David Bentley Hart’s argument in That All Shall Be Saved is built upon two foundational questions. First, he asks if it is logically possible for God to create an eternal hell for rational beings while being purely Good.2 Second, moving from a consideration of God to one of humans, he asks if it is possible for rational beings to reject God for eternity.3 In answering these questions in the negative, Hart offers four primary arguments. These four arguments comprise the four chapters of his book. Running throughout, Hart argues that God’s design for hell is essentially purgatory—it is a place that some go but all leave. All are eventually saved though many experience salvation after a period of time in hell. This paper is divided into four sections responding to each of his arguments in turn. I will spend the bulk of this contribution engaging with the first argument, drawing aspects of the latter three arguments into its discussion. This approach is warranted because Hart’s arguments bleed into one another, and a linear refutation is best presented under one head. The remaining three arguments will be discussed in a more succinct manner. I will also consider Hart’s theological background (Eastern Orthodox) in order to locate his arguments within that tradition and thereby demonstrate the underlying assumptions that, if they should be disproved, render his arguments weaker than they appear prima facie. To do this, I will examine his thesis from a Reformed orthodox perspective.

The core of this article is a hearty disagreement with Hart’s definition of sin. For Hart, sin is essentially a misunderstanding, a disease, or an inability to perceive reality correctly. Therefore, unsurprisingly, Hart thinks eternal punishment for such a misapprehension is unjust. My argument will center on the notion that sin is an ethical and willful decision made by moral agents (humans) that must be dealt with in hell. I will also seek to demonstrate that the Bible and logic verify this claim. In what follows, I will explain each argument and follow with a refutation, one by one.

1. Responses to the First Argument: Creatio Ex Nihilo

Hart’s first argument is based on the moral significance of the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo (creation out of nothing) as it is examined from its telic end. Essentially, Hart argues that creation is an extension of God’s inner perfection.4 Since God is a perfect creator, he does not create arbitrarily but with a purpose, a telic end. Since he is omnipotent and unconstrained, “all contingent ends are intentionally enfolded within his decision” to create.5 So, the creation of an eternal hell would have to be an extension of who God is ad intra (within himself). Since there is no pain, punishment, or ethical rejection within God, hell must only be a means to a good end. Hart says, “This is not a complicated issue, it seems to me: The eternal perdition—the eternal suffering—of any soul would be an abominable tragedy, and therefore a profound natural evil; this much is stated quite clearly by Scripture, in asserting that God ‘intends all human beings to be saved and to come to a full knowledge of truth’ (1 Timothy 2:4).”6 He goes on to say that this natural evil becomes moral when we consider that it is “the positive intention, even if only conditionally, of a rational will,” that is, God’s will.7 So, God positively wills hell. Therefore, it must be a good end.

Hart’s conception of eternal hell as gratuitous—a temporary, purgative hell, he argues, is desirable—is based on two primary assumptions. The first is that eternal hell cannot be completely deserved because, as the traditional argument goes, a finite sin cannot warrant an infinite punishment. The second is that, even if this were possible, using hell as a means for God’s glory would relativize God, since he is only glorious when compared to evil, and it would make those in hell, in some sense, the saviors of those in heaven, which also diminishes Christ’s sufficiency since the reprobate are required for the glorified believers’ beatific vision. In a word, Hart argues that not only does Christian universalism provide us with the most glorious picture of God, indeed, the one who is Lord over all to the extent every soul loves Him eternally, but it is also the only logically possible situation if God is truly Lord.

Following the general Eastern Orthodox tradition, Hart has an ontological and privative conception of sin. This understanding is crucial for his discourse here, as well as his third and fourth arguments. The reason Hart requires this view of sin is because without it he cannot claim that hell is an evil end. Since he sees sin as a malady, or a parasite, it is fair for him to say that creatures continuing in that sinful state are suffering from something evil. Now, this does not mean that Hart does not perceive sin to be ethical to some degree. However, the ethical nature of sin is secondary to its pathological essence. Since humans are born with ontological maladies, they are inclined to willfully and culpably sin in light of their infirm situations. This is because their ability to reason and properly apprehend what is good (or, the Good) has been damaged. Humans therefore are culpable, but only in a limited sense. Hart uses the extreme example of Hitler to show that culpability is always limited since there are only two options available in understanding sin. He says,

Hitler could, if he had been raised differently and exposed to different influences in his youth, have turned out differently; or he was congenitally wicked, and so from the moment of his conception was irresistibly compelled along the path to his full development as the Führer, so long as no countervailing circumstances prevented him from reaching his goal. But then, in either case, his guilt was a qualified one: In the former, he was at least partly the victim of circumstance; in the latter, he was at least as much the victim of fate. In neither case was he ever wholly free. These considerations do not excuse him, of course, or make punishment for his evils unjust; he was himself in any event, and the self that he was certainly merited damnation. They do, however, oblige us to acknowledge that he was finite, and so could never have been capable of more than what finitude allows … while his final judge will presumably be the God of infinite goodness and infinite might; the disproportion between them is that of creature and creator, and so the difference in their relative powers, being infinite, dictates that a properly proportional justice for the former cannot exceed the scope of the moral capacities with which he has been endowed by the latter.8

Hart argues therefore that humanity’s inevitable ontological fall, the subsequent congenital sin-defect that attends all humans, and God’s creation of that humanity ex nihilo entail that no person could deserve eternal hell. It would not be “fair” for people born into sin to pay the price for that sin if they did not choose it, especially if God created them out of nothing. However, hell is a Scriptural reality. Therefore, it must serve the good purpose of purging ontological maladies from sinful people. Towards the end of the book, he confesses that it is this intuitive anthropological consideration (that man is essentially sick rather than ethically sinful) that primarily drives his thinking. This sin-sickness, as it were, that infects us all renders us like players in a game who do not know the rules—we are destined to fail.

