Thoughts as David Bentley Hart is Condemned by Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick and Fr. Stephen De Young

Introduction

This is my first article outside of my normal subscription paywall because I’m interacting with a topic that involves a few others who I would not want to exclude from reading and responding in any way to anything that I’ve said if they wish. My thoughts here are also largely about questions internal to the Orthodox Christian faith. Others are obviously welcomed to “listen in” on it all, but you’ve been duly notified.

On the very popular (and often delightful, folksy, and informative) podcast called The Lord of Spirits, the hosts Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick and Fr. Stephen De Young spent three and a half hours critiquing the universalism of David Bentley Hart and those convinced by Hart. They named Hart several times along with his book, That All Shall Be Saved, during the last third (or “third half” as they like to joke) of their “What in Tarnation?” episode from August 25, 2023. (Incidentally, they did not mention either of the other Orthodox Christian authors who have also written excellent books on the topic in recent years, but I will note them below along with a universalist Orthodox catechism first published in 1979 and still widely used in French and German Orthodox churches.) For the purposes of this brief reflection in response, I am not going to interact with Fr. Andrew and Fr. Stephen primarily as priests (although I recognize and am grateful for this overarching blessing of their public ministry and have learned much from both). As Fr. Stephen says in his wonderfully pastoral closing words: “In the end, everybody, myself included, I need people to challenge me, often. ...We all need that to find salvation and to find eternal life. And our goal has to be what God wills, which is that all men shall be saved and come to the knowledge of the truth.” In what follows, I’m just responding to both Fr. Andrew (who I have met in person a few times as I went to hear him speak in various places) and Fr. Stephen simply from one person to another in a public forum without at all presuming that my opinions are worth their time (or anyone’s time) to read. Below, I will therefore use what I take to be a modest (i.e. not overly-familiar) convention of calling them “Damick” and “De Young” as I give my personal thoughts on what they shared, and this convention is meant as no disrespect for them and for their priestly and public ministries.

Damick had many strong pastoral moments where he brought the conversation back to the reality of suffering people who have been hurt by the many false doctrines about hell and about God’s wrathful judgment. With their typical good cheer, both hosts took the time to clarify that there are several terribly wrong and damaging ideas floating around about hell and God (and these bad things are often criticized in the course of their show as they also noted). In their standard tag team format (which can be roguish and charming), De Young did the heavy lifting in the argument and pontificated at length about a wide range of his takes on things.

De Young’s basic assessment of Hart’s universalism is that it is an intra-Calvinist dispute where Hart is saying that God must save all because God is not free, and that Hart is simply echoing a Barthian variation of Calvinist teaching with a strong deterministic bent. Adding a few (not entirely consistent) layers to this reading of Hart, De Young said that Hart is joining the liberal-critical German school of theologians in an antisemitic attack on the Jewish God and an effort to replace the Jewish God with the far more European and civilized God of Plato (with the bonus accusation of Hart being a Marcionite thrown in here). (As an aside, I find it utterly bizarre to call Plato’s God European, but De Young is pointing to a legitimate problem in some European intellectual history where this sad assumption is made.) In case anyone missed the implications of class conflict in De Young’s case against Hart, De Young explicitly says, in his final assessment, that this battle with the universalists in the contemporary church is a class struggle. Not only does Hart stand with Calvinism and with liberal-critical German antisemitism, but Hart is one of the American ruling class who, with them all, is desperate to find any excuse for ignoring the poor and running away from any responsibility to share the gospel with the people.

Working together, they also make extremely “simple” (a characteristic that they ask listeners to recognize as a theme throughout their talk) exegetical and historical cases against universalism to which I will briefly return. It was, however, these macro-framing claims by De Young that were the only remotely interesting parts (“interesting” being both a pathetic word choice and indicative of a spiritual disease in many eyes, but there you have it) of the three and a half hours for me (outside of the pastoral material sprinkled throughout which I did appreciate personally). So I’ll dwell for a moment on the ideas of Hart as a Calvanist, an inheritor of the higher-critical German theological school, and a typically responsibility-shirking member of the elite ruling class in America. None of these points are entirely consistent with each other, but that gets into nuances that are not worth the time to lay out, so I’ll just take them each separately (which is just as they seem to have been offered).

