Another thought from Hart

For myself, I prefer a much older, more expansive, perhaps overly systematic approach to the seemingly contrary eschatological expectations unfolding in the New Testament – an approach, that is, like Gregory of Nyssa’s or Origen’s, according to which the two sides of the New Testament’s escatalogical language represent not two antithetical possibilities tantalizingly or menacingly dangled before us, posed one against the other as challenges to faith and discernment, but rather two different moments within a seamless narrative, two distinct eschatological horizons, one enclosed within the other. In this way of seeing the matter, one set of images marks the furthest limit of the imminent course of history, and the division therein – right at the threshold between this age and the “Age to come” … — between those who have surrendered to God’s love and those who have not; and the other set refers to that final horizon of all horizons, “beyond all ages,” where even those who have traveled as far from God as it is possible to go, through every possible self-imposed hell, will at the last find themselves in the home to which they are called from everlasting, their hearts purged of every last residue of hatred and pride. Each horizon is, of course, absolute within its own sphere: one is the final verdict on the totality of human history, the other the final verdict on the eternal purposes of God – just as the judgment of the cross is a verdict upon the violence and cruelty of human order and human history, and Easter the verdict upon creation as conceived in God’s eternal counsels. The escatalogical discrimination between heaven and hell is the crucifixion of history, while the final universal restoration of all things is Easter of creation. This way of seeing the matter certainly seems, at any rate, to make particularly cogent sense of the grand eschatological vision of 1 Corinthians 15. At least, Paul certainly appears to speak there, especially in verses 23-24, of three distinct moments distributed across two eschatological frames, in the process of the final restoration of the created order in God….
David Bentley Hart, That All Shall Be Saved, p. 103