“Gnosticism” and Universalism: A Review of ‘The Devil’s Redemption’

by David Bentley Hart

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I had been hoping to avoid this eventuality for some months now; and, but for a certain sense of justice that it is proving impossible to suppress in myself, I suppose I could have continued attempting to avoid it. I know Michael McClymond, and for some years have been watching the slow evolution of the gigantic book that has now appeared under the title The Devil’s Redemption, in the rather grim way that one might watch a tsunami gathering on the horizon. McClymond is a historian of American Christianity, and a fairly decent one I imagine.

But at some point he got it into his head that this rather narrow range of expertise had prepared him to undertake a task that required training and skills in classical languages and history, late antique metaphysics and culture, patristics, Church history, theology, and philosophy that he most…