I. WHAT IS A TRULY FREE WILL?

AN INTERIM REPORT ON THAT ALL SHALL BE SAVED

by David Bentley Hart

…my argument is nothing more than a fairly straightforward restatement of what Christ says in John’s

Gospel: that “everyone committing sin is a slave to sin” (8:34), but that “you will know the truth, and the

truth will make you free” (8:32).

Admittedly, I do reject any simple late modern libertarian model of freedom—the idea, that is, that the will is

free to the degree that it can spontaneously posit any end for itself whatsoever, without any prior or more

general motive or rationale—but that is only because such a model is clearly nonsensical. I start from the

assumption that rational liberty and freedom of the will genuinely do exist, and for just this reason I conclude

that the “free-will” defense of the idea of an eternal hell is logical gibberish. Far from constituting some sort

of outlandish revision of our understanding of freedom, my argument hews faithfully to classical and

Christian tradition, and to every coherent account of free will from Plato to Iris Murdoch. That is to say, I

define perfect freedom as the unhindered realization of a rational nature in the end that fulfills it as rational. I

assume also that, for finite intellects, such freedom involves a deliberative ability to choose among different

courses of action. All I reject are two logically impossible notions: that there can be rational freedom that is

not first set into action by a “transcendental” final cause, and that freedom can exist in any way except in

direct proportion to the rational competency of the agent.

Thus, it is somewhat misleading to call mine a “compatibilist” view of free will (except with some very precise

definitions being attached). Daniel Dennett, for instance, is a true compatibilist in the best modern analytic

sense: that is, he is a physicalist determinist as regards human actions, but he also believes that, at the level of

empirical consequences, the sheer complexity of the physical causal chain that produces human actions can

also be described as free choice. That is, he believes there are two very different but compatible ways of

describing a single empirical reality, one blindly “mechanical” the other intentionally “purposive”;
nevertheless, he is still certain that this empirical reality can in principle be reduced without remainder to

purely empirical physical forces that only appear to be purposive. There are two different levels of reference,

but not two different levels of operation. For Dennett, every “free” act is the emergent result of an

incalculable sequence of small, mindless, material causes. In the same way, he allows that one may say that

one has a “soul,” but only so long as one grasps that this soul is composed of millions of tiny robots. I believe

exactly the opposite: that the will really does act purposively, towards an end that operates upon it as a real

final cause of rational liberty. Rather than believing that the will is empirically determined and lacks any

transcendental teleology, I believe that the will is empirically indeterminate precisely because it is transcendentally

determined to an actual transcendent end; and, under the canopy of that orientation, the mind and will are

able to pursue various finite goods freely, choosing between them as realizing different aspects of the Good

in itself.

What, after all, makes any choice free? Principally, a telos. To act freely, one must conceive a purpose or

object and then elect either to pursue or not to pursue it. But for this purposiveness—this final causality—the

will’s operation would be nothing but a brute event, wholly determined by its physical antecedents, and

therefore “free” only in the trivial sense of “random,” like an earthquake or a purely neural impulse. To be

free, one must be able to choose this rather than that according to a real sense of which better satisfies one’s

natural longing for, say, happiness or goodness or truth or beauty. What allows one to choose between

different possible objects of rational volition is an intellectual orientation toward some rational index of ends

that are desirable in and of themselves.

Hence there can be no real empirical freedom except under the canopy of a prior transcendental

determinism. There must be a “why” in any free choice, a sufficient reason for making it. You prove this

every time you choose a salad at lunch rather than a plate of broken glass. I long for a particular work of art,

say, because I have a deeper and more original longing for beauty that it can partially satisfy; and this ultimate

horizon of desire gives me a context for evaluation, judgment, and choice. We need not even posit the

ontological reality of those transcendental ends to affirm this (though, of course, Christians are obliged to
believe in the reality of Truth and Goodness and so forth). We need only recognize that such an orientation is

the necessary structure of thinking and willing, and that every finite employment of the will, to the degree that

it free, depends upon this deferral of rationales toward ends beyond the empirical.

