Bentley Hart’s Universalism

WHY I’M NOT ALTOGETHER WON OVER

If Christians really believed what we were supposed to believe about hell, we ‘would be driven ceaselessly around the world in a desperate frenzy of evangelism, seeking to save as many souls from the eternal fire as possible’; or else we would be ‘moral monsters’, ‘too morally indolent to care about anyone other than ourselves, and, perhaps, our immediate families’.  

So argues David Bentley Hart (BH) in the first chapter of his recent book: That all shall be saved.  It follows, apparently, that Christians – most probably – don’t believe what we think we believe.

An adroit rhetorical move; but one which, I believe, displays little understanding or empathy with what the Christian life feels like for most of us from the inside – whether or not we share BH’s opinions.

Why we may believe it – and still not go mad

For neither ‘desperate frenzy’ or ‘moral indolence’ are in the least compatible with a genuine Christian outlook (regardless of what doctrines may be held on the afterlife).  Which is why I am relieved – but not surprised – to find such characteristics not to be conspicuously exaggerated in the lives of my Christian acquaintance. Why not?  Well, for a start, we trust in the God’s strength, not our own – do we not?  Even the missional goals of the faith are assigned to the Church as a whole, Christ’s ‘body’ in the world, not to individuals.  Our task as Christians is therefore to collaborate in that venture as best we may with a view to God’s glory.  In Eliot’s words: ‘Ours is the trying … the rest is not our business… ‘.  No doubt this will sound, to Bentley Hart’s ears, like a way of letting ourselves of the hook.  But it might also be the only way – even the way our God has expressly appointed – for us to face up to the apparently unlimited spiritual needs of our fellow creatures, without going mad in the process.

At the more personal level, there are factors that help (rightly or wrongly) to allay our moral panic, even if we don’t share his universalist vision.  In the case of individuals, we simply do not know (nor do they themselves) their present status before God; neither can we predict the future course of their spiritual lives, and whether, even in the most apparently hardened cases, there may not be some miracle ‘between the stirrup and the ground’.  The faith warns us not to judge; and, even where, inevitably, we do, it becomes swiftly evident to us that our powers to intervene in any individual life are limited in their efficacity and likely to prove counter-productive.  So, we seek to march quietly – and prayerfully – on.  For what else can we do?

Why logical consistency does not always suffice to carry the argument

None of this, of course, is in any way to belittle the merits of the BH’s treatment of the theological issue.

And BH is plausible throughout.  What he achieves, across the four ‘Meditations’ which constitute the bulk of this study, is by no means a series of isolated attacks against the traditional ‘Augustinian’ doctrine of heaven and hell, but a well-elaborated and apparently consistent alternative doctrine, based, it is claimed, on patristic writings – especially, Gregory of Nyssa.  It is truly impressive how aspects of BH’s argument – for example, the implications of the doctrine of ex nihilo creation, Gregory’s interpretation of NT Scripture, or the Christian understanding of ‘freedom’ develop along initially separate but ultimately converging and mutually reinforcing strands to form a remarkably coherent and persuasive vision.  At the heart of it all, in Meditation 3, we find a patristically-based anthropological account of the nature of the human person, which happens, of course, to be strongly corroborative of BH’s universalist thesis – but whose interest is by no means limited to this particular issue (see below).  

But, for all its plausibility, this is not the book to win me over to universalism. For, in my experience, the most convincing critics of a position, are always those who know what it means sincerely to hold that position, either because they have done so themselves, or – still better – because they remain open to its attractions, even when they have concluded, on a balance of merits and demerits, they must ultimately reject it.  Interlocutors such as these give us at least the reassuring impression that they are capable of viewing things from outside and in – like ethnographers whose ultimately unfavourable judgment on a culture is at least based on a kind of participant observation. 

