Meaningless Babble or Something More? A review of That All shall be Saved by David Bentley Hart
"Stop rattling!" The command would come hurdling my way anytime I seemed to be babbling on for the mere pleasure of noise production. I am quite sure this insistence was justified in nearly every invocation of my juvenile existence. Perhaps I was incessantly repeating a word in varying intonations, or singing the same line of a song over and over, or even emitting some combination of howling and screeching that so often possess young children who have had too much sugar. Whatever the type of noise, the order was the same.
I'm sure this admonition was not sourced only from anger and a desire for a moment's peace. Within the curt expression also lies the sage advice that if one desires to be heard, they should choose thoughtfully when to speak. And when one does speak, they should do so understandably. What one says should actually mean something.
I am reminded of this memory years on, as I have once again been reading theology. The only subject upon which one can so easily write ten thousand words without actually saying anything at all. The amount of absolute drivel recorded and published under the designation of theology knows no bounds. But this need not always be the case.
My most recent foray into the study of God was guided by David Bentley Hart via his 2019 volume, That All shall be Saved. Although much of the book examines God and his character and attributes, the reader also enjoys a refreshing scrutinization of soteriology, eschatology, and moral philosophy. It is with much joy that I write that at nearly no point in reading Hart's book did I think of the term "rattling." Instead, I could hardly believe the moral lucidity in front of me poured forth from a man of god.
The most basic premise of Hart's book is not difficult to comprehend. He posits that the authors of the New Testament, chiefly Paul, have been mistranslated, misunderstood and, at times, purposely misconstrued. Moreover, the doctrine of eternal damnation cannot be found in a proper reading of scripture, and true salvation can only be achieved if all those who have lived are eventually reconciled with Christ. It is not his scriptural arguments that I find incredibly compelling, however. (Blame my evangelical casting if you must.) Rather, it is his moral and theological arguments against eternal conscious torment that I find equal parts convincing and eloquent. In fact, I have never read a more thorough dismantling of the traditional–or as Hart would specify, Western–idea of hell.
He begins forthrightly.
"I mean only that, if Christianity taken as a whole is indeed an entirely coherent and credible system of belief, then the universalist understanding of its message is the only one possible. And, quite imprudently, I say that without the least hesitation or qualification" (3).
Although I haven't yet decided to what degree I concur with this statement, it would certainly be true to say that the whole faith becomes a good deal more palatable if Hart's interpretation is accepted.
For Hart, traditional Christianity is unbelievable. He quickly acknowledges the "casual callousness that is so frequent a concomitant of deep piety" (11). Long has it fascinated me how those who adhere to nearly any variation of monotheism find it so impossibly easy to relay to heathen their final destination of everlasting torment. One of Hart's primary points is that people "do not really believe in it at all, but rather merely believe in their belief in it" (29). Lived experience would seem to validate that reflection. Hell is one of those pernicious beliefs that only manages to take root in believers if they are presented with such an indelicacy at a young age. Their moral sense becomes corrupted, as Hart rightly identifies. And they confuse contradictions for paradox, and recognize incoherence as profundity (19).
There is a reason that the symbol of the justice system is often found in the double-pan balance scale. Some time ago, a few of the wiser representatives of our species arrived at the conclusion that punishment ought to be mete out in even proportion to the crime committed. One of Hart's more clever observations is that nothing can be laid opposite of "eternal punishment" that can tip the scale (43). Weighing the finite across from the infinite will always result in an imbalance (44). And don't even begin to bother with the nonsensical suggestion that eternal punishment is appropriate due to the eternal and holy nature of the offended party (44). Are we blind to tyranny? It could be suggested that the only thing infinite about the Christian God is his capacity for pettiness. "A lesson that requires an eternity to impart is a lesson that can never be learned" (169).
One can hardly write too long of eternal conscious torment before thinking of John Calvin. Long before my own journey away from the Christian faith, I encountered the sordid teachings of the man. Even from a young age, my moral sense was horrified by the ideas of predestination, objects of divine wrath, and his other intolerable propositions. By the time I reached university as a prospective minister, my despise for the doctrine had deepened still. Many of my most memorable campus rows were over Reformed ideology. So imagine my pleasure when I came across Hart's critique of Calvin. Among other samples lies the following.
