone in his depiction of hell, John Milton’s (1608-1674) “Paradise Lost” has narrative and battles so cosmic and sweeping that the plots and battles of modern comic book movies look like children’s stories. In Milton’s world, one-third of heaven’s angels were damned to hell with Satan and that same throng seeks to retake heaven by force. Fast-forward to early America and we find Jonathan Edwards’ (1703-1758) “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” — the epitome of fire and brimstone preaching.
Each of these hells are worthy of lore in their own right. They are spectacular. Cumulatively, these and others have supplied the imagination with enough source material to yield terror. With hells so grand, one almost wonders if heaven has any chance to be heard.
With such dramatic images in our history, Hart invites the reader to be confronted once again by the Gospel. Without doubt, there are images of suffering and judgment in the Bible, but they hardly come near what later Christian narratives supply — “Paradise Lost” is a work of almost incomparable genius, and it should be read, but it is not the Gospel. These later narratives in some ways paper over the Gospel and we must let the Gospel reign in our hearts.
In the Gospel, the principle attributes of God are mercy and fidelity. This overarching meaning is reflected in parables such as the Good Samaritan and the Prodigal Son. When the Gospel does reign in our hearts, the kind of world we make will be the kind of world that reflects heaven’s reign: a space where there is room for all. If the victory of the cross directs our gaze, we should not be surprised when we come into conflict with worldly power. We may even discover that the vision of the kingdom is beyond what we have — as of yet — been ready to conceive.
(Patrick Schmadeke is director of evangelization for the Diocese of Davenport.)
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