Which brings me back to my book. There my argument is not that we cannot reject God. It is that we cannot

do so with perfect knowledge and perfect freedom, and so the “free-will defense” of an eternal hell rests

upon a logical fiction. Sheer choice in and of itself is not freedom. The more irrational a choice, the less free it

must be; but, the more one knows, the more rational one’s choices become. But, then, the more free one

becomes, the more inevitable become the choices one will make. In a sense, a lunatic has a far larger range of

real options than does a sane person, but only because he or she also has far less freedom. The lunatic might

choose to run into a burning building on impulse, to see what it will feel like to die in flames; a sane man,

because he can form a rational judgment of what can and cannot satisfy his nature, lacks so expansive a

“liberty.”

Consider, for instance, Frank R. Stockton’s classic story “The Lady, or the Tiger?” A handsome young

courtier who has had the effrontery to conduct a romance with his king’s daughter is sentenced to the arena,

where he must open one of two doors (as he chooses). Behind one waits a fierce and famished tiger, ready to

devour him; behind the other, a beautiful maiden, ready to become his wife. These are the only two fates

permitted him. And he does not know which door is which. The princess, however, who is watching from

the gallery, has discovered which door leads to which fate, and she discreetly signals to him to open the door

on the right. The question the story leaves hanging is whether she has yielded to jealousy and directed her

lover to his death, or whether she has yielded to her love for him and sent him to the arms of another

woman. But we can simplify the tale.

Let’s say instead that the young courtier, with no one to guide him, has a choice between a door behind

which that tiger is still crouching and another behind which the girl of his dreams (say, the princess herself) is

waiting. First of all, which door should he want to open? If he is perfectly sane and healthy, the latter,
obviously. We can agree, I hope, that one of the conditions that allows him to make a truly free decision in

these circumstances is that he is not captive to some sort of dementia that would render him incapable of

judging whether it is better to be torn to shreds by a wild beast or to be happily wedded to one’s beloved. But

that means that his freedom—his liberty from delusion, that is—has already reduced the range of his possible

preferences toward one of the two outcomes.

Then, secondly, under which conditions can he better make a truly free choice between the two doors: In a

state of perfect ignorance regarding which door is which (such that whatever choice he ultimately makes will

be primarily a result of chance), or with a secret knowledge of which door is which, perhaps procured from a

friend in the court (which allows him to choose with full rational liberty)? Obviously, the latter. The more he

knows, the freer he becomes. But, then also, the more inevitable becomes the choice he will make. In fact,

what follows is not really a “choice” at all; it is a purely free movement of thought and will toward a rationally

desired object. He has been liberated from the need to choose arbitrarily, and has thus been determined

toward an inevitable terminus by the reality of his own freedom.

It is easy to see how such considerations apply to the popular but ultimately vacuous claim that hell could be

the ultimate free choice of a rational spiritual nature. Such a claim, momentarily beguiling though it be, cannot

survive serious scrutiny. To the very degree that a rational creature might reject the one transcendent reality

that can alone satisfy its deepest needs and desires, that creature is in bondage. An injured, damaged, deluded

person might behave in such a manner; but never a free person. Freely, sanely, deliberatively to elect misery

forever rather than bliss is a form of madness. To call that madness freedom, in order to soothe our

consciences and continue to reconcile ourselves to a picture of reality that is morally absurd, is to talk

nonsense. And, too, there is a deeper metaphysical logic here to be considered. It turns out, on any careful

consideration of the matter, that only God himself—the infinite and transcendent Being, Goodness, Truth,

and Beauty that is the source and end of all reality—can be the necessary “final cause” that makes rational

freedom logically possible. So no perfectly free will can choose any ultimate end other than God, and to the

degree that a rational nature attempts to reject God it is simply deluded. In fact, an attempt at final rejection is
the most that any such nature could ever accomplish, since a spirit’s ever deeper and more primordial longing

for God is the whole substance of its rational volition. God—unlike a creature—could never appear to a

spiritual nature as merely one option among others, which could be rejected without intentional

remainder. What makes all election or rejection on the part of a finite agent possible at all is his or her

unremitting transcendental longing for God. Thus, God himself is the transcendent orientation in respect of

which any merely finite object can be rejected, and so even in trying to reject God one is expressing a still

deeper longing for God. So, just as God cannot positively will evil precisely because he is infinitely free,

neither can we will evil in an ultimate sense, inasmuch as his infinite liberty is the source and end of our

liberty too. Only in him are we truly free.

