Universalism and the Bible

The Really Good News

By: Keith DeRose
Publicly available on his blog at
https://campuspress.yale.edu/keithderose/1129-2/

Paper Sections

1. What is Universalism?
2. Some Universalist Passages
3. “All”
4. “Interpreting Scripture by Scripture”
5. Universalism and Exclusivism
6. Universalism and Strong Exclusivism
7. Two More Passages and a Dangerous Line of Thought
8. Universalism, Judgment and Punishment
9. Universalism and Eternal Punishment: A Collision?
10. “Eternal” in the New Testament
11. Conclusion

Appendices

A. The Danger of False Belief in this Matter

B. Free Will and Universalism

Further Reading

Books
Blog Posts

1. What is Universalism?
I should be clear at the outset about what I’ll mean — and won’t mean — by
“universalism.” As I’ll use it, “universalism” refers to the position that eventually all
human beings will be saved and will enjoy everlasting life with Christ. This is compatible
with the view that God will punish many people after death, and many universalists
accept that there will be divine retribution, although some may not. What universalism
does commit one to is that such punishment won’t last forever. Universalism is also
incompatible with various views according to which some will be annihilated (after or
without first receiving punishment). These views can agree with universalism in that,
according to them, punishment isn’t everlasting, but they diverge from universalism in
that they believe some will be denied everlasting life. Some universalists intend their
position to apply animals, and some to fallen angels or even to Satan himself, but in my
hands, it will be intended to apply only to human beings. In short, then, it’s the position
that every human being will, eventually at least, make it to the party.

2. Some Universalist Passages

Contrary to what many would suppose, universalism, understood as above, receives
strong scriptural support in the New Testament. Indeed, I judge the support strong
enough that if I had to choose between universalism and anti-universalism as the
“position of Scripture,” I’d pick universalism as the fairly clear winner. But more on that
later. For now, here’s three passages which support universalism.

Note the “all.” I guess there can be some question about what it means to be made alive
in Christ. A cynic might suggest that some might be made alive in order to stand
judgment and be tortured forever. But that’s very strained, especially after one’s read
the surrounding context of this passage and has also discovered what’s usually meant
by such phrases. It’s very clear, I think, that those who are “made alive” in Christ are, as
it’s often put, “saved.” The question is, To whom will this happen? This passage’s
answer: All! A point of grammar, which holds for the Greek as well as our English
translations: The grammatical function of “in Christ” here is not to modify or limit the
“all.” The passage doesn’t say, “…so also shall all who are in Christ be made alive.” If it
said that, I wouldn’t be so cheered by the passage. Rather, “in Christ” is an adverbial
phrase that modifies the verb “shall be made” or perhaps the whole clause, “shall all be
made alive.” Thus, this passage says that all shall be made alive. How? In Christ. This
last point — that it’s through Christ that all will be saved — will be important in section 6,
below.
Note again the “all.” Show me someone burning in hell, and I’ll show you someone
who’s not yet been reconciled to God. So, show me someone who’s under divine
punishment forever, or who is simply annihilated, and I’ll show you someone who’s
never reconciled to God through Christ, and thus someone who gives the lie to this
passage.

It’s verse 18 that I’m mainly appealing to. For whom will Christ’s act of righteousness
lead to acquittal and life? Answer: “all men.” (So at least we guys will be OK!) Show me
someone who never enjoys acquittal and life, and I’ll show someone for whom Christ’s
act of righteousness didn’t lead to acquittal and life, and thus someone who gives the lie
to this verse.

Though I’m appealing mainly to v. 18, I’ve included v. 19 here as well partly because
some may think it casts doubt on the universalist implications of 18, since in 19, it’s only
said that “many,” (rather than “all”) will be made righteous. But 19 doesn’t really take
away the pro-universalism power of 18. First, a point of logic: That many will be made
righteous is perfectly compatible with all being made righteous. All dogs are mammals.
True or false: Many dogs are mammals? True, of course. It may sound strange to say
that many dogs are mammals, but it’s true for all that: It’s even stranger to deny that
many dogs are mammals. “Many” and “all” don’t logically exclude each other. But this
point of logic is pretty barren. To say that many dogs are mammals, while it doesn’t
strictly imply that fewer than all dogs are mammals, it does suggest that fewer than all
are — which probably explains why saying that many dogs are mammals sounds so
strange. (“Why did he say ‘many’ rather than ‘all’? Wouldn’t he have said ‘all’ if he
thought they were all mammals?”) Likewise, one could plausibly claim that while v. 19
doesn’t strictly imply that fewer than all will be made righteous, it does strongly suggest
this. Reply: But even the suggestion of fewer than all disappears when we look at the
NIV’s translation of v. 19. (Above is the RSV translation.) The NIV translates as follows:

The key difference, for our present purposes, between the translations is between the
RSV’s “many” and the NIV’s “the many.” To say that the many will be made righteous,
while it doesn’t imply that all will be made righteous, neither does it imply, nor even
suggest, that fewer than all will be. In fact, v. 19, translated the NIV’s way, especially
following on the heels of 18, seems to suggest, if anything, a positive answer to the
question of whether all are covered, turning v. 19 from something that counts a bit
against a universalist reading of v. 18 to a verse which, if anything, reinforces the
universalist implications of v. 18. My experts have informed me that the original Greek
here is like the NIV, and unlike the RSV, in that there is not even a suggestion carried
by 19 that fewer than all will be made righteous. It’s no doubt in response to such
considerations that the revision of the RSV, the NRSV, follows the NIV in using “the
many” rather than “many.” (But it was worth first presenting the RSV translation
because many use English translations of the Bible, which, like the RSV, employ the
inferior translation of this phrase.)

[A discussion of this last passage that has come out since I posted this page, and which
I find very helpful, is Richard H. Bell’s “Rom 5.18-19 and Universal Salvation,” New
Testament Studies, Vol. 48 (2002), pp. 417-432. Those interested in a better and more
careful look at this last passage would do well read Bell’s paper. To quote Bell’s own
summary, he argues “that Paul does in fact support a universal salvation in Rom 5.18-
19. Such an understanding is supported by both the context and by a detailed study of
these verses” (p. 417).9/11/2005]

3. “All”
A key word in the above passages is “all”. Here’s one more universalist passage
featuring that wonderful word:

For various reasons I won’t go into here, though I think this is a good universalist
passage, I don’t think this passage is quite as strong as some of the passages we
looked at in section 2. I bring it up because it’s in response to this verse that I’ve found a
commentator making a move I’ve heard many times in conversation. About this verse,
the end of which he renders, “that he may have mercy upon all”, F.F. Bruce writes:
“That is, on all without distinction rather than all without exception” (The Letter of Paul to
the Romans: An Introduction and Commentary, Leicester, England: Inter-Varsity Press,
1985; p. 211). Several people I’ve spoken with about our universalist passages had
apparently been taught that “all” can mean “all without distinction” rather than “all
without exception”. What exactly is “all” supposed to mean when it carries the former
(“without distinction”) sense? Some seem to hold that it then means “some from each
group”, and where it’s people that are involved, each group seems to mean each nation.
For others, it means something a bit more: That every person, regardless of which
group she’s in, has a chance.
But it’s clear that “all”, at least when used properly, never means anything like that.
Suppose some slippery character is being investigated, and hands over to investigators
several files relating to the case under consideration. The slippery character then says
that he’s handed over all the files about the case. It later turns out that, as the slippery
character knew full well at the time of his statement, he’s held on to over half of the files.
Suppose his reaction to this revelation is: “Well, I handed over several files from each of
the 10 major categories into which they fell. And I didn’t just pick the least damaging
files to hand over. Rather, I picked in a random fashion the files I would hand over from
each category, so that each file, regardless of its category, and regardless of how
damaging it was to my case, had a chance to be handed over. So, you see, I really did
hand over all the files — all without distinction, that is; not, of course, all without
exception.” This won’t fly, precisely because “all” just can’t mean anything like what the
“all without distinction” crowd says it sometimes means. My reaction, at least, is not that
this fellow was being deceitful merely in using one sense of “all” while it has another
good sense. He’s worse than that: There’s no good sense of “all” that would make true
his miserable lie. No, “all”, when it’s used properly, always means all without exception.
Quite simply, “all” means all. [For more on this matter, see my blog
post: “All“.12/24/2011]

