Universal salvation, argues David Bentley Hart, is more than wishful thinking. It is the conviction, expounded in his latest work, That All Shall Be Saved: Heaven, Hell, and Universal Salvation, that no human being will be confined to hell forever, and that all persons will be finally reconciled with God.
Always a minority among the Christian faithful, universalists from the beginning have been accused of trading intellectual rigor for the whims of emotion. Augustine dismissed the idea of universal salvation as mere sentimentalism. The “merciful-hearted,” as he condescendingly dubbed them, believed that all sinners will be saved simply because they wanted to believe it.
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