Reflections on Balthasar's "Dare We Hope That All Men Be Saved?"

The question of how many will be saved is a perennial theological question: “​​And someone said to him, ‘Lord, will those who are saved be few?’” (Luke 13:23). Evidently, there has been concern over how many will be saved since the very beginning of Christianity and there are conflicting sentiments in the New Testament about what the actual number will look like. Jesus Himself uses language at points that might imply that only a few are saved, such as when He says that Christians should “strive to enter through the narrow door … for many, I tell you, will seek to enter and will not be able” (Luke 13:24-25). However, St. Paul uses language, at points, that has a much more hopeful and inclusive outlook. For example, he declares in his first letter to the Corinthians that just “as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive,” which could be plainly interpreted as a strong universalist statement if the word ‘all’ is emphasized (1 Corinthians 15:22). Moreover, in his epistle to the Colossians, St. Paul says that within Christ “all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross” (Colossians 1:19-20). Again, another verse which could imply that all people will be marked among the elect.

Nevertheless, the Catholic tradition has, typically, opted for the doctrine of particular salvation, where some people will be damned, although the Church has never made a judgment on whether a specific person is in hell, not even Judas (Dulles 1). In the early Church there were Church fathers who seem to have held to some form of “apokatastasis” which is “the universal restoration of all things” (Dulles 1). These figures include “Clement of Alexandria, Origen, Gregory Nazianzen, and Gregory of Nyssa” (Dulles 1). However, through late antiquity, the medieval period, and into the 20th century, the dominant view among Catholics, especially saints and theologians, was that many would be damned. To pick an example from the Counter Reformation, “Peter Canisius and Robert Bellarmine … were convinced that most of the human race is lost” (Dulles 1). 

In the 20th century, though, there was a renewed interest in the question of salvation which led Hans Urs von Balthasar to think about heaven and hell in fresh terms for the modern world. He speaks of the duality within the New Testament, a duality which characterizes the whole Catholic tradition to a large extent, of the concrete possibility“of being lost for all eternity” and of God’s will, and ability, to save all men” (Balthasar 9). The hermeneutic, as it were, that Balthasar uses to connect these two series of, seemingly, opposed propositions is love. This hermeneutic can be applied to the New Testament, the Church fathers, and hell to understand the relationship between God’s justice and mercy. What this hermeneutical reading of these three aspects of Catholicism yields, for Balthasar, an understanding where salvation and damnation are two reactions to God’s love, one embracing, while the other rejecting and also reminds Christians of their duty to hope for the salvation of all.

The New Testament’s, prima facie, conflicting “pre-Easter” and “post-Easter” passages on salvation and damnation can be made more intelligible by reading both kinds of texts through love. Even a cursory reading of the New Testament will discover that there are conflicting, apparently, passages about salvation. This fact is present in the words of Jesus Himself. For example, Jesus says in Matthew that “he will say to those on his left,” those who did not follow the Way of Christ “‘depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels’” (Matthew 25:41). However, He also says that “when” He is “lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself,” which has a much more universalist tone than Christ’s words in Matthew (John 12:32). Such conflicting statements, from the very mouth of the Lord no less, seem to render a cohesive picture of salvation and damnation a near impossible task, but Balthasar did not think so. He began his attempt of reconciliation by noting that there are pre-Easter and post-Easter texts in the New Testament. He writes that “the pre-Easter Jesus … uses … language and images that were familiar to the Jews of that time … whereas certain reflections by Paul and John clearly look back upon all that happened to Jesus—to his life, death on the Cross and Resurrection—and, in so doing, consider and formulate this totality from a post-Easter perspective” (Balthasar 9). This distinction is crucial because one could say that the pre-Easter texts exist within the Old Covenant, which bound the Jews to the law, whereas the post-Easter texts occur after the establishment of the New Covenant, which binds all men to love. The hermeneutic of love, however, makes sense of both sets of passages as it reads the pre-Easter texts as an image of what comes about as a result of rejecting God’s Love, while the post-Easter texts are the result of embracing God’s Love. In the Old Covenant, where the pre-Easter texts are found, God’s Love had not yet been revealed through the Cross and Resurrection so people were not able to fully comprehend a message of pure love and bliss since these things had not yet been revealed to them. Thus, images of punishment and torment were necessary to illustrate what will happen to those who reject God. However, the purest display of sin in the Cross made the consequences of sin very clear and the triumph of Love, which is the Resurrection, revealed the all-embracing Love of God, which is why the post-Easter texts talk in more detail of the beauty of God’s Love. The consequence of the welcoming and accepting of God’s Love could now be discussed as His Love for humanity had now been fully revealed. Thus, these pre-Easter and post-Easter texts illustrate the only two reactions towards God’s Love: rejection or acceptance.

