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David Bentley Hart, Universalism, and Confident Unorthodoxy
Oh my goodness, I loved That All Shall Be Saved so much it's embarrassing.
That All Shall Be Saved is David Bentley Hart’s book on universalism, the orthodoxy-adjacent view that there is no hell — no eternal, punitive punishment waiting for literally anyone.1 I finished it last week, and 75% of the book is underlined and highlighted and EXCLAMATION MARKED. I loved it so much. I drank it in big huge gulps. I got a lot of raised eyebrows when I told anyone I was enjoying it so much (from the queers and the conservatives). DBH has a big personality, and his tone is - a lot. Calling it “snarky” is the gentlest way to describe his writing style in a public facing blog. But I couldn’t read it fast enough. I loved his sarcastic theo bro energy and his fearlessly aggressive ego and how he thinks that everyone who disagrees with him is either not very clever, or not very moral, or at the very best, hoodwinked.
I guess it’s possible that I loved this book because it reminded me of the philosophy department at the University of New Hampshire, my first academic home that I’m always a bit homesick for. There is some white boy philosophy dude energy in this text for sure. It made me miss the particular happiness and frustration of trying to hold your own jammed in a tiny desk in the basement of the English building (where they stored all the philosophy majors), fighting with philosophy bros who hadn’t done the reading on Simone de Beauvoir and are using big words and extreme confidence to cover it up.
But the homesickness wasn’t all. I love hearing theology on the edges of orthodoxy spoken with this much confidence. I love hearing this kind of energy, that has so often been turned against me or my communities, turned to defend what feels good and holy. It makes me feel like maybe I’m not on the ragged edges of theological reality for believing that the Love of God is so great that everyone gets saved in the end.
It’s hard for me to be this confident about anything on the edges of current orthodoxy.23 Most of my "heretical" theology is offered as an apology: maybe this is OK or I'm not sure but this FEELS like a true thing about God. Even my queer theology has been invitational. Another word for invitational, though, can be “tentative”—this is probably OK, this is maybe good, this is fine in one possible world?
This mostly comes from wanting to live with care and integrity. I’m grateful for everyone in my life who did such invitational, welcoming theology when I was still struggling with big new ideas. It made room for me to consider, and wonder, and change. People made a lot of space for me, and I want to make a lot of space for other people, too, as a “thank you” and also a “welcome aboard!”
That tentativeness, though, can have an impulse of self distrust. Who am I to say that this is true or good? What if I'm wrong? Am I allowed to be confident not just in the Love of God, but also in my own understanding of that Love? By what authority do I speak? I want self-distrust to protect me from the kinds of fundamentalism that hurt me and people I love. I want to carry a holy distrust of my own theology. All theologies are attempts to name Mystery, and that is something to approach with fear and trembling.
Some of this distrust is good, and a type of humility.
Some of it, though, is just fear. The kind of fear that buries money in the ground before you’d take a risk of making a mistake with it.
My fears of making a mistake or getting in trouble or being bad are so strong that I pepper my writing and my inner dialogue with conditions and softeners, I think and maybe and I guess. I am the one that needs to apologize, because this is Barely Orthodox!
And here come David Bentley Hart! Barreling into the room! Yelling absolutely not, it is absolutely batshit to believe in Hell, this theology is immoral and theologically bankrupt and a crying shame! I will not apologize for believing this good and true thing! YOU apologize for creating a punitive God in the image of our broken cultures, a God who creates people He knows will just get destroyed! YOU apologize for maintaining a theology that hurts us; that hurts our ability to imagine restorative justice; that hurts our ability to love and be loved by God!
WHAT?! You are permitted to be that angry at the powerful theologies?? You are permitted to be that confident while standing on the edge of the theological world???4
DBH felt like such a relief because I needed to hear someone speak like the old beliefs are the ones that need to defend themselves. Defend yourself, established theologies! Power itself is not a sufficient answer for my “why”! Longevity is not necessarily a sign of the Holy Spirit! “Because I said so!” isn’t sufficient anymore! A theological world where we stop living on the defensive, and demand that those beliefs account for themselves, because they are the ones “in the dock,” is a whole new free way of being alive and doing theology.
Maybe (maybe!) we don't have to accept “God is love, even when how we’ve defined God’s Love is against everything we know love to feel like on earth, with human people; even if it feels unfair or unjust or cruel, even if it’s not things we’d do to our children or even to our worst enemies!” Like Ivan in Dostoevsky's chapter “The Grand Inquisitor,” we can kindly return the ticket.
Imagining that we can be this confident while staking our tent on the outskirts of old theological strongholds, the ones based on authority and power and longevity and control, feels wildly, extraordinarily, explosively, joyfully freeing.
