Universalism And The Church: The Biblical-Christian Hope for Universal Salvation Revisited (Summer 2020)

by Carl E. Braaten

From LF Summer 2020

The controversial belief among Christians that in the end all shall be saved has again become a subject of serious discussion. In 2019, David Bentley Hart published a book on the subject, That All Shall Be Saved: Heaven, Hell, and Universal Salvation.[1] The author is not a minor leaguer. Some have opined that he’s the smartest theologian on the planet, and as one not known for self-deprecation, he would probably agree. Hart is an Eastern Orthodox theologian, heir to a tradition rooted in the thought of Origen of Alexandria and Gregory of Nyssa, which kept the universalist vision alive as an option for Christians—in stark contrast to the Western tradition running from Augustine through Thomas Aquinas to Martin Luther, John Calvin, John Wesley, and Jonathan Edwards, who envisioned an eternal hell for those who deserved damnation by the God of justice for not believing in Christ and belonging to His church. 

I am not going to review David Hart’s brilliant book. Hart advances his universalist thesis with inflexible dogmatic certainty based on a theocentric metaphysics that claims to know a lot more than I can fathom. By delving into the themes of creation and the fall, freedom and necessity, time and eternity, primary and secondary causality, he reaches the conclusion that God cannot do other than save the whole world He created; and for Christianity to be true, there can be no doubt that all will be saved. I will argue more modestly that the biblical-Christian hope that all shall be saved is based on the gospel of God incarnate in the person of Jesus, Who gave His community a message and a mission meant not for a few but for many—indeed for all, unrestricted by race, religion, nationality, time, or temperament. The vision is universal, or it falls short of the New Testament gospel of Jesus Christ. 

David Hart is not the only theologian to bring the concept of universal salvation into contemporary theological discussion. In 2011, Rob Bell, an Evangelical Protestant, wrote a book that put him in disfavor with his fellow Evangelicals: Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived.[2] Prior to that, John Stott, a famous evangelical leader, close friend of Billy Graham, and listed by Time magazine among the 100 most influential people in the world, shocked his fellow evangelicals when he said, “I find the concept of eternal torment in hell intolerable and do not understand how people can live with it. . . .”[3] In 2011 Gregory MacDonald edited a book titled, ‘All Shall Be Well’: Explorations in Universal Salvation and Christian Theology from Origen to Moltmann.[4]Almost every imaginable kind of universalism in the history of Christian theology is treated in this book — Origen and Gregory of Nyssa in the ancient church; Julian of Norwich, the lone voice in the medieval period; a variety of lesser-known Calvinist and Arminian preachers in post-Reformation Protestantism; and finally a few prominent twentieth-century theologians, including two Protestants, Karl Barth and Jürgen Moltmann; a Roman Catholic, Hans Urs von Balthasar; and the Eastern Orthodox theologian Sergius Bulgakov. So David Hart is not a lone voice crying in the wilderness, but rather the most recent addition to an ecumenical choir. 

The idea of universal salvation is no longer merely an esoteric doctrine confined to a few pointy-headed academics. Popular Christian magazines (e.g., Christian Century, Christianity Today, First Things, Ad Fontes, et al.) have recently entered the fray by publishing lengthy reviews of Hart’s book, some fair and balanced, others hypercritical. To some the idea seems dangerously heretical, to others merely an unfounded pious wish. If universal salvation is true, what’s the point of being Christian, of believing in Christ, getting baptized, belonging to the church, avoiding temptations, living a sanctified life, and doing selfless works of mercy? If universalism is true, what’s the point of preaching the gospel, teaching the Bible, sending missionaries, and planting the church around the world?  

A Confirmand’s Question

My interest in the question of who gets saved and who goes to hell began when I was a thirteen-year-old confirmand in Fort Dauphin, Madagascar. My father and mother had been sent there by the Norwegian Lutheran Church in America as missionaries to this foreign land. My uncle was the confirmation instructor, a dedicated evangelist whose passion was to preach the gospel of Jesus Christ to the Malagasy people for the salvation of their souls. The antinomy of this belief, often barely spoken among the missionaries I knew, was that those who do not accept the offer of salvation would end up in everlasting hell. The topic of salvation came up one day in class. Some will be saved, and some will be lost. Whoever believes and is baptized will be saved. I could see that the fruit of the missionary endeavor in Madagascar was that a minority of the natives did respond to the gospel, but the majority did not. So I blurted, “Does that mean that all the Malagasy who never had a chance to hear the gospel of Christ will perish? Well, how about those in the Old Testament who died before Christ? How about the millions in China, India, and Africa who lived and died before missionaries arrived to preach the saving gospel? Will they all go to hell?” 