I have to admit that, despite all I have just said, it is not primarily on any of these metaphysical or logical grounds that I find the free will defense of eternal torment an especially absurd one (though I do take them to be decisive), but rather as a matter of simple empirical observation. Nothing in our existence is so clear and obvious and undeniable that any of us can ever possess the lucidity of mind it would require to make the kind of choice that, supposedly, one can be damned eternally for making or for failing to make. Anyone who plays the game of life in life’s house knows that the invisible figure hidden in impenetrable shadows on the far side of the baize table not only never shows his hand, but never lets us see the stakes of the wager, and in fact never tells us the rules.9

1.1. Sin as Vacuous

Hart argues at multiple points that traditional conceptions of hell and multiple loci of Reformed theology are vacuous and ultimately illogical. Our understandings of God’s justice and human freedom, Hart says, ultimately die a death of a thousand distinctions to the point that God’s hate is redefined as His love and our slavery to sin is refashioned into culpability.10 Though defense needs to be made against these claims, I want to first make my own assertion, namely, that Hart’s conception of sin has been so thinly pared down that it ultimately borders on unintelligibility. Since his other arguments come into play here, I will be drawing upon the entire book, indeed, more than one of his works, to make this point.

While affirming the usefulness of the conception of evil as privatio boni (the privation or absence of good), I want to question its ability to be comprehensive. When Hart conceives of evil as solely a lack of good, difficulties arise. For example, Hart says, “Evil is, in every case, merely the defect whereby a substantial good is lost, belied, or resisted.”11 This leads him later to affirm Gregory of Nyssa in his conception of evil as that which is ultimately powerless, “As Gregory understood, evil has no power to hold us, and we have no power to cling to evil; shadows cannot bind us, and we in turn cannot lay hold on them.”12

However, when he discusses sin, he seems to counter this nonentity language; he refers to sin as “the parasitic unfolding of evil”13 using the same term to describe the relationship between the holy or upright personality “upon which that ego is parasitic.”14 Sinful flesh is that “miserable empirical ego that so often struts and frets its hour upon the stage of this world…”15 Without pressing his language beyond what it is meant to convey, it is instructive to note that he is forced to use quite substantive and active locution to describe sin. It is not just a shadow but a parasite (or, at least, “parasitic”). It is not inactive and powerless but impels the sinner to “strut and fret.” Perhaps his most pointed definition of evil is seen in his theodicy entitled The Doors of the Sea, “… Evil, rather than being a discrete substance, is instead a kind of ontological wasting disease.”16 His purely privative conception of evil, while helpful in a restricted sense, cuts across the traditional understanding of sin and Satan as presented in the Bible, and it is forced to use language that is not purely privative—a disease is a thing.17

This is not to say that I disagree with the conception of evil as the privatio boni—the absence of good.18 God cannot sin nor “create evil.” To create evil would be to violate his nature. Therefore, evil can only properly be understood as the lack of something good—the absence of what God has created. However, Hart presses this conception to its breaking point by evacuating evil of its sinister nature in order to render eternal hell gratuitous. If evil is merely the lack of a good, he argues, how could God punish that? The biblical reality is that evil is both the absence of the good and the presence of an ethical rejection of God. Biblically speaking, evil is a very active force.

Ephesians 6:11–12 uses strong language to describe the power of evil, “Put on the whole armor of God, that you may be able to stand against the schemes of the devil. For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.”19 In Hart’s own translation of Matthew 11:12, we see, “Yet from the days of John the Baptist until now, the Kingdom of the heavens has been violently assailed, and the violent seize it.”20 Verses like these lead one to question whether it makes sense to think of evil as powerless, yet evil people and spirits as incredibly powerful, to the extent that they can inflict evil ends upon people. Does Hart’s shadow language of sin do justice to the Bible’s?

Hart wants us to see evil as essentially human misunderstanding, serious to be sure, but a misappropriation of facts at its core. Therefore, if this is all evil is, hell would indeed seem gratuitous. Surely, God would not punish someone for misunderstanding something. Punishment is reserved for those who make God their enemies.21 However, the Bible’s language concerning evil conveys a much more active, substantial, and ethically damning situation as discussed above.

Further, a purely privative conception of evil renders exegesis of Genesis 3 quite difficult. If we are to see evil as merely a lack of the Good, why did Eve see the forbidden fruit as “good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise” (Gen. 3:6b)? To reach out and take what God had forbidden was evil. Yet Eve saw it as good. Why did evil—the lack of the Good, as Hart describes it—appear good to her? Upon a purely privative conception of evil, Eve—before the fall—would be seeing evil as good. Could God’s crown of creation, as it were, so easily mistake sin for goodness? Surely such a notion would impugn the creative act. A better option is to lay the blame at Adam and Eve’s feet for willfully rejecting that which is good, not mistakenly reaching for it. This is not to say, of course, that Adam and Eve thought they were reaching for something evil for evil’s sake. To commit the act, they must have thought it was good in some sense. The point is that, for God to punish them, they had to also understand that what they were doing was evil. Hart paints a picture of intellectually deformed creatures only doing their best. The Bible’s description is one in which creatures seek to usurp the authority of their God and Father.