But wait! When I say, quite properly, “All the beer is warm”, I don’t mean that all the beer
in the whole universe is warm, but rather something like that all the beer in this room is
warm, as is seen by the fact that I can continue the sentence by saying something that
implies that there is cold beer elsewhere: “All the beer’s warm, so let’s go to the kitchen
and get some cold beer.” So how can it be suggested that “all” always means all? (But
how can it be that “all” could fail to mean all?)

What’s going on here is that the quantifier phrases of natural language (“all”, “most”,
“some”, etc.) are to be understood, on an occasion of use, relative to a contextually
determined domain. Thus, when I say, “All the beer is warm”, the contextually
determined domain is the things in this room, so “All the beer”, in context, means all the
beer in this room. So there is some sense in which “all” doesn’t always mean all: On
some occasions of use, “all”, or “all the F’s” means all (or all the F’s) within a limited
domain. But, relative to that domain, “all” really does mean all (without exception): My
sentence “All the beer is warm” turns out to be false if there is some cold beer that I
failed to notice in the room.

But when the domain is limited, there has to be some fairly clear clue as to what the
limited domain is. When “all” is used in the New Testament, as in “For all have sinned
and fallen short of the glory of God,” and similar passages, the “all”, I take it, refers to all
people. It could possibly refer to some restricted class of people, but that suggestion is
to be rejected, b/c (a) there is no such restricted class that clearly presents itself (all the
people in this room?), (b) it’s incumbent on a speaker to make clear what the class is if
he means for it to be specially restricted and no specially restricted class clearly
presents itself given current conversational intents and purposes, and (c) the NT doesn’t
specify any such specially restricted class. So, “All have sinned” means that all people
have sinned, as almost all would agree.
But similarly for the “all”s of the universalist passages. No restricted class of people
clearly presents itself, and the Biblical writers aren’t so incompetent as to mean some
specially restricted class of people that doesn’t clearly present itself without specifying
or somehow making it clear which class they mean. Indeed, in I Corinthians 15:22 and
Romans 5:18, each of the relevant “all”s occur in the very same sentence (and a fairly
short sentence, to boot) as an occurrence of “all” that seems to refer to the whole
human race (given that it’s the whole human race that died/was condemned in Adam),
so it would have been especially misleading or even incompetent for Paul to mean
something less than the whole human race there, since that would involve switching the
domains relative to which his claims should be interpreted without warning in the middle
of a single sentence — and a sentence that seems to be stressing the parallelism
between its two clauses, for that matter. So I see no reasonable alternative but to
conclude that these “all”s refer to all people.

Could they mean even more than that? Could they be including angels, including fallen
angels, and maybe even Satan himself? My reason for not going out on that limb —
besides passages like Rev 20:10, which reports that the devil is “thrown into the lake of
burning sulpher”, where the beast and the false prophet (who’s not clearly human) were
previously thrown, and where “they will be tormented day and night for ever and ever”
— is that most of the universalist passages don’t go that far. Some, like I Corinthians
15:22, write simply of “all”, and, as I said, I think the most natural way to understand the
scope of the “all” is as referring to all people. Indeed, it’s difficult to construe that
particular passage more broadly so as to include Satan, for there seems to be no good
sense in which Satan died in Adam, and the passage reads: “For as in Adam all die, so
also in Christ shall all be made alive.” And some of the universalist passages explicitly
limit themselves to humans, like Romans 5:18, which says that Christ’s act “leads to
acquittal and life for all men.”

The only universalist passages that we’ve looked at in section 2 which seems to carry
any suggestion of a broader scope is Colossians 1:20, the “reconciling all things”
passage. (There are other passages in the Bible carrying similar suggestions — see, for
instance, Ephesians 1:10.) How to square that with Rev 20:10, I don’t know, though I
am in general far more cautious about my understanding of Revelation than of any other
book in the Bible. In general, I find it unwise to take much of Revelation literally, and so,
in questions of what will actually happen, tend to take fairly minimalist interpretations of
the events John relates from his vision — or at least not to be confident of anything
beyond a minimalist reading. So, for instance, though John reports in 6:13 that “the
stars in the sky fell to earth, as late figs drop from a fig tree,” I’d be disinclined to think
that stars will literally fall to earth. That this is not to be taken literally is now confirmed
by our current knowledge of the relative size of the earth and the stars (together with the
fact that, in John’s story, this event does not completely obliterate the earth; the story
goes on), but even without such knowledge, based merely on the genre of that part of
Revelation — John’s reporting a vision he was given — I would be disinclined to take
such a passage as a literally correct description of what will actually happen in the
future. How exactly to interpret such a passage as to what will really happen is a
controversial matter. But I tend toward this minimalist reading: All that’s meant about
what will really happen — or, at the very least, all that we can be reasonably certain is
meant — by this report of stars falling to earth is that very, very bad things will happen.
Given the abundance of events reported in John’s vision that must, I think, be read in
such a minimalist way, I’m very cautious about taking very literally the report of Satan’s
doom in Revelation 20:7-10. Shall we now suddenly start taking these events as literal
reports of what will actually happen? The minimalist reading here is that evil and
deception will be decisively defeated. And, though I don’t want to dogmatically declare
that no more than this is meant to be a prediction of what will actually happen, I certainly
don’t see any grounds for being at all confident of anything beyond such a minimalist
reading. So, I don’t think a strong reading of the “reconciling all things” in Colossians
1:20 must in any obvious or automatic way be shot out of the water by what’s to be
found in Revelation. In fact, given the nature of the two books, if anything, it’s our
understanding of Revelation that should be guided by the teachings of the likes of
Colossians, rather than the other way around. Our understanding of the straight
teaching of doctrine in an epistle certainly should not automatically give way to an
interpretation of what in John’s report of his vision is to be taken as a literally accurate
description of what will actually happen. On top of all that, even if you do take
Revelation 20:10 to be a literal description of what will actually happen, the phrase that
gets translated here in popular English translations as “for ever and ever”, needn’t be
translated as implying endless duration; in fact, if you insist on literalness, more literal
translations render this phrase “unto the ages of the ages” or “for the eons of the eons.”
Literally, while this perhaps can, it certainly needn’t, mean forever, though it does seem
to indicate at least a very long time.

Thus, though I don’t find nearly as much scriptural support for a more thorough-going
universalism that includes even Satan (Origen, one of the early universalists, held to
such a more thorough-going universalism) as I do for the more modest form of
universalism I’m here defending, and though I don’t find enough support to advocate
such a more thorough-going position here, at the same time, I certainly do think the
more robust universalism is worthy of serious consideration.