De Young says that Hart is a Calvinist

The idea that Hart is actually an arch-Calvinist is one that is found very widely online among American Orthodox folks, and it is based on some perceived common evils between Calvin’s determinism and Hart’s. It’s true that Hart does love a lot about Karl Barth, and Hart certainly does not mind saying that God must save every creature that he creates. Hart does not ultimately distinguish between creation and salvation in any total or final way (following Gregory of Nyssa in The Life of Moses as well as many others in this regard). There are heavy theological questions involved here with real challenges to unravel, and there would be great things to talk about. However, this entire framing of a critique against Hart by calling him a Calvanist is too silly to be helpful. If you know anything at all about Hart, you realize that he spends far more time attacking a specific school of 16th century Catholic theology (which he loves to call two-tier Thomism) and actually gives almost no attention ever to Calvinism (other than heaping probably his most vicious rhetoric upon it in passing whenever that might happen rarely to occur). Moreover, Hart despises medieval theological voluntarism and considers it the root of almost all modern evils including Calvinism. I have yet to see any of the online critics of Hart as a Calvanist demonstrate any awareness of this far more basic starting point in the conversation. If these critics of Hart would really grapple with Hart’s hatred of medieval theological voluntarism, they might actually come to better understand Hart’s ideas about divine and creaturely freedom (which don’t align with Calvin as far as I can tell).

De Young says that Hart is Antisemitic in the German School of Higher Criticism (as well as a Marcionite)

As for the idea that Hart is an inheritor of the higher-critical German school of theology and its antisemitic efforts to replace the God of the Old Testament with the God of Plato, Hart is happy to take up the higher-critical work of scholarship and said in a recent interview that “the early church fathers were in many respects historical critical readers, to the degree they could be.” At the same time, however, Hart laughs at the core commitments and heroes of the German school to which De Young has assigned him in such unhelpful broad strokes. Speaking very recently in his interview with one of the most prominent magazines of American mainline liberal theology (The Christian Century), Hart made this distinction clear:

I don’t deny the historical reality of the resurrection, or even of the empty tomb. I’m not a modern rationalist. For starters, Tillich was a joke. He couldn’t have made it as a philosopher, with his watery, middle-Schelling approach to things, and he wrote these huge, vapid books about a religion that he only barely knew anything about. And Bultmann’s attempt to reduce everything down to apocalyptic inner illumination simply because the cosmology of the first century doesn’t match the cosmology of the 20th—I mean, it’s just the Protestant principle reaching its reductio ad absurdum.

There is a lot more that could be said here, but I’ll just suggest that to call Hart a mainstream liberal theologian is as meaningless as calling him a Calvinist.

In connection to this point, De Young also shared the often-repeated charge (see this famous case and Hart’s reply) that Hart is a Marcionite because Hart doesn’t believe in the false gods whose vengeful and bloodthirsty stories fill the Old Testament. De Young correctly pointed out that Hart’s own defense on this point is that Marcion did believe in the vengeful god of the Old Testament while Hart does not. This drew an audible gasp (or groan?) from Damick. It is a rather messy topic, and Hart certainly loves to throw grenades on this subject. When I wrote about it all once and described Hart as rejecting the pagan gods from Israel's prehistory whose mythologies underlie much of the Old Testament texts but whose stories eventually become allegorized and spiritualized by Israel’s own prophets as they come to better and better know the true God who is concerned with the defense of orphans and widows—when I wrote something like all of this once—Hart shared the article and said that it was an “impressively acute” defense of his point although not expressed in the terms that he would consider most helpful (something like that). Anyway, Hart makes a good case that Marcion was one of the first fundamentalists, and that this was a chief reason why Origen opposed Marcion so strongly. God the Father, who only Jesus Christ reveals to us perfectly, is only imperfectly revealed in the various layers of Israel's very slowly coming to know Yahweh as the One true, creator God amid many other gods, and Hart maintains that it was Marcion’s failure to recognize that these Old Testament stories were largely mythical that chiefly set him apart from the church fathers who opposed him. While all of this involves massively contested and confusing categories for American fundamentalists (and even highly-educated American Evangelical Christians), one point should not be that difficult to agree about for Orthodox Christians: None of the church fathers read all of the brutalities in the Old Testament without generously allegorizing and spiritualizing so that Yahweh’s slaughtered enemies become our passions that must be slain in our journey toward theosis. As several passages in the New Testament epistles note, God the Father, revealed by Jesus Christ, takes up all of the old gods and puts them into order before the throne of Christ, exposing falsehoods and giving a purpose and a home to all truths. This kingship of Christ moves in all directions through time, and Plato himself eventually offers a great help to Christian theologians as well. Hart’s own vision is clearly that this learning from other wisdom traditions to better see the truths of Christ’s incarnation is a learning that would never stop for Christians as long as the sun and moon persist. But I’m growing melodramatic.

