"For we labor and struggle to this end because we have hoped in a living God who is the savior of all human beings, especially those who have faith." –1 Timothy 4:10
Another Boring Rebuttal from Hopeful Inclusivism
And now I'll risk my humble retort as a “hopeful inclusivist”—a la Hans Urs von Balthasar, Metropolitan Kallistos Ware and most probably, Maximos the Confessor. Since publishing Her Gates Will Never Be Shut (Wipf & Stock, 2009), I have, until now, preferred the moniker and theology of “hopeful inclusivism” over universalism for very specific reasons. Hart has some stern and stinging words for this approach. I wish the sting had come through a sound castigation of our position rather than via hints of misrepresentation. I’ll do my best to explain this claim, knowing I’m addressing an intellectual superior who already admits boredom with the topic.
Hopeful inclusivism, as described by von Balthasar and Ware, proposes that we cannot presume to say that all will be saved, nor may we presume that even one soul will be lost. The issue is not the universal scope of Christ's redemptive work. Instead, their quarrel is with how the –ism itself generates presumption, in both pop universalists and their infernalist opponents. Rather than certitude in any dogma, however biblical or rational, our faith and hope lean wholly on the Person of Jesus Christ. Hart may not perceive this distinction because he is not inclined to presumption, but it's a temptation that ensnares many a common universalist. That's the concern and has been ever since Origen noticed it among immature disciples.
Further, hopeful inclusivism insists on the principle of human freedom, whereby salvation ultimately includes our participation through a willing human response to Jesus Christ. Some adherents to HI note that we may believe by faith the many Scriptures that foresee a universal willing response while also rejecting the Calvinist-style determinism where the elect must irresistibly bow. We’re concerned to affirm ultimate redemption without nullifying the authentic human freedom(which is why we venerate Maximos).
I’m not sure that Hart would disagree with these points in the end. The nub of his impatience with Balthasar et al. revolves around the word 'hope,' just as my quarrel with universalism is notHart’s arguments, but with what the term 'universalism' has come to mean.
Hope versus Wishful Thinking
In That All Will Be Saved, David Bentley Hart expresses impatience with those who speak in terms of 'hope,' naming Hans Urs von Balthasar and certainly knowing Metropolitan Ware also "dares to hope that all be saved.”
At the risk of joining the Calvinists in Hart’s shredder, I will admit I was frustrated by how he projected hedge-betting and wishful thinking onto the word 'hope.’ How had he missed the rich, sturdy and objective sense of the term used both in the Scriptures and by the hopeful inclusivists? Here is the one area where I thought Hart was unfair, only because I know it’s unlikely that he was careless. To reduce 'hope' to 'wishful' or even 'doubtful' in the Bible or in von Balthasar is straw-manning that deserves pushback.
Hopeful inclusivists do not regard ultimate redemption as something we hope for wistfully. Not at all. On this point, DBH could have successfully steel-manned us and still made his point. But he didn’t—and this made me second guess whether he had been similarly slapdash with the Calvinist infernalists. I double-checked and no, I don’t think he was. Glad to know.
But back to hope. Would Hart dismiss the author of Titus as a hesitant vacillator when he says we are “awaiting the blissful hope, and the appearing of the glory, of the great God and of our savior, the Anointed One Jesus…”?Of course not, since the hope and glory we await is none other than the sure appearance of our God and of his Christ. There is no double-mindedness or wavering—there’s no sense that the parousia is contingent or could swing either way. There is no free-will opt-out in that hope. Jesus is coming for sure. That is our hope, our faith, our conviction and sure foundation.
It's not about 'hoping for' with crossed fingers. It's 'hoping in' confidently in a Person. To quote the old hymn, “My hope is built on nothing less than Jesus blood and righteousness.”
