A Hartless God?

Lest the impatient reader start to think of this as the blog from hell, what follows will be – well, for a while, anyway – my last post on that subject.  Recall that in earlier posts I set out a Thomistic defense of the doctrine of eternal damnation.  In the first, I explained how, on Aquinas’s view, the immortal soul of the person who is damned becomes permanently locked on to evil upon death.  The second post argued that since the person who is damned perpetually wills evil, God perpetually inflicts on that person a proportionate punishment.  The third post explains why the souls of the damned would not be annihilated instead.  In this post I will respond to a critique of the doctrine of eternal damnation put forward by my old sparring partner, Eastern Orthodox theologian David Bentley Hart, in his article “God, Creation, and Evil: The Moral Meaning of creatio ex nihilo” (from the September 2015 issue of Radical Orthodoxy).

 
The central theme of Hart’s article is that the world qua God’s creation is an expression of his perfect goodness and rationality, and that eternal damnation would be incompatible with that perfection.  Of course, defenders of eternal damnation like Aquinas would deny that there is any such incompatibility, for reasons like those set out in my earlier posts.  So, Hart owes us some argumentation in addition to this assertion of incompatibility.  And indeed, he offers (as far as I can see) five lines of argument in defense of his position. 

The arguments are, however, all very sketchy at best rather than carefully worked out, and in my judgment none of them succeeds.  Let’s take a look.

1. To damn one is to damn all

Hart thinks that human beings are interconnected in such a way that no one could possibly enjoy perpetual happiness if others were damned.  He writes:

After all, what is a person other than a whole history of associations, loves, memories, attachments, and affinities?  Who are we, other than all the others who have made us who we are, and to whom we belong as much as they to us?  We are those others.  To say that the sufferings of the damned will either be clouded from the eyes of the blessed or, worse, increase the pitiless bliss of heaven is also to say that no persons can possibly be saved: for, if the memories of others are removed, or lost, or one’s knowledge of their misery is converted into indifference or, God forbid, into greater beatitude, what then remains of one in one’s last bliss?

Some other being altogether, surely: a spiritual anonymity, a vapid spark of pure intellection, the residue of a soul reduced to no one.  But not a person -- not the person who was.  (p. 9)

Now, one way to read this is as a metaphysical claim to the effect that a human being is literally constituted at least in part by his relationships to other human beings.  For example, what it is for Mike to exist is for Mike to be the husband of Carol, the father of Greg, Marsha, and other children, the grandson of Hank, the good friend of Jim, the employer of Alice, the dutiful employee of Ed, the loyal customer of Sam, and so on.  On this interpretation, these other people are parts of Mike in something like the way his arms and legs are parts of him.  Now, if Mike’s arm or leg was in hell, then Mike himself would be, to that extent at least, in hell.  Hence if any of these other constitutive parts of Mike – Carol, Greg, Marsha, et al. – is damned then Mike himself is, at least to that extent, also damned. 

Read this way, though, Hart’s claim would be obviously false, and indeed absurd.  For of course, Mike existed before he ever met Carol, Jim, Ed, Alice, or Sam, he would continue to exist if Hank or any of these other people died, and so on.  Mike did not gradually come into existence as he met these people, and he doesn’t gradually fade out of existence as they depart or die off.  Mike could even in theory end up as the last man on earth, if there were a nuclear war, a worldwide plague, or the like.  It’s not as if, when the second-to-last man goes out of existence, Mike himself would blink out with him!  Hence it is simply not the case that Mike or any other human being is literallyconstituted by his relations to other people. 

What Hart must have in mind, then, is the idea that our identity is determined by our relationships with others in the looser sense that those relationships play a crucial role in molding one’s character, memories, values, etc.  We could say, for example, that Mike’s understanding of his personal calling in life includes his conception of himself as the husband of Carol, the father of Greg and Marsha, the friend of Jim, etc.  Fulfilling his responsibilities to these others, enjoying their company, being involved in common projects with them, etc. are what give his life the specific meaning and unique satisfactions that it has.  He could have known other people, been born in another country, had another vocation, etc. but these possibilities all seem abstract and alien to him.  Given his actualhistory and the people who have actually played a role in forming his character and memories, he would be unhappy if they were taken away from him. 

