Sunday Saunter: Why I Am A Universalist

And All That I Take It to Imply

I grew up in a situation with divorced parents, one of whom was an alcoholic, so religion was never strictly regulated for me, and in some ways, I think that my religious life is better for that state of affairs, because it means I’ve had the occasion of a long experiment in many of the ideas I’d consider most important to my mature faith. One of those is universalism. When I was a kid, I was exposed through a friend’s Bible-school-dropout dad to Elwin and Margit Roach’s “Pathfinder” or “Godfire” website, where they lay out their Protestant case for universal salvation and a storied allegorical reading of the Bible at great length. I’d say that in the short-term, reading their stuff did more harm than good, if for no other reason than because it encouraged me to look for all kinds of hidden meaning in biblical texts that I’d now say is either not there or is best constructed only after one has established the literal meaning of the text through the use of academic methods; but in the long-term, they planted in me the belief, uncomfortably but firmly held in my high school youth group, that God would save everyone.

I did not stick to it consistently over the years. In later high school, as I started becoming little-o orthodox and little-c catholic in my theology by reading folks like NT Wright and Michael Gorman, getting into biblical studies, and attending a local Episcopal parish, and in early to middle college, I became more agnostic on the topic of universal salvation. I was a “hopeful” universalist, who wanted to both believe the best of God, that everything might well work out in the end, while taking seriously biblical language about eschatological judgment and punishment for the wicked, and the devotional tradition within many forms of classical Christianity that uses the threat of such punishment to assist in the life of virtue. And I’d say my guard was up on these questions until about 2018, just as I was finishing my first round of graduate school and starting my second.

Two things happened that year. First, David Bentley Hart’s That All Shall Be Saved (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019) was announced, if I’m not mistaken in my recollection; second, I became online acquaintances with Jordan Daniel Wood, who would (no pun intended) ironically become my actual, physical neighbor around two to three years later. And I found that one day, before the book published, I awoke from slumber and I had sort of pieced together in my mind the arguments that I had heard Hart make for universalism in different online venues and that Jordan had advanced for universalism elsewhere and found myself a victim of their logic. I have written before about having gone through a traditionalist phase in college, in which the progressivism of my school years gave way to a kind of hard-nosed rigorism in Orthodoxy (and a regressive politics that snuck in, Trojan-horse style, to my mind and that I had to expend considerable effort disabusing myself of, but that’s another story); that phase began to break down in my second round of graduate school, and my conviction about universalism was in many ways the death knell.

Seven years later (and, woah—seven years!), the basic argument remains unchanged: it was enhanced by the publication of TASBS, which, I agree with its author, is basically an irrefutably watertight argument. That argument goes something like this:

1. The Philological Argument. The Bible uses a lot of language to describe God’s punishment of the wicked at a coming crisis at the end of the age. The bulk of that language is simply annihilationist: God will destroy the wicked. A minority of that language is infernalist, referring to some kind of imprisonment and torment that will befall the wicked alongside evil angels and demons; but the vocabulary used to describe this punishment is not “eternal” in character. Another minority of that language is universalist, implicitly or explicitly declaring the salvation of all. Since the Bible is not uniform, then, and its language does not mean what its later interpreters think it means, the question of what the Bible teaches about the fate of the wicked is a hermeneutical one.

2. The Hermeneutical Argument. To read something as a canon implies that one is looking for an organizing principle that unifies a vast body of diverse material. That organizing principle does not silence or sideline the diversity of the corpus, but provides a formal and final cause that holds the thing together, without which it is finally incoherent. I’ll offer an innocuous example: Doctor Who is a pretty vast canon of television, movies, comic books, novels, and audio adventures, written by lots of different people. The organizing logos of the show is the person and character of the Doctor themselves, whose adventure through space and time allows for the possibility of changes to their own personal history. Ergo, while Doctor Who is not a uniform or fully standardized canon, it is at least a coherent one, organized by its central, governing principles. The biblical corpus is similar. Its texts were composed, collected, edited, and circulated over a period of a thousand years, mainly by scribal communities and only later by individual authors, only some of whom are recoverable to us as specific individuals by prosopography, and the process by which the Christian Bible in particular achieved its canonical form and authority took many centuries more. So, to read this anthology as a canon means looking for an organizing principle of interpretation, which is to say, looking for those texts within its corpus that can plausibly serve as priority texts, which are imperative for the interpretation of the others (even those that superficially disagree with them). Here, just like with a scientific theory, good hermeneia prefers the texts that provide the most capacious principles of interpretation, the ones that are capable of accounting for the greatest amount of the data. The annihilationist texts can perhaps plausibly explain texts which foresee infernalist torment (since perhaps torment precedes destruction, or perhaps annihilationism refers to death in this world and infernalism to torment in the next, but neither annihilationist nor infernalist eschatology can account for universalist eschatology. Only the universalist texts, therefore, can provide an eschatological throughline sufficiently capacious to be an interpretive standard for the canon, since only universalism has room for annihilation (of a false or toxic manifestation of the spiritual being, either passively surrendered to oblivion or actively purged) and an inferalist punishment which is both retributive and rehabilitative as the condition for the salvation of all.

