Trinitarian Universalism

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Review of David Bentley Hart, That All Shall Be Saved (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019), pp. 232

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St. Augustine of Hippo, in Book XXI of The City of God, chides “tender-hearted” but misguided Christians for believing not only that God intends salvation for all human beings, but will actually follow through on that promise. For Augustine, this is a serious mistake. It erases the significance of the free choices of an individual’s will, which are essential to being human, and which God foresees from eternity but does not determine. If human beings, as free rational agents, choose the corrupt earthly city over the heavenly one, God is within God’s rights to proclaim “thy will be done,” and, since the offense is against the infinite and eternal God, the punishment for this freely-chosen sin is worthy of a proportionally infinite and eternal duration. Hence for Augustine all those “tender-hearted” Christians who refuse to believe in the reality of eternal punishment therefore refuse to take human choice and human perfidy seriously. Their pity is at best misplaced, at worst heretical.

Augustine and the other early Church Fathers, Eastern and Western alike, are rightly understood as the founders of Christian orthodoxy. Their councils pondered the Trinitarian nature of God, and the Divine-Human nature of Jesus Christ, then condensed them into the…