Even if we grant that this is Eve’s gullible perception, in what sense is the sinful act of eating the fruit privation, when all it seems to do is increase her knowledge? On Hart’s view, it seems that the opening of the eyes that ensued should have done nothing less than make Adam and Eve increase in their love of God. In an online article responding to questions about his book, Hart says, “The more irrational a choice, the less free it must be; but, the more one knows, the more rational one’s choices become.”22 If Adam and Eve’s knowledge increased, they would understand the Good better, and desire it more fully. But the opposite is the case—after they ate of the fruit, they knew about evil and then desired it instead. Hart’s conception of sin utilized throughout his argument renders these passages all but unintelligible.

If Hart would respond by saying that the tree of the knowledge of good and evil did not provide objective clarity regarding good and evil but some sort of misunderstood inclination toward evil (that is, some sort of “ontological wasting disease”), we would rightly ask how God could plant such a tree without being deceptive. Even if we granted that premise (God forbid) there would be no clear motive for God to do it. It should be clear that Hart’s position renders exposition of such passages strained, if not impossible. While, on the other hand, a primarily ethical conception of sin enables one to read these passages without circuitous exegesis.

Due to this purely privative conception of evil, he is eventually forced to make this glaring concession, “Even an act of apostasy, then, traced back to its most primordial impulse, is motivated by the desire for God.”23 While we note Hart’s laudable desire to maintain consistency here, it is hard to leave unnoticed that his defining apostasy as ultimately motivated by the desire for God seems perilously close to the ostensibly Reformed tendency to define God’s hate as his love. Hart says that using the word “love” to refer to a God who punishes people in eternal hell (a common orthodox defense of hell) is to reduce the word “to utter equivocity, and that by association reduce the entire grammar of Christian belief to meaninglessness.”24 Though he lambasts those theologians who describe God’s dispensation of wrath in hell as a form of love for his saints in heaven, he does the same thing in a different way. In critiquing this apparent tendency in the Reformed, Hart makes an actual misstep in the same direction by defining the rejection of God as the reaching for God. Hart’s conception of sin as merely the lack of good fails to stand up to biblical scrutiny and it renders apostasy unintelligible.

1.2. Impugning God’s Creation

The foregoing leads us to question Hart’s ontological conception of sin as it has the potential to impugn God’s creative act. Hart describes human beings as created in an ignorant state. It is because of this unbiblical assumption that he claims hell is unjust.

Hart rightly wants to refute the charge that God created evil. In so doing, however, it seems inevitable that he has opened himself to the charge that God willfully created intellectually defective creatures. If it is only through a defect in the intellect that humans fail to choose God, one must ask whence that defect arose. Hart, along with the Eastern Orthodox tradition, attributes “the cause of the fall to the childlike ignorance of unformed souls, not yet mature enough to resist false notions.”25 Adam and Eve were “two persons so guileless and ignorant that they did not even know they were naked until a talking snake had shown them the way to the fruit of knowledge.”26

However, according to his own definition of freedom, if Adam and Eve were truly free, they could never reject God. In describing the rational soul in his theodicy, he says, “Liberated from all ignorance, emancipated from all the adverse conditions of this life, the rational soul could freely will only its own union with God, and thereby its own supreme beatitude.”27 Thus, one is forced to admit that either Adam and Eve were defectively created or Adam and Eve were created in intellectual bondage. Much of this difficulty arises from Hart’s fourth argument based on human freedom and the impossibility of a rational intellect willfully choosing an evil end (i.e., hell) for itself. While there is much force to this argument, it mitigates his understanding of the creation of man. Simply put, if Adam and Eve must have chosen God (the Good) to be free, they were obviously not free. Did God create Adam and Eve in a state of bondage?

In his exposition of Romans 9:19–33, Hart says that God does indeed bind sinners in sin, but it is so that he can later save all, “all are vessels of wrath precisely so that all may be made vessels of mercy.”28 However, this does not adequately answer the question either. One cannot answer the dilemma of God’s enslaving people by saying he does so in order to free them. If freedom is the goal of enslavement, leaving the subjects free in the first place would produce the same result.

To help elucidate his position, Hart employs the Christus victor (Christ the Victor) motif which can be seen in his historical assessment of the church’s understanding of Christ’s work, “For the earliest Christians, the story of salvation was entirely one of rescue, all the way through: the epic of God descending into the depths of human estrangement to release his creatures from bondage to death, penetrating even into the heart of hades to set the captives free and recall his prodigal children and restore a broken creation.”29 Seeing Christ’s work as primarily (if not solely) emancipation rather than propitiation coheres with the aforementioned slavery of Adam and Eve. However, it does nothing to assuage the notion that God creates slaves only to free them. Rather than creating humans upright (Eccl 7:29), God seems to be, for Hart, creating man in bondage.

Hart’s use of the Christus victor concept not only does nothing to defend against the implication that God is creating defective creatures, it causes problems of its own. One wonders exactly how it is that Christ’s death on the cross is remuneration for the manumission fee of humanity. Though Hart is admittedly sympathetic to Gnostic dualism at some level,30 he rightly wants to avoid Manichean dualism. I am unsure how he is able to maintain that elusion while still positing that Christ’s work is “the ‘manumission fee (λύτρον, lytron) given to purchase the release of slaves held in bondage in death’s household.”31 He is clear that Christ’s work “was in no sense a ransom paid to the Father to avert his wrath against us.”32 To whom is the manumission fee paid then, if not Satan? If the fee is paid to Satan, to whom is the fee paid when Satan himself is eventually purged and saved, which is part of Hart’s conclusion? The closest we get is to some ethereal notion of the kingdom of darkness. But, of course, the darkness in that kingdom has no real power since it is just a shadow (see 1.1. above). Hart is forced to denigrate God’s creative act by describing humans as created in bondage and he proffers unintelligible definitions of evil that are potentially beholden to Manichean notions of Good versus Evil rather than those found in Scripture.