3. The Moral Argument. The hermeneutical argument encompasses that which is internal to the logic of the canon. But when we do philosophy and theology, we are not merely interested in what the canon says but in how what the canon says can be correlated with what is available to conscience and reason. And of the three available eschatologies, it is doubtless true that the most humane and moral of them is universal salvation (with the caveat that universal salvation must logically include a system of moral rehabilitation for the wicked that may well be partially punitive in character). For God to simply annihilate the wicked would be, in some way, to turn their own logic of destruction against them, and so would in some way be fitting; but given God’s vast moral superiority to human beings, it is not fitting for God to settle for the strictures of human moral logic as the final word on any human’s existence. Likewise, for God to punish and torment the wicked temporarily is just. This is harder to sell in our culture for traditionally identified sins whose vicious character we question and debate, but it is not hard to sell for someone like, say, Hitler. If you’re the kind of person that believes in hell, and you don’t think Hitler’s there, you’re not the kind of person likely to be persuaded by moral logic, but if you are the kind of person persuaded by moral logic, then it’s obvious that Hitler is burning in hell: maybe not eternally, but at least for good long while. But for God to torment even the worst soul in hell forever, far in excess of any crime they could plausibly have committed within history, would be unjust. This is true even if it were possible that those in hell had, with full rational awareness, chosen to sin—though this is impossible if one adopts, as one should, a rationalist psychology that correlates rational awareness with moral fiber. We only ever choose what we think, however mistakenly, and however grotesquely, is good for us; while this does not absolve us of responsibility for our evil, it does mean that the choices we make do not bear a stamp of absolute consequence. They cannot, for we make all our choices from within a web of causation over which we have precious little control and even less comprehension: our freedom of choice is real, but our wills are born captive to sin because our flesh is mortal, and ignorance and craving catalyze one another as long as we are in flesh. So, contrary to many an apologist’s claim, it is not possible for God to justly reward temporal sins with eternal hell because, so to speak, his infinite dignity has been offended: God is not so thin-skinned, and all sins are finite. This is actually a principle we can find in many other religious afterlife systems: Hindu, Buddhist, Jewish, and even Greco-Roman pagan (not even the Tartarian damned of Aeneid VI do their gig forever). Only universalism, in which God both metes appropriate punishment for sin and mercifully reconciles every last being to himself, is morally fitting for the supreme source and summit of reality, if in fact that archē of all things is the transcendent source of our own immanent moral awareness.

