The "Eternal Conscious Torment" Model of Hell as an "Eschatologization" of the Economy of Sacrificial Order of Antiquity
This is going to be a somewhat long post, as I'm going to quote rather long sections of David Bentley Hart's The Hidden and the Manifest.
Going through two of his essays, how he frames the Easter event in terms of the clash of two "types" or "orders" of sacrifice shows to me just how radical the Gospel proclamation is and why it is entirely cogent to hold a universalist position. It also sheds light on why he so much dislikes the idea of Eternal Conscious Torment:
In Christian thought, these themes—sacrifice and judgment, life from death and the life of the age to come—converge in a way that radically transforms them. Indeed, one might even say that, on the cross of Christ, two distinct orders of sacrifice uniquely coincide, and that at Easter one order triumphs completely over the other. From a purely pagan perspective, after all, the cross is most definitely a kind of sacrifice; within a certain vision of the cosmos and of society, the immolation of the sacrificial victim and the execution of the criminal belong to the same “economy”: the preservation of “sacred” order (of the city, the empire, and the gods) through the destruction of the cause of social instability, and through the surrender of the particular to the universal. At the same time, the cross—for Christians—represents the perfection not only of Christ’s self-outpouring life of love, but also of the entire “sacrificial” logic of Israel’s Day of Atonement: an offering up of all things in love to God that allows us to draw near to him, and to be reconciled with him, under the shelter of his mercy. This latter order of sacrifice, again, is already an act of moral submission to the judgment of God, and of faith in his love, and as such is not an attempt to pay God tribute or “purchase” some portion of his power or secure some sort of abstract “credit” stored up in the absolute; it is, rather, the restoration of a communion with the divine glory, and what it asks of God is not merely the exchange of palpable goods for some imaginary sacral authority, but a return of all that has been lost in sin and death. And, at Easter, it is this latter order of oblation that God vindicates, while the former order is revealed as falsehood, nothing more than violence legitimating itself through more violence, a thing damnable to God. Another way of phrasing this is to say that, on the cross and at the empty tomb, two orders of judgment converge, and that, again, one is raised up by God as the true form of his justice, the other is overturned with an eschatological finality. Christ is condemned to death by the duly appointed authorities of his age, whose verdicts are no more than proper exercises of political prudence and responsible governance. And the crucifixion is an expression of a particular sort of “sacrificial justice,” which is always willing to destroy the individual for the sake of social equilibrium; it is a perfect epitome of the legal, religious, and political rationality by which human society sustains and justifies itself. Yet God’s verdict entirely reverses that of Christ’s judges. Rather than confirm us in our devotion to the economy of social order, and our obedience to certain “tragic necessities,” Easter reveals that divine justice is on the side of the particular, the rejected, the victim we are willing to offer up to the greater good.
For Hart, at least as I interpret him, there is no abandonment of anyone, no individual is given up, no one is sacrificed for the sake of the collective in God's salvation, and it also follows that the multitude is not given up for the particular either. God embraces all, any deviation would be God endorsing the very sacrificial order the resurrection condemned. Here's how this line of thinking reappears in his other essay The Moral Meaning of Creatio ex nihilo:
Let us imagine instead that only one soul will perish eternally, and all others enter into the peace of the kingdom. Nor need we think of that soul as guiltless, like Vanya’s helpless child, or even as mildly sympathetic. Let it be someone utterly despicable—say, Hitler. Even then, no matter how we understand the fate of that single wretched soul in relation to God’s intentions, no account of the divine decision to create out of nothingness can make its propriety morally intelligible. This is obvious, of course, in predestinarian systems, since from their bleak perspective, manifestly, that poor, ridiculous, but tragically conscious puppet who has been consigned to the abyss exists for no other purpose than the ghastly spectacle of divine sovereignty.
But, then, for the redeemed, each of whom might just as well have been denied efficacious grace had God so pleased, who is that wretch who endures God’s final wrath, forever and ever, other than their surrogate, their redeemer, the one who suffers in their stead—their Christ? Compared to that unspeakable offering, that interminable and abominable oblation of infinite misery, what would the cross of Christ be? How would it be diminished for us? And to what? A bad afternoon? A temporary indisposition of the infinite? And what would the mystery of God becoming man in order to effect a merely partial rescue of created order be, as compared to the far deeper mystery of a worthless man becoming the suffering god upon whose perpetual holocaust the entire order of creation finally depends?
The Hidden and the Manifest; God, Creation and Evil: The Moral Meaning of Creatio Ex Nihilo. Pg. 1233-1235.
Caricatures of Calvin aside (I know reformed folk love Calvin), you can still see his point. For Hart, for one person to be lost, no matter how wicked, would be to exact a "trade": the everlasting life of one made in the image of God, which by the way is not quantifiable, for the multitude; which incidentally, is the same logic behind the sacrificial order the resurrection supposedly condemns, now projected unto God Himself, in the Christian Eschatology. This is why, I believe, Hart reacts so violently to Eternal Conscious Torment, and why many turn away from the faith after struggling with the idea.
I see a lot of articles condemning universalism without addressing these issues, and it sometimes vexes me when I read them. They often fail to engage with the actual argument. I hope this helps in the discussion.
I had to edit this a couple of times after posting due to some issues popping up, using my browser infact. The wordpress app can be frustrating on my phone. I genuinely hope this post can contribute to the discussion on universal salvation. Thanks for reading.