Now, a person is indeed formed by his relationships to others in this loose sense.  The trouble is that if this is all that Hart has in mind, then the premise is clearly too weak to support the conclusion that we could not possibly maintain our identities and happiness in heaven unless everyone who played a role in molding our lives is saved along with us.  For people obviously can and do retain their identities and even happiness in the absence of some of the people who have shaped their lives, even if in some cases this is difficult.  It happens all the time.

For example, not everyone who has played a role in forming one’s life remains a part of it in the long term.  Mike is the man he is in part because of the teachers and fellow students he knew in his school days.  But he may seldom if ever think about many of these people, and his life might carry on just as it has, and as happily as it does, even if he never thinks of or hears about them again.  For another thing, people sometimes find their callings in life and achieve happiness precisely by leaving behind a pattern of life and set of relationships that once determined their conceptions of themselves.  For example, imagine that Mike had been a hard-partying musician in his twenties, but two decades later has become a family man and professional who would never want to return to his earlier, hedonistic ways and could no longer relate to the people he then knew even if he still kept in contact with them. 

Of course, it might seem harder to imagine Mike being happy if he never again saw (say) his wife Carol, his son Greg, or his friend Jim.  But suppose it turned out that Carol had been committing adultery with Jim, was stealing from Mike in order to sustain a drug habit, abandoned him and the children to run off with Jim, etc.  Mike might in that case be happier in the future precisely to the extent that he does not think about Carol and Jim.  Or suppose Greg ended up becoming a drug pusher and a murderer, was hardened into bitter ingratitude and hatred toward his father, and they became estranged.  Greg might become so corrupt that Mike might conclude that it is as if Greg were no longer his son.  Here too he might be happier in the future precisely to the extent that he does not think about Greg. 

Even in ordinary life, then, we can think of examples in which the breaking off of relationships with even once close friends and family is consistent with one’s maintaining his basic character and happiness.  Now, what C. S. Lewis called the “great divorce” between the saved and the damned is analogous to this.  As I noted in one of the earlier posts in this series, on the Thomistic account, the good that was in the damned person prior to death drops away, leaving only the soul permanently hardened in evil.  So, the people one knew in this life but will be separated from forever in the afterlife are usefully thought of on the model of the most corrupt people we come across in this life, including even people whose evil has so estranged us from them that once close emotional bonds have been dissolved. 

Now, Hart might concede that these sorts of examples give us a model for understanding how we might be happy in the afterlife even if we no longer then know some of the people we knew in this life.  But he might argue that it still does not follow that we could be happy if those people were not only separated from us forever, but also suffering forever. 

To see what is wrong with this, though, return once again to examples from this life.  Few people are troubled by the fact that mass murderers who are imprisoned for life are to that extent unhappy for the rest of their lives.  The reason is that those who suffer such punishments deservethem.  Similarly, Mike might be untroubled even if Greg goes to jail for life, if he thinks Greg has become so evil that he deserves this.  And if he hears that Carol and Jim have become miserable together in their adulterous relationship, he may well be untroubled by that too, since they deserve that misery. 

By the same token, if those damned forever deserveprecisely that punishment – and in an earlier post I spelled out the standard Thomistic account of how someone could deserve it – then the saved will not be troubled by the fact that the damned suffer that punishment.  Hart might disagree with the claim that they deserve it, but the point is that his argument doesn’t show that they don’t deserve it but at best merely implicitly presupposes that they don’t.  If so, then it simply begs the question.

