Eternal Hell Does Not Exist: Says David Bentley Hart and I Agree

 

In the book That All Shall Be Saved: Heaven, Hell and Eternal Salvation, the Orthodox theologian David Bentley Hart asserts that there is no eternal Hell. 

I had an odd accumulation of ideas on the topic of an eternal Hell, but never doubted that Hell existed, even early in my life when I was not sure that God existed. Some of the loveliest poetry ever written is a travelogue of journey down through Hell, up Mount Purgatory and into Heaven itself by Dante Aligheri. 

Earlier this year I re-read Inferno and was repelled by the way Dante and Virgil his guide happily torment those already in Hell.  

Reading Hart showed my why I was so uncomfortable and gave me clear reasons that eternal Hell does not exist.  The best of these reasons is that God is going to somehow keep all of the souls that have ever been born. Hart says that was the whole intent of creation: to eventually bring everyone into eternity.  

Hart deals with the objections head on. What about Hitler? I could do not justice to his reasoning, but Hart shows the problems with believing that even Hitler will somehow be tormented eternally.  

My belief for many years was that Hell existed, but everyone in Hell chose to be there. I got this from CS Lewis' novel The Great Divorce. Hart mocks the idea that we could choose Hell and asks how anyone could take the limited information even the most brilliant person has and choose eternal Hell? He's right. We are all mostly ignorant and bound by time and space.

Earlier this year, I read That All Shall Be Saved twice. The Kindle version has more than fifty highlighted passages. I read the book with my friend Cliff and am hoping to have a larger discussion about the book in the future.  

The book is written by a Christian for Christians, but many Jews and others believe Hell exists. Some of us have quite a list of people we think should spend eternity there. For anyone who believes an eternal Hell exists, Hart's book is eye-opening. 

Since October 7, I would have happily consigned every member of HAMAS to Hell along with every Nazi and a host of other criminals. But I now believe, with Hart, that even the worst people who ever lived will not be in eternal Hell, because the kind of god who would put limited beings in an eternal Hell is not the God of Israel.  

Henry Kissenger and The Nazi Pope: Long Lives Addicted to Power

Two terrible twins in my mind and probably no one else's are Henry Kissenger and Pope Pius XII, the pope who bowed to the Nazis to preserve the Vatican and ignored the pleas of Catholics in France, England, Poland and other countries. He also never said the word Jew or acknowledged The Holocaust during World War II. The Pope's wretched performance in World War II is well documented in The Pope at War by David I. Kertzer. 

Eugenio Pacelli, Pius XII, chose preservation of The Vatican over preservation of Catholic lives.  

In 1957, Henry Kissenger wrote his best book, A World Restored--arguably the book that defined his life's work.  In that book Kissenger wrote about the Treaty of Ghent in 1814 and how it restored stability to Europe.  Kissenger decided stability was the proper goal of diplomacy. No moral considerations could stand in the way of stability: the same reasoning that Pius XII used to put the preservation of The Vatican over the lives of Catholics and Jews in Nazi-dominated Europe.

Kissenger was in his mid-30s when Pius XII died in 1958 at 82 years old.  Kissenger lived longer, reaching 100 years, but both men clung to power and relevance until their last breath.  

After his pro-Nazi war years, Pius XII conspired with surviving Nazis by supporting the "Rat Line" that got Nazis and their looted wealth out of Europe to South America after World War II.  

Kissenger in his preference for stability opened relations with China and brought great prosperity to the communist nation, assuming that the world would benefit by bringing China into the world economy.  Fifty years later, China has the second largest economy in the world and is using it to build it its Navy and Army and threaten its neighbors, most notably Taiwan.  Building up a totalitarian country leads to a more powerful totalitarian country. 

Kissenger's path to the Vietnam peace deal includes abandoning our allies and giving consent to dropping more bombs on Cambodia and Laos than America dropped on Nazi Germany and its allies during World War II. 

In his 90s, Kissenger still craved relevance. He insinuated himself into the Trump administration through Jared Kushner--giving credibility to the biggest abuser of power for personal wealth ever to work in the White House. Kushner's Saudi Sovereign Wealth deal may exceed Trump himself in abuse of power.  

Both men chose power over every moral consideration. Both strove for relevance until their dying breath. Each made the world a better place by breathing no more. 

