Thread by @postbarthian

"The God in whom the majority of Christians throughout history have processed belief appears to be evil (at least, judging by the dreadful things they habitually say about him." #DBHart #ThatAllShallBeSaved

David Bentley Hart argues the "broad mainstream" of Christians "not exclusively in the West" … "reconcile" the "repellant notion that all humans are at conception already guilty of a transgression that condemns them justly to eternal separation from God and eternal suffering"

And "in this doctrine's extreme form, every newborn infant belongs to the massa damnata [mass of perdition] hateful in God's eyes from the first moment of existence" #DBHart #DBH

"Really, no one should be told this wicked claim: Gaze for a while into the eyes of a newborn baby, and then try to believe earnestly and lovingly in such a God. If you find you are able to do so, then your religion has corrupted your conscience."

"The very notion of 'inherited guilt' is logical absurdity rather on the order of a 'square circle.'"

#DBHart also criticized infants' limbo (limbus infantium) "which mitigates but does not dispell the doctrine's moral idiocy"

#DBHart then praises Eastern theologians like Origen for their early universalism and criticizes Western theologians like Augustine and Calvin for their original sin and predestination theology, and Western missionaries desperate to save as many people "from God".

"When Augustine lamented the tenderheartedness, the misericordia, that made Origen believe that demons, heathens, and … unbaptized babies … be spared the torments of eternal fire, he made clear how the moral imagination must bend, lacerate and twist … to absorb such beliefs."

There is more to add, and I have some criticism too. So stay tuned.

#DBHart retells the story of "poor Francis Xavier, dying of exhaustion trying to pluck as many infants as possible from the flames of God's wrath"

And "Calvin in telling us that hell is copiously populated with infants not a cubit long."

#DBHart in a backhanded way praises reformed theology for it's consistency in ita doctine of Grace and predestination, and for explaining that hell is a necessary display of the powerful wrath of God.

And because reformed theology for not justifying he'll by appealing to an incoherent model of freedom.

Such as one that argues that a "father might reasonably allow his deranged child to thrust her face into a fire out of tender regard for her moral autonomy."

#DBHart in a coyly admits comments that he could retreat into Eastern orthodoxy and dismiss Western theology (predestination, substitutionary atonement, original sin) as barbarianism

And there you have the first half of the book. It really is an argument for universalism that strives to fit within Eastern orthodoxy and dismiss the last 1500 years of theological development.

The book consistently uses male pronouns for God. Considering his flowery and pontifical language, this is intentional.

David Bentley Hart consistently and negatively caracaturizes Western theologians by Augustine, Aquinas and Calvin with virtually no citations.

Generalizing Reformed theology by Calvin alone and ignoring theological Giants such as Friedrich Schleiermacher, Karl Barth and Jürgen Moltmann is a crippling oversight to this book. Especially since they have provided a more compelling argument for universalism

DBH describes original sin as inherited guilt, suggesting that it's a sexually transmitted disease and this is not OS. And looking at an innocent infant does not prove pelagian was right and Augustine was wrong

Karl Barth did not understand original sin this way. He described OS as a rebellion by the first person among equals and that all people likewise rebel likewise of their own volition.

And DBH fails to explain the human condition which is a suffering universally experienced in this cruel world that we all inevitable contribute to the horrors that impacts us all.

Additionally, double predestination is the mechanism that rescues all God's children from falling face first into the fire, and without this sovereignty then DBH has entered into a incoherent moral freedom model that he loathes

And likewise, DBH does mention Karl Barth and a few phrases from CD IV/1 later in the book such as "judge judged in our place" and Jesus as God gone into "a far country" for us.

So I will wait to comment more than this last criticism that it is the wrath of God in Jesus that is the very purging fire that corrects the wrongs of this cruel world. It is God's no to evil that reveals a hidden Yes. A father who says "no you will not say no to my love for you"