Hart structures his case around four “meditations” on the nature of God, judgement, human personhood and freedom. Woven through all four, some crucial arguments recur. First, it is rationally incoherent to suppose any rational agent created for relationship with the Creator could freely reject God “absolutely and forever”. Second, an eternal rejection by God, specifically an eternal state of torment, cannot be a just punishment or just fate for any finite creature, however depraved. Even if such a fate is deemed compatible with an abstract form of justice, for God to permit any actual instance of eternal torment to follow from God’s act of creation is incompatible with divine goodness. Moreover, if evil has any enduring existence or if anything God creates ultimately fails to reach its fulfilment, God would not be God (that is, metaphysically absolute, the plenitude of being, “all-in-all”). Hart also offers arguments from Scripture, which he sees as overwhelmingly universalist. References to Hell in biblical eschatology refer to the penultimate horizons of history, not the ultimate horizon of eternity. He draws support from theological tradition almost exclusively in Eastern sources. His chief heroes are Origen, Gregory of Nyssa, Isaac of Nineveh and Maximus the Confessor.

- Vernon Watkins, Finding Grace Under Hellfire, TLS OCt 8, 2020