Can the Apparent Contradictions between Hart’s Views and Those of the Dominant Streams of Christian Theology and the Bible be Resolved?

Part two of two with an open letter to Daniel, my admired and beloved friend

The central “Adoration of the Mystic Lamb” panel in the Ghent Altarpiece by the brothers Hubert and Jan van Eyck (from mid-1420s to 1432).

This second of two replies (see the first here) will sadly need to conclude my efforts to think and to write in response to your recent comment, Daniel. I hope that I can soon accept one of the generous invitations that you have extended to me in recent years to spend some time together in person again. However, for now, I’m grateful for your serious questions and for these opportunities to write down some reflections in reply.

Orthodox Christians consider questions of eschatology to be almost entirely within the realm of theologoumenon. However, all Orthodox Christians are encouraged to pray for the dead as, at the very least, an activity that is good for our own souls. There is also a high degree of agreement over various ideas that are captured by beloved stories of saints such as the recent one in which Olivier Clement once asked then Elder Sophrony (now Saint Sophrony) what would happen if a person does not agree to open his or her heart and accept the love of God. Sophrony replied, “You may be certain that as long as someone is in hell, Christ will remain there with him.” There are no clear or comprehensive doctrinal pronouncements outside of the much-debated condemnation of universalism (in some form) along with Origen (or perhaps just Origenism) by the Fifth Ecumenical Council (Constantinople II in 553 with Emperor Justinian I). There are therefore a wide range of debates and ideas in this area within the church. You can find the following passage in a popular French catechism published for use by the Orthodox church in 1979 and still in use today in a second French edition as well as a German translation:

Let us state outright: the idea of eternal hades and eternal torments for some, and eternal blessedness, indifferent to suffering, for others, can no longer remain in a living and renewed Christian consciousness the way it was once depicted in our catechisms and our official theological textbooks. …It is high time to put an end to all these monstrous assertions of past centuries, which make of our God that which He is not: an 'external' God, Who is merely an allegory of earthly kings and nothing more. Pedagogical intimidation and terror is no longer effective. On the contrary, it bars entry to the Church for many of those who are seeking the God of love.

This particular chapter was considered too controversial for Americans when it was translated into English, and it was therefore omitted. However, Brad Jersak and the Monks at Holy Transfiguration Hermitage (British Columbia) later separately published an English translation of this missing chapter from Catéchisme pour les familles: Dieu est Vivant or Catechism for Families: God is Alive with my own inept translation of the title. (See here for more on this story if you wish.)

In the most recent public consideration of the universalism question among Orthodox Christians in the United States, Archbishop Alexander (Golitzin) was asked directly if universalism is a heresy, and he said that he did not know:

Well, the church expressed itself at least to the extent that it condemned, in the Fifth Ecumenical Council, at least, their understanding of Origin of Alexandria’s notion of universal restoration, the apocatastasis, and that is normally taken as a condemnation of universalism. I don’t know. I suppose you could. Myself, I rather like Kallistos Ware’s remark that we can’t teach it as dogma, but we can hope for it.

The most outspoken popular writer arguing that universalism was not condemned by the Fifth Ecumenical Council has been Father “Fedora” Aidan Kimel in his book as well as in articles such as this. Despite the various arguments, the area of agreement among Orthodox Christians is substantial, and almost all priests and bishops will come back, over and over, to this point from Kallistos Ware that, although universalism cannot be taught as dogma, it is good for us to hope for it and to pray for it.

So this is the church context in which I am most gratefully seeking to learn how to receive God’s love for me. And this is the wider context from which I’ll do my best to consider these final three points from your October 17 comment that I have been laboring to reflect upon a bit:

• If there might be some positive “overlap between serious Calvinists and Hart’s version of Orthodoxy” that holds out something of a hopeful universalism.

• How any hope that we might hold is contradicted by “the Dominical utterances” as C.S. Lewis called them when he wished that he could join both the Apostle Paul and his beloved George MacDonald as universalists but found that he could not because of so many of Christ’s teachings.

• If I have anything I’ve written anything where “the apparent contradictions between Hart’s views and those of the dominant streams of Christian theology and the Bible itself are resolved.”

I’m not entirely confident that I’ve understood the first two points with my summaries of them above as you were a little cryptic sounding to me in your statements of them. However, I took you to be affirming some line of thought in the direction of a hopeful universalism followed by a retraction grounded upon your references to several of Christ’s teachings and to some other scriptural phrases that require you to affirm the doctrine of an eternal hell. This reminded me very much of C. S. Lewis who clearly believed that the Apostle Paul was a universalist (which seems obvious to me as well) while also seeing the teachings of Jesus Christ as clearly pointing to an eternal hell for some so that he could not follow the Apostle Paul or his beloved George MacDonald.

