Appendix B
A Boundary Reference for the Whole Book
This book answers forty arguments against the hope that God will, in the end, bring every person to saving faith in Jesus Christ. Nearly every one of those arguments wounds a real target. The gnostic universalism that teaches a divine spark in each soul. The necessitarian universalism that makes salvation owed rather than given. The sentimental universalism that dissolves sin and judgment into a warm haze. These deserve the criticism they receive. Michael McClymond and James De Young have given the church a real service by cataloging them.
But their criticism lands on the counterfeits. It does not land on the biblical hope.
That single distinction is the engine of this entire book. I have called it the boundary, and I have pressed it in every chapter. The strategy is plain: concede the over-reach, defend the bounded version, and keep the two universalisms apart. Where McClymond is right about a counterfeit, I say so. Where his premise is then made to reach the creedal, Christ-centered hope that Gregory of Nyssa held and that this book defends, I show that it does not reach.
This appendix gathers the boundary into a single reference. It states what conservative biblical universalism affirms, what it refuses, and who falls where. Every teal-colored Boundary callout in every chapter of this book leans on what follows here.1
The Single Most Important Sentence
The universalism McClymond defeats is real, but it is not the one this book holds. That sentence, proved forty times over, is the heart of the defense. Every row in the table below, every counterfeit named, and every chapter cross-reference exists to make that sentence stick.
The table below is the heart of this appendix. The left column lists the marks of the universalism this book defends. The right column lists the positions this book rejects. Together they draw one clear line through a crowded field.
| What Biblical Universalism Affirms | What Biblical Universalism Refuses |
|---|---|
| The full deity of Christ and the Trinity, confessed without qualification in the Apostles', Nicene, and Chalcedonian creeds. | Any unitarianism or denial of the Trinity, including the Unitarian Universalist tradition that has abandoned the deity of Christ and become a post-Christian moralism. |
| The bodily resurrection of Christ and of the dead, a real, historical event on which everything depends. | Any spiritualizing of the resurrection into a metaphor, a moral ideal, or a subjective "Easter experience." |
| The cross as a real, objective, costly atonement for sin. Christ bore sin, conquered death, and reconciled the world to God (2 Corinthians 5:19; Colossians 1:20). Universal salvation is the application of that finished work to every person, not its bypassing. | Any universalism in which the cross recedes ("saved though never forgiven," salvation without atonement, or the notion that the cross was merely exemplary). Where the cross is optional, grace is eclipsed. (See Chapter 37.) |
| Salvation through personal faith in Jesus Christ alone, for every person who is saved. The hope is that all will freely come to that faith, not that faith is unnecessary. | Religious pluralism: the claim that all religions are equally valid paths and that Christ is not the unique Savior. (See Chapter 3.) |
| The reality, gravity, and justice of God's judgment. Sin is real. The purifying fire is real and severe. Judgment is not a sentencing hearing but a transforming encounter with God's holy love. | Sentimental universalism, the "everyone is basically fine" assumption with no doctrine of sin, no cross, and no serious judgment. The purifying fire in this book is the answer to that softness. |
| The full inspiration and authority of Scripture, Old and New Testaments. The defense in this book is built on Scripture, not over against it. | Any universalism grounded in private revelation, spirit-world communications, esoteric tradition, or the setting aside of Scripture's hard texts as primitive error. (See Chapter 21.) |
| The historic creeds (Apostles', Nicene, Chalcedonian), held unrevised. This is creedal Christianity that also hopes for the salvation of all. | Any "creeds of universalism" that substitute for the historic creeds or reduce them to cultural relics. |
| Genuine libertarian human freedom. God woos, draws, persuades, and purifies, but He does not coerce. A real "yes" requires a possible "no." | Strict necessitarianism, the claim that all must be saved by metaphysical law and that the rational will cannot finally refuse God. (See the special note on David Bentley Hart below, and Chapter 5.) |
| A universalism reached by these doctrines, not in spite of them. The biblical gospel, taken to its end, saves all: through the cross, through grace, through faith freely given. | Any universalism that reaches its conclusion by trading away one or more of the doctrines in the left column. That is the move this book calls the eclipse of grace. (See Chapter 1 and Chapters 4–6.) |
That is the line. Everything on the left is what this book holds. Everything on the right is what this book disowns. McClymond's two volumes are the best catalog in print of the positions on the right. I use his catalog gratefully, and against his own conclusion. The creedal, Christ-centered universalism of the left column is exactly the strand his thesis cannot absorb.2
Grace More Gracious, Not Less
The deepest irony of the eclipse-of-grace charge is that biblical universalism makes grace more costly, not less. Picture a grace that pursues the worst rebel through death. Through the purifying fire. Through every resistance. And finally wins a free "yes" from a healed heart. That is the most relentless grace in the Christian tradition. It is not cheap grace. It is not automatic grace. It is the costliest grace there is, and the cross is its price.
