The Bible doesn’t give you imagery of some other place than this world. In the Old Testament, the New Testament, in the Prophets, in Paul—the only image of salvation that there is, is cosmic. It’s always not just human beings praising God but all the animals of the land and the sea. It’s a restored creation. It has a new Jerusalem in it—that imagery of a purified Jerusalem descending to earth. There is no notion of going to some ethereal heaven apart from the rest of creation.
The imagery is of a renewed world, a renewed cosmos in which everything—mineral, vegetable, animal, human—is present. The ground of all nature is personal presence. That’s more original than everything else. I think that is a reality that one can confirm in experience not just through some sort of set of metaphysical commitments.
It’s clear that, when you interact with animals, you’re interacting with personal beings. I don’t give a damn how offensive that is to anyone in the tradition. You are dealing with creatures that have consciousness, that have identity, that have (to some degree) personality, so they are spiritual beings. Any attempt to deny that is simply based on a rather childish fixation on a notion of what constitutes proper human dignity. The notion that they are somehow excluded from the universal dispensation of a new creation seems to me, self-evidently, a rather squalid picture of things. Those who have owned a dog know who that dog is—unlike every other dog in many ways—that he or she has little idiosyncrasies or habits …you know if this dog is excessively timid. You are, in all of nature, always confronted with a kind of personal presence. I tend to think that here [Sergei] Bulgakov is right: all of nature, all of creation, is in its inmost essence always already personal. Its destiny can’t be the destiny of a machine that merely collapses into dust at the end of its utility. Apokatastasis literally means restoration of all things, and all things would seem to include all things.
This is from a short video clip of a forthcoming interview with David Bentley Hart that will be included within a larger documentary from what I’ve heard.
The term apokatastasis is used in the New Testament just once (in Acts 3:21) but is also talked about by many early church fathers in relation to Paul’s reference, in 1 Corinthians 15:28, to Christ subjecting himself to God so “that God may be all in all.” I’m tempted here to reflect on the similarities and differences between David Bentley Hart’s vision of the eschaton and that of N. T. Wright. Both of them insist upon a heaven that is in profound contact with the here and now, but they go about this in radically different ways. Wright insists upon the materiality (fleshly and earthly) of heaven and avoids metaphysical categories. Hart grounds the presence of God in the here and now as well as in the most substantial reality of “personal presence” and of “spiritual beings.” While Hart beautifully maintains that this is a “reality that one can confirm in experience not just through some sort of set of metaphysical commitments,” even in this passage, you can see that Hart is leaning in to metaphysical categories that he believes are profoundly present in Paul and other New Testament authors as well.
I’m also tempted to consider the image of the fire of God burning at the heart of each individual thing (each self) within creation—an image that shows up prominently in the church fathers, in Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844 – 1889), and in George MacDonald (1824 – 1905). However, I’ve tried to write about all of this before, and I will leave off trying to do any of it again for now.
Copious Flowers 
Reblogged this on Sovereign Love and commented:
Fascinating little vignette of D.B. Hart on the all encompassing nature of Universal Restoration. The upshot is so important regarding the hell/heaven debate: Historic Christian Universalism is NOT a little squabble about some minor issue of theology – No, it is grounded in the most important implications of a infinitely robust Christology – where the Cosmic scale shines blindingly forth in its glory – that Christ is the Redeemer of “all things” precisely because He is the Creator (and, therefore, Lover) of “all things”!
Thank you for this fascinating little vignette of D.B. Hart on the all encompassing nature of Universal Restoration. The upshot is so important regarding the hell/heaven debate: Historic Christian Universalism is NOT a little squabble about some minor issue of theology – No, it is grounded in the most important implications of a infinitely robust Christology – where the Cosmic scale shines blindingly forth in its glory – that Christ is the Redeemer of “all things” precisely because He is the Creator (and, therefore, Lover) of “all things”!