David Bentley Hart That All Shall Be Saved
That All Shall Be Saved (Yale University Pr: New Haven, CT, 2019)— A Summary and Review David Bentley Hart's argument, when you strip away the polemics, is fairly simple: if Christianity is coherent at all, universalism is the only version of it that can be. Not a hopeful add-on, not a pious wish — the only logically stable position. Everything else in the book is Hart working out the implications of that claim across scripture, philosophy, and the history of doctrine. He starts with the moral problem, and it's the part of the book I keep coming back to. Borrowing William James's thought experiment — would you accept a utopia bought at the price of one soul's eternal torture — Hart says no coherent Christian ethics can take that deal, whether the soul in question is Hitler or an unbaptized infant. Historically, he points out, the church's answer has usually included the infant. He insists that anyone who claims to fully believe in eternal hell while also loving th...