Hans Urs von Balthasar and Kallistos Ware, like Isaac the Syrian and Maximos the Confessor before them, all argue that our salvation includes a necessary, authentic and willing human response. We’ll go there momentarily, but first, written into von Balthasar’s hope are two clearly expressed riders:
- Balthasar urges us not to presume all will be saved. “Presume.” Words matter. My friend Robin Parry identifies as an “evangelical universalist.” He believes with complete confidence that all shall be saved. But neither is there any hint of presumption in his argument. Even universalism of the boldest flavor ought not presume that all will be saved, for the sin of presumption lies not in the surety of one’s hope for ultimate redemption but in taking so great a salvation for granted—i.e. the arrogant and groundless certitude of those many universalists who skirt the essentials of the gospel, central to which is faith in Jesus Christ. Faith in Christ is not presumption, just as hope in Christ is not vacillation.
- Balthasar holds to the principle of human willingness but also cites approvingly the straightforward claim that having seen the beatific vision, it is infinitely unlikely that any would turn from it. Words matter. Hart doesn’t take the plain meaning of these words seriously, or else he believes that von Balthasar didn’t. I do. He means, to my mind, just what he says: infinitely unlikely. Some fifth-grade math should do the trick here. It is not 1% likely that some will be lost. It is not 1 x 10-n likely that even one should be lost. It is infinitely unlikely that any should be lost at all. Such is the hope of one who’s hope IS our Lord Jesus Christ and not in the rationalistic certitude of a doctrine.
To sum up the surety of our blessed Hope, and what hopeful inclusivists mean by the term, Richard John Neuhaus explains,
“I believe, I have a confident faith, that I will be saved because of the mercy of God in Christ. It is sometimes said that Protestants, who subscribed to “justification by faith,” know they will be saved, while Catholics only hope they will be saved. That is a distinction without a difference. Faith is hope anticipated, and hope is faith disclosed toward the future.”
DBH may imagine anemic definitions of hope, but he should dignify hopeful Inclusivists with the right to define their own labels according to Scripture and the tradition.
Or maybe he’s right. Has modern 'hope' strayed so far from its objective biblical foundations that it too is no longer useful? Is hope so weakened by time and use that it has truly become synonymous with 'doubt' as Hart seems to assume? I no longer have doubts about ultimate redemption, but if referring to our blessed hope is reduced to 'vacillation' or 'doubt,' why would DBH choose that word when translating 1 Tim. 4:10, or why can’t von Balthasar likewise be trusted to mean what the Bible meant. That verse stands as both my affirmation and critique of Hart. Again,
“For we labor and struggle to this end, because we have hoped in a living God who is the savior of all human beings, especially those who have faith” (1 Timothy 4:10).
Free(d) Will
When it comes to the 'free will' defense for eternal conscious torment or any voluntary opt-out that trumps ultimate redemption, I would concur with Hart's critiques virtually down the line. In a nutshell, [I think] he believes (as do I) that a willing human response to Christ is intrinsic to salvation, but who can say that in this life, the human will is ever truly 'free’?
Of course, Calvinist universalists equivocate on the first point, denying human freedom altogether. They believe that Christ has unilaterally chosen all to salvation (unconditional election of all people) and that all will respond to Christ because of God’s irresistible grace. For the Reformers in Augustine’s monergist lineage, the human will is virtually irrelevant (nuances aside): we move from bondage of the will to the flesh to bondage of the will to God by divine fiat. We are saved by sovereign grace alone—not by any human work. Even your faith was pure gift. It’s not about choosing our “Yes” to Christ. Christ chose me; I did not choose him. Calvinist salvation is entirely unilateral, not reciprocal.
Maximos saw it differently. In my reductionist interpretation of his work, humankind was created with a will designed to naturally and freely desire the good at all times. But the natural will became dysfunctional in and since the fall. Now we waver, second guess and inevitably turn from the good. Maximos described this dysfunctional inclination as the gnomic will… it’s not absolutely bound (as with certain Reformers) such that it could never turn to the good. But on any given day, we might find ourselves pursuing Christ, then suddenly deceived or seduced by the world, the flesh or the enemy into the nearest ditch.