To sum up, then, this first argument of Hart’s rests on a fatal ambiguity.  His premise that a person’s identity is determined by his relationships to other people can be interpreted in either a literal sense or a loose sense.  If interpreted the first or literal way, then while the premise would support Hart’s conclusion, it is also obviously false.  If interpreted instead in the second or loose way, then while the premise is true, it does not support Hart’s conclusion.  Hart’s argument can appear plausible only if we fail to disambiguate these alternative readings.

2. Hell is incompatible with God’s goodness and rationality

Again, the main theme of Hart’s article is that creation is an expression of God’s goodness and rationality.  He writes:

{T]he only necessity in the divine act of creation is the impossibility of any hindrance upon God’s expression of his goodness… (p. 3)

[T]he doctrine of creation adds… an assurance that in this divine outpouring there is no element of the “irrational”: something purely spontaneous, or organic, or even mechanical, beyond the power of God’s rational freedom.  But then it also means that within the story of creation, viewed from its final cause, there can be no residue of the pardonably tragic, no irrecuperable or irreconcilable remainder left at the end of the tale. (pp. 5-6)

Now, creation would in Hart’s view be neither good nor rational if hell were a part of it.  He expresses this idea in passages like the following:

[T]he eternal suffering… of any soul would be an abominable tragedy, and so a moral evil if even conditionally intended, and could not possibly be comprised within the ends intended by a truly good will (in any sense of the word “good” intelligible to us).  Yet, if both the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo and that of eternal damnation are true, that evil is indeed comprised within the intentions and dispositions of God… And what then is God, inasmuch as the moral nature of any intended final cause must include within its calculus what one is willing to sacrifice to achieve that end…? (pp. 11-12)

Let us imagine… that only one soul will perish eternally, and all others enter into the peace of the Kingdom… Let it be someone utterly despicable – say, Hitler.  Even then, no matter how we understand the fate of that single wretched soul in relation to God’s intentions, no account of the divine decision to create out of nothingness can make its propriety morally intelligible.(pp. 12-13)

Let us suppose… that rational creatures possess real autonomy, and that no one goes to hell save by his or her own industry and ingenuity… [L]et us say God created simply on the chance that humanity might sin, and that a certain number of incorrigibly wicked souls might plunge themselves into Tartarus forever; this still means that, morally, he has purchased the revelation of his power in creation by the same horrendous price… Creation could never then be called “good” in an unconditional sense; nor God the “Good as such,” no matter what conditional goods he might accomplish in creating.  (pp. 13-14)

[I]f God does so create, in himself he cannot be the good as such, and creation cannot be a morally meaningful act: it is from one vantage an act of predilective love, but from another – logically necessary – vantage an act of prudential malevolence. (p. 16)

End quote.  Now, I quote these passages rather than summarizing Hart’s argument precisely to demonstrate to the reader that there really isn’t much if anything in the way of actual argumentation here.  Hart repeatedly asserts that hell is incompatible with God’s goodness.  But while he does so with rhetorical flourish, as far as I can tell he never actually provides a rational justification for this claim.  Perhaps he finds it obvious, but since it is not obvious to those among Hart’s fellow Christian theologians who affirm the doctrine of hell – historically, by Hart’s own admission, the majority of Christian theologians – Hart is hardly in a positon to rest his case on mere personal intuition.

Those defenders of hell have also given arguments of their own which purport to show that the reality of hell is compatible with God’s rationality and goodness.  For example, in the three previous posts in this series, I spelled out the Thomistic arguments for this conclusion.  If those arguments succeed, then a person could indeed merit eternal punishment and a perfectly good and rational God not only could but would inflict it.  So, in order for Hart to make his case, he would need to respond to those arguments.  Unfortunately, he says very little in response, and the little he does say is not impressive.  This brings us to his next line of argument:

3. Free will does not justify hell

Hart claims that in order to try to make sense of eternal damnation, it will not suffice to appeal to the idea that the damned have freely chosen their unhappy fate.  He writes:

[The] appeal to creaturely freedom and to God’s respect for its dignity… invariably fails.  It might not do, if one could construct a metaphysics or phenomenology of the will’s liberty that was purely voluntarist, purely spontaneous; though, even then, one would have to explain how an absolutely libertarian act, obedient to no ultimate prior rationale whatsoever, would be distinguishable from sheer chance, or a mindless organic or mechanical impulse, and so any more “free” than an earthquake or embolism.  But, on any cogent account, free will is a power inherently purposive, teleological, primordially oriented toward the good, and shaped by that transcendental appetite to the degree that a soul can recognize the good for what it is.  No one can freely will the evil as evil; one can take the evil for the good. (p. 10)

So, Hart evidently thinks that the conception of free will presupposed by defenses of the doctrine of hell is a voluntarist one on which the will is not inherently ordered toward what the intellect takes to be good.  This is very odd, considering that Aquinas and other Thomists firmly (and rather famously) reject voluntarism and agreewith Hart that the will is inherently ordered toward what the intellect takes to be good.   Yet they also defend the doctrine of hell.  So, Hart’s objection here is aimed at a straw man.

Hart also says:

It makes no more sense to say that God allows creatures to damn themselves out of his love for them or of his respect for their freedom than to say a father might reasonably allow his deranged child to thrust her face into a fire out of a tender respect for her moral autonomy.  And the argument becomes quite insufferable when one considers the personal conditions – ignorance, mortality, defectibility of intellect and will – under which each soul enters the world, and the circumstances – the suffering of all creatures, even the most innocent and delightful of them – with which that world confronts the soul. (p. 10)

Part of the problem with this is that once again, Hart appears to be attacking a straw man.  Defenders of the doctrine of hell – certainly Thomist and Catholic defenders of the doctrine – would not deny that factors such as ignorance, impairments to one’s intellect or to the freedom of one’s will, and the way that suffering can lead to such impairments, are relevant to one’s culpability and thus relevant to whether one is going to be saved or damned.  The traditional criteria for whether a sin is liable to send one to hell (i.e. for a sin’s being mortal) are, first, that the action is gravely wrong; second, that the sinner has full knowledge that what he is doing is wrong; and third, that the sinner acts with sufficient freedom of will.  So, to attack the thesis that someone might be damned even if he acted out of ignorance or if his will is impaired, and even if this ignorance or impairment were due to suffering he has undergone, is to attack something most defenders of the doctrine of hell are not committed to in the first place.

Another problem is that, given these conditions for a sin’s being mortal, Hart’s “deranged child” analogy is a false one.  A child typically lacks the sort of knowledge necessary for mortal sin, and a deranged person lacks the freedom of will necessary for mortal sin.  So, someone who goes to hell is precisely not like a father’s “deranged child.”  A better analogy would be a father’s adult son or daughter who is no longer under the father’s authority and has with full knowledge and deliberate consent chosen a life of evil – like Mike’s son Greg in our earlier example.  And here we would say that a respect for Greg’s “moral autonomy” should lead Mike to allow Greg to suffer the deserved bad consequences of his evil actions (e.g. jail time). 

But Hart would no doubt claim that even this analogy won’t work.  This brings us to his next objection:

4. Hell destroys the analogy between God’s goodness and ours

Aquinas takes the terms we apply to God to be properly understood in an analogical way.  The analogical use of terms is to be contrasted with the univocal and the equivocal uses.  If I say “I can make it to the party” and “I can start the car,” I am using the word “can” univocally or in the same sense.  If I say “I can make it to the party” and “The vegetables came out of a can,” I am using the word “can” equivocally or in completely different senses.  If I say “The battery is out of power” and “I have the power to release you from that obligation,” I am using the word “power” analogically or in a middle ground sort of way.  The power of a battery and the power of a person to release someone from an obligation are so very different that the term is not plausibly thought of as being used univocally.  But the senses are not completely unrelated either, so that the term is not being used equivocally.  Rather, there is something in the power of a person that is analogous to the power of a battery, even if that something is not the same thing that the battery has (e.g. it has nothing to do with electricity).