De Young Says that Hart is a Member of the American Ruling Class

I will move on to De Young’s third point about Hart being part of the American ruling class and looking for any excuse to get out of the hard work of actually caring for the people (which in this case means ensuring that the people still know that they or any of their loved ones might spend eternity burning in hell with their resurrected bodies). I was personally moved to hear De Young describe these characteristics of the American ruling class. While there are dangers within such thinking of conspiracy theories and bitterness and such, I basically agree with De Young in his assessment of American history as he described it briefly here. De Young was self-consciously pointing out “class” injustice that is a part of the American story in particular and sad ways. You could joke that De Young was channeling a little Karl Marx for a moment, and I don’t know De Young quite well enough to be sure if he would have laughed or not. In any case, I hope De Young was aware that Hart would share much of his assessments of American history as a profoundly unChristian one and of the American ruling class as having exactly the ideological and unChristian tendencies that De Young described. While De Young, to his credit here, did not mention or bother to disavow Marx at this point, I hope that De Young also realizes that Hart is not a Marxist. Hart loves to chat with mildly heterodox Marxists and point out how sad it was that Marx became an arch-capitalist near the end of his life who simply wanted to change the entire world into one big factory.

But I am getting a little off track here. The point is simply that, if you know anything about Hart—what he has fought and suffered for over a long career of standing in opposition to the secular nation state on every front as well as having seen the dusty old minivan that I saw him driving around in his current hometown of South Bend, Indiana (still sporting a little Maryland state flag on the front)—you would simply have to groan and laugh while listening to De Young identify Hart as part of the American ruling class. It would also help if you had read Roland in Moonlight. It is probably not fair for me to expect De Young to know as much about Hart’s core motivations and character as I imagine that I do having had one meal with Hart, read almost everything he’s ever written (not that this is possible, really), and listened to almost everything Hart has allowed to be recorded (which is a lot). Moreover, De Young would doubtless counter most reasonably that Hart’s “character” or even his ideas have nothing to do with his position within the American ruling class. Hart might be part of our nation’s ruling class simply because of the university positions that Hart has held and the publishing outlets that produce many of his books. Be that as it may, it feels more than a little disingenuous (or uninformed) to develop the case that De Young develops about Hart as an elite without pointing out that Hart has been about as brilliantly critical of the American “empire” (a word that I was glad to hear De Young use) and ruling class (from its earliest roots upward) as any one person could possibly be.

Again, I would love to dwell on the history of the secular nation state and areas of perceived agreement between Hart and De Young, but I need to move on to the least interesting aspects of the three and a half hour chat between De Young and Damick. They also addressed the issues of what the Bible and the broader Orthodox Christian tradition have to say about universalism.

Universalism and Scripture

On the topic of scripture, they noted that “Hades” and “eternal Hell” are separate realities marked off from each other by the general resurrection and final judgment. Hades is the realm of the dead and is simply where we all end up before the general resurrection. It has multiple regions with various levels of proximity to God and drinking water, etc., and it is temporary. Hell, on the other hand, is eternal with the same term used for “eternal” in multiple places that describe both this lake of fire (which Damick and De Young call “spiritual separation from God” at one point) and the alternative future of union with the infinite life of God. De Young and Damick also argue that no one can continue to repent after death while they languish in Hades, but we have every reason to hope that our prayers and our own repentance can be a blessing to those in Hades before the general resurrection. Those who die without having learned to receive God’s love can no longer turn to God in repentance on their own, but they can somehow be turned by the love and prayers of others who are still living so that these dead will nonetheless be found able to receive God’s love at the Final Judgment. Damick made me especially happy at one point by noting that some detail that they were discussing depended on the assumption that everything in these ages worked in a temporal sequence. I don’t tend to think myself that ages in scripture are typically related to each other in the simply flat and sequential relationship of fallen time, but this is an assumption that they made a lot. One of them said at another point in the conversation that it’s not like you can go back after you die and undo anything that you left undone. However, when they also say that we can repent on behalf of our past and dead loved ones, it sure sounds to me a little like changing or completing events in our fallen pasts (which is great by me). Also, if the dead in Hades don’t also learn to receive God’s love in some way under their own control, aren’t they being made into nothing but puppets when they are declared saved at the final judgment? I suppose that Damick and De Young might mean that the dead—after the general resurrection and witnessing the glorified Christ (when every knee will bow)—are finally able to respond in their own right to the love, sacrificial works, and prayers offered on their behalf by others and to thereby open their hearts to God’s love.