4. The Metaphysical Argument. Rationally speaking, it is not just that only universal salvation befits what conscience dictates should be true of God—that he should rise at least to, but also infinitely transcend, our standards of justice—it is also that God cannot be God unless all creation eventually returns to him, he fills it all as “all in all” (1 Cor 15:28), and this cannot be the experience of damnation. There are various reasons this must be true. If God simply annihilates the wicked, then he does so either by passively surrendering them to the nothingness from which they are made or by actively rescinding his own order that they come to be. But if God passively surrenders the wicked to nothingness, then God fails to create; and if God rescinds his own creative order, then God changes his mind. God cannot be either impotent or mutable, so annihilation cannot be the final truth of a creature. If God torments the wicked forever, then he leaves some portion of creation, however small, permanently unredeemed and unreconciled. For if God is Being and God is the Good, as philosophical theology insists, then evil is nothing other than the privation and perversion of being (privatio essendi) and the privation of the Good (privatio boni). It is not just that God will not cohabit with evil on principle, then, but that God logically cannot cohabit with evil, for where there is God, evil simply evaporates into the nothingness that it is. And if this is true, then one of two things would have to be true for there to be an eternal hell. Either a.) the damned in hell persist in their evil, in which case God does not indwell them; but if this is true, then God would not be all in all, for God would not be able to fill the wicked, but would permanently leave some portion of creation untouched, what has often been referred to as a concentration camp in the center of paradise; or, b.), the damned in hell are cured of their evil and they are filled with God, but they remain in torment. But this would both contradict the moral logic of hell, which is that hell exists to punish evil and cure it—meaning, a creature cured of its evil no longer has a place there—and it would also contradict the experience of God, which is “righteousness, peace, and joy in the Holy Spirit” (Rom 14:17). And God must fill all creation, which is to say, all creation must return to God, if God is the true source and summit of existence as philosophical theology maintains, for all effects revert to their causes; and in God’s case, for an effect to revert to its cause means for it to return to God in communion, which is to experience final beatitude; which means that there can be no eternal hell for God to be God. There is also the problem that if there were an eternal hell and people eternally damned to it, then God would foreknow from all eternity who those people would be and still nevertheless elected to create them and not to act by way of intervention to prevent their damnation, which would effectively mean that Augustine and Calvin were correct in their doctrine of double predestination, which would make God an arbitrary voluntarist and a moral monster; but this is not just a contradiction of conscience but also of reason, since this is exactly what God, qua God, cannot be.

Again, these four arguments are, to my mind, absolute in the deconstruction of infernalism and the support of a belief in universal salvation. There is also, connected to the Moral Argument, an aesthetic or emotive argument, which I would frame this way: the story in which God rescues absolutely every last element of creation is a better story than a story in which God sacrifices anywhere from the vast bulk of the created order to the tiniest speck of it to either oblivion or damnation for the sake of a privileged few. It may feel good if one believes they are part of that privileged few, but the psychosis required to work one’s self into that belief and to maintain it against nagging paranoia to the contrary wreaks such havoc on the soul that such feeling is often nullified. Who is the more glorious hero—the one who leaves behind a battlefield of slaughtered adversaries, who leads the defeated foes in triumphus, or the one who magnanimously spares conquered enemies after having bested them? And which religion, intuitively, would you want to be a part of—one that is comfortable with the eternal loss of most of the human race (and most of the natural world, too, but that’s a different story), or one that will not rest until every being is liberated from suffering?

Now, interestingly, going whole-hog universalist has had the surprising effect in my thought and life of faith of reinvigorating hell as a genuinely fearful thing. No one goes to hell for all eternity, and no rational spirit is lost forever to its Creator. So far, so good. But all that means is that the stakes of this life are nothing less than my “self.” That is to say, my rational spirit is not all I am: it is not my soul, my body, the social fiction of my ego, the relationships that have constituted my persona in this life. All of that stuff is mortal, and if it wants to live forever, it has limited options. Once again we can apply a hermeneutical principle to the canon: Jesus teaches that God will destroy soul and body in Gehenna (Matt 10:28); Paul teaches that the Day of Judgment is a day of fire that will burn up the works of everyone, leaving some to be saved “as though by fire” with everything else lost, but some, who have composed their life of virtues as though of precious metals, keeping much or all of themselves (1 Cor 3:10-15); or else, he speaks of turning over flesh to Satan so that the spirit may be saved in the Day of the Lord (5:5). I think there’s a warning here, even for the universalist: the good news that your spirit will be saved no matter what is not necessarily good news for the stuff you typically think of as being “you.”

And so the threat of hell lingers, no longer as an eternal loss without any hope of homecoming, but as the threat of oblivion to this person that I have made myself in this life, to this soul and this body. If I wish to immortalize them, then I have one option: I can love God with all my being and my neighbor as myself, the latter by concrete, corporeal and spiritual works of mercy. I can, in other words, follow God’s laws and moral standards. I can seek to purify my soul of its passions, open my eyes in theoria of God’s omnipresence in the sensible, imaginal, and intelligible universe, and through this seek henosis with God already in this life. I can try to compose my personality, in other words, of things that do not die.

