That passion and skill makes for a delicious little volume, That All Shall Be Saved: Heaven, Hell, and Universal Salvation, which destroys the intellectual and moral underpinnings of Christian enthusiasm for belief in eternal damnation of souls. Hart will have none of it; fear of hell may be a useful threat when wielded by church and state seeking to control fractious humans, but it is neither scriptural and nor patristic, nor, in his view, healthy.
He maintains:
There have been Christian "universalists" -- Christians that is who believe that, in the end, all persons will be saved and joined to God in Christ -- since the earliest centuries of the faith. ... the universalist faction was at its most numerous .. in the church's first half millennium. ...In the early centuries these were not, for the most part, an especially eccentric company. They cherished the same scriptures as other Christians, worshiped in the same basilicas, lived the same sacramental lives. They even believed in hell, though not in its eternity; to them, hell was the fire of purification ... the healing assault of unyielding divine love upon obdurate souls ...But as the Christian church became the state and vice versa, especially in the West, the doctrine of eternal damnation of those souls who had rejected, or somehow flunked, salvation became orthodoxy. Hart knows he's up against a potent received "truth."
I find it a very curious feeling, I admit, to write a book that is at odds with a body of received opinion so well established that I know I cannot reasonably expect to persuade anyone of anything, except perhaps of my sincerity. ... I suspect that those who are already sympathetic to my position will approve of my argument to the extent that they think it successfully expresses their own views, or something proximate to them, while those who disagree (by far the larger party) 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.
Some, for instance, will claim that universalism clearly contradicts the explicit language of scripture (it does not). Others will argue that universalism was decisively condemned as heretical by the fifth Ecumenical Council (it was not). The more adventurous will take what they take to be stronger versions of those same philosophical defenses of the idea of an eternal hell that I describe and reject in these pages. The most adventurous of all might attempt to come up with new arguments of their own (which is not advisable).
... there is, at least, something liberating about knowing that I have probably lost the rhetorical contest before it has even begun. It spares me the effort of feigning tentativeness or moderation or judicious doubt, in the daintily and soberly ceremonious way one is generally expected to, and allows me instead to advance my claims in as unconstrained a manner as possible ...Hart finds the idea of eternal damnation, what he labels "infernalism" both wrong and repulsive, incompatible with belief that God is good.
... I certainly cannot believe what I find intrinsically unbelievable. I have never had much respect for the notion of the blind leap of faith, even when that leap is made in the direction of something beautiful and ennobling. I certainly cannot respect it when it is made in the direction of something intrinsically loathsome and degrading. And I believe that this is precisely what the infernalist position, no matter what form it takes, necessarily involves. ...
... Let me, at least, shamelessly idealize the distant past for a moment. In its dawn, the gospel was a proclamation principally of a divine victory that had been won over death and sin, and over the spiritual powers of rebellion against God that dwell on high, and here below, and under the earth. It announced itself truly as the "good tidings" of a campaign of divine rescue on the part of a loving God ... it was, above all, a joyous proclamation, and a call to a lost people to find their true home at last ... It did not initially make its appeal to human hearts by forcing them to revert to some childish or bestial cruelty latent in their natures; rather it sought to awaken them to a new form of life, one whose premise was charity. Nor was it a religion offering only a psychological salve for individual anxieties regarding personal salvation. It was a summons to a new and corporate way of life, salvation by entry into a community of love.
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Anyone who has read this far will have guessed that I'm among the "already sympathetic" who find Hart expressing my views, eloquently. I think, until very recently, it was probably pretty much impossible for any sort of queer person to get anything out of Christianity unless we could slough off the notion of eternal damnation. After all, how to believe in a good, benevolent God/creator, if She had damned what She had made -- that is, damned us? Most of us sloughed off God; some sloughed off eternal damnation.
• • •
While I'm on the topic of how it's all good, here is some bonus home truth from Lutheran minister and theologian Nadia Bolz-Weber:
What I am saying is that faith is optional. It really is. Just like gratitude, faith is not an obligation, it’s an invitation. It’s not the cost, it’s the gift.
... My friend James says that faith is relaxing. Relaxing in the presence of God in the way we do when we are in the presence of someone we are certain is fond of us. Perhaps that is true praise of God, trusting that there is no extra credit to be had. No ranking to be jostled for. No worthiness to be earned. No one to vote off the island so that I have a place. We can all relax, and have our actions explained in the kindest way possible. Thanks be to God, Amen.
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