4. “Interpreting Scripture by Scripture”

I believe the above pro-universalist passages, and, as you’ve seen, take them quite
literally. (I should note here that there are several other universalist passages I didn’t
utilize above. The above, though, I think, give you a good idea of the type of passages
that can be marshaled in favor of universalism.) I wouldn’t say that they constitute an
overwhelmingly strong case for universalism (see sections 5-6 below, for a view —
exclusivism — the support for which I am willing to call overwhelming), but it is pretty
strong, and stronger than any case I’ve seen for anti-universalism.

But some would urge me to interpret these passages in the light of other scripture.
(Many of these people seem never to even recognize the possibility of interpreting the
other scripture in light of these universalist passages.) I must admit I have some
difficulty in construing myself as “interpreting” these passages. I do place interpretations
on some passages in the Bible: When I glean a particular message for us from one of
Jesus’ parables, for instance, that’s an interpretation. But am I “interpreting” these
passages in a pro-universalist way? Calling this “interpretation” seems strained to me. I
often quote the above passages, not just to support, but actually to express my
universalism, and such quoting seems only in a strained sense a case of interpreting.
(Once, when someone asked me whether I thought anyone would be denied everlasting
life, I replied, “I believe that as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive.”
My questioner, not realizing I was quoting Scripture, accused me of taking an unbiblical
position!)

Still, if there are passages which teach that universalism is false with anything close to
the force that the above passages carry in favor of universalism, we’re going to have to
consider re-adjusting our understanding of the above passages. Maybe they really don’t
mean what they seem to. And, indeed, most who write against universalism, when they
urge an understanding of the above passages which strips them of their universalist
implications, do so largely on the grounds that other passages of the New Testament
teach even more clearly that universalism is false. Indeed, many write as if the Biblical
case against universalism is overwhelming. But this confidence is badly misplaced. As
we’ll see in sections 5, 6 and 8, below, it’s mainly due to a confusion of universalism
itself with certain unbiblical versions of universalism.

5. Universalism and Exclusivism

Many of the passages that are typically utilized to attack universalism
teach exclusivism — which here refers to the doctrine that it’s only (exclusively) through
the saving work of Christ that any can be saved. I agree that exclusivism is clearly
taught in the New Testament, so I won’t bother to cite the supporting passages. But the
universalist needn’t deny exclusivism. The biblical universalist will accept exclusivism;
she’ll just disagree with the non-universalist about the scope of who will be saved by
Christ’s saving work — the universalist exclusivist holding that, eventually at least,
through Christ, all shall be made alive. And now that I’ve echoed I Corinthians 15:22, it’s
worth noting how this verse, as well as the other passages discussed in section 2,
highlights the compatibility of universalism with exclusivism, since this universalist
passage insists that it is in Christ that all shall be made alive.

6. Universalism and Strong Exclusivism

But perhaps we should distinguish between two types of exclusivism. Let’s label
as strong exclusivism the position that adds to exclusivism the further claim that, in
order to be a recipient of the salvation Christ makes possible, one must in some way
explicitly accept Christ and/or the salvation he offers. (Different versions of strong
exclusivism with differ as to the exact nature of this requirement of explicit
acceptance.) Weak exclusivism, then, will be the position that combines the exclusivist
thesis that Christ’s saving work is necessary for the salvation of any person — so that
were it not for Christ, none could be saved — with the position that one needn’t explicitly
accept or acknowledge Christ in order to receive the salvation his saving work makes
possible.

The scriptural basis for exclusivism is overwhelming, I believe; the support for strong
exclusivism is not nearly so conclusive. It’s not that there’s any strong basis for weak
exclusivism. It’s rather that the scriptural basis for deciding between the two versions of
exclusivism is not nearly so great as that supporting exclusivism itself. Still, the
suggestions of strong exclusivism found in the New Testament are strong enough that,
for complicated reasons I won’t here go into, though I’m far from certain about the
matter, I tend to lean toward strong exclusivism.

And some might think that strong exclusivism is incompatible with universalism, so that
whatever evidence there is for strong exclusivism will also be evidence against
universalism. For strong exclusivism, combined with the observation that some resist
Christ all the way to their dying moment, can seem to spell the doom of the universalist
position.

But only if death is the end of one’s chances to be saved by explicitly accepting Christ.
And I haven’t seen anything close to a strong Biblical case for the position that death is
the end of one’s chances for salvation. (We’ll look at the typical argument mounted for
the doctrine of no further chances a few paragraphs below). Many, in fact, content
themselves with arguing that the scriptures typically used to support the position that
some will get further chances after death are far from conclusive.

What passages are these? Well, many friends of the doctrine of further chances cite I
Peter 3:19-20 and I Peter 4:6 as supporting their position.

[Note: The NIV scandalously translates the beginning of I Peter 4:6 as “For this is the
reason the gospel was preached even to those who are now dead,” confessing in a
study note to the NIV Study Bible — users of NIV’s other than the NIV Study Bible don’t
get this warning — that “the word ‘now’ does not occur in the Greek,” and explaining
that the reason they’ve added it is that, for reasons coming from another part of the
Bible, not even in the book of I Peter, they believe that there are no further chances
after death. Now, the case they give in that note for the doctrine of no further chances is
hopelessly weak. (We’ll encounter it below.) But put that aside for the moment. The
more pressing point here is that this practice of doctoring a translation to protect the
theological positions that the translators happen to hold on controversial issues is
deplorable. The much more responsible NRSV, true to its general character, more
reliably translates this passage as, “For this is the reason the gospel was proclaimed
even to the dead.” This better translation leaves the matter of whether “the dead” refers
to people who were dead when they were preached to or rather to those who were dead
at the time of the writing of I Peter about as open as it is in the original Greek. The NIV
translators, on the other hand, for no respectable reason, add a word to close down the
reading, left open in the Greek, that doesn’t best serve their own theological purposes,
though it seems the more natural of the two readings.]

Now, the issue of how to understand these passages from I Peter is as difficult as it is
controversial. I won’t get into it here, except to register my opinion that it isn’t wise to
lean on these passages; they’re far too inconclusive to inspire any reasonable
confidence in the doctrine of further chances after death.

But the case typically mounted in favor of the opposing doctrine of no further chances
after death is at least as inconclusive. The only passage cited in favor of this dubious
doctrine of no further chances in the notorious NIV Study Bible note to I Peter 4:6 is
Hebrews 9:27, which reads: “Just as man is destined to die once, and after that to face
judgment,” with the sentence being completed in v. 28. But the universalist who believes
in further chances needn’t deny that people die once. I’m such a universalist, and I don’t
deny that, nor do I see any reason why I should have to. And, as I noted in section 1
and as we’ll see in section 8, the universalist, including the universalist who believes in
further chances, needn’t deny that after that death one will face judgment. So there isn’t
anything in Hebrews 9:27 that should even begin to produce any discomfort in the
universalist who believes in further chances.

