All Must be Saved Because We are Who We Love

Hell for some would be hell for Jesus

The smell of chicken thighs browning in a cast iron skillet with olive oil and garlic, onions, and peppers sautéing next to them, reminds me every time of my grandmother. Every old guy who walks out of church on Sunday morning smelling of Old Spice recalls my grandpa. My handwriting, down to the same black felt tip pen, is his careful square engineer’s script. The musty air of every Goodwill recalls my first parish in New Jersey and its lay leader, Irma, who steadied my hand and encouraged me to trust that maybe Jesus had in fact called me to preach.

One of the people in my constellation of memories is the theologian David Bentley Hart. My first theology teacher at the University of Virginia, he opened up to me a breadth and depth of Christian thinking that flummoxed me, captivated my imagination as a new Christian, and fortuitously set me on a different path than the one I had anticipated. Because I know his public reputation among some readers and critics is contrary, I should note that I have, over the years, found David Bentley Hart to be a warm, winsome, compassionate, and thoughtful mentor. He has been unfailing in following up to inquire about my health. He often ribs me good-naturedly about the deficiences of National League baseball and how my Washington Nationals would scarcely be more than a bottom feeding team in the AL. The passion of his prose and the ferocity of his humor stem from an authentic zeal for the good and the beautiful. He can be uncompromising with sloppy thinking because theology isn’t merely an academic abstraction but can and often does have monstrous consequences for how we conceive of God and our neighbors, especially the poor and the vulnerable.

The person I am is literally inconceivable apart from him or the others who have taught and formed me. They are good examples of how none of us are persons in isolation from others.

My point:

We are who we’ve loved.

That I am not my self in isolation from others bears directly upon this self’s eternity.

From this incontrovertible axiom follows an equally incontestable assertion:

Hell for some would be hell for all.