The counterfeits are not abstractions. They have names, representatives, and histories. Naming them plainly is the honest work this book does throughout, and it is the same work McClymond does in The Devil's Redemption. The difference is that I use his taxonomy to defend the hope he overlooks rather than to bury it. Each counterfeit is summarized here in a sentence, with a pointer to the chapter that treats it fully.
The claim: All religions are equally valid paths to God, and Christ is not the unique Savior.
The representative: John Hick.
Why it is refused: It makes the cross unnecessary. If every path saves, then no Savior was needed. This is the deepest of the counterfeits, because it removes the very thing the biblical hope rests on. (See Chapter 3.)
The claim: The human soul is a fragment of the divine, a "spark" of God's own substance. It returns to God by nature rather than by grace. No cross, no faith, no particular Savior is needed. The soul just unfolds what it already is.
The representative: The gnostic tradition from second-century Alexandria through Kabbalah to the modern esoteric universalists whom McClymond traces in chapters 2–5 of The Devil's Redemption.
Why it is refused: It replaces grace with nature. If the soul saves itself by being divine, the cross is swallowed up in the soul's own homecoming. McClymond calls this "salvation by nature" (Greek kata physin, "according to nature"), and he is right to reject it. So does this book, as firmly as he does. The soul is a creature, not a fragment of God. It is dead in sin and saved only by grace (Ephesians 2:1, 8–9). (See Chapter 4.)3
The claim: A "dark principle" (a ground of wrath, negativity, or chaos) exists within God Himself, and creation, including evil, flows from this divine darkness. Salvation is the resolution of a drama inside God.
The representative: Jakob Böhme (1575–1624) and the theosophical tradition he inspired.
Why it is refused: The Bible says the opposite in five words: "God is light, and in him is no darkness at all" (1 John 1:5). Biblical universalism rests on a God of pure goodness, not a God at war with His own shadow. Where universalism drinks from Böhme, it inherits a corrupted doctrine of God. This book refuses it outright. (See Chapter 18.)
The claim: All rational beings must be saved as a matter of metaphysical or logical necessity. The rational will cannot finally refuse God.
The representative: David Bentley Hart is the most brilliant recent defender of this position in That All Shall Be Saved. (See the special note on Hart below.)
Why it is refused (as a position, not as a person): If salvation is necessary, it is not grace, because grace is free and could have been otherwise. McClymond's charge that necessity eclipses grace lands here, and this book agrees. The biblical hope keeps libertarian free will. It holds that universal salvation is an overwhelming conviction, not a metaphysical entailment. The "yes" is freely certain, not logically forced. (See Chapter 5.)
The claim: The soul purges its own sin through suffering in a postmortem fire, paying its own debt, so that no Savior's work is finally needed.
The representative: Certain purgatorial models that let the soul's own suffering replace the cross.
Why it is refused: If the soul pays for its own sin, the atonement is a redundancy. Grace is eclipsed by self-help. The purifying fire in this book is real and severe, but it is not the soul earning its salvation. It is God's holy presence burning away the evil in the rebel, and the cost was paid at Calvary, not in the sinner's suffering. (See Chapter 6.)4
The claim: Everyone is basically fine. God is too loving to judge anyone seriously. Sin is a mistake, not a rebellion, and hell is a scare-word with no real referent.
The representative: Popular-level "love wins" preaching that dissolves sin and judgment into a warm assurance without the cross or repentance.
Why it is refused: It trivializes evil. A death camp is not a misunderstanding. Sin is real, and judgment is real. This book holds a severe doctrine of the purifying fire precisely because it takes sin seriously. The hope is not that judgment is a fiction. The hope is that judgment finishes its work. (See Chapter 12.)
The claim: Everyone is already saved. Atonement is unnecessary because there was never a real separation between humanity and God. Evil is "just good misunderstood."
The representative: Carlton Pearson, whose trajectory from Pentecostal orthodoxy to New Thought this book tells with sorrow, not scorn.
Why it is refused: Pearson's "gospel of inclusion" dissolves the need for repentance, faith, and the cross. His core claim, that human beings are "innately, internally, and eternally divine," is the gnostic spark-of-the-divine dressed in evangelical clothing. The cross recedes until it vanishes. This is exactly what McClymond means by the eclipse of grace, and the author shares the concern. (See Chapter 12 and Chapter 39.)5
The claim: Grace is universal and unconditional, so moral effort, repentance, and holiness are optional. "Free to sin and still be loved" is the working motto.
