Metabiblical

I have recently finished a first reading of David Bentley Hart’s That All Shall Be Saved: Heaven, Hell, and Universal Salvation, in which Hart argues that universal reconciliation is the only sensible eschatology possible in Christian thought, and that a universalist interpretation of the New Testament is not only possible, but, in fact, obvious.

From page 94-95:

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 extravagent apocalyptic imagery that, in itself, has no strictly literal elements? How did some images become mere images in the general Christian imagination while others became exact documentary portraits of some final reality? 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. I am thinking of such verses as, say:

Here I will reproduce the verses Hart quotes, although in the ASV, rather than in his own translation:

Romans 5:18-19: So then as through one trespass [the judgment came] unto all men to condemnation; even so through one act of righteousness [the free gift came] unto all men to justification of life. For as through the one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners, even so through the obedience of the one shall the many be made righteous.

1 Corinthians 15:22: For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive.

2 Corinthians 5:14: For the love of Christ constraineth us; because we thus judge, that one died for all, therefore all died …

Romans 11:32: For God hath shut up all unto disobedience, that he might have mercy upon all.

1 Timothy 2:3-6 … God our Saviour; who would have all men to be saved, and come to the knowledge of the truth. 5 For there is one God, one mediator also between God and men, [himself] man, Christ Jesus, who gave himself a ransom for all …

Titus 2:11: For the grace of God hath appeared, bringing salvation to all men …

2 Corinthians 5:19: to wit, that God was in Christ reconciling the world unto himself, not reckoning unto them their trespasses, and having committed unto us the word of reconciliation.

Ephesians 1:9-10. … making known unto us the mystery of his will, according to his good pleasure which he purposed in him unto a dispensation of the fulness of the times, to sum up all things in Christ; the things in the heavens, and the things upon the earth; in him, I say …

Colossians 1:27-28: … to whom God was pleased to make known what is the riches of the glory of this mystery among the Gentiles, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory; whom we proclaim, admonishing every man and teaching every man in all wisdom, that we may present every man perfect in Christ;

John 12:32: And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto myself.

Hebrews 2:9: But we behold him who has been made a little lower than the angels, [even] Jesus, because of the suffering of death crowned with glory and honor, that by the grace of God he should taste of death for every [man].

John 17:2: even as thou gavest him authority over all flesh, so that to all whom thou hast given him, he should give eternal life.

John 4:42: and they said to the woman, Now we believe, not because of thy speaking: for we have heard for ourselves, and know that this is indeed the Saviour of the world.

John 12:47: … for I came not to judge the world, but to save the world.

1 John 4:14: And we have beheld and bear witness that the Father hath sent the Son [to be] the Saviour of the world.

2 Peter 3:9: The Lord is not slack concerning his promise, as some count slackness; but is longsuffering to you-ward, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance.

Matthew 18:14: Even so it is not the will of your Father who is in heaven, that one of these little ones should perish.

Philippians 2:9-11: Wherefore also God highly exalted him, and gave unto him the name which is above every name; that in the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of [things] in heaven and [things] on earth and [things] under the earth, and that every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.

Colossians 1:19-20: For it was the good pleasure [of the Father] that in him should all the fulness dwell; 20 and through him to reconcile all things unto himself, having made peace through the blood of his cross, [I say,] whether things upon the earth, or things in the heavens.

1 John 2:2: … and he is the propitiation for our sins: and not for ours only, but also for the whole world.

John 3:17: For God sent not his Son into the world to judge the world; but that the world through him might be saved.

Luke 16:16: The law and the prophets [were] until John: from that time the gospel of the kingdom of God is preached, and every man entereth violently into it.

1 Timothy 4:10: For to this end we labor and strive, because we have our hope set on the living God, who is the Saviour of all men, specially of them that believe.

Going through this list was particularly jarring for me because I have read the entire New Testament through, several times, back when I was in evangelicalism. And somehow, with the exception of 1 Timothy 4:10, I don’t think I ever noticed the universalist implication that seems to be sitting right on the surface of these passages.

Of course, there are passages which seem to push against Hart’s thesis, perhaps most notably Matthew 25:46 — And these shall go away into eternal punishment: but the righteous into eternal life.

Anyone committed to inerrantism is going to find themselves having to negotiate their way through the passages, but it now seems strange to me that the phrase eternal punishment in Matthew 25:46 is treated as a fixed and non-negotiable ground truth, while expressions like unto all men, and all shall be made alive, and one died for all, and mercy upon all, and a ransom for all, and bringing salvation to all men, and reconciling the world unto himself, and draw all men to myself, and Saviour of the world, and save the world, and that all men should come to repentance, and so on and so on — all these expressions must not mean what they seem to mean.

And it is not that Matthew 25 is simply accepted in modern infernalism at face value, while everything else is explained away. Indeed, Matthew 25 seems on its face to divide mankind into two grounds on the basis of their works. I have never heard a preacher preach this one at face value.

Instead, a single concept from Matthew 25 — the eternality of punishment, is then mashed together with some material from Paul (who seems to have no concept of hell at all), and then somehow an account emerges in which the New Testament is imagined to be about getting into heaven after death, and avoiding eternal punishment in hell.

I don’t quite know what to do about all this — I do not know my way around the New Testament as well as I would like to. I know enough to know that the standard fundamentalist / evangelical account of salvation simply doesn’t appear in most of the New Testament, and that the New Testament often explicitly disagrees with this standard account. I do not know enough to really clearly evaluate whether Hart is correct in his overall picture of what the New Testament says.

Further study is needed.