II. WHAT GOD WILLS AND WHAT GOD PERMITS

In my previous installment of this report, I addressed the final phase of the argument put forward in That All

Shall Be Saved, which concerns the nature of rational freedom and the question of whether the idea of a hell of

eternal torment can plausibly be defended as an expression of the free will of creatures. In reaching the

answer to that question—“No,” to be precise—I asserted it as a given that “God cannot positively will evil

precisely because he is infinitely free.” But I gave no indication the precise significance of that claim within

the context of the book’s larger argument. So now I want to retreat to the beginning of my promised

“itinerary” of that argument. Normally I would be unwilling to recapitulate a case I felt I had already made

with sufficient clarity; and obviously I cannot condense the book’s logic into a few paragraphs. But on this

occasion a sufficient number of misconceptions have taken root around the book, and I think I should try to

clear some of the undergrowth away if I can.

There are two questions that define the path the book’s reasoning takes, and every step along the way falls

between them: First, can the God who either imposes or permits a state of perpetual conscious torment for

rational creatures really be not only good, but (as reason and faith alike say he must be) Goodness in
itself? And, second, could finite creatures possessed of real freedom (as opposed to a mere voluntarist power

of spontaneous movement toward any end whatsoever) actually freely reject God eternally and, by the exercise

of that liberty, merit perpetual torment? And, again, the answer to both questions is “No.” Other questions

of equal import are also addressed, but these two dominant questions give the argument its shape. That said,

the argument unfolds by way of roughly half a dozen major themes, which must be held together if one is to

make sense of the book as a whole.

The first of these, and one that subtends the whole of the text, is the question of analogy. If theological

language is to have any intelligible content, there must be some analogical continuity between the language we

use both in regard to creatures and in regard to God. After all, Christ himself insisted on the rule of analogy,

when for instance he enjoined his disciples to understand God’s universal fatherhood by comparison to their

own experience of paternal love and concern for their children. This is in no way to deny the apophatic limits

that prevent our words and concepts from granting us the ability to comprehend God. But the logic of

apophaticism still requires that our words retain some kind of consistency of meaning in passing from the

creaturely realm of reference to the divine, even if in the latter case the full truth of our words infinitely

surpasses the little we are able to understand.

If, though, our theological claims oblige us to use words in such a way that their creaturely and divine

meanings become clearly antithetical to one another, then at once those predicates become equivocal and so

meaningless. As soon as this happens, a contagion of equivocity is inaugurated, one that must ultimately

render all Christian language both semantically and syntactically vacuous. This is important to emphasize at

the outset because, as the book’s argument unfolds, one persistent temptation for some readers will be to

beat a sudden retreat to an inflexible insistence on absolute inscrutable divine sovereignty as the only valid

divine predicate, and to the consequent claim that we must not presume to judge God’s actions in terms of

good and evil as we understand them. A devout dialectical strategy, no doubt, but a self-defeating one.
For one thing, there is the metaphysical catachresis of introducing an element of arbitrariness into God’s acts

(a discussion for another time). For another, to argue thus is simply to surrender to that aforementioned

contagion of equivocity. To claim, for instance, that the whole drama of election and dereliction is undertaken

by God as a display of his glory is simply to evacuate “glory” of any moral content. At that point, faith is a

pure epistemological nihilism, neither conceptually nor morally distinguishable from faithlessness. We are no

longer even be able to adduce “reasons” for believing anything.

A second theme follows from this: that is, the impossibility of finding a concept of “justice” (or “mercy” or

“love” or “goodness”) that can successfully span that analogical interval between the divine and the creaturely

if the premise of an eternal hell is accepted. On the one hand, the concept of justice entails a sane

proportionality between any punishment and the culpability of the one punished. On the other hand, we are

instructed by tradition to believe that the sort of finite offenses of which creatures are capable—hindered

though they be by the obvious limits of their mental competency, intentionality, or power—justly merit an

eternal and absolute punishment. The issue here is not some presumptuous attempt to hold God accountable

by our standards; it is the recognition that the very notion of justice becomes incorrigibly equivocal if we are

asked to accept the now standard account of damnation. And none of the traditional attempts to surmount

this problem are credible.

At this point, however, the book’s argument has not yet truly begun. At most, a question has been posed.

