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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