But to do that is already a kind of death—to “die before you die.” As Jesus says, to follow him is to take up the cross and to lose your life, which is to save it (Mk 8:34-38); or, alternatively, to hide your life with Christ in God (Col 3:3). It means dying to the flesh and coming alive to the Spirit, largely through the struggle between the two and their priorities; it means persistence in spiritual askesis, in seeking to grow in prudence, justice, courage, temperance, faith, hope, and love; it means, finally, martyrdom, “witness” to the truth that “I have been crucified with Christ, and it is no longer I”—quite literally, ego!—“who lives, but Christ in me” (Gal 2:20). There is, finally, only one path to salvation for all, and it is through the cross: we may either voluntarily take up the cross in this life, in which case we may already begin in this life to rise from the dead in Christ and to live immortal with him, since those who believe in Christ will live even though they die, and in fact will never die (Jn 11:25-26). Those who begin in this life, in other words, will find in the next life that already much of who they take themselves to be has simply become Christ, and so is immortal.

Those who, by contrast, have given themselves dissolutely to evil in this life will find Death a painful separation from all that they love and will find their afterlife an altogether different sacrament of the cross. Especially, those who victimize the poor and the weak will find that hell is first retribution and only then rehabilitation—but the rehabilitation for many will simply be de-creation and re-creation. This is another element in universalism, so I take it: universal salvation does not mean having to share heaven with Hitler (or for that matter with Donald Trump). It means that the rational spirit that is reduced to mustard seed size and spark within the two of them will have to be extricated from the husk of the monstrous personas they have crafted for themselves in this life, only after it has been roused from its deep slumber through punishment. For souls like that, it will be their own consent to being remade that will constitute their synergy with God in final salvation.

Most souls, I think, are not quite so wicked. I think the vast majority of humanity will find after life that things are much more like cosmic rehab, a purgatorial halfway house in which they will need to face up to the evil they’ve done in their lives—in most cases, domestic, melodramatic evil, but evil nonetheless—and to make what repair is possible for it. A great many souls will also need therapy from this life: rest, recovery, and repair for evils done to them, before perhaps they can get on with the serious business of their own spiritual ascent. I am not the judge, and do not know how it works fully. But I do think some souls fall into that most hideous state of needing to be fully unmade to save the spirit. And it’s for this reason, actually, that I am open to a traditional, Platonic and Philonic/Hellenistic Jewish form of metempsychosis, gilgul in later kabbalistic Judaism, as a solution to save the horrifically evil: it offers those spirits another chance to get it right, and as many chances, perhaps, as any spirit needs, separated by whatever appropriate intervals come between such lives.

But again, the point here is that universalism has teeth: that God will save all is not a license to sin. It would not occur as such to a more rational and moral species anyway, since the highest form of morality and the highest form of love are to do good for good’s sake, to love God and the neighbor for their own sake, and not out of fear of punishment or hope of reward: we all have to start somewhere, and we all typically start in one of those two places, but ideally the highest expression of our spiritual sentiments is to do what is right because it is right and to show little concern for what will happen to us as a result hereafter. Yet there is nevertheless a moral urgency to this life also for the universalist: who I am and take myself to be might not survive the judgment, if I do not seek to assimilate myself as far as possible to virtue and to God, as God has revealed God’s self in Christ, and therefore to love. My job in this life remains to try and make sure that David Armstrong, and the whole world that constitutes him and for which he is responsible, makes it into the Kingdom, even if by the skin of his teeth.

But there is also, finally, a reinvigoration of hell’s appropriate rhetorical use when one takes this position. In biblical and related literature, the primary objects of wrath in hell rhetoric are the rich and the mighty. Jewish apocalyptic emphasized the underworld and its torments (I will not say “invented” because it didn’t) and the final battle in which God and his angels will slay the wicked to express their prophetic displeasure with the way that the rulers and elites of the world as they were living through it were tyrannizing them and their people. They extrapolated from this the apocalyptic notion that there must also be demonic and evil angelic elites in the cosmos similarly abusing the people of God from metaphysical stations anterior to the empires of the Babylonians, Macedonians, and Romans (the Bible basically likes the Persians) whom God will also topple in the future when he deals with the great pagan emperor(s). When Jesus talks about hell, the objects of his ire are these rich and powerful people making life a living hell for everyone else: the only biblical story in which Jesus describes an infernalist vision of someone burning in hell, it’s because he wouldn’t give bread to a beggar at his door.