Again, for Aquinas, when we speak of God as powerful, as good, etc. we are using terms in an analogical way.  We are saying that there is in God something analogous to what we call power in us, something analogous to what we call goodness in us, etc.  It is not the same thing as what we call power or goodness in us (given that, unlike us, God is immaterial, outside time and space, changeless, etc.) but it is not entirely unrelated either.  (Note that the analogical use of terms being spoken of here is not a metaphorical use but a literal use.  A battery literallyhas power and a person literally has the power to release someone from an obligation.  Similarly, God literally has power and goodness, just as we literally have power and goodness, even if -- as with the battery and us -- it is not exactly the same thing that is had in both cases.  Not all analogical language is metaphorical.) 

Now, Hart evidently agrees with this account of theological language.  But he alleges that the doctrine of hell is incompatible with it.  In particular, he thinks that if God damns people to hell, then we are really using terms like “good,” “merciful,” “just,” “loving,” etc. in an equivocal way rather than an analogical way (pp. 6-7 and 11).  Moreover, he claims, “the contagion of this equivocity necessarily consumes theology entirely” (p. 14).  All of the language we use about God will turn out to bear no relation to the meanings it bears when we apply it to us, not even an analogical relationship.  Hence we will be unable to say anything about God at all.

Unfortunately, here too Hart’s position appears to boil down to little more than mere assertion, and a failure to consider much less respond to the arguments of the other side.  Aquinas, after all, champions both the doctrine of analogy and the doctrine of hell.  Moreover, as we have seen in the three earlier posts in this series, he gives detailed arguments for the latter, and these arguments purport to demonstrate the justice and goodness of damning some people to hell.  So, if Hart’s position is to amount to more than mere undefended assertion, he needs to respond to those arguments, and he does not do so.

Consider that when a human being with the authority to do so inflicts on a guilty person a punishment proportionate to the offense, we do not count this as evidence that the former is not really “good,” “merciful,” “just,” “loving,” etc. in anything like the ordinary senses of those terms.  For example, if a judge imposes a longer sentence on a repeat offender than he would on a first-time offender, we don’t think this contrary to justice in the ordinary sense, but rather precisely as an exercise of justice in the ordinary sense.  When a parent finally grounds a teenager who has repeatedly stayed out past his curfew, despite the fact that his parents have shown leniency to him in the past, we don’t think this contrary to their being loving or merciful.  On the contrary, we think it a case where the child has abused his parent’s mercy and love and for that reason is even more deserving of punishment.

Now, as we have seen in the previous posts, Aquinas argues the punishment of hell is perpetual precisely because those who are punished perpetually choose evil and perpetually reject the mercy and love of God.  Their punishment is as proportionate to their offense as the repeat offender’s punishment is proportionate to his offense, and as the teenager’s punishment is proportionate to his.  Properly understood, their punishment supports rather than undermines the analogy between our goodness on the one hand and God’s on the other.  Certainly Hart has said nothing to show otherwise.

(Incidentally, at pp. 7-8 of his article, in the context of his comments about analogy, Hart also makes some highly disparaging remarks about the doctrine of original sin.  This is a large topic, but suffice it for present purposes it to note that Hart directs his fire at the least plausible construal of that doctrine rather than at the most plausible construal.  I gave an exposition of the latter in an earlier post.)

5. Scripture doesn’t really teach eternal damnation 

Since Hart is a Christian theologian who regards scripture as divinely inspired and authoritative, one would expect him to have something to say about those biblical passages which are widely and traditionally understood to teach the doctrine of hell.  And indeed he does.   What he says is that this biblical evidence amounts to:

three deeply ambiguous verses that seem (and only seem) to threaten eternal torments for the wicked.  But that is as may be; every good New Testament scholar is well aware of the obscurities in what we can reconstruct of the eschatological vision of Jesus’s teachings. (p. 15)

That’s it.  Hart does not tell us exactly which passages he has in mind, and he does not explain why those passages do not really teach the doctrine of hell despite the fact that they are typically taken to teach exactly that.