The book’s third theme may really be several distinct themes knitted together by logical interdependency, and

so it requires particularly careful exposition. Stated most simply, it is this: given the metaphysics and logic of

the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo, any distinction between what God wills and what God permits necessarily

collapses at creation’s eschatological horizon; so too any distinction between God’s antecedent and

consequent wills. Thus there are three cardinal tenets of Christian tradition that—if the teaching of eternal

damnation be accepted—cannot all be true simultaneously: that God freely created all things out of
nothingness; that God is the Good itself; and that it is certain or at least possible that some rational creatures

will endure eternal loss of God.

If God creates the world from nothingness, under no compulsion and with no motive but the overflow of his

own infinite goodness, it is only in the finished reality of all things that the full nature of God’s activity will be

revealed. What will be disclosed, moreover, cannot be only the nature of creation, but must necessarily touch

upon the divine nature as well. If it is true that creation in no sense adds to, qualifies, or “perfects” God—if,

that is, the God who creates from nothing is always already the infinite God who neither requires nor is

susceptible to any process of becoming—nothing proper to creation is beyond his power

and intention. Inasmuch as creation is not a process of theogony, by which God forges himself in the fires of

the finite, it is a genuine theophany, and its final state—intended as it is in the very act of creating—must

reveal something of who God is in himself.

Call this point “Theme 3)a”: While it is true that creation does not modify or qualify God, much less

determine what he is in himself, and true also that creation is instead entirely determined by him, for just this

reason—creation’s total dependency upon God’s will—the final reality of creation will reveal God for who he

is in himself. Any intentional act that is not conditional upon some prior or more ultimate necessity is a

revelation of the moral identity of the intending agent. If I happen to kill someone because, in willing some

other goal, I end up doing so contre coeur, that fact does not disclose much about who I truly am. If I kill

someone because I freely choose to do so, as a necessary part of an ultimate design that I was never bound to

realize by any condition other than my own desire to bring it to pass, then that fact tells everything about me.

Remember, both according to any logical evaluation of the natural good of rational agents and according to

the language of scripture (Matthew 18:14; 1 Timothy 2:4; 2 Peter 3:9; etc.), the eternal loss of a living spirit is

at the very least a natural evil, contrary to the will of God. And a natural evil becomes also a moral evil to the

very degree that it is directly intended by a willing agent. And yet, given the metaphysics of creatio ex nihilo,

there is no logical room here for making a moral distinction between what God directly intends in creation
and what he merely allows to happen. Call this “Theme 3)b”: at that final limit, will and permission

necessarily become indistinguishable.

It is a logical truism that all secondary causes in creation are reducible to their first cause. This is not a

formula of determinism. It merely means that nothing can appear within the “consequents” of God’s creative

act that is not, at least as a potential result, implicit in their primordial antecedent. So, even if God allows only

for the mere possibility of an ultimately unredeemed natural evil in creation, this means that, in the very act of

creation, he accepted this reality—or this real possibility—as an acceptable price for the ends he desired. In

acting freely, all the possibilities that the agent knowingly accepts are positively willed as acceptable conditions

of the end the agent seeks to achieve. If I freely and knowingly choose a course of action that may involve the

death of my child, knowing that that death will then be an ineradicable detail of the pattern of what I bring

about, morally I have willed his death within the total calculus of my final intentions, as a cost freely accepted,

even if in the end his death never actually comes about. One cannot positively will the whole without

positively willing all the necessary parts of the whole (whether those parts exist in only potential or in fully

actual states). And so, if God does indeed tolerate that final unredeemed natural evil as the price of his

creation, he not only thereby reduces the “goodness” of his creative act to a merely relative goodness; he also

converts that natural evil into a moral evil, one wholly enfolded within the total calculus of his own venture in

creating, and thereby reveals himself to be not God, the Good as such, but only a god who is (at

most) relatively good.

This also means, incidentally—call this “Theme 3)c”—that in such a final state of things the damned would

in some very real sense be the saviors of the elect, or at least their redeemers: sacrificial victims whose eternal

suffering is the cost accepted by God for the felicity of the blessed. For, whether the damned are

predetermined to their reprobation or merely carried there by the unpredictable forces of chance, they—far

more so than Christ—are the true lambs slain from the foundation of the world, the ransom eternally

ordained by God and the blood eternally spilled so that the Kingdom may be established. They are what God
is willing, either by decree or permission, to forfeit. After all, if this is how the game must be played in order

for anyone to win at it, the losing lot might just as well have fallen to the redeemed.

This, however, seems a good place to pause. I shall resume the itinerary in the next installment.

