Universalism

Universalism is the doctrine that every rational creature will ultimately be reconciled to God, so that no one finally suffers unending punishment. Its strongest form denies that hell is everlasting at all; a milder form allows a real but temporary, purgative hell that every soul eventually leaves. First represented in Christian theology by Origen as the doctrine of the restoration of all things (apokatastasis), it has been taught throughout church history by a small minority and has been judged by the wider church to conflict with Scripture’s own teaching on hell and the final judgment.

Historical Origin

The doctrine that all things will eventually return to God did not begin in Christian theology. Bavinck traces it to Indian and Greek philosophy, from which it passed into Gnosticism and Neoplatonism before it was “for the first time represented in Christian theology by Origen.”¹ Origen’s own version held that even the devil might eventually be saved, purified through a remedial fire after a period of purgation proportioned to each soul’s sin.¹ Charles Hodge likewise traces the doctrine to Origen’s teaching that “in the purifying fire at the end of the world, all souls, and all fallen angels, and Satan himself, will ultimately be purged from sin, and restored to the favour of God,” and records that “this doctrine was condemned in the Church.”²

Bavinck names several others who held some form of the position “in antiquity”: Gregory of Nazianzus, Gregory of Nyssa, Didymus, Diodorus of Tarsus, and Theodore of Mopsuestia.¹ In the Middle Ages he places Scotus Erigena and the Brothers and Sisters of the Free Spirit; after the Reformation, Hans Denck and a number of Anabaptists, along with Jung-Stilling and Emanuel Swedenborg; and in the modern era, Friedrich Schleiermacher “and many others.”¹ Van Mastricht supplies two named cases from the era of Reformed orthodoxy itself: Francesco Pucci, “an Italian Socinianizer,” and Samuel Huber, “the Swiss…Lutheran who had been a Reformed minister,” both of whom taught, on the ground of God’s mercy, that every human being would in fact be saved.³ Mastricht treats their teaching, like Origen’s, as an abuse of the doctrine of divine mercy rather than a legitimate inference from it.³

The doctrine’s most recent defense is David Bentley Hart’s That All Shall Be Saved (2019), which argues from the Eastern Orthodox tradition that an eternal hell is logically incompatible with a God who creates ex nihilo out of pure goodness.⁴ Robert Golding’s 2024 Themelios article responds to Hart from a Reformed orthodox position, treating his argument as the contemporary face of the same doctrine Origen first argued for the ancient church.⁴

Core Tenets

Bavinck distinguishes two forms of the doctrine, both aimed at the same conclusion by different routes.¹ Hypothetical universalism holds that hell and eternal punishment depend entirely on the human will: repentance remains genuinely possible even after death, “not only in the intermediate state right up until the final judgment…but also thereafter and for all eternity,” so that proponents “flatter themselves with the hope that in the end all will repent and enter into eternal life.”¹ Bavinck calls this, in substance, “a theory of ongoing purgation and a renewal of the doctrine of the migration of the soul,” relocating the purification that pagan metempsychosis places in this life (Diesseits) into the next (Jenseits).¹ Unconditional universalism, by contrast, does not merely hope for universal salvation but “is expected as certain and proclaimed as dogma”: all creatures will, in fact, “participate in eternal salvation and glory.”¹

Universalists of both kinds appeal to Scripture’s own most sweeping language: that Christ is “the propitiation for the sins of the whole world” (1 John 2:2; Col. 1:19-20), that God “desires all humans to be saved” (1 Tim. 2:4; 4:10), that “as all die in Adam, so all will be made alive in Christ” (Rom. 5:18; 1 Cor. 15:22), that God is gathering “all things under Christ as head” (Eph. 1:10) until “every knee” bows before him (Phil. 2:10) and God is “all in all” (1 Cor. 15:28), and that “God has imprisoned all in disobedience so that he may be merciful to all” (Rom. 11:32).¹ Some universalists press further, arguing that the Greek word usually translated “eternal” (aiōnios) denotes only an age of indefinite length rather than an unending duration, so that the destiny of the lost is better read as “destruction,” “corruption,” or “ruin” than as endless conscious torment.¹

Hart’s contemporary argument runs on a different track: because God created the world ex nihilo out of his own perfect goodness, and because “all contingent ends are intentionally enfolded within his decision” to create, an eternal hell would make everlasting suffering part of God’s own positive design, “an abominable tragedy, and therefore a profound natural evil.”⁴ Hart’s argument depends on a privative, therapeutic view of sin: since sin is fundamentally a “malady” or a failure of perception rather than a willful, culpable rebellion, no finite creature’s guilt can justify an infinite, unending penalty, however great the sin.⁴ On that basis Hart treats hell as, in substance, purgatory: a real but temporary place every soul eventually leaves once purified.⁴

