What is Good?: A Reflection on DBH's 'That All Shall Be Saved'

Hart is cantankerous, bloated, and an obnoxious person to listen to and engage. When I first read his The Beauty of the Infinite, I was enchanted a bit for what seemed to be an exorcism of my modernist ghosts. But the more I read, the more I engaged, the more I found Hart something of a blowhard. But it this assessment doesn't mean Hart is a dope or doesn't raise good points, even if, on the way, he has mastered the art of smug pontification and an overweening arrogance.

Thus I was not surprised when his newest book came out, That All Shall Be Saved, a controversy erupted. There were a variety of criticisms, some completely vacuous and others more measured, but no one ever is able to understand Hart. He even prowls around the internet, commenting on posts about how no one is able to understand his arguments. And let me preface this: I don't think Hart is edifying and he is self-conceited even for an academic. But he does have a point. Within the realm of the hodgepodge that conservative First Things types call "classical theism", Hart has delivered the death blow. While his self-pitying and distasteful upper-brow, quintessentially Episcopalian, cocktail party scenarios left a bad taste in my mouth, he does have a point. He is correct, as he has said in a variety of interviews, that he lays out a series of simple, tightly-woven, arguments that are interconnected. Again, Hart can't help lamenting his own project: I don't know why I write this book, no one will listen and this is so obvious that I shouldn't even have to argue for something so obvious. He's a combination of Cassandra and Merlin. He can't help hurling invectives and the book reads something like a liquor-soaked Hitchens editorial written at 4 AM (that doesn't mean it wasn't well written or cogent).

But like I said: he hits all the right notes. Hart's argument revolves around four basic arguments:

-Following Gregory of Nyssa, protology and eschatology mirror one another in a kind of exitus-reditus. All creation is a theophany (as opposed to Hegelian process theology). If all creation originates good, including the instantiation of all Humanity, then it all must end good. There can't be a quarantined zone of endless torment if the end is like the beginning. And since God is good, yea, even Good, no other result besides the redemption of all is acceptable, otherwise the end has not yet come.

-This leads into an argument that scripture is ambiguous about the punishments of hell. Some parts (especially Paul) suggest a double-eschatological movement, one of a historical judgement, where the damned will be purified through divine fire until the final eschatological moment when God will be all in all (something Hart claims Nyssen believed).

-Doubling back to the original argument, utilizing Nyssen, Hart argues that persons qua persons are established through relations. They are not pure relationality (like the Trinity, which makes God most fully and ultimately personal), but we are still only who we are through our relationships. As long as someone who constitutes who we are remains in Hell, paradise is impossible (discounting the ideas that we enjoy the torment of the damned, which is obscene, or we don't care or forget, which would lobotomize our personhood).

-Finally, truly free freedom is freedom to be what we are, which as rational creatures is to pursue the good. When we're truly free we will choose God, and if we're not free then God's judgement is something of an obscene punishment that doesn't fit the crime. The idea of an arbitrary free choice violates our natural wills, and God is infinitely attractive as the Good (God is not a god, not a big-baddie being in the room with other beings).

What Hart demolishes is the soft "infernalist" (what he calls people who believe in eternal conscious torment/punishment) position that you see in CS Lewis. The idea that God wrings his hands, tries all he can, but incorrigible sinners aren't simply redeemable. The last of the 4 arguments explodes this notion along pretty strong lines. Why would God let people gamble eternity away in a state of infantile ignorance, a simple drip in the ocean that is timeless eternity? He would be a moral monster. Hart repeatedly gives credit to the Calvinists (particularly the capo himself, Jean Cauvin) for consistency. They might worship the devil, possess 0 moral intelligence, and probably would support the death penalty for children stealing candy, but they're at least ruthlessly consistent with the infernalist Augustinian logic. Hart takes a faux-solace in that he doesn't think most people really believe in the infernalist position; rather, they believe they believe in this position out of dogmatic slumber. In a lot of ways, Hart drops a nuclear bomb on the soft academic world of professional theology. There are no survivors...except the radiation-resistant cockroaches (or the moral equivalent of Calvinists in Hart's view).

It was interesting re-running through these arguments because I was, for a time, an evangelical universalist. By that I mean I was committed to a kind of universalism linked exclusively to the person and work of Christ. I had little-to-no interest to Vedanta and other Asian pagan theologies that Hart does, but even so Hart presses the same line I did. Salvation is because of Christ alone, the full theophanic revelation of God's victory over sin, death, and the "devil" (well, sorta, he skirts around saying the devil and instead talks of impersonal darknesses, but close enough). I don't know if I would have ever made these same arguments (I wasn't smart enough), but the emotional ethos was the same. It's not a cozy feel-good appeal that, kumbaya, we're all on our way to the great beyond, drops in the ocean of being. But Hart presses the envelope in a way he doesn't fill in (or isn't willing to fill in). In his first meditation, Hart gives an oblique reference that this whole world and its history doesn't add up to divine revelation. In other words, God has put us in the shit for no apparent reason. His theophanic account of creation is classic in articulation, but tinged with that existentialist melancholy. Was all this filth and garbage really necessary? Did God really need to express himself (here, Hart states that emmanation and creatio ex nihilo have little metaphysical difference in reality) in this way, a way that has a world where little girls are raped and people are beheaded? Hart is tasteful, and cunning, in saying that in the end, God himself will be judged by himself. Or, as he says, "disclose" himself if one is inclined to more pious verbiage