1.3. Hart’s Utility of Hell

At this point we would do well to question Hart’s claims that any divine utility of hell would denigrate God’s perfection, since he would only be compared to evil rather than being infinitely Good, and render Him immoral, since he is subjecting finite creatures to infinite punishment. In response, we note that Hart’s position, rather than answering these problems, only partially circumvents them. Hart must allow that it is impossible for God to save certain souls without the purgative effects of hell. Even though “God can (if nothing else) so arrange the shape of reality that all beings, one way or another, come at the last upon the right path by way of their own freedom,” he can only do this “in this life or the next.”33 Hart is forced to admit that God does not have the power to guide all human decisions in life toward himself. Rather, he must—in the majority of cases, since most people do not have the gospel—resort to extreme spiritual and physical punishment in the afterlife in order to elicit this effect. His contention is that a reformative hell is better than a retributive one, but it leaves one wondering why there is a hell at all.

If the condition that put a human in hell is ontological sickness, why put that sick person through the anguish of hell to remedy that sickness when it is well within God’s power to do so through the pleasant confines of his church? This is not to say that Hart abandons all culpability and therefore all condign punishment of sin, but he freely confesses that the situations that provoke much of that culpability are unfair. One person is born in the church and, though sinful, avoids the purgative punishment of their sins. Another, on the other hand, is born outside the church—without even the opportunity to hear the gospel—and must endure anguish to be eventually saved. Perhaps this notion would cohere if all people equally heard the gospel and had equal chances in life to sin or not to sin, but, as cited above, he says, “Anyone who plays the game of life in life’s house knows that the invisible figure hidden in impenetrable shadows on the far side of the baize table not only never shows his hand, but never lets us see the stakes of the wager, and in fact never tells us the rules.”34

In order to maintain his Christianity, Hart seems to be willing to say that none will avoid hell without Christ (though I could be wrong, and if I am, he would be more of a general universalist than a so-called Christian universalist). Of course, not all people have the opportunity to hear about Christ in this life. If life is so uncertain and unfair, how is it equitable that some of us ascend to heaven on the effulgent pillars of Christ’s church, while others must crawl, not just from the unfortunate milieu of, say, a mud clad Jhuggi in Delhi but out of eons—Hart is open to the idea that the temporary purgation of hell can last a very long time—of purgation in hell’s blazing flames because they never heard the gospel? Hart’s project takes some sting out of the intuitive reaction to eternal hell, but only to replace it with the bite of unequal and arbitrary purgation. To be sure, in Hart’s analysis all will be well in the end but the means to that end seem inevitably unjust since some are afforded a strikingly better opportunity of avoiding hell than others. This question must be answered: How is it just for God to effectively force certain persons to go through hellish purgation while others are given the opportunity to avoid it? Far from offering an answer to this question, Hart propounds the difficulty by highlighting how unfair life is.

Of course, this question can be posed to the traditional proponent of eternal hell as well, but there is an answer from the Reformed perspective. As difficult as it may be to accept, the radical equalizer of total depravity, not just in every faculty but in every person, that brings divine treason and therefore entails absolute culpability is the only way to make sense of human beings’ unequal status. Since we all deserve death as a result of our ethical rejection of God, none could deserve saving (Rom 3:23). On Hart’s scheme, eternal hell is never deserved. On a Reformed understanding, hell is nothing but absolute justice for every human that has ever lived, aside from Christ. Therefore, the recognized inequality experienced by human beings throughout the world is not due to certain groups having less than they deserve, but it is solely attributable to other groups having more than they are entitled to. Christ’s parable of the workers in the vineyard is instructive here (Matt 20:1–16)—one person’s reception of grace does not occasion the merit of all. For Hart, however, even temporary hell is the result of innocent ignorance. So why do any have to go?

Hart avoids eternal hell by saying all humans are ignorant and no one could possibly deserve it. But, if that is true, it follows that no one would deserve a temporary hell either. What is good for the goose is good for the gander.

1.4. Hart’s Definition of Election

Another issue to discuss at this point (though it principally arises in his third argument) is Hart’s definition of election. Since a predestinarian doctrine would amount to inequality in Hart’s system, he must equate the elect with the first fruits of God’s redeeming work which are instrumental to save the “derelict.”35 Ultimately then, “there is, it turns out, no final division between the elect and the derelict here at all, but rather the precise opposite: the final embrace of all parties in the single and inventively universal grace of election.”36 Though this is philosophically coherent, it is still open to the question posed above. That is, why would God elect only some and allow others to suffer in hell? If all are eventually elect, why only elect some at first? Hart’s conception, in seeking to depict God as restoring the brokenness in all humanity, inevitably portrays him as achieving that end in a dubious manner. To be sure, this is more palatable than the vengeful God he caricatures of Reformed Christianity, but nevertheless, Hart’s presentation is not without its faults particularly in its arbitrary definition of election. The doctrines of sin, humanity, hell, and election must all be played in minor keys in Hart’s system, if they are played at all, when, on the other hand, these doctrines are strikingly set forth, often with vivid imagery, in the Scriptures.