My uncle said something to my surprise and relief — people like that who never had a choice might be given a second chance. And he pointed to the verse in i Peter 3:19, which says that after Jesus died and before His resurrection, “He went to preach to the spirits in prison.” My uncle did not elaborate much, but his answer seemed to relieve the anxiety I felt at the time. I put my uncle’s words in the back of my mind and did not retrieve them until years later when in the course of my theological studies I learned about the Harrowing of Hell— the significance of Holy Saturday in spreading Christ’s redemptive work to all people of all times and all places, despoiling the power of Satan over all humans, not only those alive now but also all the dead. 

When I started teaching and writing articles and books on Christology, ecclesiology, missiology, and eschatology, there was no way to escape the question students were asking, the same question I asked as a confirmand decades before. So I had to think about it as hard as I could. The truth is I do not have anything really new to say, so I will draw on a few passages from books that address the matter head on. The issue remains inescapably at the heart of controversial theology. 

A Professor’s Journey

In 1969 I published The Future of God, The Revolutionary Dynamics of Hope,[5] which I called in the preface a “little dogmatic.” Assessing the future of the Christian mission, I wrote 

. . . that the theological capital that backed up the foreign missionary movement of Western Christianity is now depleted. . . .The outburst of missionary zeal that sought to save souls from everlasting hell may linger on in isolated pockets of old-fashioned piety. . . .Yet, the missionary imperative remains essential: to proclaim the gospel of the kingdom of God to the ends of the earth until the end of time.

That is what the missionaries, Catholic and Protestant, tried to do, and I have never doubted they were right. But this issue began my quest for a theology of the Christian mission with a different motivation linked to a different eschatology. Christian eschatological hope that endorses a dualistic vision which expects that the unbaptized masses of human beings are condemned to hell, while a minority who happen to enjoy the minimal success of two thousand years of missionary evangelism will go to heaven cannot do justice to the revelation of God’s all-inclusive love in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth and the all-encompassing message of the apostolic church. 

I published Christ and Counter-Christ: Apocalyptic Themes in Theology and Culture [6] in 1972. Here I thought about the Christian mission in relation to other religions in light of the eschatological future the gospel of Christ promises to all who believe. I laid down four dogmatic propositions as foundational. First, Jesus Christ is the Person in Whom God’s final revelation has occurred, so that in history “we do not look for another” (Matthew 11:3). Second, faith in Jesus Christ means personal participation in divine salvation. Third, the church is a community of believers who are entrusted to proclaim the gospel of salvation to all nations until the end of time. Fourth, it is God’s will that all shall be saved and that the whole creation will reach its fulfilling future through Christ alone. 

The problem that immediately leaps to mind is that the particular historical means to accomplish salvation seem incapable of attaining the universal eschatological end to which they are intended. How can God’s will to save all happen when explicit faith in Christ is necessary for salvation according to Evangelicals (sola fide in Christo) or being a member of the one true church according to Roman Catholics (extra ecclesiam nulla salus)? Look around — only a few make it into the ark of salvation; the rest perish in the flood. This is a depressing prospect. The logic is unassailable: if faith in Jesus Christ or being a member of His church here and now is requisite for salvation, a measly minority will get to heaven while the massive majority will go to hell. Some hellfire and damnation preachers have relished the thought of the damned tormented in the unquenchable flames of hell.[7] 

Hope is the bridge between the particular means and the universal end of fulfillment. Hope inspired by faith and love bets on the power of God’s grace somehow to accomplish salvation for all. The history of doctrine shows that theologians from earliest times have speculated on this “somehow.” The apostolic fathers counted on the idea of the eternal universal Logos, the same Logos (Word) Who became incarnate in Jesus, to reveal God’s truth to the entire non-Christian world. Thus these early fathers averred that there is hope that such great philosophers as Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle as well as other noble pagans would be saved. And the same hope was extended in some papal encyclicals to “men of good will.” Karl Rahner called the sages of other religions who evinced intellectual and moral enlightenment “anonymous Christians.”[8] The problem with such speculation is that the saintly souls of the world are “somehow” included, whereas the salty sinners are excluded; this is not the kind of speculation that befits a gospel of unconditional love and unmerited grace. 

