David Bentley Hart's That All Shall Be Saved challenges head-on a Christian doctrine commonly thought to be thoroughly biblical and traditional: an eternal hell. The book is relatively short and made to feel even shorter by Hart's prose and avoidance of technical jargon. Without a single footnote, his case is made not by appealing to various authorities, but by appealing to one's better angels – whom, he implies, are better guides to truth than the authorities have been. According to Hart, the view that all shall be saved – or universalism – is the only morally palatable or logically coherent eschatological view (see 12–13, 103, 167). Hart is not alone in his defence of universalism. The recent works of historian Ilaria L. E. Ramelli and philosopher Thomas Talbott, both of whom are mentioned by Hart, are examples of modern defences of universalism. Hart's work, however, is an easily digestible introduction to the debate, as he addresses the question of universal salvation from a number of perspectives.

Hart's ‘chief ambition’ is ‘to try to think through certain questions about the “last things” ’ in a way closer ‘to the obscure origins of the Christian conception of reality’ (2). He does this in three parts. The first is ‘The Question of an Eternal Hell’’, which consists of one chapter ‘Framing the Question’ (9) and another ‘Doubting the Answers’ (33). Although some subordinate questions are relevant, the ‘always more significant question’ is whether anything could ‘truly permit us to love an omnipotent and omniscient God who has elected to create a reality in which everlasting torture is a possible final destiny for any of his creatures’ (13). ‘The Infernalists’, or ‘defenders of the idea of a real hell of eternal torment’ (12–13), have offered a number of answers, including the Thomist account of freedom or the Calvinist doctrine of individual predestination (36, 49). Hart more than doubts the answers since he regards them as ‘wholly illogical’ (40) or a ‘metaphysical absurdity’ (49).

The second part of the book, Apokatastasis, includes four meditations which constitute Hart's argument for universalism. The first meditation, ‘Who is God?’, is on ‘the moral meaning of creatio ex nihilo’ (65). With careful attention to the fourth-century Cappadocian church father Gregory of Nyssa, he argues that the doctrine of ‘creation out of nothing’ is not only a metaphysical or moral claim but an eschatological one (68). If out of his goodness God creates the world, then to his goodness the world must return. He concludes that ‘if God is the good creator of all, he must also be the savior of all’ (91). The second meditation, ‘What is Judgement?’, is ‘a reflection on biblical eschatology’ (92). Hart offers over twenty biblical passages in support of universalism and alternative interpretations of passages often used to defend an eternal hell. Specifically, he cautions against building eschatological doctrines on images which are likely to be ‘more poetic than precise’ (115), such as those in Revelation (106–110) or those described by Jesus (110–119). He also argues that the Greek word aionios, often translated as ‘eternal’ to describe the length of final punishment, does not have ‘the intrinsic meaning of “eternal” ’ but a ‘vaguer connotation’ of a certain age or time (123). He concludes that the biblical data are clear that hell, insofar as it exists, is not eternal (129).

The third meditation, ‘What is a Person?’, is ‘a reflection on the divine image’ (130). Hart returns to Gregory of Nyssa and pines for an alternative version of Christian history where the church hitched its theology to Gregory instead of Augustine (138). According to Hart, Gregory's understanding of the divine image attends to ‘the whole of the [human] race, comprehended by God's “foresight” as “in a single body,” which only in its totality truly reflects the divine likeness and the divine beauty’ (140). Because of this, ‘each person . . . is indispensable, for the humanity God eternally wills could never come to fruition in the absence of any member of that body’ (144). If one person is saved, then all must be saved. The fourth and final meditation, ‘What is Freedom?’, is a ‘reflection on the rational will’ (160). Hart rejects a ‘libertarian’ understanding of freedom (172) in favour of an ‘intellectualist’ understanding (36) that is necessarily ‘teleological in structure’ (173). ‘True freedom’, he says, ‘is contingent upon true knowledge and true sanity of mind. To the very degree that either of these is deficient, freedom is absent. And with freedom goes culpability’ (177). Since humans are made with an orientation towards the Good, persons are only free insofar as they choose the Good – thus, an ‘eternal free rejection of God’ is ‘a logically vacuous idea’ (178).

