David Bentley Hart’s Inconsistent Triad (2): Comparing DBH to Tom Talbott

In my previous post, I identified an inconsistent triad in the essay “God,Creation, and Evil: The Moral Meaning of creatio ex nihilo” by David Bentley Hart.

Here is Hart’s inconsistent triad:

1. God freely created all things out of nothingness
2. God is the Good itself
3. It is certain or at least possible that some rational creatures will endure eternal loss of God

The work of Thomas Talbott, author of The Inescapable Love of God, can also be viewed through and summarized by an inconsistent triad.  I’ve written about Talbott's inconsistent triad here.

Here is (a form of) Talbott’s inconsistent triad:

1. All humans are equal objects of God's unconditional love in the sense that God, being no respecter of persons, sincerely wills or desires to reconcile each one of them to himself and thus to prepare each one of them for the bliss of union with him. 
2. Almighty God will triumph in the end and successfully reconcile to himself each person whose reconciliation he sincerely wills or desires.
3. Some humans will never be reconciled to God and will therefore remain separated from him forever. 

Or to put it more succinctly:

1. God wants to "save" everyone.
2. God has the ability to "save" all that he wants to "save".
3. Some will be forever separated from God, the nature of that separation notwithstanding (eternal conscious torment, annihilation, etc.)

The parallels between Hart's and Talbott's inconsistent triads are striking.  Most striking to me, however, is how the (sometimes subtle) differences in phrasing enrich and elucidate the meanings of the first two propositions in each triad.

Hart’s 1^st proposition (that God freely created out of nothingness) corresponds with Talbott’s 2^nd proposition (that God can save all that he wants to save).  It clarifies a connection between the free creative act of God and the nature and substance of God’s “sovereignty”.  Neither of the triads argues for or against specific ways that God exercises this sovereignty, but the connection does cement the idea that creatio ex nihilo demonstrates that there is no created thing that exceeds God's creative act.  It connects beginning and end.  God is not simply sovereign overlord, God is Creator.  And not Creator meaning a sovereign overlord who has the functional power to make stuff from nothing, but Creator as the one who "calls us forth" and whose calling is grounded in an eternal telos that's never separable from the eternal nature of God.  In the words of Hart:

In the end of all things is their beginning, and only form the perspective of the end can one know what they are, why they have been made, and who the God is who called them forth from nothingness.  And in Gregory's thought, with an integrity found only also in Origen and Maximus, protology and eschatology are a single science, a single revelation disclosed in the God-man.     (God, Creation and Evil, p 16)

Hart’s 2^nd proposition (that God is the Good itself) corresponds with Talbott’s 1^st proposition (that God wants to save everyone).  It cements the connection between goodness and love, not just love as a general ideal of goodness, but as the particularity of willing the final good of the creation that God brought forth from nothing.  For many people the connection between love and goodness is perfectly obvious and goes almost without saying.  But for those who think that God's essential "goodness" need not entail a final love of all humanity, this one's for you.

So while these two inconsistent triads are worded differently, particularly the first 2 propositions, they could be combined to form a common argument: that goodness-as-love combined with sovereignty-as-creation-from-nothing means that the 3rd proposition, that some rational creatures will endure eternal loss of God, must be false.

Are DB Hart's and Talbott's inconsistent triads two ways of making the same argument?

In my next post, I'd like to look at DBH's triad in the context of theodicy.

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David Bentley Hart’s Inconsistent Triad (1)

It’d be hard to overstate how important the essay “God,Creation, and Evil: The Moral Meaning of creatio ex nihilo” by David Bentley Hart has been for me.  I’ve read it maybe 10 times and each time it yields some new insight that, having seen it, I can’t unsee it.    

Just recently I noticed something at the end of the essay that I hadn’t noticed before: an inconsistent triad.

While the essay itself is a fairly grueling (though highly rewarding) read for us non-academics, the triad itself is quite accessible.  Not only that, but in my reading the entirety of the essay is an exercise in sober semantic precision in support of the argument present in this sentence:

We are presented by what has become the majority tradition with three fundamental claims, any two of which might be true simultaneously, but never all three: that God freely created all things out of nothingness; that God is the Good itself, and that it is certain or at least possible that some rational creatures will endure eternal loss of God. (p 16)

To visually break up the three claims:

1. God freely created all things out of nothingness
2. God is the Good itself
3. It is certain or at least possible that some rational creatures will endure eternal loss of God

So the inconsistent triad is both a helpful lens through which to read the essay and the end to which the various arguments aim and find a simple and powerful expression.

Is Hart’s analysis sound?  That any two of these statements can be true but never all three? 

That’s the big question, of course.  What do you think?

In the next post I’d like to compare Hart’s inconsistent triad to that of another well-known and influential Christian universalist – Thomas Talbott.

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