Theopedia

David Bentley Hart

Overview

David Bentley Hart (born 1965) is an Eastern Orthodox theologian, philosopher, and translator, best known outside Orthodox circles for That All Shall Be Saved (2019), a book-length argument for Christian universalism, the position that everyone is eventually saved.1 Reformed reviewers have engaged that book’s arguments directly and at length, chiefly on the ground that its underlying, privative conception of sin cannot be squared with Scripture’s own language for evil and the will.2

Life and Ministry

Hart was born February 20, 1965, in Howard County, Maryland, and converted to Eastern Orthodoxy at twenty-one from an Anglican upbringing.1 He holds a BA in interdisciplinary study from the University of Maryland, an MPhil in theology from the University of Cambridge, and a PhD in religious studies from the University of Virginia.1 He has taught at the University of Virginia, the University of St. Thomas (Minnesota), Duke Divinity School, Loyola College in Maryland, and Providence College, where he held the Robert J. Randall Chair in Christian Culture; he later held the Danforth Chair at Saint Louis University (2014-2015) and has been a Templeton Fellow at the University of Notre Dame’s Institute for Advanced Study since 2015.1

Theological Contribution

Classical theism and aesthetics

Hart’s earlier work, The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth (2003), argues that beauty is not a decorative addition to Christian doctrine but belongs to theology’s own method and substance.3 Writers drawing on the Reformed tradition of divine simplicity have quoted his The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss (2013) for its blunt statement of the doctrine’s stakes: “A denial of divine simplicity is tantamount to atheism.”4 Craig Carter credits Hart with coining the term “monopolytheism” for a god who is merely the greatest of many beings within a shared order, rather than the transcendent Creator of everything that is not God.5 Hart has also published his own translation of the New Testament (2017), rendering several passages in ways that depart from standard English versions.2

Christian universalism

That All Shall Be Saved: Heaven, Hell, and Universal Salvation (2019) argues that an eternal hell is incompatible with God’s goodness and with the freedom of a rational creature.2 Robert Golding’s Themelios review lays out Hart’s case as four connected arguments. Since God creates ex nihilo and wills everything toward a good end, and since his will is identical with his own perfectly good nature, an eternal hell would mean a perfectly good God’s creative act terminates in genuine, irreversible evil, which Hart holds is impossible; hell must therefore be temporary and purgative, “a place that some go but all leave.”2 Multiple New Testament passages using “all” and “the world” in connection with salvation (for example Rom. 5:18-19, John 12:32, 1 John 2:2), together with the range of Greek terms translated “hell” and “eternal” (Gehenna, Hadēs, Tartaros, aiōnios), support a reading in which final punishment is not everlasting.2 Because human persons are, in Hart’s account, “subsistences of relationality” rather than self-contained individuals, the saints in heaven could not be whole while loved ones remain lost, which counts against a hell that is ever final.2 And a rational creature that truly perceives the Good (God) cannot, Hart argues, finally will against it; every act of sin, traced to its root, is really a misdirected desire for God, which means no one is capable of the fully informed, free rejection an eternal hell would require.2

Golding’s review, an expanded version of an article he first published in 2021, answers each argument in turn from a Reformed perspective. He argues that Hart’s privative conception of sin and evil, “the parasitic unfolding of evil” or an “ontological wasting disease” rather than a willful, ethical rejection of God, cannot account for Genesis 3, where Eve perceives the forbidden fruit itself as good, or for the New Testament’s own active language for evil, such as Ephesians 6:11-12’s “rulers… authorities… cosmic powers over this present darkness.”2 On the lexical argument, Golding follows N. T. Wright in reading Paul’s universal “all” language as referring to all classes of people (Jew and Gentile together) rather than every individual, and notes that Hart’s own concession that the Greek aïdios carries “the intrinsic meaning of ‘eternal’” goes unapplied to Jude 6, a passage using that word for the everlasting chains of fallen angels.2 Against Hart’s account of personhood, Golding argues the position is closer to Neoplatonic monism than to a Christian doctrine of the person.2 Against Hart’s argument from freedom, Golding draws on Jonathan Edwards’s distinction between desiring a particular good and desiring “Being in general,” arguing a creature can rightly perceive who God is and still, by a willful and culpable turn of the will, hate him: “an unbeliever can properly perceive God but have no desire for God because God’s justice demands the eradication of cherished sin.”2

Historical Significance

That All Shall Be Saved has drawn sustained Reformed and evangelical criticism since its 2019 publication. Golding’s Themelios article is a revised, expanded version of one he first published in 2021, and the book was still drawing Reformed responses years after its release.2 Golding traces Hart’s argument to his Eastern Orthodox theological background, including a Gregory-of-Nyssa-style privative account of evil and the essence/energies distinction, and treats the underlying disagreement as one over how sin and evil are defined, not one Scripture settles on lexical grounds alone.2

Related Doctrines

References

  1. Wikipedia, s.v. “David Bentley Hart,” accessed September 28, 2026, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Bentley_Hart. The Theopedia Library holds no dedicated biography of Hart; this entry was the only source available for these uncontroversial biographical facts (dates, education, posts). ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4

  2. Robert Golding, “The Devil Is Not a Christian: Critiquing Christian Universalism as Presented by David Bentley Hart,” Themelios 49, no. 3 (2024): 677-94. ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5 ↩6 ↩7 ↩8 ↩9 ↩10 ↩11 ↩12 ↩13

  3. Samuel G. Parkison, Irresistible Beauty: Beholding Triune Glory in the Face of Jesus Christ (Fearn, Ross-shire: Christian Focus, 2021), chap. 2, quoting David Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003), 15, 17-18. ↩

  4. Matthew Barrett, None Greater: The Undomesticated Attributes of God (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2019), chap. 8, quoting David Bentley Hart, The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013). ↩

  5. Craig A. Carter, Contemplating God with the Great Tradition: Recovering Trinitarian Classical Theism (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2021), chap. 7. ↩