I continued to explore the dimensions of biblical-Christian hope in 1974 by meditating on its source. In Eschatology and Ethics: Essays on the Theology and Ethics of the Kingdom of God, I wrote:

Christian hope is based on the gospel of the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, because in this event God released the power of his own living future beyond the finality of death. . . .We hope for a lasting future of our own personal identity, as well as life together with all those whom the love of God embraces. . . .In raising Jesus from the dead, God promises to give life to the dead. . . .The knowledge of faith awaits its doxological future and fulfillment to the glory of God the Father who will in the end be all in all (i Corinthians 15:28).[9]

Resurrection hope embraces hope for the world, for the whole world, not merely for the individual. The universalism of hope means that in the end God will be all in all. That is Paul’s vision impregnated by hope. It is no small hope that clings merely to the salvation of the individual soul. Christians imbued with love do not hope merely for themselves, their families and friends, and let the rest go to hell. The gospel is not good news for humans and bad news for the cosmos. Humans are in continuity with nature. Ultimately the forward movement of the material world and the history of personal and social life converge on the same ultimate goal.[10]

Another Look at Missiology

In 1974 and 1975 I travelled around the world to give lectures at a number of seminaries founded by missionaries in Hong Kong, Singapore, India (Madras and Bangalore), Kenya, Tanzania, Madagascar, Chile, Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico; and out of this experience I published a book on the theology of the Christian mission titled The Flaming Center.[11] I had read numerous critiques of the whole Western Christian missionary movement. “Missionary, go home!” was a catchphrase filled with deep passion. An African writer stated without intending to exaggerate, “When the missionary came, he had the Bible and we the land. Now we have the Bible, but he has our land.” The German theologian Martin Kähler, a staunch friend of the missionary movement, warned the missionary societies of the difference between propaganda and mission. The propagandist, he said, “tries to make exact copies of himself.”[12]

I felt the need to rethink the missionary enterprise which was burdened by its association with European colonialism and military expansionism, or keep my mouth shut. But I was aware also of the danger of throwing the baby out with the bath water as I believed some theologians were doing, bogged down in historical relativism and pluralistic theories of religions. 

Rethinking missions must start with the central belief of the New Testament that “God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself” (ii Corinthians 5:19). This verse means that Jesus Christ is the center and goal of world history; He alone is the Savior of the world. Acts 4:12 is foundational: “There is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved.” I have doubted many things but not this fundamental New Testament consensus. However, the more one affirms “no other name,” the greater the challenge to reckon with the fact that vast multitudes of people have never heard the name by which they can be saved. What about the millions who live and die with nary a chance of being within earshot of the preached gospel? Again we face the problem: how are the elected means equal to accomplish God’s will that “all shall be saved”? An accident of geography and history may prevent someone from an encounter with the name which is above every name. How can Christ be the Lord of history and the eschaton of its salvation if He lacks the means to make Himself universally present to every person ever born? That is the missiological problem which the gospel of universal hope attempts to answer. 

David Hart’s book, That All Shall Be Saved, is the most recent attempt to answer the question. There are other suggestions at the opposite pole: one, for example, proposed by John Hick in his book God and the Universe of Faiths.[13] He calls for a “Copernican revolution in theology,” which removes Christ from the center of soteriology, opening the way to think of God working his will of salvation through all the religions apart from Christ. What then is the point of the church’s mission? Only dialogue that aims to help Muslims to be better Muslims, Hindus better Hindus, humanists better humanists, and in the process make Christians better Christians. Such a view is a flat-out denial of what Paul wrote in Philippians 2:9–11: “Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name which is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.” 