For my part, it seems ridiculous to say that we would know if this repentance is or is not happening at any point in the intermediate state that Damick and De Young designate as Hades. It makes far more sense of the scriptures and the patristic writings to understand that various ages are not always in a simple sequential relationship to each other. I love what Sergei Bulgakov has to say about fallen time versus the various kinds of angelic time that spiritually embodied beings enjoy. Hart told The Christian Century that Bulgakov was “the greatest theologian of the late modern age,” and has recommended his book The Bride of the Lamb on many topics including an understanding of the atemporal fall and fallen time. I also love the book Transfiguring Time: Understanding Time in the Light of the Orthodox Tradition by Olivier Clément.

In addition to questions about time and the ages, I’d also note that Paul talks about the fact “that flesh and blood cannot inherit the Kingdom of God” (1 Corinthians 15:50) as well as that resurrection life “is sown a psychical [composed of soul] body” and “raised a spiritual body” because “if there is a psychical [composed of soul] body, there is also a spiritual [body]” (1 Corinthians 15:42-45). These three kinds of human embodiment (flesh-bodies, soul-bodies, and spirit-bodies) may or may not relate to the “old man” and the “new man” that Paul also talks about and to the death of the soul and the body that Christ talks about separately in various places. And all of these categories might or might not relate to the sheep and the goats or the wheat and the chaff that Christ describes in various places as well. As I recall, some Orthodox teachers (Metropolitan ​​Anthony Bloom, especially, comes to mind) speak of each individual human life as being subject to the ongoing division by Christ into both sheep and goats (with goats very possibly meaning “immature kids”). When we consider that Christ’s teachings generally aimed at the immediate and present encounter of his every listener with the presence of God and God’s Kingdom, these teachings should separate light from dark within each heart (or we might say bone from marrow at the innermost or most substantial level of each person’s own life and body). At the level of exhortation and spiritual instruction, this is “simple” as Damick and De Young insist repeatedly that Christian teachings must be on this topic. However, while the confrontation within my heart should be a simple and transformative one with each hearing of Christ’s words, I don’t think that the implications for eschatology and theology, as such, are simple at all. Christ’s teachings on judgment are rather profound and intensely otherworldly. It all gets even more intense when we read from the church fathers that Christ both creates and judges the world from the cross where he is glorified and enthroned (under the veil of death and humiliation in our fallen and brutal world). With all of this otherworldliness, we should also note that within the liturgical life of the church, we sometimes sing and pray about the Last Judgment as an already accomplished event within the continual presence of God’s life. The Lamb who is slain from the foundation of the cosmos is both the one crucified within fallen time and the eternal heavenly bread that is both the beginning and end of our creation.

Anyway, my point was not to launch here into all of my own rambling opinions on any of these topics, but simply to say that it is worth reading and pondering slowly over a lifetime the volumes of great scholarship on the phrases and images that Christ uses to teach about divine judgment (The Geography of Hell in the Teaching of Jesus: Gehena, Hades, the Abyss, the Outer Darkness Where There Is Weeping and Gnashing of Teeth by Kim Papaioannou was one excellent and careful study although I did not agree with it’s annihilationist conclusions) and on the terms like eternal or “of the age” or “apokatastasis” (including several thoughtful volumes by the Catholic scholar Ilaria Ramelli). All that I got from Damick and De Young was that it is important to realize that there is a very simple answer contained within all of this which is: We cannot repent in any way after we die and go to Hades to await the general resurrection and a last separation at the final judgment into those who enjoy eternal life and those who will be in the lake of fire forever with their new spiritual bodies.