Austria 1938--The Sudden Betrayal

 

In September I walked through this square in the center of Vienna where Hitler spoke from a balcony announcing the Anschluss (joining) of Austria and Nazi Germany.  This sudden tragedy haunted "The Sound of Music" one of the annual movies of my childhood.  

When Trump was elected, I read many books and articles about how The Holocaust happened. Each country was different.  Each was a tragedy. In some ways, Austria was the worst.

Jews in Austria, Vienna in particular, had very good lives. They lived in a country of long cosmopolitan tradition. So when the Nazis took over on March 11, 1938, the change was sudden, dramatic and terrible.  Teenagers planning to be in college the following year were in ghettos.  Many lost one or both parents to suicide or beatings. Doctors, lawyers, professors, artists, writers and others middle class professionals were broke, shunned by all, their property confiscated, humiliated in public.  

While no one could have believed in 1938 how bad The Holocaust would be, Jews in other countries had experienced years of prejudice and open violence.  German Jews knew that rural white Christians, Catholics and Jews, led the coalition that put Hitler in power, knowing that Jews would suffer and die if he took office.  Once the Nazis invaded Poland, Jews across Europe knew they were in mortal danger. They had months, sometimes years, to adjust to knowing the entire world hated them.

Austrian Jews went from citizens to pariahs overnight. Which is why, I believe, the suicide rate was so high among Austrian Jews. Their world collapsed overnight.  

As an American Jew, I can barely imagine what it felt like to be a Jew when Nazis ruled much of Europe and had millions of sympathizers here in America.  Anyone who thinks it was easy for Jews in America between the World Wars should read People Love Dead Jews by Dara Horn. 

Since 2016, I have experienced an emotional kinship with Jews under the Nazis. When Trump was elected and put the Nazi-enabler Steve Bannon in the White House, I was alarmed. When Trump winked at the Nazis in Charlottesville, I thought America would show the true Nazi basis of "America First."  The Tree of Life Synagogue shooting by a Trump lover is so far the worst violence against Jews.  

From Trump's election to October 7 of this year, I joined more than 300 protests from New York to Washington, but mainly in Philadelphia.  The only protest I have been to since October 7 was the Pro-Israel Rally on the National Mall. 

Beginning on October 7 and since, many organizations I protested with have become open Jew haters.  They have cheered HAMAS. The Jewish babies burned in their cribs, the Jewish women raped and killed, the slaughter of families in their homes is not even tragic, it is an acceptable cost.  

So I can no more ally with those groups than I can join with the Republicans who want to abandon Ukraine and support Christian Nationalism.  

Since October 7, Black Lives Matter, the Democratic Socialists of America, the World Workers Party, all of whom I have joined at protests, are now my enemy. If I am to ally with any feminist organization, I will want to see their condemnation of the barbaric violence against women on October 7. 

HAMAS celebrated their rape and torture and murder on videos they posted on social media. A transcript of one is here. 

The feeling I had on October 7 hearing BLM, DSA and other progressives is the sudden betrayal with an echo of Anschluss. Anyone who can cheer for HAMAS is the same as a swastika-wearing Nazi to me.  

  

On Tyranny 1

Do not obey in advance. Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given in times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want than offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do. 

Anticipatory obedience is a political strategy. Perhaps rulers do did not initially know that citizens were willing to compromise in this value or that principle. Perhaps a new regime did not have, did not at first. Have the direct means of influencing citizens one way or another after the German elections of 1932, which permitted Adolf Hitler to form a government or the Czechoslovak elections of 1946, where the communists were Vic. 

The next crucial step was anticipatory obedience, because enough people, in both cases voluntarily extended their services to the new leaders, Nazis and Communists alike realized they could move quickly toward full regime change. The first heedless acts of conformity could not then be reversed. 

In 1938, Adolf Hitler, by then securely in power in Germany, was threatening to annex neighboring Austria after the Austrian chancellor conceded it was the Austrian's anticipatory obedience that decided the fate of Austrian Jews. Local Austrian Nazis captured Jews and forced them to scrub the streets to remove the symbols of independent Austria. Crucially, people who were not Nazis looked on with interest and amusement. 

Nazis who had kept lists of Jewish properties stole what they could. Crucially, others who were not Nazis joined in the theft. As the political theorist Hanna Erent remembered, when the German troops invaded the country and Gentile neighbors started riots at Jewish homes, Austrian Jews began to commit suicide. The anticipatory obedience of Austrians in March 1938. Taught the high Nazi leadership what was possible. 