In a culture like ours, where Christian culture has been hegemonic for so long, the rhetoric of hell is most often weaponized against dissidents from the hegemony: non-Christians, dissident or alternative Christians (in antiquity, “heretics”; in our setting, “liberal” or “woke” Christians), and traditionally suppressed populations seeking empowerment and liberation, like African Americans, indigenous people, women, immigrants, and LGBTQ people. When I was growing up, in my Southern Baptist youth group, I heard hell invoked more than once in reference to some of these groups explicitly, and others of them implicitly. When very apocalyptically and charismatically minded Christians use hell language, it is usually against these forces that they see as “corrupting” the culture.

I can understand why Christians like me would typically not want to engage in that same kind of use of the rhetoric of hell to distance themselves from such people. I, after all, want to live in a world where black people, indigenous people, women, immigrants, and queer people are free, equitably empowered, and happy, so I can sympathize with an aversion to using a rhetorical tool that has often deepened and psychologized their suffering. But I actually think the point here is that it’s not that hell language is generally inappropriate, but that it’s been wrongly weaponized against the wrong kinds of people. In the Jewish, Christian, and Islamic Traditions, hell has always been a threat from God to the powerful to mind the power they’ve been given responsibly, justly, and compassionately. That is also how a lot of hell language functions in Hinduism and Buddhism. In a world where many people have no other recourse against oligarchs and tyrants than actions of speech and faith, it is important to be able to name what God has set aside for people who amass power and wealth to protect their corruption and feast upon the poor and the weak. It is important to be able to push back with this prophetic and apocalyptic language against the people it was actually designed for, to reclaim it and repurpose it as an expression of popular spirituality, justice, and equity rather than elite control. This is related to the ethical, social, and political dimension of universal salvation. Universalism should not make us “nice” and it should not make us tolerant of social evils, willing to look past them to a future where all are reconciled and, thus, not wishing to offend against offenders in the present. Universalism should make us passionately committed to “justice and liberty for all.” For what finally is the meaning of all being saved if not that all are equally, and eternally, loved and wanted by God in the peaceable kingdom?

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And that’s it for Sunday Saunter. This was a fun summer experiment, and I might bring it back out next year.

I want to chime in here at the end to give a look at what’s coming down the pipeline for the Fall. I’m in the rare position of being almost completely written up to the end of 2025, to make sure that I have ample time and energy to focus on the school year this Fall (lots of Latin to teach, and a class on the Hebrew Prophets at a local synagogue), and so am in a position to forecast. This is not to say that I won’t write the occasional Zeitgeist Zephyr or Homely Homily or random post or what have you as fancy strikes, but being written up this way actually frees me to be able to do that more than I otherwise might.

• August and early September will feature a series on “How to Think About the Eucharist” in four parts.

• The remainder of September will see the completion of the “How to Think About (Historical/Biblical) Israel” series and an article on the Inklings.

• October will see the return of the “Better Know A Mytheme” series from last year, with articles on the vanishing fairy, the nostalgia of the Odyssey, the heavenly twin, and the threshold guardian.

• November will feature a four part series on Christianity, especially Catholicism, and Islam.

• December will be one of three things (I haven’t completely decided yet): either a.) a follow-up series on Catholicism and Hinduism (thus completing the theme I set out at the beginning of the year on “Christian Futures in a World of Religious Change,” b.) a series on Catholicism and various pagan religious mythologies, or c.) a random, digressional mashup to close out the year with something fun.

I am as always deeply grateful to those of you who subscribe on a paid tier for APD, but also to those of you who read even just the free stuff. If you’re on the fence about whether to get a subscription for the coming year, two notes I’d put out: first, my prices remain as low as Substack allows them to be, and there will always be at least one article a week with hopefully a second one on Sunday. (Want more? Let me know and I’ll think about what I could manage.) Second, Fall is really when a lot of my best stuff comes out—it’s a Dionysiac frenzy that overwhelms the Apollonian summertime in me, I don’t know how else to put it. So if you want to read me at my best, September-December is really the time to do it.

Curate ut valeatis,
David