This is very odd, especially coming from Hart.  Longtime readers will recall my exchange with Hart on the topic of whether there will be animals in heaven.  In that context, Hart put great emphasis on scriptural evidence, accused me of ignoring it (which in fact I had not done, as the article linked to shows), and dismissed any non-literal interpretation of passages that seem to imply the presence of fauna in the afterlife.  Yet when the topic is hell, Hart is strangely uninterested in scripture, dismisses in two sentences the biblical evidence against his position on the basis of the undefended assertion that the relevant passages “only seem” to conflict with it, and is apparently suddenly happy to consider non-literal readings.

In fact, contra Hart, the relevant passages are mostly not ambiguous, “deeply” or otherwise, and when one considers passages other than those reporting the words of Christ, there are a lot more than just three of them.  Those most relevant to the eternity of the punishment suffered by the damned are as follows (all quoted from the RSV):

The sinners in Zion are afraid;

trembling has seized the godless:
“Who among us can dwell with the devouring fire?
Who among us can dwell with everlasting burnings?” (Isaiah 33:14)

And they shall go out and look at the dead bodies of the people who have rebelled against me; for their worm shall not die, their fire shall not be quenched… (Isaiah 66:24)

And many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt. (Daniel 12:2)

And if your hand or your foot causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away; it is better for you to enter life maimed or lame than with two hands or two feet to be thrown into the eternal fire. (Matthew 18:8)

Then he will say to those at his left hand, “Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels…” … And they will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.  (Matthew 25: 41, 46)

Woe to that man by whom the Son of man is betrayed!  It would have been better for that man if he had not been born.  (Matthew 26:24)

[I]t is better for you to enter life maimed than with two hands to go to hell, to the unquenchable fire… [I]t is better for you to enter the kingdom of God with one eye than with two eyes to be thrown into hell,  where their worm does not die, and the fire is not quenched. (Mark 9:43, 47-48)

They shall suffer the punishment of eternal destruction and exclusion from the presence of the Lord.  (2 Thessalonians 1:9)

Sodom and Gomorrah and the surrounding cities, which likewise acted immorally and indulged in unnatural lust, serve as an example by undergoing a punishment of eternal fire. (Jude 7)

And the smoke of their torment goes up for ever and ever; and they have no rest, day or night, these worshipers of the beast and its image, and whoever receives the mark of its name. (Revelation 14:11)

 And the devil who had deceived them was thrown into the lake of fire and sulphur where the beast and the false prophet were, and they will be tormented day and night for ever and ever. (Revelation 20:10)

Now, there have of course been creative attempts to interpret such passages in a way consistent with universalism or annihilationism.  For example, it is sometimes claimed that the Greek words translated as “everlasting,” “eternal” or “forever” could instead be interpreted as indicating that the punishment in question will last merely for an age or period of long duration, without being strictly endless.  But there are serious problems with such proposals.  For one thing, if the critic of the doctrine of hell were to be consistent in such an interpretation, then he would also have to say that these scriptural passages don’t teach that the reward of the saved will last forever either, but only that it will last for an age or period of long duration.  But if the relevant passages are in fact saying that the reward of the saved lasts forever (as they obviously are), then given the parallelism they employ it is clear that the punishment of the damned lasts forever as well. 

Moreover, the interpretation in question isn’t consistent with other scriptural uses of the relevant Greek terms.  For example, when the Bible speaks of God living forever or having glory forever, it obviously doesn’t mean that God lives or has glory only for an age or period of long duration (1 Timothy 1:17; 2 Timothy 4:18; Galatians 1:5; Revelation 15:7).

It is also very hard to see how Christ could have said that it would have been better for Judas not to have been born if his punishment is only temporary.  If even Judas is destined to be saved eventually, as Hart apparently thinks, then how could it not be better for Judas to have been born?