Maximos went on to famously argue that Christ assumed the human will to heal the human will through his willing surrender to the Father’s will, especially in the Gethsemane. As through a human will humankind fell, so through Christ’s human will, humankind will be saved. How? Christ heals and restores the natural will and finally frees it, even if at the final judgment, for it would be unjust for Christ to condemn and exclude anyone for rejecting him with a dysfunctional will. That would be like condemning a blind man for being unable to see. But when every eye shall see him, freed from the deceptions of this present evil age (most notably our egoism) and apart from the blindness of the fallen will, we will activate our redeemed will and freely desire God’s will. We will love God because he first loved us.
Perhaps I am mistaken and Hart can show us this is not what Maximos meant. But it is what I mean after reading him. I hope (maybe in Hart’s wishful thinking way) that this is also what Hart meant in his book. The freed will shall not remain fallen, nor will it opt out of the Good when we behold the Son with unveiled, healed spiritual eyes. My point is that this IS the hopeful inclusivist position and for all the reasons both Hart and Maximos recount. That is, I’m saying Hart has co-opted Maximos for his universalism when von Balthasar may be his rightful heir apparent.
Said another way, Maximos prescribes the position adopted by H.I. (when articulated rightly by its own adherents within the parameters carefully laid out by Maximos). If Hart agrees with Maximos as I suppose, he has a high view of the freed and healed natural will and its role in our salvation … but in his rhetoric, he may sound to some like he undermines 'free will.' That's mainly because he first needs to thoroughly take down the problematic free-will opt-out defense of the infernalists. I understand this. I just wish he hadn’t misrepresented hopeful universalism, as it is sometimes called. The pseudo-enemy he describes and rejects (as I would) could instead be dubbed gnomic universalism. Have at it. But I don’t think it fair to relegate von Balthasar or Ware to that camp. Or if their caution is so problematic, it should be for Origen as well, as we’ll see.
CLICK HERE to read part I: "In Praise of Hart"
CLICK HERE to read part III: "The Amorphous Imprecision of 'Universalism'"
CLICK HERE to download the full review of David Bentley Hart’s That All Will Be Saved - Jersak
Thanks Brad for this excellent review. I appreciated your clear summary of Hart's argument, your nuanced response to his comments about Hopeful Inclusivism and particularly you fine comments about hope. I recently read Terry Eagleton's Hope Without Optimism and I found much symmetry between your explication of hope and Eagleton's, particularly the idea that hope is based upon evidence. He reckons that optimism is not a “disposition one attains through deep reflection or disciplined study. It is simply a quirk of temperament…Authentic hope, by contrast, needs to be underpinned by reasons. .. It must be able to pick out the features of a situation that render it credible. Otherwise, it
is just a gut feeling”.
I am working on a book entitled "humility and hope: Forming Christian Communities in a Secular Age" where I seek to riff off of Taylor's work (and William Cavanaugh and Willie Jenning's critiques) to argue for a Church/churches that take a longer view of God's restoration of all things by pursuing both a thicker shared life and a thicker engagement with the issues of our culture (a la Willis Jenkins excellent book).
I have very much appreciated your writing and pastoral work over the years from the short distance away in Vancouver and want to thank you for your contributions to theology and the mission of God.
Posted by: Tim Dickau | November 20, 2019 at 03:02 PM
It’s ‘ ersatz universalism ‘,
“ The ersatz universalist grants that necessary universalism cannot answer the free will argument, but insists that necessary universalism can be defended nonetheless. The defense proceeds by first granting the value of freedom, but denying that it is so valuable that it can sustain the possibility of a person ending up in hell. The idea, then, is that God honors freedom and solicits our cooperation in securing our presence in heaven, but if such an approach fails, there is always the option of coerced presence in heaven.”
..., and it’s always the use of the the natural will , the how, ...as essence ( logos) ..,.,is a tool , you know, the ole hypostatic employment of it ( tropos), There’s so much scholarship on Maximos now, that one can’t miss it. ...., but good luck , lol!
Posted by: Jeff | September 14, 2019 at 06:54 AM