That All Shall Be Saved

It is not the way of the compassionate Maker to create rational beings in order to deliver them over mercilessly to unending affliction in punishment for things of which He knew even before they were fashioned, aware how they would turn out when he created them--and whom nonetheless He created.

--St. Isaac of Nineveh, Ascetical Homilies

 ... if Christianity is in any way true, Christians dare not doubt the salvation of all, and that any understanding of what God accomplished in Christ that does not include the assurance of a final apokatastasis in which all things created are redeemed and joined to God is ultimately entirely incoherent and unworthy of rational faith.

--David Bentley Hart, That All Shall Be Saved

Hart, quoted above, and whose book I've lately been rereading, brings what is for me a convincing theology to life, arising from a devotion to the Eastern Orthodox tradition, which differs, sometimes quite sharply, from the Roman Catholic and later Protestant doctrines, retaining an early church, more truly apostolic viewpoint, lost in the west through faulty interpretation of the New Testament Greek and the resultant construction of faulty, ultimately illogical doctrines. And if you want someone who can unravel all the threads of logic without making an impossible knot of things, Hart is the man to go to. The reading here, however, does require rapt concentration. If you let your mind drift for a moment, you will find yourself stranded in the middle of a long paragraph like a man on a desert island with no idea how you got there. As with Hart, the idea of a hell of eternal suffering inflicted by God on any of God's creatures never made sense to me, for it seemed in conflict with the nature of God Himself, which is love. Western theologies, Catholic and Protestant, have struggled long and hard to find various ways around this essential contradiction, none of which, being contradictory, stand very well against logical examination. Yet instead of simply admitting that their ideological constructions don't work, they have searched for loopholes and excuses, tending merely to trivialize and obfuscate. I find in Hart's writings a thorough explanation of my own instinctive feelings and beliefs, an access to the words that I cannot form for myself, and an introduction to a faith tradition that had previously lain outside my experience.