III. CAN PERSONS BE SAVED?

Before resuming my “itinerary” of the argument of That All Shall Be Saved, one additional point seems worth

stressing. Though in the last installment the issue was raised of whether God intends or permits evil, the

book’s argument has nothing to do with the traditional problems of rational theodicy. The question is not

“Why does God permit evil if he is both omniscient and omnipotent?” or “Why is the possibility of evil

necessary for creation?” or even “Is this the best of all possible worlds?” All of those are perfectly interesting

queries in their proper place (or so I hear); but that place is not this book.

It is a good mereological rule that to try to understand the whole in terms of its parts and to try to understand

the parts in light of the whole are two very different operations of reason (induction and deduction, to be

precise). It is one thing to attempt to judge the relative goodness or badness of a discrete evil in relation to

some final purposes we cannot see, but another thing altogether to judge the goodness or badness of a

supposedly total narrative that pretends to describe the whole rationality of all its discrete events. The former

judgment can never be more than conjectural; the latter is a matter of logic. There may logically be such a

thing as an evil that is redeemed in the greater good toward which it leads; there is no such thing as an

unredeemed evil that does not reduce any good end toward which it might lead to a mere relative value. In

the former case, it is logically possible that evil may be non-necessary in the ultimate sense, but a real

possibility in a provisional sense—though even then only as a privation that will ultimately be effaced from

the “total picture.”

We may, at least, stipulate as much for the nonce, and assume that the possibility of transient evils is part of

the progressive process whereby free spiritual beings are called into existence out of nothingness. But the
final state of creation, as a finished totality, will not be redeemed in some yet more ultimate end; in its sheer

permanence and finality, it must be accounted as itself the end for the sake of which all the conditional evils

and imperfections leading to it were provisionally and temporarily tolerated. So my question remains: does the

story Christians habitually tell about God oblige us to believe that he directly intends evil as evil, even if only

as a possibility, as a permanent part of his final design for creation. And the reason for asking this is obvious:

if God can will any evil as a final unreconciled evil, then he is not the transcendent Good, but only a finite

agent possessed of an only relative moral status. And my argument is as simple as it is undeniable: even if

God wills a final evil only as a possibility within creation’s design, he has already positively willed it as an

intrinsic feature of that pattern, and it is this that touches on who God is.

Which brings me to the book’s fourth major “theme,” which concerns precisely what, according to the actual

language of Christian scripture, that final intentional horizon might be. And here I defend one classical

universalist reading of the texts of the New Testament—especially of 1 Corinthians 15—over against what I

take to be clearly inferior readings. After dealing with various hermeneutical issues, such as what the text

actually says about “hell” or its eternity, I move on toward something like Origen’s or Gregory of Nyssa’s

understanding of eschatology as involving a twofold judgment: first a judgment on the immanent shape of

human history and on each of us as historical subjects, then a more encompassing and ultimate judgment on

the eternal shape of creation in the divine intentions “The eschatological discrimination between heaven and

hell is the crucifixion of history, while the final universal restoration of all things is the Easter of creation”—

or so my book claims.

It is also its claim that only this eschatological language is able to synthesize all the theological claims of the

New Testament (including the surprisingly large number of explicitly universalist statements) into a single

theological picture without evasion, contradiction, or duplicity. This part of the argument deals with such

issues as the immanent eschatology of John’s gospel, and of “preterist” readings of Christ’s prophecies in the

synoptic gospels, and how the two might be reconciled in an “eschatological” understanding of the triduum of

Christ’s death and resurrection. It deals as well with Paul’s understanding of the relation of the Church to
Israel in God’s eternal counsels, and the eschatological grammar of the book of Revelation. It also advances

sundry exegetical claims, such as the assertion that, in the New Testament, the word aiōnios—usually rendered

as “eternal,” and of relevance to this discussion only with respect to a single verse—might better be

understood in many instances as being a reference to the “Age-to-Come” and in other instances as a

reference to the divine reality “above” the world of “time” (chronos). On the whole, however, this part of the

book cannot really be very effectively summarized.