But I'm a self-professed annihilationist because I've really struggled with these questions in the past. Hart is right that, if you work through the moral implications, eternal conscious torment is hard to stomach, especially for a modern man. And Hart is less innovative than reflective of the common assumption most people make. Very few Christians, if pushed violently into the corner with pictures of their own children, loved ones, innocent victims (say, an unbaptized child who died from starvation) would like to own up to the doctrine. Hence the flow of soft infernalist arguments because, hey, it's less hard to stomach of the hardened sinner chooses to be such. But I want to be faithful to the biblical data and not simply get dragged along by contemporary mores. I can't pretend that my assessment wasn't impacted by current sentiments, but I also don't think Hart's blithe dismissal of tradition as (in general, with exceptions) a bunch of moral retards is right. Of course, he would argue that he's faithful to "a" tradition, one that runs through Origen to some of the Cappadocians (at least Gregory of Nyssa and, perhaps, Nazianzen) and through the proto-Nestorians, Diodore and Theodore, into the Assyrian Church of the East in such luminaries like Isaac of Nineveh. Of course, maybe there's something to the argument that Origen's Hellenistic metaphysics about natures makes him a progenitor, of sorts, to Nestorian Christology, but I'll leave that off.

Hart is not just after the typical infernalists, but all types, including annihilationism. But Hart gives credit to the annihilationists, they are the most consistent with the biblical grammar of destruction. Here's where I would register my first problem with Hart's project: his anti-biblicism. He says out and front in his 2nd meditation: biblicism is retarded and he doesn't believe in oracular revelation (i.e. the Spirit spoke through men like a musician plays a harp viz. st. Ephraim the Syrian). In this way, Hart has surely made a presuppositional error. His theology presupposes the God of Theism, the Good, Being Itself, which is manifested in texts like the NT, perhaps exclusively in history through Jesus Christ. But I would argue such is backwards. Hellenism is only a tool once one is grounded in the revelation of God given in Scripture and preserved through His people. Hart would scoff: I'm a dolt who doesn't know 2TJ studies and how there's no unique Hebraic identity. 2TJ studies have blown up the Harnackian Hellenizing thesis, but that doesn't mean all Jews were part of some melting-pot called the Greco-Roman world. There were still Jewish distinctions that were loudly asserted (sometimes to the point of anxiety that Jews were losing out and getting swallowed up). This distinction is still reflected and argued about in academic scholarship. Whatever the differences were, Jews were not all Hellenes, and Jews had a particular way of understanding the cosmos that didn't always (or ever) fit with Plato or Zoroaster. But Hart is not one who would shackle his conscience to the word of God (understood as scripture) and won't be sold a false bill of goods. He simply rejects the perspecuity of scripture and thinks Nyssen's read is simply ironclad.

But in terms of philosophy, I wonder if Hart has made an error in how he assesses what evil "is". I put that in scare quotes because Hart, per Augustine and classical neo-Platonism, doesn't believe evil exists. Evil is ignorance of the good, an absence, like dark and light or cold and heat. The latter is and the former "is" an absence of a positive good. Thus Hart will assert that, in intellectualist terms, we will always choose the good if we know clearly; it's according to our nature. But I wonder if evil isn't so much an absence, but a question of configuration. Evil is not something missing, but our relation to somethings. Romans 1 is all about how man knows God's power and eternality and yet debased himself, worshiping the creation not the Creator. That doesn't seem to be a problem of ignorance or an absence of good (or Good). Rather it seems to suggest that man will relate himself to one set of goods, creation, in a way that is ultimately sinful, denying the fount of all such goods.

I have to think about this point more, but I do think if Hart's supposition about good and evil is false (such being neo-platonism, and not necessarily the bible) then his argument doesn't work. Hart assumes, as a consequence of his metaphysics, that man could never choose evil if he knew the Good, but I'm not so sure. I think some men will opt out, but not in such a way like CS Lewis' The Great Divorce, where God always keeps the door open. Rather it's in the punitive sense of judging human history: you failed, you loved death, so I will give you over and meet out judgement and obliterate you. Perhaps the resurrection unto destruction will give bodies that will reflect such a vile transformation. The image is withdrawn, and with the face of a zombie or a demon, the damned will be destroyed utterly, along with satan and his angels. I don't know, but it's something to think about.\

Ultimately, perhaps intentionally, Hart can never really answer Jesus' indirect statement about Judas: it would have better for him not to have been born. What could this mean? Would eternal beatitude, even if Judas has to go through the ringer of millennial purgation, be better than not ever existing? Hart is never able to quite synthesize why Jesus would say this, especially given his personalist argument about we are who we know. How could Jesus be Jesus (or the Apostles themselves) if Judas were never born? Ultimately, this is the rock I think Hart's arguments founder upon. But this isn't a sweeping refutation of any philosophical heft. Rather it's the stupid appeal (from a Protestant no less!) about scripture's epistemic a priori. It won't get a book published by Yale, but I do think that's the substance of the faith. Without it, Christianity is a vehicle for a more basic philosophia perennis, which can make common cause with Platonism, Vedanta and Sufism. But that's not the gospel. Of course, I probably didn't understand the arguments either.

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