2. Responses to the Second Argument: The Lexical/Exegetical Argument

This argument and the ones following it will be dealt with in a succinct manner since space precludes a thorough analysis and much of what was covered in section I above applies to II–IV. In this section, Hart provides multiple linguistic arguments and refers to lexical use in various ancient authors. To do full justice to his presentation, an exegetical analysis would need to be done in each of his references which would meet or exceed the length of Hart’s argument. However, I seek to make some expeditious remarks below that will show Hart’s argument belies the ability of appropriating biblical language for universalist teachings. Below, I make at least seven claims against Hart’s thesis, but even so I am not comprehensive; there are more arguments in his work that I cannot respond to in this space.37 But engaging with the selection of arguments below should show that his system is not as watertight as he believes it to be.

The second argument in Hart’s work relies upon Scripture more than the other three. He provides copious universalist sounding passages as proposed evidence for the Bible’s teaching of a purgative hell.38 Fortunately, most are written by Paul, and they employ similar Greek. Eighteen of the twenty-five passages Hart provides use the word πάντα (“all”) in one way or another. Many exegetes have seen this word in the context of salvation as referring to all classes of people rather than all individuals as Hart would have it. This interpretation admirably embraces the passages that indicate that not all individuals are saved and it makes sense of Paul’s recurrent emphasis on the inclusion of both Jews and Gentiles in the fold of God, that is, both classes of people.

N. T. Wright strongly indicates the need to read these passages in the traditional sense, “Perhaps only those who have lived in societies split down the middle can appreciate how that ‘all’ sounded in Paul’s world—the early Christian world—where ‘Jew and gentile’ were the key categories. To allow his ‘all’ to resonate instead in the echo-chambers of the modern western world, with its quite different theological and soteriological questions, is mere anachronism.”39 In isolation, Hart’s interpretation is valid. However, when reading these passages within their grammatico-historical framework as well as the other pages in Scripture, his interpretation is strained. Clearly the biblical authors meant “all” in the sense of “all types of people” and not “all individual people.” It may be hard for modern Westerners born and raised with equality indoctrination to see this, but for biblical authors steeped in radical hierarchies of class and nationality, “all people” could only mean one thing.

In another six of the passages Hart supplies, the word κόσμος (“world”) is used in reference to those that God will save. A similar argument to that made above can be applied here. Most of these passages are Johannine and a similar stress on inclusion of classes of people can be seen here as in the Pauline literature. For example, 1 John 2:2, which states, in Hart’s translation, “And he is atonement for our sins, and not only for ours, but for the whole cosmos”40 is referring to the atoning work of Christ which applies to more than just the original audience of John. When John says the Christ is the atonement “for the whole cosmos,” his point is, obviously, that the Christ is the atonement “not only for ours.” John does not mean to tell his readers that Christ saves even the unrepentant in this life. Rather, John wants his audience to understand that Christ is the savior of far more than their little group. Again, John is referring to all types of people corporately, not all people individually—Christ saves the whole world, not just Israel, which is a small part of the world. This makes contextual sense, and it accords with the passages that teach eternal hell (see below).

Though amassing passages is next to pointless in this discussion, we should note in passing that Hart’s claim that the preponderance of passages on hell are universalist needs to be checked. He claims, “If one can be swayed simply by the brute force of arithmetic, it seems worth noting that, among the apparently most explicit statements on the last things, the universalist statements are by far the more numerous.”41 However, even including some dubious insertions in Hart’s list, I was able to amass at least as many references to eternal hell from both testaments, not including parallel passages.42 By far, Hart is incorrect.

Hart moves on to spend some time defining the various terms used for hell in the Bible (שְׁאוֹל, “Sheol”; γέεννα, “Gehenna”; ταρταρόω, “Tartarus”; ᾅδης, “Hades”) to show that the lexical range in the Bible is indicative of a non-eternal nuance43 as well as arguing that the temporal adjectives often modifying these words (עוֹלָם, αἰώνιος, which are usually translated something like “eternal”) are similarly not meant to indicate eternal duration, but unspecified periods of time.44 However, it is essential to notice that he does admit that ἀΐδιος (a derivative of αἰώνιος) does “have the intrinsic meaning of ‘eternal,’” 45 but conspicuously missing in his argument is any mention of Jude 6 which employs this word to describe the chains with which the fallen angels are held in “gloomy darkness.” Granted, the chains are used “until the judgment,” and Hart would likely say this is an indication of the fallen angels’ eventual redemption. But this passage much more easily accords with Revelation in which the fallen angels are presented at the judgment of Christ and are subsequently sent into the eternal lake of fire thereafter (Rev 20:11–15), which would render their chains truly ἀΐδιος.46 Even upon his very limited concession of Greek terms that mean “eternal,” there is at least one passage in the New Testament (Jude 6) that explicitly refers to judgment as just that—eternal—and Hart does not mention it.

Further, though he claims αἰώνιος is primarily used as a finite time marker by writers before, during, and immediately after the NT era (like Plato, Philo, Josephus, and many patristics),47 BDAG notes that Diodorus Siculus (1st century BC), Josephus, Flavius Arrianus (2nd Century AD) as well as various inscriptions use the term to convey “a period of unending duration, without end.” 48 For example, Josephus uses αἰώνιοςto refer to a period of time without end when he says that Elijah, “both made them amends as well as the country, by a lasting favor [αἰωνίῳχάριτι].”49 There is a semantic range for αἰώνιος, but Hart fails to show that a limited temporal reference is mandated in NT use. Further, he does not grapple with the aforementioned classical and patristic era’s use of the term as “eternal.”

