That All Shall Be Saved: Heaven, Hell, and Universal Salvation
David Bentley Hart
New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019
Throughout my reading of That All Shall Be Saved, my thoughts and reactions have organized themselves in such a way that what follows below will more likely read as a personal reflection on the central themes of David Bentley Hart’s book than as a conventional review.
Perhaps I should more accurately describe Hart’s treatise as revolving around a single theme possessing multiple aspects. To those of heaven, hell, and universal salvation foregrounded in his subtitle we must add sin, human freedom and agency, divine love and forgiveness, and the ineffable mode of interplay among these infinitely unequal—but equally indispensable!—divine and human factors in the ultimate fulfilment of God’s loving plan for His creation from before all ages.
The more reflectional than drily summary or critical character of this “book review” arises from my own struggles from my earliest childhood memories (I turn 65 this July) to make sense of the same terrible, unanswerable questions that also began to trouble Hart at a tender age. This I share with him: neither of us probably remembers a time when the all too tidy binary of heaven and hell—with the superaddition of purgatory and limbo, for those of us receiving a classical pre-Vatican II religious formation—did not weigh heavily on the spiritually sensitive imagination of childhood and remain with us into adulthood.
Where Hart and I differ, and starkly, is that for me these questions remain not only unanswered, but indeed unanswerable, and must continue ever so in this life.
ORTHODOXY IN DIALOGUE 