The other passage that’s commonly cited in favor of the doctrine of no further chances
is Luke 16:26. This is a bit stronger than the Hebrews passage. But that’s not saying
much, and there’s very little, if any, ammunition to be found here for the doctrine of no
further chances. This passage occurs in the parable of the rich man and Lazarus, and,
as such, appeals to it suffer from all the limitations inherent in attempts to extract
theological doctrines from the details of parables, especially when the doctrines in
question are not the main point of the parable. In this parable, the rich man, now dead
and suffering in hell, asks Father Abraham to “send Lazarus to dip the tip of his finger in
water and cool my tongue” (v. 24). v. 26 is the second part of Abraham’s explanation for
why this request won’t be granted; it reads, “And besides all this, between us and you a
great chasm has been fixed, so that those who want to go from here to you cannot, nor
can anyone cross over from there to us.” But again, the universalist needn’t deny that
there will be punishment, only that such punishment will last forever. And there’s no
reason at all for her to have to hold that, while the punishment is still going on, those
suffering from it can end it at will any time they want, and cross freely from hell to
heaven, nor that those in heaven (in this parable, Lazarus is “at Abraham’s side”) will be
allowed to visit hell. So even if we made the mistake of trying to extract from the details
of this parable a position on the issue of whether there will be further chances, there still
wouldn’t be much cause for taking this passage as supporting the doctrine of no further
chances with any force at all. For as long as the universalist who believes in further
chances sensibly allows for the possibility that, while punishment is occurring, those
suffering from it can’t just end it any time they want, she can make perfectly good sense
of the words this parable puts into the mouth of Father Abraham. After all, if a road has
been covered with deep enough snow drifts, we’ll tell someone who must drive on that
stretch of road to get to where we are, “You cannot cross over from there to us.” We’ll
say this quite properly and truthfully, even if we know full well that the road will be
cleared in a few days, or that, in a great enough emergency, a helicopter could be used
to get across to us even today, if, say, we’re at a hospital. [But doesn’t that show that
there is a sense, then, in which they can cross over to us? Yes, there’s a perfectly good
sense in which they can, and a perfectly good sense in which they cannot. For
enlightening and accessible explanations of the meaning of “can” and related words, I
recommend Angelica Kratzer’s “What ‘Must’ and ‘Can’ Must and Can Mean” (Linguistics
and Philosophy 1 (1977): pp. 337-355) and example 6 (“Relative Modality”) of David
Lewis’s “Scorekeeping in a Language Game” (Journal of Philosophical Logic 8 (1979):
pp. 339-359.]

So to hold that this passage establishes, not only that those suffering from punishment
can’t just end it any time they want, but that it can never, not even by the saving power
of Christ, happen that they’re released from this punishment, is surely a very desperate
stretch.

In fact, I think no other doctrine can even compete with “no further chances” in terms of
the following three factors. No doctrine even comes close to a) being so strongly
believed by so many evangelicals despite b) being so utterly disastrous in its
consequences and c) having so little by way of Scriptural support.

Still, as I admitted earlier, the case for the opposing doctrine of further chances, based
on the I Peter passages, is also inconclusive. But I never intended to use the I Peter
passages as part of my positive support for universalism. My universalism is founded on
passages like the ones we looked at in section 2. I find them far more forceful in their
support for universalism than anything I’ve ever seen adduced in support of anti-
universalism. But some will disagree, and claim that a powerful case for anti-
universalism can be mounted from strong exclusivism, together with the very plausible
observation that some never accept Christ in this life. I have merely been pointing out
that that line of thought supports anti-universalism only insofar as the doctrine of no
further chances can be established. And, as we’ve seen, that’s not very far at all.
Certainly nothing even approaching the power of the universalist passages. If, on top of
all that, there actually were — against my own best judgment about the matter — some
significant positive support for the doctrine of further chances to be gleaned from the I
Peter passages, that would be argumentative over-kill.

Do I, then, believe in further chances after death? Yes, but not because of anything to
be found in I Peter. My belief in further chances is rather grounded in my beliefs that (a)
there are fairly strong grounds for universalism provided by the likes of the passages in
section 2, (b) there are fairly strong grounds for strong exclusivism in passages we
haven’t looked at here, (c) the only way (at least the only way that I can see) to
reconcile universalism with strong exclusivism is if there are further chances, and (d)
there’s next to nothing in the way of good reasons for denying that there are further
chances. Thus, though there’s perhaps not much of a direct case that can be made for
further chances from the likes of the I Peter passages, in light of (d), the indirect case
for further chances provided by (a)-(c) proves decisive. I stress, then, that my belief in
universalism is not based on my belief in further chances; rather, it’s the other way
around.

7. Two More Passages and a Dangerous Line of

Thought
Since we’re on the topic of further chances, let me here, in a brief digression from the
main line of argument, introduce two more passages which together have some
universalist tendencies in a way that involves the doctrine of further chances. I present
them not primarily because of the added support they might provide for universalism,
but because they’ll help to illustrate a dangerous line of thought which explains much of
the resistance I had to the doctrine of further chances. Insofar as others resist the
doctrine of further chances for the same reason I used to, they may wish to check this
dangerous line of thought. Consider, then:

This raises the question: Who will so confess and so believe? This is one of those
questions, at least with respect to the confession part, that gets answered in the Bible,
for, as we read in Philippians 2:11 and elsewhere, every tongue shall confess that
Jesus is Lord. Maybe some of these confessors will fail to believe in their heart that God
raised Jesus from the dead, and thereby fail to be saved. But I always imagined this
confession taking place at a time when it had become painfully obvious that the whole
Jesus story was true — perhaps at judgment — so I’ve never really thought that these
confessors weren’t believing.

To be honest, the real reason I never thought of the Philippians passage as having
universalist implications in conjunction with the Romans passage is that I thought that
such a confession would be “too late” and so wouldn’t count. Why did I think that?
Romans 10:9 includes no fine print to the effect that the confession must take place
prior to death to be effective, and, as we’ve seen, there’s next to no good Scriptural
reason to deny further chances. Well, there are many reasons one might think this
confession is too late, but, unfortunately, in my case, the line of thought was roughly as
follows: “Of course they’ll confess then. It’ll be so obvious that Jesus is Lord at that
point. There’s no merit to confessing at that point.”

Yikes! I had always been taught, and had always thought I believed, that salvation came
through God’s grace alone, and not at all through the merit of the one being saved. One
just had to accept this grace, by confessing, etc. But the above line of thought shows
that the tendency to understand rewards in term of merit was so strong in me that I had
taken the confession and acceptance part of the above story and turned them into
matters of merit — to the point that I wouldn’t let them count if they didn’t strike me as
sufficiently meritorious. This is surely a dangerous line of thought.

Three reactions: First, we don’t know enough about the circumstances under which
such confessions will take place to judge their merit. But, second, should that matter?
And, third, just how wonderfully meritorious was my confession and acceptance?

Insofar as any others find themselves engaging in the dangerous line of thought I was
subject to, they may wish to re-think the role of merit in salvation, and how that relates
to the doctrine of further chances. But perhaps I was unique in thinking along those
lines, and this whole, thankfully short, digression was for nothing.

8. Universalism, Judgment and Punishment

Many of the passages that are typically utilized in attacks on universalism teach that,
after death, God will judge people and punish many of them. Indeed, many who write as
if the case against universalism is overwhelming list scores of such passages —
which looks very impressive — in their long lists of what they claim are anti-universalist
scriptures.

Many of the passages typically cited in this connection are the endings of parables in
which the unprepared or otherwise naughty are cast off to weep and wail and gnash
their teeth. (It’s usually in Matthew’s presentation of parables that such an ending is
included.) To get eternal punishment from such a parable is quite a leap. Some read
many of these passages as Jesus predicting the suffering incurred during the
destruction of Jerusalem. It was apparently a big issue in the Jewish community around
the time of the writing of the book of Matthew whether this truly horrible and gruesome
event was due to the Christians following a false Messiah (as some non-Christians
claimed) or rather because the non-Christian Jews had failed to recognize the hour of
their visitation (as some Christians held). Parables in which those not prepared for the
coming of the Christ-figure are thrown out to weep and wail, etc., can easily be read as
coming down on the Christian side of this debate. But even if one dismisses such an
interpretation (though it’s difficult to see the grounds for such a dismissal), one should
begin to appreciate the tenuousness of drawing a particular theological conclusion from
such a parable.