In addition, even if we were to admit that every single use of αἰώνιος must mean something like “the age” (though there is no good reason to do so), there is no reason to conclude that the αἰώνιος to which Paul is referring is not the last αἰώνιος. That is, the age to come in which all will be in heaven or hell could just as well be the last age in which people’s destinies have been fixed. Indeed, many NT scholars interpret αἰώνιοςalong with Hart, but nevertheless maintain the traditional doctrine of eternal hell.50

Another weakness of Hart’s exegetical work is seen in his use of Pauline literature. Early in the book, Hart paints Christians as hypocritical if they believe in eternal hell and are not vehemently preoccupied with evangelism.51 The true Christian who holds to the traditional view of eternal hell, according to Hart, would never “be able to rest even for a moment, because he 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.”52 However, this critique seems to be nullified by the writer upon whose corpus Hart most intently relies. This definition of a true Christian who believes in eternal hell waxes biographically Pauline as we remember Paul’s incessant missionary zeal that literally drove him around the known world. In just one of his voluminous statements evincing his zenith desperation to evangelize, Paul says, “For though I am free from all, I have made myself a servant to all, that I might win more of them…. To the weak I became weak, that I might win the weak. I have become all things to all people, that by all means I might save some” (1 Cor 9:19, 22, emphasis mine; cf. Rom 9:3; 2 Cor 11:16ff). The biblical author that Hart relies upon most seems to act as if he—according to Hart’s own standard—believes in eternal hell.

Finally, we are faced with Hart’s question:

We can see that the ovens are metaphors, and the wheat and the chaff, and the angelic harvest, and the barred doors, and the debtors’ prisons; so why do we not also recognize that the deathless worm and the inextinguishable fire and all other such images (none of which, again, means quite what the infernalist imagines) are themselves mere figural devices within the embrace of an extravagant apocalyptic imagery that, in itself, has no strictly literal elements?53

In response, we simply note that this is the approach of Reformed exegetes by and large. Almost none affirm strictly literal interpretations of Jesus’s sayings or those in Revelation that depict eternal flames and undying worms. However, a metaphor is employed not just as a disorienting phantasmagory (though veiling is surely part of the impetus for the imagery in many cases), but it is used in order to convey something to the hearer. If we cannot affirm that, there is no point in reading and studying them; on Hart’s analysis, these passages are next to, if not completely, useless. We can and do recognize the metaphorical nature of biblical imagery of hell without resorting to, it seems to me, diminutive terms to describe them (i.e. “phantasmagory,” “extravagant,” and “hallucinatory imagery”) or claiming that “we delude ourselves if we imagine that … we could hope to grasp even a shadow of a fragment of [the book of Revelation’s] intended message.”54 A better approach is to read these texts as shading in our understanding of hell, providing crucial context and color. They are not “hallucinatory.” With this in mind, we turn to Hart’s quotation, “Theologians are often the most cavalier in their treatment of the texts, chiefly because their first loyalty is usually to the grand systems of belief they have devised or adopted …”55 Indeed, theologians are often cavalier with their texts.

2.1. A Slight Concession

With this said, I argue not only that the aforementioned passages do not teach universalism but that another passage Hart cites, along with others like it, could be interpreted to indicate a preponderance of salvation for humanity. While rejecting most of Jesus’s teaching on hell as “intentionally heterogenous phantasmagory, meant as much to disorient as to instruct,”56 Hart says that Matthew 18:14 “maybe even”57 supports universalism (it is instructive to note that some of Jesus’s teachings should be essentially ignored, for Hart, but others should be considered as potential proof for his argument). Here Jesus says (again, in Hart’s translation), “So it is not a desire that occurs to your Father in the heavens that one of these little ones should perish.”58 Interestingly, Charles Hodge takes this passage, as well as the references to the οἱ πολλοί (“the many”) in passages like Romans 5:18–19, to indicate that “all who die in infancy are saved.”59 Employing different means to the same effect, Warfield argued that “those theologians have the right of it who not merely refuse to repeat the dogma that only a few are saved, but are ready to declare … that ‘not only will order be restored throughout the universe, but the good will far outnumber the bad; the saved will be many times more than the lost.’”60 Warfield here cites Alvah Hovey approvingly and notes that, in addition to Hodge, both Robert L. Dabney and William G. T. Shedd are aligned in the gist of the foregoing statement. Thus, there is not only a readily available and, I argue, more appropriate interpretation of passages like these over against the universalist reading Hart propounds, there is also much Reformed precedent to see these passages as indeed indicating a prevalence of salvation in redemptive history through the salvation of those who die in infancy. That is, the means by which more would be saved than lost is universal infant salvation (which Hodge and others taught), coupled with historically high infant mortality rates. This mitigates some of Hart’s harangue against the traditional view of God’s mercy because God is seen as saving the lion’s share of humanity. But, again, one person saved would be more grace than humanity could ever deserve. Such is the grace upon grace of the God of mercy.