Another problem is that, whatever a few somewhat later thinkers like Origen thought, the very earliest of the Church Fathers (Polycarp, Ignatius, Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, et al.) took the punishment of the damned to be everlasting.  And those who were closest in time to the scriptural authors are in the best possible position to know exactly what those authors meant. 

Like other universalists, Hart puts great emphasis on passages that speak e.g. of God as willing that all be saved (Romans 11:32, 1 Corinthians 15:22, 1 Timothy 2:4, etc.).  The standard universalist move is to suggest that there is a deep tension here with the passages that speak of eternal damnation, and then to suggest that the only way to resolve this is to give the latter a non-literal interpretation.  This way universalism can be sold as a harmonizing defense of scriptural teaching, rather than as a departure from scriptural teaching. 

But the purported tension is bogus.  Consider the following parallel example.  God wills that no one sin.  But obviously it doesn’t follow that no one in fact sins.  On the contrary, people sin constantly, as scripture itself teaches.  It would be ludicrous to suggest that the fact that scripture says that God wills for us not to sin, but also complains that people do in fact sin, shows that there is some deep tension that needs to be resolved.  There is no tension at all because the claims are perfectly consistent.  Given our free will, it is possible for us not to do something that God wills for us to do.  Similarly, that God wills that all be saved simply doesn’t entail that all will in fact be saved, and for the same reason.  Given our free will, we are capable of rejecting the salvation that God wills for all of us.  There is nothing mysterious about this.

It is also odd for people who demand a non-literal interpretation of passages which speak of eternal punishment suddenly to sound like strict literalists when reading a passage like 1 Corinthians 15:22, which says that “as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive.”  For there is simply no reason to read the “all” here as entailing that every single last person will be saved.  “All” and related expressions are sometimes used somewhat loosely, including in scripture.  For example, when Matthew 3:5-6 speaks of John the Baptist going through “all Judea” baptizing, it obviously doesn’t mean that he walked through every single square foot and baptized every single person (e.g. Herod was obviously not baptized by John).  When Hebrews 9:27 says that it is appointed to human beings “once to die,” this doesn’t entail that absolutely everyone dies at most once (since those who have been resurrected, such as Lazarus, have died twice) and it doesn’t entail that absolutely everyone dies even once (since Hebrews 11:5 itself says that Enoch did “not see death”).  Such passages are simply making general claims but without intending to rule out the possibility of exceptions. 

1 Corinthians 15:22 has to be read in the same way.  Indeed, like Hebrews 9:27 it can’t be read as intending to assert that “in Adam” absolutely every single human being dies, given examples like Enoch and Elijah.  By the same token, there is no reason to think the claim that “all” shall be made alive means that every single human being will be saved.  And given that (for all the universalist has shown) there are many scriptural passages that teach eternal damnation, that can’t be what 1 Corinthians 15:22 means. 

But even if someone wants to resist these exegetical claims, Hart has given us no reason to reject them.  Again, like some of his other arguments, the one in question here boils down to little more than sheer assertion.

* * *

Remarkably for someone with a reputation as a champion of orthodoxy (as well as Orthodoxy), Hart suggests that “the God in whom the majority of Christians throughout history have professed belief would appear to be evil” (p. 6).  Lest there be any doubt about how radical is his critique of the tradition, he adds: “Nor am I speaking of a few marginal, eccentric sects within Christian history; I mean the broad mainstream” (p. 7).  The Christian God is heartless, thinks Hart, and needs a transplant.  To accomplish this he proposes constructing the needed organ out of selected scriptural passages and the ideas of what have, historically speaking, been a small minority of Christian thinkers.

Yet in defense of this bold hairesis or “choosing” of one part of the tradition to the exclusion of the other, Hart offers only imprecise claims, begged questions, undefended assertions, straw men, a false analogy, a failure seriously to address scriptural counter-evidence, and in general a reliance on rhetoric rather than careful argumentation.  A cri de coeur perhaps, but hardly an exercise of the rationality he attributes to God and in the name of which he attacks perennial Christian doctrine.