Universalism and the Church’s Holy Tradition

Going beyond scripture, Damick and De Young maintain that this is the plain and clear teaching of the church with no real exception other than Origen who was condemned. They briefly address two points regarding the questions of church tradition and history. First, they say that only two saints beyond Origen might have believed in some form of apokatastasis (a “universal restoration”): Saints Issac the Syrian and Gregory of Nyssa. In both cases, however, Damick and De Young say that these claims are dubious and based on proof texting (although no universalist texts are ever actually noted or considered by them). In a real low point, Damick points out that you can “Google these names” and find all kinds of articles arguing that they were not actually universalists. One has to hope that this is not as telling a comment as it seems. I have “Googled” this a few times over the years myself, and the results are more remarkably stark than normal as far as any actual training in Greek or patristic studies involved for anyone making the case that someone like Gregory of Nyssa was not a universalist. It is, frankly, a serious and inexcusable obfuscation to even vaguely suggest that there were no universalist Christian saints. For his part, Hart does not only cite these two saints but has recently said, “I think all the Cappadocians, even Basil, were probably universalists.” A few scholars also argue that Maximus the Confessor was a universalist. The lists of those saints over whom these questions are asked is a very long list indeed. See the works of Catholic scholar Ilaria Ramelli for example. Not surprisingly, the determination regarding what these various saints taught tends to line up with how you read some of the key Greek terms involved such as “eternal” or “of the age” or “apokatastasis” (which carry through from the interpretation of the New Testament to the writings of the church fathers as well). And none of this takes into consideration the lives and writings of later saints and teachers, among whom Sergei Bulgakov is one clearly vital figure.

After their cursory consideration of universalism among the saints and claims that it probably didn’t ever exist, Damick and De Young moved to the question of Orthodox tradition and the Fifth Ecumenical Council. Here De Young says that even if the fathers gathered at the council never did talk about the topic at all within their actual meetings and the condemnations of Origen were inserted into the records of the council by scribes in Justinian’s court, it has been clearly established by subsequent declarations of the church—and principally through centuries of liturgical services and hymns—that our inheritance from this council nonetheless condemns Origen and every form of apokatastasis (universal restoration). Here Damick and De Young briefly consider the nature of Holy Tradition and how something declared by the church for centuries within its life of worship cannot possibly be wrong or we would be declaring the Holy Spirit to have failed us (an obviously absurd impossibility). Their inadequate account of the actual history is sidelined by all of this, and we are confronted simply with the question of tradition, its nature, and its function. This is, at least, honest on their part. This entire issue, for pious Orthodox Christians, hinges legitimately on the nature of Holy Tradition and how it prescribes doctrinal faithfulness, and this, of course, includes a consideration of both the witness of scriptures and of the first seven councils of the church. I certainly don’t fault Damick and De Young for taking these two things seriously, and they consider the matter to be a blindingly clear and incontrovertible one on both of these grounds. I’ve already spoken as much as I can to the questions of scripture above, and I’ll briefly note my thoughts below regarding what (very little) they had to say about tradition. However, I can’t pass by the history entirely as their mode of argument tended strongly to do.

Their account of the Fifth Ecumenical Council was—as they promised would be their running theme—very simple: We can’t know for sure how much the fathers of the council actually discussed anything related to Origen or the doctrine of universal reconciliation. However, we know for sure that Saint Justinian included with the conciliar documents the anathemas that include one condemning Origen as a heretic and another condemning any doctrine of universal reconciliation as heretical. We have sung these anathemas together every year for centuries, and how can we pretend that the church has ever believed anything different, other than the occasional “deviant” (their term) follower of Origen who might have cropped up from time to time? To argue any other account is simply a desperate example of willfully revisionist history. This account of theirs, however, does not include at least a couple of basic factors that should be considered at least at the level of honest history.