3. Response to the Third Argument: What Is a Person?

Hart’s third argument seems to be the most speculative. His exegesis of Romans 9–11, as noted above, proffers a notion of God’s election in which some are rejected so that all can be later included. He follows Gregory in asserting that God’s creation is essentially twofold in that the prior eternal “creative act that abides in God” is followed by “a posterior creative act, which is the temporal exposition … of this divine model.”61 We note a Barthian theme in that the creation of Adam and Eve was really the creation of humankind as a whole and, “moreover, this human totality belongs to Christ from eternity, and can never be alienated from him.”62 This unity of humankind, as mentioned above, is extrapolated by Hart’s assertion that human beings are (merely?) relational experiences, or “subsistences of relationality.”63 As such, eternal hell is seen as an impossibility for two reasons. First, the people in hell are really Christ in some sense, and he cannot be in hell eternally. Second, the saints cannot enjoy their glorification because they will be preoccupied with the attendant grief arising from their loved ones’ suffering in hell.

Hart’s construal here seems beholden to a neo-platonic monism in which all people are really One person as per their exitus et reditus (exit and return) from the One. In response, we first question here whether his attempts at maintaining individuality for those in heaven are successful. He argues that as subsistences of relationality, we are unable to exist in heaven apart from those in hell. But I would turn the argument around and say that as instantiations of the single mass of humanity, which is joined with God’s simple divinity in heaven, individuality begins to dissolve into the meaningless. God would continue to exist, but would we? Hart would likely employ the Eastern Orthodox distinction between God’s essence and energies to allow for a non-monistic theosis of the saints. This of course brings with it the attendant complications of potentially dividing God and rendering him ultimately unknowable; further, it does not seem to address the issue of monistic unity of humanity. This is not to say that Hart’s presentation is incoherent but perhaps fraught with unneeded difficulties when compared to the Reformed scheme. Furthermore, as many have pointed out before, these ideas are more Platonic than Christian.64

Secondly, and more simply, we note that the connectedness that the saints once had with their reprobate loved ones was really a connectedness to God’s goodness, which, upon the Reformed scheme, will be fully in heaven with them.65 So, there is no “part” of the saint (or Christ) in hell, since all the goodness with which they were connected is not in hell. Rather, that goodness is now fully in heaven. This is not because the things the saints loved in the reprobate moved back to God, as it were, but because the things they loved in them were God. The emanations of the sun do not cease to exist when the moon is gone. In the same way, the goodness the saints loved in the reprobate still exists, though the reflections of that goodness are gone (relationally speaking). Thus, the saints could never miss anything in their unbelieving loved ones because everything about them that they ever loved will be in heaven with them, yet to a greater degree. This is because the goodness we love in one another is ultimately God’s goodness. Hart should readily affirm this since all earthly good, in his view, is a participation of the Good (God). When people are in hell, their goodness is gone (unless Hart wants to say that God punishes his own goodness). Therefore, the saints in heaven would not mourn those who are in hell. This is because all that is left in hell is bad.

Another consideration is that those in heaven will no longer be concerned with the things of the past, whether family or otherwise. As Isaiah says, “For behold, I am creating a new heavens and a new earth; and the former things will not be remembered or come upon the heart” (Isa 65:17, LSB).

4. Response to the Fourth Argument: What Is a Freedom?

The final argument in That All Shall Be Saved is related to the first and, as such, it is potentially the most powerful. While the first argument looked at the possibility of hell from God’s perspective, the last considers the logic of hell from the standpoint of a rational creature. Hart bases this argument on the notion that a desire to repent in the reprobate would render hell unjust because God would be withholding reconciliation out of vindictive spite. Immediately then, we notice that Hart’s argument is predicated upon the notion that eternal hell is not entirely deserved. If it were, even the desire for reform would not warrant the claim that it must be given to the culpable. A murderer may desire to do good things for society and reform his ways, but that does not mean he does not deserve to spend the rest of his days in jail. Even so, one could still argue that an omniscient jailor would not be operating with perfect ambition if he were to withhold reform from the person who he knew could experience it if he were given the opportunity. Therefore, we will assume, for the sake of argument, that the reprobate must not desire reconciliation from hell to God’s embrace in heaven if hell is to be just. The untenability of an ontological conception of sin was addressed in 1.1. above. Here, I seek to move the response a bit further by assuming an ethical conception of sin and a condign eternal hell and therefore looking at the cognition of the reprobate as that which understands God yet does not desire Him—that is, rational creatures do desire eternal hell.

Hart utilizes a transcendental metaphysic to argue that rational creatures are unable to both know the Good and not desire it. That is, since God is the ultimate Good, rational creatures cannot not desire him any more than they cannot not desire to be happy. They are programmed to desire God. All desire for sin, or those things that are not good, is seen by Hart as a misperception of the things in and of themselves. As noted above, this approach leads Hart to say, “Even an act of apostasy, then, traced back to its most primordial impulse, is motivated by the desire for God.”66 But, I argue that this falsely equates good things and God à la pantheism. My argument is based on Jonathan Edwards’ notion that a desire towards a being that participates in Being is not necessarily (perhaps is even necessarily not) a desire for Being in general (i.e. God).67 Or, put another way, one’s desire for a good can be contrary to God, despite Hart’s argument.