The third and final part consists only of final remarks, which are largely summative in nature. He especially underscores, however, his conviction that the doctrine of an eternal hell, majority view though it may be, is ‘morally repugnant’ (199). He revisits the ‘always more significant question’ (13) from the beginning of the book: whether a God who would allow even a single soul to endure an eternal hell would be worthy of love or worship. His answer is ‘an unqualified and unyielding no’ (208). If Christianity requires a belief in hell, then it would be, for him, ‘proof that Christianity should be dismissed as a self-evidently morally obtuse and logically incoherent faith’ (208).

A full evaluation of Hart's book is well beyond the scope of this review, but I offer a few commendations and a few questions that remain. In this book, Hart traverses biblical, moral, philosophical, theological, and historical ground with an impressive familiarity with each. A particularly strong moment was the lucid defence of analogical predication with respect to language about God. He argues that, even if God's transcendence guards against univocal predication, our language about God cannot be wholly equivocal lest faith become ‘nothing but mindless submission to a collection of intrinsically unintelligible oracles arriving from an entirely hidden source’ (55). He insists, then, that for infernalists, and especially Calvinists, words like ‘love’, ‘justice’, and ‘goodness’ lose their meaning entirely (53–61, 81, 88). He challenges his readers to cling to the goodness and love of God, and implores them to consider what these words really mean. Another strong moment was the critique of the popular ‘libertarian’ account of freedom, which pervades much of Western culture. To be ‘fully free’, he argues, one must not merely choose but choose well (173).

A few questions remain, however. The first is how Hart himself defines words like love, justice, goodness, and even hell. His insistence on ‘childish imagery’ (53) perhaps invites us to evoke plain or obvious meanings of these words, but his own use of them is at times unclear. For instance, while it is a virtue to address different versions of hell, it is not always clear which version is being critiqued and whether the critique is applicable to other versions. Additionally, while he considers a proper understanding of love to be incompatible with an eternal hell, his detractors might find a proper understanding of love to be incompatible with universalism. For Hart, persons are only free by choosing the good and thus ‘God frees souls by dragging them to himself’ (179). This conjures an image of mosquitos mindlessly and inevitably drawn by their animal nature to a blue light. The Christian tradition, however, has often argued that humans are endowed with a God-given rationality which, though it allows them to choose evil, also allows them to choose God. God's transcendence, after all, is always balanced in the tradition by his personality; God is the source of all, but also a person who, himself intrinsically relational, invites the rational human soul into the fullness of that relationship. It is difficult, using ‘childish imagery’ at least, to make sense of a truly ‘loving’ relationship that includes one person ‘dragging’ the other, against one's will, to himself.

Another question which remains is whether Hart's eschatological conclusions have any relevance in the present for the existence of evil. Given the nature of God, Hart says that ‘God . . . is wholly capable of determining the result of all secondary causes, including free will, while not acting as yet another discrete cause among them’ (184). This means that God could arrange the contingencies of life ‘until evil has vanished altogether’ and still would ‘not trespass upon the sanctity of the autonomous will’ (186). However, this presents a dilemma for God's present actions in a world where evil exists. Either God is determining the results of all secondary causes without violating free will or he is not doing so even though he could. The first horn appears to make God the author of evil, but the second horn makes one wonder why God has not eradicated evil if he could do so without violating free will. On this point, a younger David Bentley Hart apparently thinks differently:

If the younger and older Hart can be synthesized, one might say that the ‘real and autonomous force of defiance’ granted to the soul by God is only temporary. If this is so, one wonders why God would allow this force to exist at all.

These questions remain, however, only as an invitation to further conversation about whether all shall be saved. Hart's book on its own is sure to inspire such conversation, and those interested in Christian eschatology will especially find it helpful in engaging the topic.