A nonchristological solution to the missiological problem is a nonstarter. Some theologians have tried to build a bridge to attain the goal of universal salvation by speculating about an “anonymous Christ,” or “anonymous Christians,” or “latent church,” at the expense of the exclusive particularity of the historical mediation of salvation, the hapax of Christ’s salvific life and ministry. “For Christ also died for sins once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring us to God, being put to death in the flesh but made alive in the spirit” (i Peter 3:18). Any solution to the problem that diminishes or denies the necessity of Jesus’ suffering and death on the cross and resurrection from the grave for human salvation kills the proverbial goose. The Christian hope is that one day somehow the eschatological future will bring about the fulfillment of the world solely on account of the boundless mercy and omnipotent love of God manifest in Jesus Christ. It is because Jesus Christ is the Savior of the world that we can hope for a universal restitution (anakephalaiosis ton panton) inclusive of people who do not yet know the name of Jesus. Is hoping against hope enough of an answer to our question?  

In 1983, I published Principles of Lutheran Theology,[14] which still survives as a textbook in some quarters. Again I addressed the topic of salvation in a section titled “The Universal Meaning of Jesus Christ.” By this time, I had read virtually everything I could lay my hands on that dealt with universal salvation. I observed that the trend was going in a direction opposite of what I could affirm — at the expense of a high Christology and the Great Commission. I could not accept the universalist option touted by the new missiology that put Christ into a pantheon of world saviors with many different names. The New Testament is the only document in the world of sacred literature that tells us Who Jesus is. The only Jesus we know is Jesus from Nazareth, Who is the living Christ, the Son of God incarnate, the eternal Logos, the Lord of the Church, final Judge, and Savior of the world. These titles of highest honor bar the door to the kind of christological reductionism espoused by the now discredited Jesus Seminar. Their thinking about Jesus is too small to bear the weight of the eschatological salvation promised by the apostolic gospel in His name. 

The uniqueness of this New Testament Jesus as the Word of God incarnate gives rise to belief in His universal significance. Because Jesus is the unique and universal Savior, there is a large hope for salvation, for all people whenever or wherever they might have lived. It is clearly God’s announced will that all people shall be saved and come to the knowledge of truth (i Timothy 2:4). Universalists who hope for the salvation of the totality of the world and humankind do so in terms of the faith, hope, and love generated by nothing less than the New Testament gospel about Jesus the Christ. 

Is there really such a universalist thrust in the message of the New Testament? Let us quote a few verses from some of Paul’s writings and see whether they mean what they say. “For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive” (i Corinthians 15:22). “For in him (Christ) all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell; and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven making peace by the blood of his cross” (Colossians 1:19–20). “For he has made known to us in all wisdom and insight the mystery of his will, according to his purpose which he set forth in Christ as a plan for the fullness of time, to unite all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth” (Ephesians 1:9–10). There are other such statements that point to the universal scope of Christ’s meaning. The most intriguing is in i Corinthians 15:28: “When all things are subjected to him, then the Son himself will also be subjected to him who put all things under him, that God may be everything to everyone.” As I read these verses, the word all never means some or only a few. 

Most of the books I continued to write kept asking the question, “Will all people be saved in the end?” As a church theologian committed to teach within the mainstream of the Great Tradition, I had to take into account that the church has never solemnly promulgated an eschatological dogma. There is no magnum consensus in the Christian tradition on what God will finally choose to do with the world He created that has gone off the tracks. Some things we do not and cannot know because they have not been revealed. But we do know what God has revealed in Christ—that it is His will that all shall be saved and come to the knowledge of truth. We do know that the love of God is universal. We know that we do not believe that God has predestined some to be saved and some to be damned. We do know that the atoning work of Christ on the cross is unlimited in its scope. We do know that Christ gained victory over sin, death, and the devil. We do know that there is not a single person excluded from the love of God manifest in the Christ Who died and rose from the dead. 

The church was created by the Holy Spirit to carry the message of salvation to all the nations. Its purpose is to invite people everywhere to accept the gospel’s promise of salvation here and now. That is the apostolic mandate. Continuity with the apostles means to continue to do what the first apostles did, preaching no other gospel and no other name. Any church that fails to do this forfeits the mark of apostolicity. No doubt the church on its missionary journey will do (and has done) a lot of things besides preach the gospel, such as providing education, medical assistance, social service, and cultural enrichment. But there is one essential dimension which is the unifying center of all others, without which the mission would lack the motivating message of God reconciling the world to Himself. The church of Christ exists in history between the times: between the kairos of salvation in the person of Jesus and the final parousia when He will judge all the living and the dead. 