Confessional and Biblical Response

The Second London Baptist Confession states plainly that on the day of judgment “the wicked, who know not God, and obey not the gospel of Jesus Christ, shall be cast aside into everlasting torments, and punished with everlasting destruction, from the presence of the Lord, and from the glory of his power,” in contrast to “the righteous,” who “go into everlasting life.”⁵ The same paragraph pairs the two destinies under a single word: the righteous receive “everlasting rewards” and the wicked “everlasting torments.”⁵

That pairing anchors Bavinck’s biblical response to the apokatastasis argument from aiōnios. The New Testament uses the same adjective, in parallel constructions, for both destinies: the wicked go to “eternal punishment” while the righteous enter “eternal life” (Matt. 25:46).¹ If the word does not mean endless when applied to punishment, there is no principled reason it should mean endless when applied to life; Scripture nowhere “indicates or even leaves open the possibility that the state that begins there can still come to an end.”¹ Nor does the language of “destruction,” “corruption,” and “ruin” imply annihilation: Scripture calls the prodigal son “dead” while he still lives (Luke 15:24, 32), and calls the Ephesians “dead” in their sins before their conversion (Eph. 2:1), without meaning either had ceased to exist; “death” in Scripture names a moral and relational ruin, not a cessation of being.¹

As for the universalists’ “all” texts, Bavinck answers that “Scripture nowhere teaches that one day all humans and even all devils will be saved. Often it indeed uses very universalistic language, but that is because, intensively, Christ’s work is of infinite value and benefits the whole world and all of humanity in its organic form of existence. But it unambiguously excludes the idea that all human individuals or even the devils will at some time become citizens in the kingdom of God.”¹ He traces the doctrine’s underlying logic to pantheism, in which “all things” proceed from God and simply return to him again, leaving God “not the lawgiver and judge” of Scripture “but an unconscious immanent force”; on that reading, sin is no longer lawlessness but “a necessary moment in the evolution of the world,” and redemption is a physical process rather than an ethical and juridical one.¹ “In any case,” he concludes, the doctrine of apokatastasis “is of pagan—not Christian—origin; it is philosophical, not scriptural, in character.”¹

Van Mastricht answers the same claim on grounds of Scripture, divine justice, and the logic of the confession’s own doctrine of election: a judgment that shows no mercy at all (James 2:13), the “eternal flames” and “unquenchable fire” of Matthew 25 and Isaiah 66:24, and God’s “avenging justice” (2 Thess. 1:8-9) all stand against it; because a finite sinner cannot bear an intensively infinite punishment, justice requires one extensively infinite instead, that is, unending in duration; and because universal salvation abolishes reprobation outright, “when there is no reprobation, there is also no election” either.³ To the objection that eternal punishment for a temporal sin is disproportionate, Mastricht responds that the gravity of an offense is measured by its object, not merely its duration: sin is finally committed against an infinitely worthy God, so that “a penalty that is infinite in duration” is the only proportionate response to it.³

Golding’s more recent response to Hart presses the same point about the nature of sin from a different angle: against a privative, therapeutic account of sin, Golding argues that sin is “an ethical and willful decision made by moral agents,” so that unrepented sin, not a mere “misapprehension,” is what hell justly answers.⁴ On that reckoning, Hart’s argument that eternal punishment cannot be “deserved” depends on a doctrine of sin the Reformed tradition does not share.⁴

Modern Forms

Unitarian Universalism is a distinct, organized American religious movement rather than a direct continuation of the doctrine described above. Its Universalist strand emerged as an organized body in the late eighteenth century under leaders such as Hosea Ballou, John Murray, and Elhanan Winchester, and merged in 1961 with the American Unitarian Association to form the Unitarian Universalist Association. Unitarians denied the Trinity outright and stressed the unity of God, the mere humanity of Jesus, and the inherent goodness of human nature; the merged movement combines that denial of the Trinity with the older universalist hope.

Contemporary “Christian universalism,” as argued by Hart, professes Trinitarian, Nicene Christianity, which sets it apart from Unitarian Universalism. Golding’s critique treats it nonetheless as a restatement of the ancient doctrine of apokatastasis rather than a new position, since it reaches the same conclusion, universal and certain final salvation, by a comparable argument from the nature of divine goodness.⁴

Related Doctrines

References

Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 25, “The Consummation.” ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹ ↩¹⁰ ↩¹¹ ↩¹² ↩¹³ ↩¹⁴ ↩¹⁵ ↩¹⁶
Charles Hodge, “Chapter I. State of the Soul After Death,” in Systematic Theology, vol. 3 (New York: Charles Scribner and Company, 1873), 765-766. ↩
Petrus van Mastricht, Theoretical-Practical Theology, vol. 2, Faith in the Triune God, ed. Joel R. Beeke, trans. Todd M. Rester (Grand Rapids: Reformation Heritage Books, 2019), chap. 17, “The Love, Grace, Mercy, Longsuffering, and Clemency of God,” 413-415. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴
Robert Golding, “The Devil Is Not a Christian: Critiquing Christian Universalism as Presented by David Bentley Hart,” Themelios 49, no. 3 (2024): 677-94. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸
The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 32, “Of the Last Judgment,” para. 2. ↩ ↩²