What can be stated with considerable certainty, and with quite a good deal of scriptural evidence, is that

wherever the narrative of salvation becomes most developed, especially in Paul’s theology, it necessarily

expands into an affirmation of the universal and cosmic scope of God’s saving work in Christ. Whether or

not Paul was ever explicitly a universalist, it is obvious that his understanding of the logic of salvation in

Christ becomes completely internally coherent only as a universalist narrative. Thus, such famously difficult

verses as Romans 5:18 or 1 Corinthians 15:22 (difficult, that is, for proponents of eternal perdition) ought not

to be treated as incautious hyperbole or rhetorical excess, but as moments of extreme clarity in the unfolding

of the Pauline vision. So too, verses such as Romans 11:32 and 1 Corinthians 3:12-15 cannot be confined

within the logic of limited election without dissolving into empty babble.

In part, this is because—as Gregory of Nyssa so clearly saw—the very concept of what a saved “person”

might be makes no sense within such limits.

This, at any rate, is the substance of the book’s fifth theme: what the nature of finite personhood is, and what

it would really mean (morally, in this world or any world to come) for any soul to reconcile itself to the bliss

of union with God in the absence and on the condition of the perpetual torment of any other soul. The

principal claim here is that, whether we consider the most intimate relationships we have with others or

consider instead the most remote and perhaps abstract of our human connections, we will find that ultimately

it becomes meaningless to assert the salvation of any person apart from all others. Whether something else
might be saved—some anonymous spark of spiritual identity, something more primordial or more ultimate

than personality as such—is another matter altogether, and one that falls largely outside Christian tradition.

Some things are obvious: it is difficult to imagine what becomes of the actual person who was, say, a mother

if she enjoys eternal beatitude despite the eternal dereliction of a child whom she loved and who loved her

and whose presence in her life (most importantly) constitutes an essential part of who she is as a person. In a

sense, however, it is no less difficult to understand how, say, a man who never knew that child, and perhaps

never even really knew that mother, remains the person he was if he must become indifferent not only to that

child’s fate, but to her grief as well, in order to enter into the bliss of the Kingdom. The issue here is not

merely one of the extrinsic association that exists between persons, but of the very ontology of personhood

itself. Our relations to others in fact constitute us as the persons we are, and there is no such thing as a

person in perfect isolation. If any person is in hell, so too is some part of every person whose identity was

shaped by his or her relation to that damned soul.

But these attachments necessarily belong to a continuum of relations and interrelations that simple logic tells

us extends to all persons everywhere. In order to affirm the true beatitude of the saved, one must introduce

partitions into that continuum, invariably arbitrary, in order to define areas of morally and emotionally

acceptable indifference; but, as soon as one does that, one discovers that that region of indifference is actually

limitless, since it must potentially accommodate not only any person who might fail to be saved, however

proximate or remote, but also anyone related by bonds of love or fidelity to that person, and so on ad

infinitum. And this means that one has, morally speaking, proleptically detached one’s happiness from the

well-being of everyone else, since—as demonstrated earlier in the text—what one is willing to sacrifice to

achieve one’s end, even if only as a possibility, is something one has already absolutely surrendered.

At the last, the realm of one’s concern must in principle contract until nothing but the isolated self remains;

and thus the ethos of heaven proves to be the same as the ethos of hell: every soul for itself. And this remains

true—more so, in fact—if one argues that God might spare the redeemed the knowledge of the lost by
expunging them from memory (as one especially absurd argument goes). For then, of course, what would

then be saved could not really, in any meaningful sense, be a person any longer; it would be only the remnant

of a person. In fact, it would be some other creature altogether. In which case, one’s “salvation” would really

be one’s annihilation as a particular person within the community of created persons.

Finally, the sixth theme concerns the nature of human freedom and the incoherence of attempts to defend

the reality of an eternal hell as a correlate of that freedom. This, however, is where I began this report, so I

need not revisit the topic.

I do, however, have one more thing to say.

IV. IN DEFENSE OF A CERTAIN TONE OF VOICE

Having completed—albeit somewhat elliptically—my “itinerary” of the argument of That All Shall Be Saved, I

have reserved the final installment of my report for a last, brief, bitter, even somewhat petulant and self-

pitying complaint about some of the more belligerent readings the book has inspired. Perhaps I ought not to

do so, since the whole point of providing an outline of the text was as an aid principally to the book’s

detractors, in the hope of inspiring better informed attacks on it. But, after six months of listening to the

clamor of confused readers, I cannot resist. I even feel free to name names.