But the above is a secondary point, especially since many of the passages which teach
that there will be punishment are not from parables. The main point to be made is that,
as I pointed out already in section 1, universalism as I understand it — and, more
importantly, as it’s supported by the universalist passages like those in section 2 — is
perfectly consistent with the belief that there will be judgment for all and punishment for
some. So, unless the universalist goes overboard and claims that there will be no
punishment at all — an extension of universalism not licensed by the passages of
section 2 — these passages teaching that there will be punishment won’t even begin to
hurt her position. So, like the anti-universalist argument from exclusivism and the
argument from strong exclusivism, this anti-universalist argument, now from
punishment, has no force against the universalism that’s supported by the universalist
passages, but only against the unwarranted extensions of universalism that some
unwise universalists might make.

9. Universalism and Eternal Punishment: A

Collision?
But among the many passages that teach that there will be punishment, a few (a very
few, it turns out, but see also Matthew 25:46) specify (or seem to specify) that the
punishment will be “eternal.” By far, the strongest of these passages is:

Here, finally, we have something which really has the potential to cut against
universalism. (Matthew 25:46 is weakened by the fact that it’s part of a parable. In fact,
many who cite this parable as a good source as to the duration of punishment don’t take
seriously its teaching as to the grounds of the distinction between those who are
rewarded and those who are punished. It’s quite clearly said that those who are
rewarded are rewarded for their good actions and those who are punished are punished
for a lack of such good actions (see verses 34-36 and 41-43, paying careful attention to
the word “for” or “because” (depending on your translation) in each). But most who cite
this parable as a good source on the duration of the punishment don’t accept salvation
by works — perhaps because it’s taught in a parable, all the details of which needn’t be
taken to reflect the actual world? At any rate, if you are inclined nevertheless to give this
feature of the parable great weight as an indication of the duration of actual punishment,
the below discussion of the meaning of “eternal” will apply to this Matthew passage as
well.)

Now, as I’ve noted, there are only a few passages that specify that punishment will be
(at least for some) eternal. And the universalist passages are quite strong, tempting one
to “interpret” these eternal punishment passages away. But this II Thessalonians
passage looks very clear; I used to call it the “killer text”. It looks like it collides with the
universalist passages. For a long time, I feared that just such a collision occurs here in
Scripture. I tried to “interpret” the universalist passages away, and then to do the same
to this eternal punishment passage. But all such “interpretations” seemed very strained
— they seemed more like denials, or at least revisions, of what was said in the relevant
passages being “interpreted.”

10. “Eternal” in the New Testament

Fortunately, this is only an apparent collision. The appearance of a collision is produced
by a problem arising with our English Bibles’ translation of “eternal”.

The Greek adjective (and its cognates) that our English Bibles translate as “eternal” or
“everlasting” (and their cognates), literally means “age-enduring” or “pertaining to an
age”, and can be used in such a way that it does not imply endless duration. This opens
up a way around our collision: If the “eternal” in the “eternal” punishment passages is
understood as not implying an endless duration, there’s no conflict between these
passages and the universalist passages.

What makes this a very comfortable, and not a strained or desperate, way around the
collision is that, not only can the Greek word mean something that doesn’t imply
endless duration, but it often does get used with such a meaning — including in the
Bible itself, and even in the Pauline corpus. Consider Romans 16:25-26, which, as our
translations have it, speaks of “the mystery that was kept secret for long ages but is now
disclosed.” Here, the Greek that gets translated as “for long ages” includes the very
Greek word that is translated as “eternal” or “everlasting” elsewhere, including the
“eternal” punishment passages. But in this Romans passage, Paul seems not to mean
“eternal” by this word, for he immediately goes on to say the secret “is now disclosed”,
so of course it wasn’t kept secret eternally. That’s why our translations don’t translate it
as “eternally” here.

[For more on this Greek term, as well as on the Greek term used here for “punishment,”
which, apparently, was usually used for remedial punishment(!), see the final section
(“Punishment in the Coming Age,” pp. 89-92) of Thomas Talbott’s “Three Pictures of
God in Western Theology,” Faith and Philosophy 12 (1995): pp. 79-94). More extensive
commentary on this matter of translation, which is also more convenient for those with
access to the internet, because the good folks at the Tentmaker site have made it
available on line, is Rev. John Wesley’s Hanson’s treatise on THE GREEK WORD
AIÓN — AIÓNIOS. Talbott now has a book, The Inescapable Love of God, which
incorporates much of his earlier prouniversalism work; for information and for some
parts that are available on-line, click here.]

Incidentally, I’ve heard it argued by some who emphasize the parallelism in Matthew
25:46 between the fate of the damned and of the saved — “Then they will go away to
eternal punishment, but the righteous to eternal life” — that if you deny that punishment
lasts forever, then you must also deny that the “eternal” life of the saved is unending.
But, of course, that doesn’t follow. Where the Greek word that gets translated as
“eternal” doesn’t imply endless duration, it also doesn’t mean anything that implies less
than endless duration. It can mean “in the age to come,” or “for long ages,” or, perhaps,
if another of Talbott’s suggestions is right, it can mean something like “having its source
in the eternal God”; at any rate, all of these are neutral with respect to the question of
whether what’s called “eternal” will last forever. So taking such a reading of “eternal”
here does not imply that the “eternal” life of the saved will come to end; the most that
can be gotten out of the parallelism of Matthew 25:46 is that we can’t confidently base
our belief that the “eternal” life of the saved will last forever on that passage. Hopefully,
though, we have bases for that belief other than that detail of this parable! (For much
more on this passage in Matthew, see the section entitled “THE PRINCIPAL PROOF-
TEXT” (which contains several numbered subsections) of the Hanson treatise, to which
there’s a link above. For Greek words which do teach endless duration and which do
get applied to the blessed life of the saved, but which are not applied to punishment,
see the section of Hanson entitled “WORDS TEACHING ENDLESS DURATION.”)

That Paul himself uses the relevant Greek term in such a way that it doesn’t imply
endless duration makes the possibility that he’s using it the same way in the “eternal
punishment” passages a very live possibility. By comparison, all the attempts to get
around the universalist implications of the likes of the passages we saw in section 2 that
I’ve encountered seem very strained, even desperate. (Example: “Here where it says
that God through Christ will reconcile all things to himself, it really means (not what is
says but rather?), at least as it’s applied to people, that God, through Christ, will give
all an opportunity to be reconciled to him, and where it says that in Christ all shall be
made alive, what it really means (is not what it says but rather?) that in Christ all will be
given an opportunity to be made alive, or that all will be made alive to the possibility of
salvation.”) At the very least, those who think it’s clear that the strongest scriptural case
on the question of universalism goes against the view, and that it’s therefore clear that
it’s the apparently universalist passages which must be interpreted away, have a lot of
explaining to do.

11. Conclusion
If I’m right that Romans 11:32 is a universalist passage, it’s the thought of universalism
that inspires what directly follows that verse — Paul’s wonderful doxology of Romans
11:33-36, the penultimate line of which takes on added significance in a universalist
context:
Universalism is far from a mere doctrine of barren theology; many, like Paul, find great
joy in the belief. Part of the joy some find is in the thought that not only they, but their
fellow humans, will, eventually at least, experience everlasting life with Christ. But, like
Paul, you may find the joy is focused rather on God, and on how wondrous and
complete a victory will be won by the God “who desires everyone to be saved” (I
Timothy 2:4). And, on the other side, the non-universalist picture may come to look
strangely dim, not exclusively because of the awful fate that awaits some of your fellows
on this picture, but because God is deprived of such a complete victory, and, in winning
only a partial victory, his desire that everyone be saved will ultimately be frustrated.