Edwards defines people who desire good (being) yet do not desire God (Being in general) as those who “have a determination of mind to union and benevolence to a particular person or private system, which is but a small part of the universal system of Being: and that this disposition or determination of mind is independent on, or not subordinate to, benevolence to Being in general.”68 This is for three reasons. First, in the words of Edwards, this benevolence toward particular persons (or, for our purposes, good things) when not subordinate to Being in general (or the Good) is actually against the Good because it does not desire its propagation exhaustively, but only in so far as it benefits the one with the desire. Simply put, one can desire goods and not the Good due to culpable selfishness (not innocent ignorance, as Hart would have it). This is therefore a desire for a particular object in opposition to its general existence. Like, for example, desiring a cog in a watch, removing it, and damaging the watch whence it came. Secondly, the desire for good things is not only in opposition to the Good, but it can lead to enmity towards it. Edwards says, “for he that is influenced by private affection, not subordinate to regard to Being in general, sets up its particular or limited object above Being in general; and this most naturally tends to enmity against the latter, which is by right the great supreme, ruling, and absolutely sovereign object of our regard.”69 Thirdly, this inordinate desire for good things ultimately leads Edwards to consider the desire “itself [as] an opposition to that object [that is, God].”70

An analogy of this idea can be seen in interpersonal actions—though a person can cognitively understand that God creates all people, he can desire to subjugate and oppress certain people under himself as means to his own ends. In so doing, he is desiring a good (people) while hating God whence people come. He does not need to misperceive God in order to hate God. He knows that God claims authority over all people, and as such, there are no other true sovereigns. Thus, he can desire his own sinful interaction with good things through his own sinful sovereignty, while fully understanding who God is and what he commands. Hart would have no recourse to say that this man is simply misunderstanding God because God really wants to give him his basic desires. The man’s basic desires are for complete control over other humans, and in no way does the beatific vision comport with that desire. Here Hart would likely reply that it is the man’s desire for happiness that is ultimately driving him (and oppressing people is just a means to that end), and if he understood that he could only be perfectly happy with God, he would not desire to oppress people but would rather desire God. But I argue that this man is so different from the saints that he cannot be happy without meeting his desire for oppression.71 The man needs domination to be happy, and God does not offer his saints domination.

We might be able to explain this notion by considering willful ignorance. Like the man who desires to oppress people, Satan and demons can only desire sin. They have a proper understanding and apprehension of God in terms of understanding who he is and what he desires to do with humanity. But they reject his good plan since they perceive autonomy and self-rule to be better than submission to him. Are we really to believe, on Hart’s scheme, that a creature that is thousands of years old, who knows the Scriptures better than all theologians, is really just unaware of who God really is? Or do we agree with the plain biblical teaching that Satan both knows God and hates him?

This does not mean that those in hell desire the effects of hell or punishment, of course. Rather, it is to say that they desire something to the exclusion of God to the extent that they have enmity for him. I have suggested that this desire may be for dominance and freedom from God’s sovereignty. However, one does not need to say what the desire is for in order to maintain that they desire something other than God. Indeed, there may be desires for multiple things apart from God. Thomas Aquinas puts it this way: “First, there is the turning away from the immutable good [i.e., the Good], which is infinite, wherefore, in this respect, sin is infinite. Second, there is the inordinate turning to mutable good [i.e., God’s creation].”72

Alvin Plantinga, relying on Edwards, makes a similar argument. Utilizing a distinction between the intellect and the will, Plantinga shows that a person can properly perceive God via the intellect and simultaneously reject him via the will in the same way that a bird might properly perceive a snake, or a mariner might rightly see a storm. In both cases, the snake and the storm might be objectively beautiful, and the bird and the mariner are properly apprehending them. However, the beautiful snake and storm are hated due to the relation they possess with the one who is beholding it.73 In the same way, an unbeliever can properly perceive God but have no desire for God because God’s justice demands the eradication of cherished sin. The unbeliever would then see God’s beauty as wrath since it poses a direct threat to what the unbeliever most loves, which is, inevitably, himself.

Thus, we have a complete paradigm shift between Hart and Edwards. Hart says the desire for good things is the desire for God on all accounts. Edwards says that the desire for good things in a sinful manner is intentionally against God. The reprobate want goodness for themselves, which indicates that they do not desire those good things generally. Indeed, the desire for good things selfishly (i.e., the desire for other beings) is enmity for those same things generally (i.e., Being in general). In this way, rational creatures in hell still desire good things, but they hate the Good in the same way that a person can love a being while hating Being. Thus, we have both logical and Scriptural grounds to reject Hart’s thesis.

5. Conclusion

Hart’s thesis is compelling when viewed in the abstract. But when we examine it in light of the whole corpus of Scripture and consider the implications of some of his conclusions, we see that the argument has many inherent difficulties and it does not accord with all of Scripture. We have examined all four of his primary arguments, highlighting their shortcomings with varying degrees of significance. At each step in his overall argument, weaknesses are present. Even his more minor claims are subject to serious critique. At the very least, with this many difficulties, we are prudent to take a long pause when considering his thesis rather than perceiving it to be above reproach, as Hart does.

In closing, I would remark that Hart’s thesis requires that the Holy Spirit has allowed the vast majority of the Church to completely misunderstand its doctrine of hell for two millennia. If the foregoing did nothing other than balance the scales (though I think it shows we should abandon Hart’s thesis), it seems we should opt for the traditional account on the grounds that it would not require us to maintain this vast theological tragedy in church history.

Though Hart would have us believe Satan is destined to repent of his evil ways one day in hell and be among the glorified redeemed in heaven, the truth of the matter is that he will be “be tormented day and night forever” (and in case that was not clear) “and ever” (Rev 20:10b, LSB). Satan will never be a Christian, but those we know this side of eternity might be, by the grace of God. May the Lord give us the strength to tell them the good news of salvation today. How many thousands will not live to see tomorrow? How impossible is the chance of redemption then!