Following suit, interpreting the Church fathers, as well as subsequent saints and great theologians, through the hermeneutic of love generates a more cohesive picture of their views on salvation and damnation. Debates over the population of hell date back to the early centuries of the Church. What may be surprising to some contemporary Christians is that universalism was seen as a legitimate position as not only did Origen hold to it, who was later condemned, but also “Clement of Alexandria, Gregory of Nyssa, Didymus the Blind and Jerome prior to his feud with Rufinus” as well as “Gregory Nazianzen, and Maximus the Confessor,” all of whom are now recognized as saints (Balthasar 18). However, this position fell out of favor as a result of it, seemingly, being condemned at the Fifth Ecumenical Council and Augustine “interprets the relevant texts in such a way as to show that he … knows … the outcome of divine judgment … and all those bowing to his authority … will become knowers in the same sense, taking this knowledge … to construct their further speculations about God’s twofold predetermination” (Balthasar 19). St. Augustine’s interpretation of New Testament passages which reference hell makes it so that hell is a place active torment and punishment by God, as shown in his City of God: “In the City of God, an entire book (21) is devoted to punishments in hell, and every possible opening that might enable the “compassionate” to deny the fact of a hell populated not only by devils but also by people is carefully plugged” (Balthasar 19).

Balthasar finds issues with both the universalists of the early Church and St. Augustine. The universalists have a tendency to see God’s Love so powerful that it can overwhelm human freedom, resulting in a kind of optimistic Christian determinism. Augustine, on the other hand, places too heavy an emphasis on the punishment owed to the wicked such that the Love of God, especially as it is directed towards the damned, can be obfuscated. The solution, in Balthasar’s eyes, is to return to an understanding of Christian love which accounts for human freedom. This is the Love of God, which can be painful to those who reject Him because it is everlasting, but be blissful to those who love God also because it is everlasting. Moreover, this attitude of Christian love applied towards others requires that Christians hope for the salvation of all. As Balthasar articulates “Thomas Aquinas taught that ‘one can hope for eternal life for the other as long as one is united with him through love,’ and from which of our brothers would it be permissible to withhold this love?” (Balthasar 68).

Finally, Balthasar’s understanding of hell as a consequence of the rejection of God’s Love, which is always on offer, illuminates the fundamental nature of hell in a way which can be heard by modern man. In his Short Discourse on Hell, Balthasar portrays hell as a place of torment, not because of God’s vindictive wrath, but because of the damned’s interior choice to reject Love. Hell is a place where the “consuming fire” of God’s Love burns not with passion, but pain as hell is for those who remain in the natural state of man: people “who care not one iota for that love” the “unsurpassable love” of God and “have absolutely no conception of its dimensions and are, almost, happy if someone wishes to remove the burden of our guilt before God from us and carry it himself” (Balthasar 59). This conception of hell, where it is the result of an obstinate refusal of God’s unearned offer of salvation, enables the notion to be consumed by modern man. Modern man desires to take any chance he can get to reject religious truth on the basis of a doctrine’s obvious imbecility, and hell is a doctrine which he tends to use this rebuttal against. However, Balthasar’s conception of hell does not view the torment therein as some comic torture by God, but the result of an interior decision to reject him. His conception forces modern man to reckon with his own interior dispositions and see whether or not his refusal of God’s Love is justified.

In conclusion, Balthasar’s central insight in Dare We Hope and his Short Discourse on Hell, is that Catholic soteriology, and the related doctrines of heaven and hell, need to be framed within the idea of love. “God is love” and so any theological concepts must acknowledge this reality in some way, otherwise they risk losing their validity as Christian doctrines and, consequently, their truth value (1 John 4:16). Thus, Balthasar applies this truth to seemingly opposed lines of thought in the Christian tradition, specifically as they appear in the New Testament, the Church’s saints and theologians, and the doctrine of hell itself. These lines of thought either emphasize the punitive, just punishment delivered to the wicked as the righteous consequence of their actions, or God’s infinite love, mercy and compassion which can redeem all men. By reading these lines of thought through love, Balthasar reminds modern Christians that the most fundamental aspect of reality is love and so these lines of thought must be interpreted as possible reactions to God’s love. Therefore, hell, properly understood, is not a place of active torment by God upon the wicked, but the horrendous result of a persistent rejection of God’s salvific love. This framing of hell as “locked on the inside” thwarts modern efforts to dismiss hell as a sadistic medieval or antique fantasy and forces modern man to look inward and confront his own active resistance to God (Eyre 1). Balthasar’s vision of hell, and of salvation more generally, makes the doctrine relevant to modern man and thus forces him to engage with Christianity, despite his desire to ignore it.

Works Cited

Balthasar, Hans Urs Von. Dare We Hope: “That All Men Be Saved”? ; With, a Short Discourse on Hell. Ignatius Press, 1988.

Dulles, Cardinal Avery. “The Population of Hell.” First Things, 1 May 2003, www.firstthings.com/article/2003/05/the-population-of-hell.

Eyre, Stephen. “C.S. Lewis on Heaven and Hell.” C.S. Lewis Institute, 8 Sept. 2018, www.cslewisinstitute.org/resources/c-s-lewis-on-heaven-and-hell/.

Suggs, M. Jack, et al. The Oxford Study Bible: Revised English Bible with the Apocrypha. Oxford University Press, 1992.