This focus on the teachings of Jesus Christ gets into topics on which I would be an actual and abject fool to suggest competence or authority. However, as a layperson, having read and listened to what I can, I see five basic categories involved here (just from off the top of my head):

First, there are questions of time and ages within ages. Jesus Christ may have had a sense of ages layered within ages and not necessarily in some kind of a simple sequential way. A fallen age such as our own might have had a less substantive form of time available to us all, a kind of time leading to and characterized by death that needed to be freed from this bondage and allowed to fully participate again in God’s kingdom and true creation—i.e. within the age that contains this fallen age. Every moment of fallen time is in incomplete and imperfect contact with the fullness of time in God’s creation, and events in God’s creation can be in contact with multiple or even with every moment of time within our flattened experience of chronos. Every moment of fallen time is therefore subject to a crisis of judgment in relation to the true and full time of God’s kingdom, and Christ’s teachings are intended to confront us perpetually with this crisis or in-breaking potential as God’s kingdom confronts and offers to both condemn and fulfill each of our fleeting moments. This makes each moment of fallen time also an illusory threat from a bad infinity that robs us of time itself in its true potential in relation to the depth and life-giving eternity of God’s own fully-actualized and yet dynamically and personally trinitarian life.

Second, there are the images of the fire of this age or the eternal fire and the fire sustained by God. These images are rooted in Old Testament battle-field imagery involving the cleaning up of dead bodies by the victorious king (where worms can be a help as well). Such images have as much to do with our own current lives now in this fallen world where God has already ignited a fire that no creature can hope to extinguish and which promises to burn up everything evil by loving us more deeply than any of our hatred extends. This fire is, ultimately, the fire of God’s own presence and love revealed fully from the cross by Christ. This love burns up all of empirical history’s seemingly endless lies and flights away from each other and from God. It meets us each at the far end of our anger and our hurt and our desperate attempts to escape. Christ is there for us upon the cross and in the grave ready to meet us at the end of our own false road or false images of ourselves that must be burned and cast into the sea and left forgotten forever as far as the east is from the west while we ultimately take up the lost and broken moments and do what we should have done moment by moment to show forth the image of God as we learn to participate with our own given theme in the great song of God’s creation.

Third, there are various images of a great wedding feast with guests who are not prepared and who are left outside with the door closed upon them or who are cast outside where they weep and grind their teeth in envy and frustration at the joy, the light, the wine, and the dancing that they are missing. These are actually some of the most complete and damning images, but they indicate stages and ultimately a consummated relationship within a city descended to earth and whose gates are never shut.

With a fourth and more minor image, there is a debtor’s prison with a period of time required until we have repaid every last farthing.

Finally, on a fifth topic, we have a fairly wide assortment of concepts about fleshly, soulish, and spiritual (or angelic) lives and embodiments where flesh may need to die in the ground to be born again (as we see with Paul) or where a soul might be a false creation that needs to be destroyed in order to be born again and to live and to be transfigured with a true life and embodiment in keeping with who God has created us to be. We only become what God has created as we learn to participate in that divine creation. However, as God’s image bearers, we are capable of false subcreation whereby we invite and enact lies about ourselves and others that create pretenses of personhood with no actual life or spirit and that must ultimately be destroyed and given over to the unquenchable fire of God’s abiding presence. Also, with this topic of embodiment, is the subject of corporate embodiment. It seems to me that all of humanity is a single indissoluble body as the image of God marred in Adam within our fallen time and revealed in Christ from the cross. Gregory of Nyssa most thoroughly relies on such a vision within several works, and it guides his reading of Paul.

For my own part, I am confident that the apparent contradictions between Hart’s views and those of the dominant streams of Christian theology and the Bible itself are indeed fully resolvable. Honestly, I don’t think that “the dominant streams of Christian theology” are nearly so clear or dominant as we think. It seems entirely reasonable to me to consider that the early church was predominantly universalist for the first three centuries, and that the various teachings and stories that make it into our Bible (via liturgical usage over almost a century) were all understood in universalist terms by the original teachers such as Paul (almost certainly) and by Jesus Christ (less clearly, I grant).