Normally, I would not bother. One expects hostile reviews when one writes a book on a controversial topic;

and this book in particular I knew would provoke and annoy. That was very much part of its purpose: to

challenge Christian complacency with regard to the idea of a hell of eternal torment. But, in this case

uniquely, a strange pattern has clearly emerged: to wit, none of its truly energetic critics in print has thus far

condemned it for any claims actually contained in its pages. I do not mean that they have failed adequately to

address its arguments. I mean that, to this point, none has even come close to identifying what those arguments

are, let alone confuting them. Some reviews have demonstrated an almost perfect inability to grasp so much

as a single thread of its reasoning, however elementary. Probably the most exotic example of this was a
somewhat psychedelic tiptoe through the tulips written by J.P. Manoussakis, who apparently wandered over

the landscape of the text in a kind of delirium or fugue-state, haphazardly snatching up stray sentences or

phrases here and there but without any sense of their context or import (even those with a very long

philosophical pedigree, like “rational freedom”), and the result was that he ended up reviewing a book entirely

of his own imagining; it was a tour de force of accidental creativity, admittedly—a grand invention by way of

continuous misapprehension. But it was also, sadly, quite a sui generis performance. Even though the book’s

other antagonists have also tended to avoid its real philosophical, theological, and scriptural proposals and to

grapple instead with arguments of their own devising, no one else has produced anything quite so inspired (or

delightfully hallucinogenic) as Manoussakis did. Mostly, they have simply tried to distract from the text by

loudly complaining that its tone is “ill-tempered” or “abrasive.”

All right, then. There is here perhaps, if nothing else, a vivid reminder of how powerfully our subjective

intentionality shapes our perceptions of things. Anyone comparing the book’s favorable notices to the

unfavorable could be forgiven for thinking that two entirely different texts were under discussion. This is

especially true as regards the matter of “tone.” To one camp, the book’s voice is one of militant compassion,

maybe sometimes tinged with indignation; to the other, it is a seething cauldron of venom and spleen wildly

heaved in the faces of all those humble innocents who meekly cling to what is, after all, a perfectly inoffensive

item of Christian orthodoxy. Now, I have been chivalrously defended on this score by various writers, such

as Katherine Kelaidis, Jason Micheli, Alvin Kimel, Jordan Wood, and others. And, obviously, some of the

grosser mischaracterizations of the book have simply been cynical strategies for avoiding a real engagement

with the challenge it tries to pose.

Even so, I cannot help but find the constant stream of misrepresentations annoying. I have grown especially

tired of being arraigned for my allegedly intolerant invective regarding more traditional believers. Again and

again, I see myself rebuked for supposedly accusing such believers of moral imbecility or something of the

sort, even though not a single sentence in the book actually condemns anyone for anything. Admittedly, I

denounce certain ideas I find odious, and in ringingly candid language. But I do so always as a reproach aimed
at everyone at once and at no one in particular—at all Christians, Eastern and Western alike, for allowing

ourselves to be convinced that we are obliged to believe things about God that we would be ashamed to

believe about all but the worst of men.

I suppose I am partly to blame. I unwittingly made it possible for the book’s most bilious critics to tear

phrases out of their very specific settings and then to present them as insults flung at the whole of

Christianity in general, or at least at all believers in hell. It began, as far as I can tell, with a ponderously

“whimsical” piece by Douglas Farrow in First Things, which consisted entirely in roughly a dozen patently

false claims about the book’s argument, illustrated with a few orphaned clauses from its pages, followed by

two dozen fevered shrieks of frothing rage at all the things I had never actually said. Two pieces by the

American religious historian Michael McClymond were of much the same fabric, though marked by even less

philosophical sophistication. Similarly, someone called Benjamin Guyer produced a review that, while

spectacularly failing to follow so much as a single filament of the book’s case, heaped up a gaudy collection of

fragments of the text, rearranged so as to give as false an impression as possible. Perhaps the most comical

example of this approach was a column in the Wall Street Journal by the journalist Barton Swaim (whose name

makes it reasonable to suppose that he began his existence as a minor character in a Gore Vidal

novel). Swaim did not even pretend to address any of the book’s arguments, but he expended enormous

energy opportunistically pouncing on every seemingly damning turn of phrase that he could find in it pages,

wrenching it violently out of its limited frame of reference, and then falsifying its import.