For myself, it’s hard to even imagine going back to my earlier way of thinking about
God, according to which it’s only the case that:
 I scanned this drawing, by
E.W. Kemble, from the 1885 edition (New York: Charles L. Webster and Company) of
the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, p. 366. To see the other drawings by Kemble from
the first edition, see Virginia H. Cope’s Huckleberry Finn site at the University of
Virginia.

Please note: This web page has generated a tremendous amount of e-correspondence.
I’m very pleased that it has caused some to consider the important issues addressed,
and am especially gratified that it has caused some to think so carefully about the
issues that they have crafted very thoughtful responses. You are welcome to write me
about these ideas, but please understand that I simply cannot respond to all the
communications — even all the thoughtful communications — that I receive, and please
don’t take it personally if I do not respond. Often, it will just be that you contacted me at
a particularly busy time. And even in the best of times, I can respond only to a very
small percentage of the messages I receive. –KDR
Appendices
All of the above remains basically unchanged in content since I wrote it for an adult
Bible study in early 1998. (The only changes, I believe, are a couple of references and
links to other web sites that I added to section 10 later and a reference added and
marked as an update at the end of section 2.) Since I posted the above on the internet
in the Winter of 98-99, I have received a lot of feedback on it. Some of the e-mail I have
received has raised substantive points. Below I briefly address two of the areas that I
have been very frequently asked about. The first area concerns the danger of believing
and promoting universalism, and the second concerns philosophical issues that arise in
reconciling universalism with free will. So in neither case do the concerns very directly
involve the Biblical case for or against universalism. Thus, addressing them moves us
beyond the topic of my original post. Nevertheless, since these are two of the areas of
concern that have been most often raised about the above, it is worth addressing them
here.

A. The Danger of False Belief on this Matter

Many have e-mailed to warn me of the dangers of believing and promoting
universalism. Two closely related dangers have been stressed. Some focus on how
important Christians will think it is to spread the gospel if they accept universalism, and
warn that belief in universalism would undercut evangelism. Others focus on the
potential detrimental effect of promoting universalism on potential Christians
themselves, supposing many will think something along the lines of, “Well, I’ll be OK
anyway, so why bother to accept Christ?”

I do not think that belief in universalism should have the above effects. Here it is
important to note that universalism — at least the position I’ve been referring to by the
term — does not imply that it is unimportant whether one accepts Christ in this life, or
sooner rather than later. All that universalism per se rules out here is the “infinitely big
stick”: that one will be eternally barred from heaven (and perhaps consigned to hell) if
one fails to accept Christ in this life. As I’ve stressed, universalism itself does not rule
out that there will be punishment for some after death. Indeed, it does not rule out that
there will be a lot of punishment for some. So it’s not only consistent with the existence
of sticks, but with very big — indeed, immensely huge — sticks, though of course
universalists will disagree amongst themselves about the nature and size of whatever
sticks there are. Universalism does rule out the infinitely big stick. But it would indeed be
very sad if Christians believed that there is strong reason or motivation for accepting
Christ in this life only if one faces an infinitely big stick if one fails to do so. Universalism
also guarantees that all humans will eventually attain the tremendous carrot. But does
the fact that things will eventually be OK for someone remove the motivation — for
herself and for others — to improve her lot in the meantime? Those who believe they
are going to heaven, whether they’re universalists or not, believe everything will
eventually be OK for them, but few lose all interest in their well-being in the meantime.
And those who believe that certain other people (say, loved ones) are destined for
heaven don’t lose interest in promoting their well-being in the meantime. Why, then,
should accepting that everyone will eventually be OK sap all motivation for promoting
their well-being in the meantime — especially since it’s at least consistent with
universalism that that “meantime” can be a very long time?

It’s also worth pointing out that though the universalist believes all will attain heaven, it’s
consistent with universalism that what one’s heavenly existence is like may depend on
one’s earthly life. Thus the universalist may hold (though perhaps some will not) that
how one lives one’s earthly life — perhaps crucially including whether one accepts
Christ in this life — will have eternal significance, even if it doesn’t determine whether
one (eventually at least) attains heaven.

But even if I’m right that belief in universalism should not have the bad effects described
above, I don’t doubt that belief in universalism will have such bad effects, at least on
some. After all, some people claim that belief in universalism would have such a bad
effect on themselves, and I’d be a fool to suppose I can judge better than them what the
effect of the belief would be on them.

But those who press the potential dangers of belief in universalism seem to neglect the
corresponding potential dangers of their own position. Indeed, many who press the
concern about the detrimental effects of accepting universalism go on to explicitly state
that there is no danger on the other side as part of their case for resisting the promotion
of universalism.

But they are wrong. There are dangers on the other side. I have received many e-mails
from those who have related that the doctrine of eternal hell was the biggest stumbling
block to their accepting Christianity, and many others said that believing that doctrine
interfered greatly with their ability to love God. Now, one doesn’t have to accept
universalism to avoid the doctrine of eternal hell — one can accept some view on which
those who don’t make it to heaven are (eventually or right away) annihilated. But, for
many, universalism is the view that rings most true, and the version of Christianity
they’d be most likely to accept.

Suppose for a minute that universalism is correct, and suppose that these people
are right to think that there is no way that God would allow some people to be forever
excluded. In that case, promoting the false view that God will allow such exclusion is
doing great harm. Indeed, many universalists, myself included, believe that non-
universalism is one of the most harmful falsehoods ever promoted in the Christian
church.

There is danger on both sides. Either way, if one is wrong, one may be doing harm to
people by advocating one’s false view. Indeed, either way, even if one is right, one can
do some harm to others by advocating the truth one believes. (Even if universalism is
true, my promoting that truth may cause some to lose their faith, and may thereby harm
them. Likewise, if universalism is false, those who declare it false may thereby harm
some people.) One possible response to these dangers, whichever side one is on,
would be to remain silent on the issue. [But there is also grave danger in remaining
silent if you could have spoken up, since your speaking up might have helped
someone!8/6/2010] Another response is to present one’s thinking on the issue for
others’ consideration. That is the path I have chosen — as have those who write to
oppose me. If I have caused you think about the issue, to study the Bible (especially
important here is reading not just the passages for and against universalism that have
been presented, but also the material that surrounds them and gives them their
context), and to prayerfully consider the issue, then I am happy, even if I haven’t
convinced you of my position.

B. Free Will and Universalism6/13/2003

Many who have e-mailed me have been concerned about free will. Doesn’t one have
to freely accept Christ in order to be saved? This is an extension of strong
exclusivism. Strong exclusivism, as I have used it above, says that in order to be saved,
one must somehow explicitly accept Christ. Now, we’re adding to this that the accepting
must be free. Let’s call this new position fervent exclusivism. If we
accept fervent exclusivism, how can we say that universalism is true?

I don’t know of any serious scriptural support for fervent exclusivism itself. Still, it’s worth
taking seriously and thinking about, because it is, for those who think human freedom is
very important, the natural extension of strong exclusivism, for which there is in my view
significant scriptural support. If you think that one must accept Christ to be saved, and if
you think that human freedom is important, you’re likely to think that the free acceptance
of Christ is very valuable and important — perhaps important enough that one’s ultimate
destiny might ride on it.

