Tag: David Bentley Hart

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“HOW CAN UNIVERSALISM BE TRUE IF…?”

Under the breath of many Christians who raise objections to universalism you can hear them say, “but universalism has always been a minority tradition.  How can all the infernalist greats like Augustine and Aquinas be wrong?  How can so many pastors, priests, and ministers—including some who are hardly of the intolerant, fire-breathing sort—be wrong?”  Indeed.  (In fact, according to David Bentley Hart, for the first few hundred years of Christianity universalism just might have been more than a minority position.  But let that go for now.)

Well, we should not forget what a shock it must have been to the Roman Catholic world to be confronted by some obscure German monk in the early 16th century and told that the Pope himself, the Vicar of Christ, was wrong, terribly wrong, in a number of very serious ways.  Besides, is Christianity or is it not a revolution?  If it is, (and it is) it should not be too surprising to expect it might change drastically in a number of ways over the years, that it might teach us things that either are in scripture but have never been seen there, or which might not be in scripture at all.  (I am leaving aside for the time being the question of whether universalism is scriptural or not.)  But must the truth of God be small enough that it can be packed in one book and tied up in a bow with no significant, new developments for almost two thousand years?  How were Jews during and shortly after the time of Christ expected to follow Jesus if religion is simply a matter of following extant texts in ways that were already prescribed?  Wasn’t Jewish scriptural tradition always evolving anyway? And were not its ways of reading far more creative than some of the arid Christian fundamentalism one encounters?  And what of the pagans?  Were they not being asked by Christianity to throw over—contemptuously even—certain of their beliefs and practices that had been held dear for countless generations?  If Christianity upset the apple cart of history some two thousand years ago, we should not be too surprised if within Christianity itself old certainties are to be overthrown.

Or are we to believe that it is only the hallowed “us,” the Christian tradition, which has no need of revolution?

“As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end, Amen,” is not a reference to human understanding, even of the most enlightened sort.

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UNIVERSALISM AND A CHRISTIAN LEFT

In That All Shall be Saved (Yale UP, 2019) David Bentley Hart says,

“The truth is that all of these theological degeneracies follow from an incoherence deeply fixed at the heart of almost all Christian traditions: that is, the idea that the omnipotent God of love, who creates the world from nothing, either imposes or tolerates the eternal torment of the damned.” (78)

It is one thing to argue that a just and loving God might annihilate or even torture forever some of his children.  Infernalists and universalists clearly are on opposite sides of the fence here; the issue is usually argued on the basis of reason, scripture, or both.

But what does it mean spiritually or psychologically to believe in an infernalist God?

What does it mean politically?

I think that Christian infernalists are houses divided against themselves.  As Hart asserts, probably many Christians only think they believe in hell.

But might it be that infernalism has hamstrung the church?  Might it be that laying our arguments for infernalism aside, the infernalist position sets up a God who, even if he can be justified on logical or scriptural grounds simply cannot be loved?  I believe so.  The god infernalists love (or think they love) is not lovable.  This cannot be stressed enough.  It is all very well to take a hard line on divine sovereignty and say that since God is God there are no ethical constraints above him to which he must comply.  But if what God does with this infinite right and power strikes us as abomination, how are we to love him?  We cannot.  We may proclaim that it is ourselves who are totally depraved in objecting to hell and to such a God, but whatever one makes of that argument we still cannot love the God of hellfire we claim to believe in.

If a Nobel Prize winning mathematician told you that 2+2=5 you might choose to believe he is right, even if you cannot see how.  But you have disqualified yourself from ever doing mathematics again.

And if a cruel and monstrous god is supposed to be love itself, that makes it more difficult for us to truly love ourselves or each other.  This is true in both the personal and political spheres.

So what is going on?

Why this insistence on the divine bogey, the horrific Nobodaddy?

Once one has swallowed the balderdash of infernalism, one can believe almost anything.  If an omnipotent deity wants to save everyone, but cannot because his hands, supposedly, are tied by our free will, what other social, political, economic monstrosities can be rationalized and accepted?  Feudalism, patriarchy, capitalism—one can do a song and dance and accept their necessity or even goodness if one can believe the holy, just, and loving creator of the universe will roast certain of his children over an open flame forever.

In effect, the church has corrupted itself by holding a form of moral idiocy close to its heart.  It does not help that the idiocy of infernalism has been believed by many people who are by no means idiots.  It seems that most thoroughly respected and even brilliant theologians have believed it.  The idiocy has been believed by people with loving hearts and a true desire to know Christ.

It is also notable that it tends to be the more politically and socially conservative of the church who are most likely to believe in hell and to emphasize it.  Could this situation be one of the reasons why Christianity and the Left have so often been at odds and even outright enemies?  By this I mean not only that leftists object to infernalism, but that there is something in the beliefs and attitudes behind infernalism that are inimical to the entire leftist project.

(It seems to be a common phenomenon to find people who are theologically brilliant, but politically obtuse.  Likewise, some of the most acute and perceptive political thinkers are blind or ignorant when it comes to matters of religion.)

Not that there has not always been a Christian Left, of course, but in his 2017 Protestants: The Faith that Made the Modern World (Penguin) Alec Ryrie asserts, “The real novelty of our own time is not the prominence of the religious Right but the silence of the religious Left” (7).

It is time for this Christian Left to arise.  We must tell the world that infernalism is not fundamental to the faith.

Even if one makes the case that the secular left from the 19th century onwards owes its sense of justice to Christianity, this is no reason for religious triumphalism.  What it means is that while the Church largely fumbled the ball by siding with the powerful, opposition to oppressive systems and ideologies like capitalism has been left largely to a secular Left, thereby deprived of the greater strength and spirit it might have had.

At numerous times and places the secular Left has had a stronger and more Christian ethic than the church.  I am convinced the church’s frequent hostility to the secular left comes in part from an unacknowledged moral envy the church has sometimes had when it failed to help the poor the left was in solidarity with.  Could it be the church’s ethic and spirit has been crippled by infernalism?  Could it be that a more ethically sensible Left found itself unable to cleave to a religion that demanded eternal torture for some malefactors?  I by no means advocate that Christianity should give up infernalism in order to gain more converts.  One can only justify universalism in the name of truth: whether or not that gets you more or fewer converts is not relevant.  But perhaps the secular Left has been more morally intelligent on numerous occasions.