"Calvin, in telling us that hell is copiously populated with infants not a cubit long, merely reminds us that, within a certain traditional understanding of grace and predestination, the choice to worship God rather than the devil is at most a matter of prudence" (76). (Oh the delight of a good sentence!)
Among all the arguments Hart puts forth in the book, perhaps his strongest is found in his analysis of heavenly personhood. Surely all of those who are saved must know at least a few of the damned. To be sure, the way most Christians speak, each saved soul will have many acquaintances, friends, and even family who didn't make the cut–whose piety just wasn't up to snuff. Hart examines the traditional answers to this conundrum. How can one bask in heavenly bliss while knowing those they knew–and potentially loved–are being actively tortured?
"To say that the suffering of the damned will either be clouded from the eyes of the blessed or, worse, increase the pitiless bliss of heaven is also to say that no persons can possibly be saved: for, if the memories of others are removed, or lost, or one's knowledge of their misery is converted into indifference or, God forbid, into greater beatitude, what then remains of one in one's last bliss? Some other being altogether, surely: a spiritual anonymity, a vapid spark of pure intellection, the residue of a soul that has been reduced to no one. Not, however, a person–not the person who was" (79).
Really, Hart's prose is wonderful. His rhetoric is morally admirable and impressively cogent, which makes it all the more curious as to why he maintains his alliance to (some sort of) Christianity and biblical truth. Hart's god appears sophisticated, refined–even woefully misunderstood.
For example, he writes that "In fact, if God were some impulsively erratic or playfully mercurial psychological personality, capable of occasionally contradicting his own essence just to make the point that he can, all theological language would be just so much meaningless babble" (60). Here is the point in the book where the nonbeliever raises his eyes from the page, furrows his brow, and quickly glances side to side. Hart has hit the nail on the head, but can't hear the ringing of the hammer. To be fair, Hart truly doesn't believe in this God of contradiction. He has somehow managed to divorce the biblical god from His own capricious actions exhibited within the Old Testament. He has clearly reinterpreted the traditional view of salvation and eternity, where still more obvious contradiction lies. And he rejects the fundamentalism that remains so easy to poke fun at. Yet where Hart ends up, doesn't seem really any place at all. This is how liberalized Christianity always appears: a hodgepodge of all the delectable bits, and nothing more.
Allow me to highlight another place where the unbeliever can't help but release a heavy sigh. While writing about Paul in the book's Second Meditation, Hart notes, "If he [Paul] really believed that the alternative to life in Christ is eternal torment, it seems fairly careless of him to have omitted any mention of the fact" (106). What I find fairly careless is that the whole Pauline oeuvre is so unbelievably equivocal that the overwhelming majority of Christian adherents have managed to misunderstand what seems to be just about the most important bit of the faith. Perhaps the divine inspiration should have been tuned to a finer frequency in the early first century? Do we think God omniscient, omnipresent, and benevolent–but a downright horrid communicator? Is not the fact that this subject has warranted the writing of so many a book evidence in and of itself that theology is nothing more than meaningless babble? Or at least not divine babble?
A quick glance to my right lands my eyes on Edward Fudge's Hell: A Final Word. The book is Fudge's attempt to reinterpret scripture as promising a hell of annihilation, where its residents simply cease to exist. Only this book is a mere reader's digest edition of his five hundred word scholarly tome, The Fire that Consumes. Surely, all this back and forth is proof that god does indeed not speak to man. Or if he does speak, it is in the most cryptic and confused of manners.
(This reminds me terribly of the gay Christians who attempt to prove the Bible condones their lifestyle by insisting on reinterpreting the traditional understanding of the few verses that seem to reference their sexual orientation. I always found their hermeneutical claims a bit far fetched. You would think they would realize that if god cared for them at all, it wouldn't be so damn hard to make their case. One could simply flip the page to the verse that commands, "thou shalt let people fuck whom they wish to fuck and love whom they wish to love.")
So what then to make of Hart and his book? Well, I can't help but to be fond of them both. His writing is lovely, his position meritorious, and his arguments warrant sincere consideration. Do buy the book. Is there some rattling within its pages? Yes–it comes with the territory. But even if you learn nothing of God, you'll certainly learn something of morality. And to Hart, that is perhaps one in the same.