It seems to me that there were understandable pastoral reasons for shifting away from more open and direct universalist teaching as time went by, but some of this shift was also simply the degradations of human sin and ignorance which are ever as restless and destructive as the waves of the sea. As difficult as it has been for me to accept it at various stages and in various respects over the years, I’m convinced at this point by the understanding of Christian doctrinal developments expounded in books such as The Myth of Christian Beginnings by Robert Louis Wilken. And I regard the scriptures, old and new, to be inspired in connection to their prayerful and liturgical function over the years up to the present day in each service wherein we hear them as the eucharistically constituted body of Christ that receives the tradition of our faith only by living it out and communicating it afresh to our children (both spiritual and fleshly). Anyway, I could list a variety of books on the wild assortment of topics above, but that feels unhelpful here (though I’d be glad to try on any particular points within comments). These are just the basic range of thoughts that come to mind, as best as I can distill them quickly, in response to what you raised.

Perhaps, looking over the three bullet points at the top, I should circle back on the first one regarding some possible “overlap between serious Calvinists and Hart’s version of Orthodoxy.” Here, I’m not actually sure if you are using Calvinism to critique Hart or to commend him as someone who is glad to say that all creatures must necessarily be saved in God’s good providence. I’ve heard Hart condemned as a Calvinist by so many of my American Orthodox brethren that this rings a little harshly in my ears even if it is, as I think that you intended it, a potential point of commendation. Either way, however, I’m convinced that it is an utter misunderstanding of Hart—as understandable and widespread as it is both with positive or negative intent. Hart follows Sergei Bulgakov (see here and here for some of my endless reflections lately on his work) very closely in his ideas of both creaturely and divine freedom as well as creaturely and divine necessity. Whether or not this theology of Hart and Bulgakov has any alignment with Calvin probably depends, as far as I can tell, on whether or not you read Calvin as falling in line with medieval voluntarism or intellectualism. I suspect that Calvin was a voluntarist and understood the will as primary over our capacity to see. Hart and Bulgakov are certainly in the other camp of claiming that it is our capacity to see that guides our wills. Even if Calvin might have held to intellectualism in his anthropology and avoided the banal impoverishment of a libertarian understanding of freedom, it seems clear that Calvin would have at least failed to fully appreciate the synergy between creaturely and divine life envisioned by Bulgakov as a result of the shared divine nature existing in God as Sophia without being hypostatized but existing in creation as the hypostatized spirit and logoi of every creature. This synergy for Bulgakov is such that creation is created but not caused by God, and all causation is creatures as we must freely participate in the enactment of our own creation as gifted to us by God from within the timeless fullness of divine and trinitarian life. It’s beyond my paygrade to be too certain or dogmatic about it, but I’m pretty sure that Hart is far more Orthodox in his theology than Calvin despite the lovely synergistic passage that can be found in Calvin such as this one:

All creatures are animated by angelic motion: not that there is a conversion of the angel into an ox or a man, but because God exerts and diffuses his energy in a secret manner, so that no creature is content with his own peculiar vigor, but is animated by angels themselves.

Even such passages, however, tend to involve a kind of hierarchy of divine energies that is not giving each creature its own free and creative task to see and to gratefully enact its own divinely-gifted life as and within God’s creaturely image.

There could be so much more to say on all of these vast topics, and I’ve not even touched on sacrifice or justice or sin or soteriology. However, you’ve read mountains of rich and good things on these topics, and I’m confident that we’d find much common ground very easily in many of these territories. My primary thought in closing is that, with all of this, I really did not want to dwell entirely on exegetical and theological points (although I appreciate these things and see them as the ground upon which such questions must be considered). As I have reflected on your comment from last month, however, my primary lines and currents of thought have all been dominated by a sense of profound gratitude as I was reminded and refreshed in the memories of the countless demonstrations and enactments of Christ’s love that I have received (and continue to receive) all throughout my childhood and my young adult years (and into the present day) from my parents, my siblings, my extended family, and from many friends such as yourself. These ministrations of God in my life from family and friends—even more than the biblical-theological visions of Charlie Dennison, Geerhardus Vos, Timothy Keller and many others that remain beautiful and inspiring to me—showed Jesus Christ to me in ways that will (I am so very grateful to know with such confidence) be a vital part of what sustains and guides me to Christ up until the moment of my death. They taught me, despite my continued failures, to look and to listen and to seek after the face of God, knowing that I must have a God whose love would be so good to receive given that I had already been so nurtured in the goodness of a myriad human loves that were so warm, joyous, and unconditional.