So, for those who are attracted to this fervent variety of exclusivism: First note that even
fervent exclusivism is compatible with universalism. The first of these says that to be
saved one must freely accept Christ. The second says that, eventually at least, all will
be saved. It’s easy to see how these can both be true: If all will eventually freely accept
Christ.

But even if it is possible for both positions to be true, is it all plausible to suppose they
will be? Supposing there is nothing barring further chances — that the free accepting
may take place after death (see sections 6 and 7 above) — I don’t see why not. After
all, there is an omnipotent and infinitely resourceful God, whom we know “desires
everyone to be saved” (I Timothy 2:4), and has as much time as He needs to bring
everyone around. I certainly wouldn’t want to bet against Him! We know that some in
this life have been only been moving further and further away from accepting Christ.
And some people can be very obstinate. And some have become incredibly evil in this
life. But, on the other hand, even in this short life, we all know of instances in which
people having all three of these problems to a great degree who were brought around
and were saved. So, again, I see no grounds for pessimism that an infinitely resourceful
God, who is able to take as much time as He needs, will be able to win over everyone
eventually.

(If you think that the most dramatic turn-arounds in this life have involved an
infringement on the freedom of the people involved, but agree that they were saved
nonetheless, then you you are not a fervent exclusivist, and you should have no
objections to such non-free savings taking place after death. I am here addressing only
fervent exclusivists.)

But some seem to have a different worry — not that fervent exclusivism is incompatible
with universalism, but that, if fervent exclusivism is true, then nobody, not even God,
can know (or at least know for certain) that all will be saved, since nobody can know
what people will freely do. So, even if universalism will turn to be true, we cannot know
that now, and God would not have revealed that to us already. According to this worry,
fervent exclusivism doesn’t show that universalism won’t be true, but it does undermine
the position that universalism is revealed in the scriptures.

This new worry, then, is based on the assumption that free will is incompatible with
foreknowledge: that it is impossible, even for God, to know (or at least to know for
certain) ahead of time what someone will freely do. Note that God can still be
omniscient despite not knowing what we will freely do. Omniscience is a matter of
knowing all truths. And if you deny that God knows what creatures will freely do, you’re
likely to also believe that there aren’t now any truths to be known about what creatures
will freely do in the future. God’s “failure” to know what you will freely do then would
count against his omniscience no more than does his “failure” to know that 2+2 = 796:
In neither case is the proposition in question (now) true and so in neither case is it the
kind of proposition that can (now) be known. But while the assumption that freedom is
incompatible with foreknowledge doesn’t undermine God’s omniscience, it
is highly debatable. In fact, my sense is that most theists reject this assumption. Indeed,
traditionally, many theists have supposed that free action is not only compatible with
foreknowledge, but also with divine determinism: That one can be free even if God’s
decrees causally determine you do the action in question. How can one be free if divine
decrees, issued long before one is born, causally determine what one does? I don’t
know. That position — compatibilism about freedom and determinism — has always
seemed very implausible to me. But even among those who join me in rejecting
compatibilism about freedom and determinism, many (and I think most) accept the
compatibility of freedom and foreknowledge.

If you believe that God knows ahead of time who will freely accept him in this life, then
you must not really be an incompatibilist about freedom and foreknowledge, and you
should have no objection to supposing that God can know ahead of time who will freely
accept Him in the life to come. Thus, this objection will have carry no weight with you.
If, on the other hand, you hold that foreknowledge is incompatible with freedom, and
thus hold that God does not know what people will freely do even in this life, then you
should be aware that you are holding a minority opinion (at least among Christians, but I
think also among philosophers, both Christian or non-Christian), and if you use this
incompatibilism — let’s call incompatibilism regarding freedom and
foreknowledge zealous incompatibilism, to distinguish it from the milder view that
freedom is incompatible with pre-determination –, together with fervent exclusivism, in
objecting to the universalist stance, then you should be aware that your argument is
resting on an assumption that is highly debatable, to put it rather mildly. So it certainly
isn’t anything of a “killer” objection to the universalist stance. As far as assessing the
strength of the objection to universalism that can be obtained by these worries about
freedom goes, that’s the important point: There is no strong objection here, since the
objection is based on such a controversial position — indeed, on two highly debatable
positions: fervent exclusivism and zealous incompatibilism.

Nevertheless, I myself am somewhat attracted toward these controversial views. For

those of you who join me in finding these positions appealing, despite their
zealous/fervent nature, here are a couple of options for how to put zealous
incompatibilism together with fervent exclusivism (or at least something close to it), and
universalism (or at least something close to it) into a coherent package of views. A way
to think about these two options is that one (perhaps) compromises a bit on
universalism, the other on fervent exclusivism.

Option 1: Holding very firmly to both zealous incompatibilism (freedom is incompatible

with foreknowledge) and fervent exclusivism (in order to be saved, one must freely
accept Christ), one can hold that, while it may not be absolutely certain, it is
OVERWHELMINGLY probable that all will eventually accept Christ and be saved, and
the probability that any will resist forever is VANISHINGLY small. After all, God will be
on the case, and will have as much time as He needs. While it is true that some are
heading in the completely wrong direction, and give no sign that, left to their own
devices, they will do anything but accelerate their progress in that wrong direction, they
will not be left to their own devices. There are actual instances in this life of
breathtakingly dramatic turn-arounds, and God does intervene to bring people around in
this life (without violating their freedom, according to the fervent exclusivist). So once we
jettison that disastrous and quite unsupported view that death is the end of one’s
chances, there’s no reason to doubt that such divine activities will continue in the life to
come, nor that they will (eventually, at least) be successful in yielding free acceptance.

If one takes this option, I think one can still be counted as a universalist. After all, you
believe it is overwhelmingly probable that all will be saved, and in contested theological
matters, we can’t expect to reach beyond that level of certainty anyway. (Indeed, due to
the usual causes — human fallibility on such tough questions — we’re not even going to
get up to that level of certainty, nor even close to it, on this or any other tough matter,
anyway.) But this does seem to compromise on universalism a bit, because one is not
only admitting that one could (of course!) be wrong about the matter in question, but
also that according to the position one holds (however firmly or tentatively), there is
some (VANISHINGLY small, but still existent) objective chance that not all will be
saved. Not even God knows absolutely for certain that all will be saved.

And this gives rise to a sticky question about whether God would have revealed that all
will be saved if He was not absolutely certain that this would be so. It’s easy to feel
uncomfortable about saying that’s what God did — even if He was amazingly close to
being absolutely certain that what we was revealing to us is true.

Option 2: God could pick some time in the distant future — a time far enough off that it
is overwhelmingly probable that all will have freely accepted salvation by then, given the
(non-freedom-violating) means of persuasion God intends to employ — and resolve to
at that time compel acceptance of any hold-outs that are then left. These would then be
saved by their acceptance, though their acceptance might not be as valuable, given that
it was not free. Thus, God can be absolutely certain, and can therefore responsibly
reveal to us, that all will be saved. (There are many variations of this story that you
might think up and think about for yourself. For instance: God could pick different times
for different individuals, etc. Of course, any such story will be highly speculative, and so
one probably shouldn’t invest any confidence in any such tale. Still, these can be helpful
stories in that they show various ways that certain combinations of views can be made
true, and thus can show the views themselves to be compatible, even if one can’t be
certain of the details of just how it will be worked out. In this case, these stories illustrate
ways that zealous incompatibilism and universalism — and even foreknown
universalism — can both be true even while the value and importance of human
freedom is respected to a great degree.)