First, the entire context of the language in the anathemas as a whole as well as of all the church history over the course of the 299 years between Origen’s death and the Fifth Ecumenical Council all suggest strongly that the anathemas are not condemning Origen himself but one or more of the several Origenist schools that developed in the centuries following his rather influential, eventful, and much-contested life. So Origen may very well not be a heretic but only certain of his followers who defended later ideas such as the temporal preexistence of souls and perfectly spherical resurrection bodies. Second, these schools of Origen existed within influential and heavily competitive monastic communities within the Byzantine Empire of Justinian, and it was not necessarily Justinian himself who may have inserted the anathemas into the record of the Fifth Ecumenical Council after the fact but simply a bureaucrat or court scribe who was caught up in the often intense mix of theological and political rivalries that raged between such monastic schools for centuries. Most likely, there was no devious plot to condemn universalists but simply a slick move by one Origenist camp to condemn another camp by attaching their condemnations to the declarations of the Fifth Ecumenical Council. This was, as De Young said, a set of condemnations of certain Origenists that had been repeated over several centuries in various similar terms by various local councils, so it was not a last-minute idea on anyone's part. However, the historical evidence strongly suggests that the condemnation of these certain Origenists was not a topic of discussion among the fathers of the council as they met and reached their conclusions on the critical and entirely different topics that they actually had been assembled to address.

In any case, it is true that we do not chant the anathemas every year against a “school of Origenists” but against “Origen” or against a “specific variety of universal reconciliation” but against the “teaching of apocatastasis.” In signing these condemnations, however, we have lost sight of the fact that the other anathemas surrounding these two provide very critical context as well as the 300 years of church history between Origen’s death and his supposed condemnation as a heretic. Of course, there are many excellent scholars at this point who have carefully considered the story of Origen and of the several schools inspired by him (which certainly included the Cappadocian Fathers themselves). Hart, for one, considers Origen a saint, and many throughout the history of the church have considered Origen to be the greatest teacher of the saints. (See chapter 16 of Destined for Joy: The Gospel of Universal Salvation by Alvin F. Kimel for an excellent treatment of these questions about Origen, universalism, and the Fifth Ecumenical Council.)

Returning, finally, to the question of Holy Tradition and how it works, I would be a true fool to weigh in with any of my own opinions. I’ll simply note that, having read a few Orthodox teachers, including Ware, Schmemann, and Bulgakov on the nature of the Holy Church and her Holy Tradition, the recent work by David Bentley Hart on this topic does not strike me as outside the fold. I’ve read Hart’s Tradition and Apocalypse: An Essay on the Future of Christian Belief twice. I have good reason to be confident in my basic understanding of it because Hart himself has shared a couple of short essays that I wrote defending his book against extremely ignorant attacks by a Calvanist historian. I’ll admit, however, that this book by Hart is the one with which I have struggled the most. I was frankly very dubious until his book drove me to read more of Bulgakov on the nature of the church as well as more of an eminent, and generally very traditional, Catholic church historian, Robert L. Wilken (author of books such as The First Thousand Years: A Global History of Christianity, The Spirit of Early Christian Thought: Seeking the Face of God, and Remembering the Christian Past). In addition to these three titles, I read his first book, The Myth of Christian Beginnings, and I was astonished by its parallels to much within Hart’s Tradition and Apocalypse. When Hart read my account of these parallels, Hart wrote: “What’s interesting is that The Myth of Christian Beginnings is a title of RW’s I’ve never read. So maybe I’m just catching up to where he was in 1971.” For me, reading and digesting Wilken’s challenging message in The Myth of Christian Beginnings along with Bulgakov’s astonishing vision of the Holy Church within The Bride of the Lamb was all of the clarification and confirmation that I needed to take to heart for myself most all that I was grasping in Hart’s book. One other title in this vein that was especially helpful to me was Jesus Through the Centuries: His Place in the History of Culture by the distinguished Orthodox Christian scholar Jaroslav Pelikan.