If you are seeking such a judicious and balanced weighing of the relative strengths and weaknesses of the alternative doctrines – let alone some empathetic account how these could both, at different points, have emerged out of the common root of a Spirit-inspired ecclesial tradition – then, on his own admission BH is hardly your man.  He frankly states, at the outset, that he has ‘always – or a at least as long as I can remember thinking about such things – been an instinctive universalist as regards the destiny of souls’.  Far from seeing this history as a disqualification, BH makes a virtue of this necessity; there is no possibility, he claims, of adopting a more positive view where this particular doctrine is concerned.  Empathy would be wasted.  According to BH, the Western Church’s traditional position is the theological equivalent of a derelict industrial wasteland which we instinctively preserve out of piety towards our collective past, long beyond the point where anyone would seriously consider serious investment in its reconstruction. No-one, argues BH, has anything genuinely more positive at stake in the Augustinian doctrine of Heaven and Hell than a vague fear that its demolition would put at risk other areas of venerated Christian doctrine.  The only proper theological response, therefore, is to send in the bulldozer.

Maybe BH is right in this case.  At all events, the challenge has been issued, and it will be interesting to see if any worthy theological antagonist emerges to take it up!

A relational understanding of the human person

I come now to what is best in the book.

This is the reflection in Meditation 3 on the relational nature of our humanity.  It begins with the exposition of Gregory of Nyssa’s notion of Man: simultaneously conceived from eternity under the form of an archetype and one-day-to-be-attained perfection as the divine image, and unfolded historically through the entirety of all human beings in every age from first to last.  One day, the two ‘eschatological horizons’ of eternity and history will ‘fold’ one into the other, and Man in his historical actualization will at last coincide with the perfection of the divine image.  Such is the anthropology that BS, following Gregory describes.  Evidently, this grandiose vision excludes entirely the possibility of any decisive, future separation of one segment of humanity from the rest.  For Gregory, ‘there can be no true human unity, nor even any perfect unity between God and humanity, except in terms of the concrete solidarity of all persons in the complete community that is, alone, the true image of God’.

BS then supplements this with less theological, and more empirical, reflections of his own on what it is to be a ‘human’, and the implications of this for our understanding of the destiny of souls.  Broadly, our experience as humans is that of relational beings: ‘We exist as ‘the place of the other’ to borrow a phrase from M. de Certeau’.  This makes it impossible to envisage a post-mortem continuation of ourselves that is not, simultaneously a post-mortem continuation of the tissue of human relationships of which we constitute a part.  Any such continuation that we might try to imagine ceases to be ‘us’.  How then are we to accommodate the idea of an eternal parting-of-the-ways that would separate us from those to whom we belong?  Think of a parent’s relationship to a beloved but wayward child.  If those to whom we belong are lost, then we are also to that extent lost to ourselves.   Our ‘personhood’ is, in principle, incapable of abstraction from that of the personhood of other.  We co-inhere.  Outside that tissue of lived experience we are nothing but some ‘vapid spark of intellection’.

The exciting thing about this anthropology of the ‘human person’ is that its consequences go well beyond the issue of universalism.  In fact, it provides an explanation of how the historical event of the incarnation can exercise an influence over the entirety of humanity throughout its temporal and spatial extent.  I am reminded of C.S. Lewis’s description of the incarnation in Mere Christianity as a kind of inoculation with a ‘good infection’ – of how, in apparent defiance of cosmic entropy, Christ’s one ‘good apple’, tossed into the rotting barrel of humanity, works its curious purifying and healing effect, and how the sanctifying of human personhood in the shape of one member of the species brings about a spiritual leavening which can – and indeed must – spread, in time, throughout the entire mass.  The secret of this strange spiritual contagion of salvation would seem to reside – if BH and Gregory are right – in the indefeasible solidarity of human personhood that was conceived from eternity in the shape of an archetype, and can only reach to reach its concrete actualization in a divine humanity from which all shadow of sin has been purged.  The anthropology which excludes the possibility of any individual instantiation of human personhood being definitively cut off from the rest (such is the co-inherence of every instantiation in every other) also explains why the sanctifying contagion of salvation, once introduced through the incarnation, will inevitably work its way through to each and every individual instantiation.  In both cases – negative and positive – the explanation lies in the ‘concrete solidarity of all persons in the complete community that is, alone, the true image of God’.

In my own view, the negative implications of this anthropology – what it means for the doctrine of the fate of souls – may not be the most interesting or significant thing about it.

THE GIFT, JOHN BARCLAY AND ST PAUL