The representative: The charismatic-Pentecostal antinomian strand McClymond documents in §11.6 of The Devil's Redemption, including John Crowder and related figures.
Why it is refused: Paul heard this objection about his own gospel and answered it: "Shall we go on sinning so that grace may increase? By no means!" (Romans 6:1–2). The grace that saves also "teaches us to renounce ungodliness" (Titus 2:11–12). This book upholds the moral law, demands repentance, and insists on sanctification. Grace that leaves you in your sin was never grace at all. (See Chapter 39.)
Readers will notice that necessitarianism appears in the "refused" column above, and that David Bentley Hart is named as its most brilliant representative. I want to be careful here, because Hart occupies a unique place in this book's landscape. He is not a counterfeit. He is a source.
Hart is fully orthodox. He confesses the Trinity, the deity of Christ, the Incarnation, the bodily resurrection, and the reality of the atonement. He holds the Nicene Creed without qualification. His linguistic and patristic scholarship is among the best in the field, and this book draws on it gratefully. His observations on the New Testament afterlife language, on the meaning of correction (Greek kolasis, "corrective punishment"), and on the early church's range of views about the world to come are used throughout.6
I part from Hart on one point, and only one: the philosophy of freedom. Hart argues that a rational will, fully informed, cannot finally choose against the Good. On his account, the universal "yes" to God is not merely certain in practice. It is necessary in principle. The will that sees God clearly has no real capacity to refuse.
I think this goes too far. I keep libertarian free will. A genuine "yes" requires a possible "no." The bare logical possibility that some creature could refuse God forever cannot be ruled out by argument alone. What makes the universal hope overwhelming is not that refusal is impossible. It is that refusal is, in the end, vanishingly unlikely to be final.
A perfectly loving and all-knowing God, with eternity to work and full knowledge of what each person would freely choose, can compose the most persuasive appeal any heart could receive. That appeal is offered in His own unveiled presence, with the fire burning away every obstacle, until even the hardest rebel freely yields.7
This difference matters for the book's defense, because it is the exact point where McClymond's necessity charge breaks. He is right that necessitarian universalism eclipses grace. If salvation is owed as a matter of metaphysical law, it is not a gift. But this book does not hold necessitarian universalism. It holds that grace freely given wins freely chosen "yeses." The contingency McClymond wants is still here. The graciousness of grace is still intact. The eclipse-of-grace charge loses its target.
Source, Not Counterfeit
Hart's Christ-centered frame, his creedal orthodoxy, and his linguistic and patristic work place him firmly inside the boundary of this book. The book declines his metaphysics of the will, but that is an intramural question. It does not move Hart across the line. He is an ally whose philosophical claim the book parts from, not an adversary whose theology the book disowns. (See Chapter 5 for the full treatment.)
Every chapter in this book carries a teal-colored Boundary callout. Each callout asks one question of the argument at hand: does this objection wound the biblical hope, or only a counterfeit? The honest answer follows one of two patterns.
Most often the callout shows that McClymond's or De Young's charge lands squarely on a counterfeit while leaving the biblical hope untouched. The "salvation by nature" charge (Chapter 4) is a clear case. It devastates the gnostic spark-of-the-divine teaching. It does not touch a universalism that holds the soul is a creature, dead in sin, saved only by the contingent, gracious work of Christ applied through the Spirit. The objection is true. It is just aimed at someone else.
Sometimes the callout concedes the hit. This is the book's most honest and most disarming move, and it appears often. Where McClymond's critique catches a real over-reach in a universalist thinker, the book says so plainly. Chapter 37 is the clearest case: the book sides with McClymond against any universalism in which the cross recedes, because a salvation without atonement is no salvation at all. Chapter 5 concedes the force of the necessity charge against strict necessitarianism. Chapter 12 concedes that Pearson's "gospel of inclusion" really does trivialize evil. Chapter 39 concedes that the antinomian and esoteric strands deserve every criticism they receive.
Both patterns serve the same strategy. The concessions are not weakness. They are the book's way of showing that it takes McClymond's critique seriously, uses his own distinctions, and defines the biblical hope precisely to exclude the positions he rightly wounds.
McClymond Names the Problem, and the Book Uses His Diagnosis
McClymond writes that the effort to extend grace to all has "repeatedly ended up compromising or even eliminating the notion of grace." He observes that what appears to be "all grace" turns out to be "no grace." He is describing a pattern that runs through the gnostic, necessitarian, and self-expiating strands. On those strands, the pattern is real.