Even without these four most recent rich and inspiring readings on the nature of Holy Tradition (one of them Catholic and two Orthodox), I would not have found the canonical nature of the anathemas attached to the Fifth Ecumenical Council relevant to the doctrines of universalism that I have read about in books by the Orthodox Christian authors Sergei Bulgakov, David Bentley Hart, Alvin Kimel (Destined for Joy: The Gospel of Universal Salvation), and Bradley Jersak (Her Gates Will Never Be Shut: Hell, Hope, and the New Jerusalem). One other place that I have found it is in a French catechism published for use by the Orthodox church in 1979 that featured several passages along these lines:

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 Dieu est Vivant: Catéchisme pour les familles (or God is Alive: Catechism for families to put it clumsily into English) is still much loved and widely used in the Orthodox churches of Europe. A second French edition was printed in 1987, and it has also been translated into German. When it was translated into English in America, however, the chapter on eschatology was left out (although a few others have since translated and printed it elsewhere). Olivier Clément was the original editor and a contributor alongside Fr. Cyrille Argenti and Fr. Alexandre Turincev (who wrote the chapter on eschatology). The book received the blessings of Metropolitan Meletios (Greek) and Metropolitan Anthony (Bloom) of Surozh. Anyway, the conversations and debates over universalism in the contemporary Orthodox church certainly are far larger than simply David Bentley Hart and his one book.

Returning to the larger issue of Holy Tradition, however, books such as those mentioned a couple of paragraphs above have increasingly filled me with a longing to see a thriving church that might continue to clarify and synthesize and deepen its own vision of Jesus Christ and, thereby, its capacity to reveal Christ more clearly to the entire world. David Bentley Hart has spoken recently about a “cosmopolitan Christianity” that can learn from other world faiths how to better and better perceive, conceptualize, articulate, and enact the beautiful revelation of the only God who gave himself willingly to be crucified. If our divine revelation in Jesus Christ is the most perfect and profound revelation of the unknown God, then we should have more to learn about our own faith than any other ancient traditions of human wisdom, and this should challenge us continually to be the best students of all religion and wisdom that the world has to offer. All truth teaches us more about our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ. All of this means, of course, that we Christians should be more capable than any others of recognizing our errors and our limitations, of serving others and of learning from them. We should not only be the most patient and long-suffering but also the most eager to stay engaged, welcoming, and maturing. Within the whole course of Christian history, we have known countless slow pathways of discovery and learning. We had to synthesize and defend the Nicene Symbol from out of a wild garden of Christian heterodoxies and pagan conceptual categories. We slowly came to clarify the demands of our faith upon the various forms of human slavery. This list could (and should) go on and on, but the point is that we have little reason to be surprised if various Christian universalisms widespread in our early years might have almost entirely disappeared for centuries due largely to a bureaucratic sleight of hand that may not have even been aimed at the entire category of universalism as whole. None of this is in conflict with any historic conception of the church’s living tradition, its symbol of faith, and how these work across fallen time. In fact, the church has demonstrated a capacity to mature and to heal even after terrible mistakes, hopeless confusion, and prolonged blindnesses. If Orthodox Christian universalists are right, there is no reason not to hope that the church might not eventually gain a confident and unified vision of itself again surrounding this question of our current bondage to fallen time and God’s ever-present offer of eternal life.

The One Key Point of Disagreement

But I have again wandered very far from my purpose of a simple account of this podcast with only my most basic thoughts in response. There were a variety of specific points covered, of course, within the various topics that I tried to summarize above. They quoted two church fathers (both from long after the anathemas attached to the Fifth Ecumenical Council). One was Saint John of Damascus (c.  675 to 749) who they noted as a great source regarding the meaning of “eternal” and an excellent source for understanding the harmony of meaning or consensus from across the earlier fathers of the Church. They also quoted Theodore Abu Qurrah (c. 750 to c. 825) to defend the justice of eternal punishment. One of them cited Abu Qurrah’s point that, if your wife is raped, the punishment does not simply last as long as the crime. This passing comment struck me as a little jarring and problematic at a couple of levels, but it was just a passing comment. In another place, I’m pretty sure that one of them said that all of the laws and systems of punishment in the Old Testament were intended to restore the person who had sinned. While I agree that this is broadly the case, if I’m correct that they said “all” Old Testament punishments, the practice of stoning people to death must be at least one exception to the restorative principle. However, I am starting to get petty.

In the end, De Young and Damick circled back to affirm the universal Orthodox Christian teaching that God desires to save all (1 Timothy 2:4 as an example). This is a point on which all Christians in the Eastern tradition agree. Moreover, I think there is also agreement that God is capable of saving all (Matthew 19:26 as an example), although with the corollary point attached that creatures must also freely cooperate in this divine salvation. All of this adds up to an agreement regarding a basic pastoral encouragement that should be given to every Christian regularly. We all should learn to pray for and to grow in our desire and hope for the salvation of all people so that we might have a heart more and more like God’s heart.