In all, not a single phrase or clause or sentence adduced from the book’s pages by any one of these authors

says, in context, what they make it out to say. Neither does a single claim or characterization or assertion

attributed to me by them (regarding, say, Augustine or Wittgenstein or Latin Christianity or anything else)

correspond to what I actually wrote. Neither does any of them even vaguely describe any argument I truly

make in the book. And I do not exaggerate in saying this.

Well, then, oh my ears and whiskers, how does this happen? And what is one to do? Perhaps I should be

pleased. At least, I might flatter myself that, were those critics capable of answering any of the book’s

arguments, they would not have needed to use such tactics. But here is where the issue of intentionality

comes in. As I say, those who approve of the book see one thing in its pages, while those who hate it profess

to find quite another. On the whole, the former strike me as clearly right by any objective measure; but I

cannot say with absolute conviction that the latter are simply being dishonest (at least, consciously

dishonest). It is possible that each of them, to some degree at least, actually believes that his portrait of the

book is accurate. You see, I am beginning to suspect that this particular topic has an almost magical power to

provoke all sorts of ungovernable emotional volatilities in certain souls, of the sort that render them unable to

absorb what they are reading. It may even have the power to generate false memories. Some readers may

really think that they clearly recall the book speaking of believers in hell as “moral cretins” (a phrase

appearing nowhere in its pages).

Perhaps, then, the inability of certain critics to follow any of the book’s actual arguments is not just

obtuseness (though a bit of that, surely), but instead reflects a temperamental incapacity on their parts for

confronting any sustained assault on their own understanding of what they believe. And this, I think, is

because (to adopt my language in the book) they do not really believe what they believe they believe. Perhaps

there is a great deal of the redoubtable Freudian mechanism of “projection” at work here. Readers who feel

that the book impeaches them for some deficiency of moral intelligence are in all likelihood merely

subliminally accusing themselves and then reacting to the sting of their own consciences by accusing me of

unjustly accusing them. They are aware, at some level they rarely plumb within themselves, that they have

reconciled themselves to a belief that they know to be morally unintelligible, but cannot admit it to

themselves. They believe they are bound by faith to defend an indefensible picture of reality, one that could

not be true, morally or logically, in any possible world. And they are angry at me and my book for making

them do something explicitly that they prefer to do only implicitly and subconsciously because, in the deeper

fathoms of their consciences and intellects, they know it to be irrational and degrading. And so maybe, in the
end, I should feel honored to have been cast in the role of the superego in their fierce little interior

psychodramas.

And, as I say, I do in fact—and quite intentionally—use very strong language about certain teachings I find

abominable. I will not feign contrition on that score. Nor should I. My characterizations of the teaching of

eternal conscious torment are perfectly apt and fair, and they are directed as much at me as at any other

Christian. I know how coarsened our consciences can become when trying to justify to ourselves what we

think is required of us by faith and tradition. But, frankly, the burden of proof—and of a certain seemly

reticence—falls quite on the other side of the room in this debate. After all, why should anyone feel the need

to apologize for denouncing an idea that looks fairly monstrous from any angle, one whose principal use

down the centuries has arguably been the psychological abuse and terrorization of children?

Who, after all, is saying something more objectively atrocious, or more aggressively perverse? The person

who claims that every newborn infant enters the world justly under the threat of eternal dereliction, and that a

good God imposes or permits the imposition of a state of eternal agony on finite, created rational beings as

part of the mystery of his love or sovereignty or justice? Or the person who observes that such ideas are cruel

and barbarous and depraved? Which of these two should really be, if not ashamed of his or her words, at least

hesitant, ambivalent, and even a little penitent in uttering them? And which has a better right to moral

indignation at what the other has said? And, really, don’t these questions answer themselves?

A belief does not merit unconditional reverence just because it is old, nor should it be immune to being

challenged in terms commensurate to the scandal it seems to pose. And the belief that a God of infinite

intellect, justice, love, and power would condemn rational beings to a state of perpetual torment, or would

allow them to condemn themselves on account of their own delusion, pain, and anger, is probably worse than

merely scandalous. It may be the single most horrid notion the religious imagination has ever conceived, and

the most irrational and spiritually corrosive picture of existence possible. And anyone who thinks that such

claims are too strong or caustic, while at the same time finding the traditional notion of a hell of everlasting
suffering perfectly unobjectionable, needs to consider whether he or she is really thinking clearly about the

matter at all. If anything, my rhetoric in the book may have been far, far too mild.