The deep motive of mission is loyal obedience to Christ; to share the love of God; to care for people body and soul, and let God worry about how to end the creative project He began some millions of years ago. The work of Christ reaches way beyond His earthly ministry. When all will be raised from the dead, every person will inescapably face a postmortem encounter with Him. This means that Christ ascended to heaven to continue His kingdom work in eons to come beyond His incarnate phase. He is not sitting at the right hand of God doing nothing; there will be a final judgment. If everyone gets what they deserve, they will go to hell. “There is none righteous, no, not one. . . . Since all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:10, 23). Jesus Christ will be the judge; and we have reason to believe and hope that His judgment will rhyme with the way He treated sinners in His earthly ministry. The question to ponder is whether the last judgment will occur according to the Law of Moses and his Ten Commandments or according to the apostolic gospel of God’s love on account of the crucified and risen Messiah. 

The hope of universal salvation is a benedictory prayer that expresses the soul of the church and not a dogma to be pronounced from the pulpit. We walk by faith with a flashlight and not by sight with a floodlight; so when we speak of things that have not yet happened, we must tread humbly and hopefully. All we have is the knowledge of things hoped for. “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen” (Hebrews 11:1). 

Addendum 

I don’t count myself a Barthian, but I agree with those who claim that Karl Barth was the greatest church theologian of the twentieth century. He wrote some things appropriate to our topic:

There is no good reason why we should forbid ourselves, or be forbidden, openness to the possibility that in the reality of God and man in Jesus Christ there is contained much more than we might expect and therefore the supremely unexpected withdrawal of that final threat, i. e., that in the truth of this reality there might be contained the super-abundant promise of the final deliverance of all people. To be more explicit, there is no good reason why we should not be open to this possibility. . . . of an apokatastasis or universal reconciliation.[15]

There is not one for whose sin and death he did not die, whose sin and death he did not remove and obliterate on the cross. . . .There is not one who is not adequately and perfectly and finally justified in him. There is not one whose sin is not forgiven sin in him, whose death is not a death which has been put to death in him. . . .There is not one for whom he has not done everything in his death and received everything in his resurrection from the dead.[16]

Carl E. Braaten is Professor of Systematic Theology emeritus, Lutheran School of Theology, Chicago, Illinois; former executive director of the Center for Catholic and Evangelical Theology; and past editor of Pro Ecclesia.

Notes

[1]  David Bentley Hart, That All Shall Be Saved: Heaven, Hell, and Universal Salvation (New Haven, CT: Yale, 2019).

[2]  Rob Bell, Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived (New York: HarperOne, 2011).

[3]  John Stott and David L. Edwards, Evangelical Essentials: A Liberal-Evangelical Dialogue (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 1989), 315. 

[4]  Gregory MacDonald, ‘All Shall Be Well’: Explorations in Universal Salvation and Christian Theology from Origen to Moltmann (Cambridge, UK: James Clarke, 2011).

[5]  Carl E. Braaten, The Future of God, The Revolutionary Dynamics of Hope (New York: Harper & Row, 1969), 133–34.

[6]  Braaten, Christ and Counter-Christ, Apocalyptic Themes in Theology and Culture (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress, 1972), 142. 

[7]  This attitude can be found as early as Tertullian’s De spectaculis, written c. 197. 

[8]  Karl Rahner, Theological Investigations, tr. David Bourke, vol. xiv (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1976), 283. 

[9]  Braaten, Eschatology and Ethics, Essays on the Theology and Ethics of the Kingdom of God (Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg, 1974), 64–65.

[10]  Ibid., 66–68.

[11]  Braaten, The Flaming Center: A Theology of the Christian Mission (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress, 1977).

[12]  Martin Kähler, “Die Mission: ist sie ein unentbehrlicher Zug am Christentums?” Dogmatische Zeitfragen, II (Leipzig: A. Deichert'sche Verlagsbuchhandlung Nachf., 1908), 347.

[13] John Hick, God and the Universe of Faiths: Essays in the Philosophy of Religion (London: Macmillan, 1973).

[14] Braaten, Principles of Lutheran Theology (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress, 1983).

[15]  Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, tr. T.F. Torrance et al., iv/3, first half (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1988), 478.

[16]  Barth, Church Dogmatics, tr. T.F. Torrance et al., iv/1 (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1961), 638.