I wanted to engage with David Bentley Hart’s recently published book That All Shall Be Saved: Heaven, Hell, and Universal Salvation; this seems to be the thing to do right now, so I thought I should at least say something. I haven’t as of yet read the book, but I have watched a ninety-minute lecture he did where he presented the major themes of the book; with some development. So, my engagement will not be in-depth coverage, but it will be an initial impression based upon what I understand his argument to be. In particular, what I really want to do is deal with his Orthodoxy, and the theory of authority he appeals to in order to make his ‘exegetical’ arguments. As a primer to that, let me share a quote from Jaroslav Pelkian, that Al Kimel shared on Twitter; it fits into the context of DBH’s theory of ecclesial and interpretive authority—indeed, Kimel is friends with DBH, and sporadically shares posts from DBH at his blog. But I think he shared this quote from Pelikan as a help towards understanding the exegetical bases by which DBH is able to arrive at his conclusions in favor of Christian Universalism (what TF Torrance identified as one of the twin heresies; the other being the Calvinist ‘limited atonement’). Here is Pelikan via Kimel:

“The Old Testament achieved and maintained its status as Christian Scripture with the aid of spiritual interpretation. There was no early Christian who simultaneously acknowledged the authority of the Old Testament and interpreted it literally.” – Jaroslav Pelikan

This might strike us as rather enigmatic to the broader discussion on universalism, but it is an important piece of the pie for DBH’s biblical interpretive work to have any force at all. Beyond what I would take to be an overstatement by Pelikan (JND Kelly would dispute this as a sweeping generalization, I think), what is interesting is how this allows for the sort of license that DBH takes with various passages of Scripture that would seem to indicate an antecedent prothesis of what would be developed and picked up on later by the exilic Rabbinic tradition in regard to teaching a concept of an eternally conscious torment understanding of hell. To help illustrate the way DBH thinks about Scripture more fulsomely, let’s take a look at what he recently had to say in response to Peter Leithart’s book review of the book under question:

In short, you want me to account for myself in a way answerable to the hermeneutical practices of communities gestated within a religion born in the sixteenth century.  But those practices are at once superstitious and deeply bizarre.  They are not Christian in any meaningful way.  They are not Jewish either, as it happens.  They are a late Protestant invention, and a deeply silly one.  From Paul through the high Middle Ages, only the spiritual reading of the Old Testament was accorded doctrinal or theological authority.  In that tradition, even “literal” exegesis was not the sort of literalism you seem to presume.  Not to read the Bible in the proper manner is not to read it as the Bible at all; scripture is in-spired, that is, only when read “spiritually.”[1]

We can see how DBH needs to mitigate any possibility for what Calvin might call the sensus literalis (‘literal sense’), when it comes to an engagement with and interpretation of Holy Scripture. DBH needs the text to ‘only’ be opened to an allegorizing or spiritualistic, or maybe Alexandrianizing way of biblical exegesis. In this mode of interpretation DBH has the capacity to insert what would seem to be foreign categories into the text of Scripture, under the guise of these categories being the ‘spiritual’ sense of the text. In this way, and eo ipso Hart can begin an argument for the evacuation of a literal hell, by understanding its function as a spiritual one wherein that only serves as a foil for the reconciliation of all of creation.

But beyond this, and this has to do with DBH’s theory of authority as an Orthodox thinker, the categories and whence he gets his theological soundings from is not Holy Writ, but the Holy Fathers of the Church. It is upon the basis of Apostolic Succession, and the authority inherent to this magisterium, this consensus patrum, that Hart can offer an argument for universalism that negates the concept of a literal, physical, and eternal hell from the pages of Holy Scripture. For DBH, Scripture is not the norma normans, nor is it the principium theologiae; instead Scripture is on the same plane as the patrological tradition, and the consensus of the faithful that has developed within the halls of the Church; in Hart’s case, the east-wing of those halls. This might not, in itself, give him an absolute argument for universalism, but it does allow him the latitude to appeal to an extra scriptura; or he can appeal to the theological furniture available to him in his own Eastern context. Indeed, this is what Hart does. His argument requires the Protestant, as I understand it, to submit to the authority inherent to apostolic succession, and allow the Eastern vector, of an aspect present in that wing of the Church, to present us with the theological foundations by which we arrive at his conclusion for his version of a Christian Universalism.

This is all I’ve got for now (without actually reading his book, and only going off of what I remember from his lecture on his book; and reading Leithart’s review, and DBH’s response). But what is most interesting to me, beyond Hart’s normal rhetorical flourishes (indeed, they can be quite beautiful to the wordsmiths among us), is that his argument really requires that the Christian be already submitted to the Apostolic Succession that Hart takes as normative for his biblical exegesis. In other words, I don’t really see how DBH’s argument can be entertained by the Protestant thinkers in the room. This is not to say that there aren’t a variety of Protestant arguments for Christian Universalism; it is just to say that Hart’s is idiosyncratic to the furniture of his own ecclesial living room.

[1] David Bentley Hart, Good God? A Response, accessed 10-09-2019.