With these key points in agreement, it can be difficult for some lay people to see what all of the fuss is over, especially if they come into the Orthodox tradition from Christian backgrounds that do not affirm God’s desire or intent to save everyone. I’ll admit that this is true for me being a Presbyterian missionary and pastor’s kid in a large and loving family (the oldest of nine kids growing up in Kaohsiung, Taiwan). Damick and De Young do an admirable job in the last few minutes of the episode, however, focusing on the key point of disagreement with Hart and others in his camp. They make it clear that the problem comes in when there is any suggestion that God must save all people because this eliminates the need for creaturely freedom and cooperation. Putting requirements on God or failing to recognize either God’s freedom or our freedom is what it all comes down to in the debates among Orthodox Christians on this topic today. This leads De Young to say at one point that Hart’s universalism is wrong because “God is not a rapist.” God cannot force us to be saved. Therefore, an eternal lake of fire must always remain acknowledged as a possibility for each of us.

Archbishop Alexander Golitzin of the Orthodox Church in America recorded a public interview on January 14, 2022, in which he named Hart's book That All Shall Be Saved and said that it “draws upon some very prominent and worthy and holy teachers” in the early church who held that the “love of God will ultimately overcome the capacity of the creature to say no to God.” This is a far more generous assessment of Hart’s book than either Damick and De Young give. (At one point, if I recall correctly, De Young says that Hart’s book is the single most badly argued book that he has ever read. He notes that Yale sent him a review copy when it first came out but that he did not review it because he could not think of a single positive or constructive thing to say about anything in the book.) Archbishop Golitzin went on to clarify, however—along lines similar to where Damick and De Young end up in the final moments of their three and half hours—that “we can’t teach universal salvation as doctrine, but we can hope for it” which Golitzin identified as “my own attitude ... which I take from Metropolitan Kallistos Ware.”

In closing (because it really is long past time to close this down), I’ll say two things. First, I don’t really see the tension between Hart’s position and the standard Orthodox position all that strongly any more just at the level of how God’s freedom and creaturely freedom actually work together. Of course God needs to have the free participation of his creatures in God’s divine life in order for this to be true life, but I’m simply not surprised by the fact that God will achieve this from God’s transcendent and unspeakable existence outside of whatever kinds of fallen and unfallen times exist for all of us creatures who interact with divine life from within some mode of creaturely temporality. From our side as fallen creatures, of course we do not know when we might be saved, and our prayers and labors on behalf of the salvation of ourselves and of others should fill every moment of every day. One of my favorite stories of all time is this very simple one. When the Orthodox theologian Olivier Clément asked Elder Sophrony (recognized later by the church as a saint some time after his passing) 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.” This just seems so obvious to me, and I simply want to grow in my conviction with regard to this fact. And I’m rather sure that Fr. Andrew and Fr. Stephen and David Hart would all say the same. Moveover, the longer that we spend learning to pray and praying that God would help our hearts to open to God’s love for us, the more fully we realize that this last sinner left in hell is actually me. I’m aware that there are important theological differences to fight over, but it’s still worth reminding myself how much we all have in common as Orthodox Christians.

Second (and last of all), I’ll simply say that the vision of the living and holy tradition of the Orthodox Christian Church presented by scholars such as Bulgakov, Wilken, Pelikan, and Hart (all of whom have books that I mentioned above) is a vision of astounding depth and beauty that our desperately lonely and confused world so badly needs. I might be entirely wrong about the extent to which these visions of holy tradition from these four writers (and many more I could name) line up and both challenge as well as deepen and strengthen our Christian thinking about this critical topic. However, I’m pretty confident that I’m not entirely off base in saying that if the church would spend more time carefully considering the hardest challenges (and often hidden opportunities) brought to her by such thinkers, she might make more progress in being a bright and irresistible witness to Christ so that we might join Christ, exalted upon his cross, as he “drags” all people to himself by the beauty of his voluntary suffering with us in our sin (to use Hart’s translation of Christ’s astonishing claim in John 12:32).