It was in Vienna that August that Adolf Eichmann established the Central Office for Jewish Immigration. In November 1938, following the Austrian example of March, German Nazis organized the national program known as Kristallnacht. In 1941, when Germany invaded the Soviet Union, the US took the initiative to devise the method of mass killing without orders to do so. They guessed what their superiors wanted and demonstrated that. What what was possible? It was far more than Hitler thought. 

At the very beginning, anticipatory obedience means adapting instinctively without reflecting to a new situation, to only Germans do such things, the Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram contemplating Nazi atrocities. Wanted to show that there was a particular authoritarian personality that explained why Germany behaved as they had. He devised an experiment to test the proposition, but failed to get the permission to carry it out in Germany. So we undertook it. Instead, in a Yale University building in 1961. 

At around the same time that Adolf Eichmann was being tried in Jerusalem for his part in the Nazi Holocaust of the Jews. Milgram told his subjects some Yale students some New Haven residents that they would be applying an electrical shock to other participants in an experiment about learning. In fact, the people attached to the wires on the other side of the window were in on the scheme with Milgram. And only pretended to be shocked as the subjects thought they shocked the people they thought were the participants in a learning experiment. 

They saw a horrible sight, people whom they did not know against, they whom they had no grievance. Seemed to be suffering greatly pounding the glass and complaining of heart pain. Even so, most subjects followed Milgram's instructions and continued to apply what they thought were even greater shocks until the victims appeared to die. 

Even those who did not proceed all the way to the apparent killing of their fellow human beings left without inquiring about the health of the other participants. Milgram grasped that people are remarkably receptive to new rules in a new setting. They are surprisingly willing to harm and kill others in the service of some new purpose if they are so instructed by a new authority. I found so much obedience, Milgrim remembered that I hardly saw the need for taking the experiment to Germany.

 

The Prince, Chapter 23, Avoiding Flatterers

 

The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli, Chapter 23 

In What Mode Flatterers are to be Avoided 

[Translated by Harvey Mansfield]

I do not want to leave out an important point and an error from which princes defend themselves with difficulty unless they are very prudent or make good choices. And these are the flatterers of whom courts are full. 

For men take such pleasure in their own affairs, and so deceive themselves. They defend themselves with difficulty from this plague and in trying to defend oneself from it, risks the danger of becoming contemptible, for there is no other way to guard oneself from flattery. 

Unless men understand that they do not offend you in telling the truth, but when everyone can tell you the truth, they lack reverence for you. Therefore, a prudent Prince must hold to this mode, choosing wise men in his state, and only to these should he give freedom to speak the truth to him, and of those things, only that. He asks about and nothing else. But he should ask them about everything and should listen to their opinions. 

Then he should decide by himself in his own mode. And with these councils and with each member of them. He should behave in such a mode that everyone knows that the more freely he speaks, the more he will be accepted. Aside from these, he should not want to hear anyone. He should move directly to the thing that was decided and be obstinate in his decisions. Whoever does otherwise either falls head long because of flatterers or changes, often because. 

Of the variability of views from which a low estimation of him arises. I want to bring up a modern example in this regard. Father Luke. A man of the present Emperor Maximilian, Speaking of His Majesty, told how he did not take counsel from anyone and never did anything in his own mode. This arose from holding to. Policy contrary to that given above. For the Emperor is a secretive man who does not communicate his plans to anyone, nor seek their views. But as in putting them into effect, they begin to be known and disclosed, they begin to be contradicted by those whom he has around him. And he an agreeable person, is dissuaded from them. From this it arises the things he does. On one day he destroys on another that no one ever understands what he wants or plans to do, and that he cannot. And that one cannot found oneself on his decisions. 

A Prince, therefore, should always take counsel, but when he wants, and not when others want. On the contrary, he should discourage everyone from counseling him about anything unless he asks it of them. But he should be a very broad questioner. And then in regard to the things he asked about a patient listener to the truth, indeed he should become upset when he learns that anyone has any hesitation to. Speak to him. And since many esteem that any Prince who establishes an opinion of himself as prudent is so considered not because of his nature, but because of the good counsel he has around him, without doubt, they are deceived, for this is a general rule that never fails. 

