Many feel that David Bently Hart’s That All Shall Be Saved: Heaven, Hell, and Universal Salvation is the best case in our day against an everlasting hell and for universal salvation. Although I can’t tackle these important questions here, I do want to take issue with Hart’s oversimplification of God’s fatherhood in the quote below, as well as his misapplication of Matthew 7:9-11 to a wider audience than Matthew’s context allows.
“Sometimes childish imagery—even child anthropomorphisms—can have a certain convenient power for elucidating things that should be clear already, but often are not. Take a clear example: Christ instructs his followers to think on his analogy of a human father, and to feel safe in assuming that God’s actions toward them will display something like—but also something far greater than—paternal love.” ‘Is it not the case that no man among you, if his son should ask for a loaf of bread, would give him a stone? Or, if he should ask for a fish, would give him a serpent? If you, therefore, who are wicked, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more with your Father in the heavens give good things to those who ask him’ (Matthew 7:9-11; cf. Luke 11:11-13)… It is perfectly reasonable, then, to allow this similitude a particularly privileged status when trying to think about God’s relationship to his creatures. But perhaps in order to understand this fully, we must force ourselves to reason in a childlike way. We can then at least gain some sense of what not to expect from God. For instance, a father who punishes his child for any purpose other than the child’s correction and moral improvement, and who fails to do so only reluctantly, is a poor father. One who brutally beats his child, or wantonly inflicts needless pain of any kind upon his child, is a contemptible monster. And one who surrenders his child to fate, even if that fate should consist in the entirely ‘just’ consequences of his child’s choices and actions, is an altogether unnatural father—not a father at all really in the most trivial biological sense.”
David Bently Hart, That All Shall Be Saved: Heaven, Hell, & Universal Salvation (Yale University Press, 2019) 53-54.
Here are my issues with this quote:
1. Hart oversimplifies what it means to be fathered by God. Although what Hart says is provocative and has some appeal, it misleads as he conflates two very different things: the universal fatherhood of God (something for all) and the redemptive fatherhood of God (something for some). In doing so, he does the opposite of what many evangelicals do or have done in denying the universal fatherhood of God altogether. As I’ve written here and here, as well as in chapter three of Irreplaceable: Recovering God’s Heart for Dads, I believe that the conservative denial of this important doctrine has been reactionary, wrong, and contributed to our lack of civility, as well as our inability to listen well, appreciate diversity, and love our enemies.
Hart, on the other hand, has no problem with the universal fatherhood of God but, again, conflates the universal fatherhood of God with the redemptive fatherhood of God so that there is no longer any distinction between the two. This, then, allows him to make his case that all shall be saved in the end. In other words, if all are God’s children, then all are also full beneficiaries of his paternal love– a love that has “total, ceaseless abandon.” But this is not what the whole of Scripture teaches, nor is it what Matthew 7:9-11 is saying.
2. Hart distorts Matthew 7:9-11 by widening its application beyond the narrower audience it was given to. As part of the Sermon on the Mount, these verses were given specifically to Jesus’ “disciples” (5:1), not the “crowds” (4:25). In other words, in context, Jesus’ words are limited to those who have embraced his rule, not all “the Gentiles” (6:32). And so, the things that Hart so aptly describes as “what not to expect from God” should be applied only to the “all” of John 1:12—those that have or will experience the redemptive fatherhood of God:
“But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God…”
John 1:12, NRSVUE