Now, this position does give up on fervent exclusivism (though not on strong
exclusivism or exclusivism simpliciter), since it holds that one can be saved even if one
does not freely accept Christ. Nevertheless, it does go a fair way toward
accommodating the motivation behind fervent exclusivism — the importance of human
freedom — in that it has God adopting a plan by which He goes to tremendous lengths
to attain free acceptance from every person. And those who hold this view can still
maintain that it is far better and more valuable for a person to freely accept than for this
acceptance to be coerced in a freedom-negating way. But it does deny that one must
freely accept in order to be saved, and thus it does deny fervent exclusivism. Still, it’s
worth considering, for it gives those who might otherwise insist on fervent exclusivism a
compromise position which doesn’t simply write free acceptance off as unimportant.
This potential compromise position is especially valuable if I’m right about how one
would likely come to be a fervent exclusivist in the first place: That there’s no substantial
scriptural support for fervent exclusivism itself, but that fervent exclusivism is the likely
result of combining strong exclusivism (for which there is significant support) with a
belief one might have that human freedom is important. Since the compromise position
respects the importance of human freedom, it is likely to be an attractive compromise.

[Some fine print about a very tricky matter I just skated over above: It is worth noting
that this view does depend on God’s being able to foreknow with complete certainty
what He Himself will do. Many who hold that God cannot foreknow what we will freely
do seem to suppose that He can know what He Himself will do. This gets too
complicated for me to go into in detail here. But whatever else you believe, if you think
that God cannot know with complete certainty what He Himself will do, then, so long as
you think that God will always have the power to make us miserable (which His
omnipotence seems to assure), then you will be stuck with thinking that God cannot
know with certainty that we won’t be miserable at some later time. Thus, even those
who hold that God cannot foreknow with complete certainty what we will freely do
are very strongly motivated to hold that He can foreknow what He Himself will do. This
can be because God’s freedom is in important ways different from ours. In any case,
when I speak of “zealous incompatibilism,” I mean the position that God’s certain
foreknowledge is incompatible with human freedom.]

The above options are sketched out as potentially helpful guides for those who are
attracted to certain combinations of views involving freedom, foreknowledge, and
salvation. It’s important to reemphasize in closing the important point reached several
paragraphs above: that there is no strong objection to universalism that can be
squeezed out of these thoughts — at least not in any way that I can see.

Further Reading
The following materials are recommended by Keith DeRose for further reading on the
matter of Universalism and the Bible. –ZDR

Recommended Books on Universalism

• That All Shall Be Saved: Heaven, Hell & Universal Salvation, by David
Bentley Hart, Yale University Press, 2019.
• The Inescapable Love of God, by Thomas Talbott. An excellent defense
of universalism by the philosopher, Thomas Talbott.
• Universal Salvation?: The Current Debate, edited by Robin A. Perry &
Christopher H. Partridge. Part I is a defense of universalism by Thomas
Talbott; Parts II-V are “Biblical Responses,” “Philosophical Responses,”
“Theological Responses,” and “Historical Responses” to Talbott from a
variety of evangelical writers; and Part VI is Talbott’s Replies to these
Responses.
• The Evangelical Universalist by Gregory MacDonald (pseudonym). I still
haven’t read all of this book myself, but what I have read of it is very
promising, and it comes highly recommended by some folks who really
know what they’re talking about.
• If Grace Is True: Why God Will Save Every Person, by Philip Gulley
and James Mulholland.
Though I found this book quite valuable, I do disagree strongly with parts
 of it. Most of my strong disagreement is with the material in Chapter 5.
Most relevant to the concerns of this web page, Gulley & Mulholland seem
to reject the position I’ve been calling “exclusivism” — the view that it is
only through Christ that people are saved. They seem to think that the
denial of exclusivism follows directly from universalism [see pp. 124-5] and
in any case give no other reason I can see for their denial. As I’ve been at
great pains to stress here, universalism can co-exist with what I’m here
calling exclusivism, and even with strong exclusivism — and perhaps even
with fervent exclusivism. Perhaps G&M would agree that universalism is
compatible with exclusivism. Perhaps their claim would be that while
universalism is compatible both with exclusivism and with non-
exclusivism, it fits in better with non-exclusivism. They write [they adopted
the literary device of writing in the first person singular, though there are
two of them]: “When I became convinced God would save every person, I
tried to hold on to traditional Christian formulas — the trinity, the
incarnation, and atonement theology. I wanted to pour this new wine into
old wineskins. I quickly learned why Jesus recommended against this: the
old wineskins always burst. Just as fermenting wine causes old leather to
rend and tear, my expanding view of God strained the credibility of my
childhood theology” (pp. 125-6). Perhaps exclusivism, too, is part of that
old wineskin that G&M now find not to fit in well with the new wine of
universalism — maybe they even intended to include exclusivism in the
quoted passage, as part of the “atonement theology” of their childhood. If
so, my experience has been completely different. The Christian theology I
grew up with seems quite similar to what G&M were taught. But I had
always found it puzzling, given the relevant elements of this theology, why
some would not be saved. If salvation is won through Christ’s sacrifice,
and is then God’s free gift to us, why would this gift be given only to
some? Of course, there were answers that were typically given to this
question, but with one exception they struck me as implausible. (The one
reason that seemed plausible was that only some accept the gift, but that
raised the question, at least in many cases, some of which made the
question quite urgent, of why the offer wouldn’t be made under more
favorable circumstances.) When I accepted universalim, I found it to fit in
better with the other relevant elements of the theology of my childhood
than did the denial of universalism. So far from being new wine that
strained and burst an old wineskin, universalism seemed to me like
something that made a lot of previously puzzling elements of my childhood
theology finally come together and make sense.
• Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person
Who Ever Lived, by Rob Bell.12/23/2011There was a lot of controversy
about whether this book espouses universalism, with Bell himself, in
interviews given around the time of the release of the book, denying that it
does. Though Bell’s denials seemed to me to be based on an overly
stringent account of what it takes for a position to count as universalist, in
the end, I accept his denial (even if not the reasons he gives for it). Still,
 this book provides a nice and sympathetic exposition of the universalist
position. (The view was presented not as Bell’s own, but as a view to be
discussed. That he presented it so nicely and compellingly is part of what
got him ID’d as a universalist, I think.) This is a very accessible book that
will appeal to many Christians who are chafing under traditional doctrines
of hell, and who are hungry for alternative visions. I suspect it has been
and will be literally a Godsend for many readers. I recommend Tom
Talbott’s short but nice review of the book here.

Recommended Blog Posts on Universalism

I have discussed some issues surrounding Christian universalism (not the scriptural
case for & against the view, though that does come up in some of the comments to the
posts), in these posts to the “Generous Orthodoxy Think Tank” group weblog.

• “The Problem with Universalism”? 5/27/2006

• Hoping that Universalism Is / Will Be True 6/6/2006
• Underground Universalism? 6/8/2006

I have also posted at “Generous Orthodoxy Think Tank” a paper sent to me by Gregory
MacDonald (ppseudonym), author of The Evangelical Universalist (see above, under
“Books”).

• “Can an Evangelical Be a Universalist?” by Gregory MacDonald 11/21/06

Some related posts I’ve done for the (now defunct) Prosblogion blog:

• “All“ 3/7/11
• “Leads to“ 3/11/11
• “Hope and the “Hitler Types“ 5/15/11

And even a relevant Facebook note (set to “Public”):

• “N.T. Wright, Kingdom Come Christianity, and the Focus Problem” 6/1/14