That a Prince who is not wise by himself cannot be counseled. Well, unless indeed by chance he should submit himself to one alone to govern him in everything who was a very prudent man. In this case, he could well be, but it would not last long because that governor would, in a short time, take away the state. But by taking counsel for more than one, a Prince, who is not wise, will never have United Counsel, nor know by himself how to unite them. Each one of his counselors will think of his own interest. 

He will not know how to correct them or understand them, and they cannot be found otherwise, because men will always turn out bad for you unless they have been made good by a necessity. So one concludes that good counsel. From wherever it comes, must arise from the prudence of the Prince and not the prudence of the Prince from good counsel.

Nigel's 24th Birthday

 

Nigel turns 24 today

My youngest child and youngest son is Nigel Garrison Gussman. He was born November 19, 1999, in Pittsburgh where he lived until he was six weeks old when we brought him to Lancaster. He was officially adopted a year later.

Nigel lived in Lancaster until 2021 when he moved to Minneapolis, Minnesota, where he lives now. His sister Lisa Stanton lives just a few miles away. 

Nigel is named after 1992 Formula 1 World Champion Nigel Mansell and the writer Garrison Keillor, host of Prairie Home Companion and author of several books, and his Mom's favorite pop culture personality.

Like me, Nigel is a fan of Formula 1 racing. We have both followed and cheered for 7-time champion Lewis Hamilton since his rookie year in 2006.  We are both hoping he will get one more championship before he retires at the end of the 2025 season.

Nigel raced bicycles and played basketball when he was in school and coached middle school basketball recently in Minneapolis. 

We won our age groups in Sunbury

At the start in Farmersville

Nigel rode the tandem with me beginning at 5 years old

Nigel was great at cheering. He cheered for Lisa on every lap at 3 years old.

Dressed up for a dinner

Visiting the Major Dick Winters Memorial in Ephrata

Family photo almost a decade ago

Visiting his brother JacariWaddell

5 years old

With favorite stuffed animal Elmo

Happy 24th Birthday Nigel!!!

Transcript of HAMAS Terrorist Bragging About Murder--To His Parents

From the podcast Making Sense by Sam Harris:

There’s a piece of audio from October 7th that many people have commented on. It’s a recording of a cell phone call that a member of Hamas made to his family, while he was in the process of massacring innocent men, women, and children. The man is ecstatic, telling his father and mother, and I think brother, that he has just killed ten Jews with his own hands. He had just murdered a husband and wife and was now calling his family from the dead woman’s phone. Here's a partial transcript of what he said: 

“Hi dad — Open my ‎WhatsApp now, and you’ll see all those killed. Look how many I killed with my own hands! Your son killed Jews!” 

And his dad says “May God protect you.” 

“Dad, I’m talking to you from a Jewish woman’s phone. I killed her, and I killed her husband. I killed ten with my own hands! Dad, ten with my own hands! Dad, open WhatsApp and see how many I killed, dad. Open the phone, dad. I’m calling you on WhatsApp. Open the phone, go. Dad, I killed ten. Ten with my own hands. Their blood is on their hands. [I believe that is a reference to the Quran] Put mom on.” 

And the father says, “Oh my son. God bless you!” 

“I swear ten with my own hands. Mother, I killed ten with my own hands!” 

And his father says, “May God bring you home safely.” 

 “Dad, go back to WhatsApp now. Dad, I want to do a live broadcast.” 

And the mother now says, “I wish I was with you.” 

“Mom, your son is a hero!” And then, apparently talking to his comrades he yells, “Kill, kill, kill, kill them.” 

And then his brother gets on the line, asking where he is. And he tells his brother the name of the town and then he says “I killed ten! Ten with my own hands! I’m talking to you from a Jew’s phone!” 

And the brother says, “You killed ten?” 

“Yes, I killed ten. I swear!” Then he says, “I am the first to enter on the protection and help of Allah! [Surely that’s another scriptural reference] Hold your head up, father. Hold your head up! See on WhatsApp those that I killed. Open my WhatsApp.” 

And his brother says, “Come back. Come back.” 

And he says, “What do you mean come back? There’s no going back. It is either death or victory! My mother gave birth to me for the religion. What’s with you? How would I return? Open WhatsApp. See the dead. Open it.” 

And the mother sounds like she is trying to figure out how to open WhatsApp… 

“Open WhatsApp on your phone and see the dead, how I killed them with my own hands.” 

And she says, “Well, promise to come back.”