I’m tentative with new ideas, because I’m cowed by the idea of authority and who can have it — who am I to say something with spiritual authority? “Authority” is for the people who have had church power for a long time, and power can feel like its own justification. I think the church got this addiction of believing “power justifies itself” from the world. "They have been in power for a long time, so the Holy Spirit must have been guiding them and they must be right."
“Power,” though, wasn’t something Jesus talked about as a gauge of truth. “It’s always been this way!” wasn’t a compelling argument for Peter, when he woke from a vision about what was clean and unclean.5
Power and authority aren’t the only, or the best, ways to imagine theologies. There’s another way to imagine the Spirit at work—a Spirit who lets some ideas sleep until we’re ready for them, hovering over the waters of our souls and the world, waiting to wake us all up together when the time is right.
That’s not to say that universalism is a newfangled or haphazard theology. DBH outlines a compelling argument, tracing very old theologians and very good Biblical exegesis. This isn’t Love Wins.6 That's not to say there aren't holes in DBH’s theology. There are also holes in the established theologies, though. There are holes all over any doctrine that tries to capture mystery or interpret the Bible or tries to name the unamable. We're gonna be wrong! The Bible is not clear about literally anything! We do the best with what we have!
This theology of radical love is compelling, though, and we don't need to patch all the holes in the floor to believe in this kind of God. Patching holes to protect God is what we did in fundamentalism, and all it meant was ignoring the holes and putting throw rugs over them and everyone winking and nodding at each other as we walk around them.
But now we are not ignoring these holes in the floor! Pull up a chair! Let's look at them together! Let’s invite God to the party to check them out, too! All the theologies have them! Every single one!
We are called as Christians to do the best we can with the resources given to us—with Scripture, which is a resource; our practical human experiences of loving and being loved, which is a resource; our walk in the Spirit, which is a resource. We put all these things together in prayer and community and say—we cannot know for sure, but we can make a very well-resourced guess.
In that guess, we’re allowed to release theologies that snag our attempts to love our neighbor and love God. We’re also allowed to release our defensiveness about the act of release itself. (I have a feeling this second practice will be a growing edge of mine for a real long time).
And in that guess, we’re allowed to take risks, and take risks confidently! And this confident risk-taking isn’t even necessarily in contrast to our desire to offer welcome to our neighbor, because when I read this book, I felt welcomed. This book invited me into a spacious place where God’s love wasn’t just waiting for me, but was waiting for everyone. It was an invitation into something new and delightful and powerful and freeing, a new way of seeing God and a new way of seeing myself. That was a gift. This book was love to me—bombastic, over-confident, enthusiastic theo-bro energy and all.
There are a lot of ways to offer welcome. There are a lot of ways to love the world. Taking a risk on a bigger, more spacious God - and taking that risk with our own biggest, most spacious selves! - is scary. But when we unbury our souls from their risk-free underground spaces, what kinds of reckless expansion can God’s love lead us into, when we take a risk on the reckless, expansive love of God. 7
I’ve written on this before on my blog, “Hell No: Why Grace is Coming for Us All” and in a short essay collection for Lent.
Because universalism is not a newfangled theology! It’s been hanging around Christianity since the beginning (we have universalists doing theology in the 190’s!).
How great is it that Substack has footnotes???
I mean, of course you are, if you're a straight white professor doing theology. I mean—yeah, of course.
On Peter and how the unclean/clean gentile debate can inform our queer theology over here on Queer Grace.
I don’t hate Rob Bell’s book on universalism! It’s just not super academic, and I don’t follow his conclusions from his Biblical passages. It was a spiritually encouraging book for me, but wasn’t solid ground for a theological argument.
A postscript! In conclusion! Do I recommend David Bentley Hart's book That All Shall Be Saved? I mean, how could I not? But also, kind of, how could I? If you have been hurt or frustrated or condemned by the (sometimes unbearable feeling) confidence of straight white male theologians, I don't recommend it. The tone can be quite a lot. Also, practically, it’s on the dense side. It has a lot of theological arguments, and they are not all simple to wrangle. Some pages I just didn’t understand. Proceed at your own emotional and philosophical risk.
I love the takeaway that power/authority (and dare I add, tradition) is not a defense. I see so many arguments that rest on that majority/history/dominance argument and it's just so weak but remains convincing for so many.
I also very much love David Bentley Hart, but preface my recommendations by saying something like, “The thing is, he’s VERY confident about his positions, and sees no reason to pretend otherwise, AND has anticipated the inevitable ‘citation needed’ attacks.”