A Collatio in Response to Edward Feser’s review of David Bentley Hart’s _That All Shall Be Saved_

A Collatio in Response to Edward Feser’s review of That All Shall Be Saved: Heaven, Hell, and
Universal Salvation By David Bentley Hart, Yale University Press (2019).

Feser recently published this review: David Bentley Hart’s attack on Christian tradition fails to
convince

Precis of Feser’s Review

For Hart, at the end of the day it is not scripture, not the Fathers, not the councils, not the
creeds, not Holy Tradition, that should determine what Christians believe.

The Fathers

Feser: The possibility of eternal damnation is taught in Scripture, by almost all the Church
Fathers.

Why did Jesus not explicitly say that everyone will be saved, if that is what he meant? Why did it
take centuries before any Christian even floated the idea?

Response:

Ambrose Andreano: Patristic universalism

The Councils

Feser: The Council of Trent rejected the view that a Christian can be certain of his salvation. As
a non-Catholic, Hart would not be troubled by some of these facts, but his view is generally
considered heterodox even in Eastern Orthodoxy.

Response:

Justin Coyle: May a Catholic faithful to the magisterium endorse universalism?

The Scriptures
Feser: Hart dismisses the traditional interpretation of the scriptural passages that teach the
possibility of everlasting punishment. He claims that Christ’s words to this effect are either
hyperbole of the kind typical of parables and apocalyptic literature, or have been mistranslated.
When Christ speaks of punishment that is “everlasting”, he really means merely that it will last
for an age.

Response:

Matthew Joss – Graduate Student of St. Mary’s College Logos Institute, University of St.
Andrews writes:

DBH describes his hermeneutical method: obvious doctrinal statements (generally from the
epistles) should be privileged over the figurative language of the Gospels and Revelation (93-
94). There is an extended section dealing with the translation of aionios, which is quite helpful,
although its actual application to texts is limited. He concludes, “The texts of the gospels simply
make no obvious claim about a place or state of endless suffering”

Theological Anthropology

Feser: On the philosophical side, too, Hart’s book is a mess. A line of argument developed by
Aquinas holds that it is impossible for the will to change its basic orientation after the death of
the body. The reason is that the intellect’s attention can be pulled away from what it judges to be
good and worth pursuing only by the senses and imagination, and these go when the body goes.
The view has been spelled out and defended in detail within the Thomist tradition, but Hart has
little to say about it other than to dismiss it with a few insults and cursory objections which
Thomists have already answered.

Response:

Pastor Tom Belt:

Maximian irrevocability thesis

Moral Responsibility

Feser: Hart argues that since rational creatures are made to know and love God, any choice
against God is irrational. If a choice is non-culpable because it is irrational, how can we be
culpable for any bad thing that we do (given that bad actions are always contrary to reason)?
How can we deserve even finite punishments? And if we can’t, then why do we need a saviour?
Response:

DBH: response to David W. Opderbeck, Ph.D.

Hart’s Rhetoric

Feser: DBH’s book freely indulges the boundless appetite for gratuitous invective and other ad
hominem rhetoric for which he is famous.

Response:

John Sobert Sylvest:

re DBH’s harsh rhetoric

Hart’s Pantheism

Feser: Hart holds that all human beings are parts of Christ’s body in such a way that if even one
person is damned forever, then Christ’s body is incomplete, and even his obedience to the Father
is incomplete. Hart also holds that the individual self is destined to be “reduced to nothing” so
that we can be “free of what separates us from God and neighbour.” What is left he compares to
the Hindu notion of Atman. But all of this is hard to distinguish from a pantheism that
blasphemously deifies human beings.

Response:

John Sobert Sylvest: That’s too facile a caricature to dignify with a response.

Divine & Human Agential Interaction

John Sobert Sylvest:

account of the noncompetitive nature of divine & human agencies

The Arguments of DBH Ed Feser Failed to Engage

Response 1
John Sobert Sylvest:
Essay Before Reading TASBS

Response 2

John Sobert Sylvest:

Essay After Reading TASBS