Not until the nineteenth century did
any Christian body make universal salvation its official teaching. The
first to do so, the Universalist Church, later merged with another to
form the Unitarian Universalist Association. Within the mainstream
churches, medieval and early-modern universalists led a subterranean,
catacomb existence—isolated figures, often concealing their views—while
Christendom in all its major branches preached hell no less than heaven.
Following Origen’s lead, universalists preserved a covert gospel,
withheld from the masses, who needed hellfire to scare them straight,
while a tiny cadre of religious intellectuals saw themselves as the only
ones fit to know the truth. Dogmatic universalism—the notion that God
must save all human beings—was for centuries not a public tradition but
an esoteric one.
During the first half of the twentieth century, overt expressions of
universalism were rare among acknowledged church teachers, with the
exception of certain Russian thinkers such as Sergius Bulgakov. In the
1940s, Jacques Maritain confided to a notebook his private thoughts
regarding a larger hope of salvation, and Emil Brunner affirmed without
fear of contradiction that apokatastasis (universal
restoration) is “a doctrine which the Church as a whole has recognized
as a heresy.” At mid-century, Catholic theology showed no sign of
changing. Yet something shifted during the 1950s and 1960s: Karl Barth’s
affirmation of universal election in Church Dogmatics allowed
universalism to come out of the shadows. Hans Urs von Balthasar
acknowledged Origen’s influence and that of “Barth’s doctrine of
election, that brilliant overcoming of Calvin.” In the 1970s and 1980s,
Catholics discussed “anonymous Christians” and “the unchurched,” while
Evangelicals pondered “the unevangelized.” Yet the Catholic-Evangelical
pivot to inclusivism would prove to be merely a stepping-stone. By
century’s end, the earlier debates over inclusivism had become passé,
and the new arena of controversy was universalism, either in a hopeful,
Balthasarian vein, which seeks to affirm the possibility of universal
salvation, or in an assertive, Moltmannian version, which makes it a
divine imperative. Among today’s young Christian theologians,
Balthasarian tentativeness is fast yielding to ever more strident
affirmations of the necessity of salvation for all—as in David Bentley
Hart’s recent book, That All Shall Be Saved.
Hart charges those who believe in an eternal hell with “moral
imbecility.” The language of rude dismissal was something of a guilty
pleasure when he deployed it against the “New Atheists” more than a
decade ago. Now he is denouncing Dante and everyone else who sustains
the age-old tradition of the Church. By his reckoning, their view of God
should evoke in us “only a kind of remote, vacuous loathing.” So much
for Augustine, Chrysostom, John of Damascus, Aquinas, Pascal, Newman,
Chesterton, C. S. Lewis, and Pope Benedict XVI—not to mention
innumerable canonized saints of the Church, the great majority of
ancient Greek, Latin, Coptic, and Syriac writers, and such Protestant
luminaries as Luther, Melanchthon, Bucer, Calvin, Hooker, and Edwards.
Oddly, Hart now sounds very much like Richard Dawkins. No less than the
aging atheist, Hart finds the two-thousand-year Christian tradition not
just unbelievable but repugnant and inhuman.
Read the rest here.
How Many Orthodox Christians Are in America?
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1 comment:
McClymod is so far out of his element when it comes to early Chritianity, its painful.
In any case, Hart's book should be examined on the merits of his arguments, which are several and sound. Then again, for the most part he is just channeling Gregory of Nyssa. I suppose I will take seriously the weeping and gnashing of teeth of his "infernalist" adversaries when a general Council anathematizes St Gregory. Until then, I'll rest comfortably with the conviction that my patron is correct. We will see in the end.
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