— Michael McClymond, The Devil’s Redemption, V 1, p. 24The irony is that McClymond's own diagnosis is this book's best tool. He has cataloged the counterfeits with enormous learning. I use that catalog gratefully. I just draw a different conclusion from it. He says: the counterfeits prove the hope is false. I say: the counterfeits prove the boundary is necessary, and the hope survives the boundary intact.
Here is the final thing to say about the boundary, and it may be the most important.
The boundary is not a clever device I invented to escape McClymond's net. It is the same line he himself draws. McClymond spends two volumes sorting universalisms into families: the gnostic strand, the Böhmist strand, the liberal strand, the necessitarian strand, the evangelical strand. He knows they are not the same. He knows the gnostic version and the creedal version rest on opposite foundations. He catalogs those differences with care.
What he does not do, and what this book does forty times over, is follow that distinction to its natural end. If the gnostic, the necessitarian, the antinomian, and the self-expiating universalisms are all counterfeits, and if there remains one strand that holds the creeds, confesses Christ, rests on the cross, keeps free will, and reaches the universal hope through these doctrines rather than around them, then McClymond's critique has not defeated universalism. It has refined it.8
That is what happened in this book. McClymond's case cleared the field of the counterfeits. The biblical, creedal hope stands in the cleared field. Grace is not eclipsed. It is fulfilled.
The boundary is stated in principle in Chapter 1 and given its first full treatment in Chapter 2. It is applied, chapter by chapter, in every Boundary callout throughout the book. The chapters where it does its heaviest work are:
Chapter 3: the genetic argument. Universalism is not guilty by descent from gnosticism, because the biblical strand has a different lineage entirely.
Chapter 4: grace eclipsed by nature. The gnostic spark-of-the-divine teaching is refused; salvation is the contingent work of Christ.
Chapter 5: grace eclipsed by necessity. The necessitarian claim is declined; the book keeps free will and parts from Hart's metaphysics.
Chapter 7: the problem of God. The "divine drama" of self-alienation and self-return is refused; God is not working out an inner conflict.
Chapter 18: Böhme's dark principle. The theosophical inheritance is flatly rejected; in God there is no darkness at all.
Chapter 37: when the cross recedes. The book sides with McClymond here; a universalism in which the cross is optional has lost the gospel.
Chapter 38: cultural accommodation. The boundary answers the charge that universalism is just the spirit of the age; this version rests on the ancient creeds, not the modern mood.
Chapter 39: antinomian and esoteric universalism. The most extreme counterfeits are named, disowned, and distinguished from the hope this book holds.
The cumulative defense is gathered in Chapter 40, where the boundary is restated one final time and the surviving strand is named.
The boundary is not a device for disowning the embarrassing universalists. It is a device for telling the truth. Some universalisms really have traded away the gospel. They have let the cross recede, replaced grace with nature, and built their hope on metaphysics rather than on the character of the God who bled. Naming those losses is not disloyalty to the larger hope. It is the only way to hold it with integrity.
But the truth runs both ways. The counterfeits are not the whole story. There is a universalism that holds every creed, confesses every doctrine, rests on every text, and still says: the God who began a good work in every person He made will bring it to completion. That universalism is reached through grace, the cross, the creeds, and the Scriptures. It has never needed Böhme. It has never needed gnosticism. It has never needed the abolition of free will or the dissolving of judgment. It needs only the gospel, taken to its end.
That is the strand that survives the critique. And that is the strand this book has defended, forty chapters long.9
↑ 1. The boundary is first stated in outline in Chapter 1 (the eclipse-of-grace thesis) and given its first full treatment in Chapter 2 ("What Sort of Universalist Are You?"). The theological commitments that ground it are laid out in the author's doctrinal framework (see especially the discussions of salvation exclusively through Christ, the cross as a real atonement, and the free-will commitment). Every chapter's teal Boundary callout is a chapter-specific application of the table and counterfeits listed here.
↑ 2. Gregory of Nyssa (c. 335–395) is the test case McClymond's thesis cannot easily absorb. Nyssa held the full Nicene faith—he helped write it—and also held the restoration of all things (apokatastasis). His universalism was reached by grace, the incarnation, and the cross, not around them. If McClymond's thesis were that every universalism eclipses grace, Nyssa would be the refutation. See Ilaria L. E. Ramelli, The Christian Doctrine of Apokatastasis (Brill, 2013), chaps. 5–7; and the discussion in Chapter 15.
↑ 3. McClymond traces the spark-of-the-divine teaching from second-century gnosis (the Basilideans, Valentinians, Carpocratians) through kabbalistic traditions to modern esoteric figures. He notes that Irenaeus accused the gnostics of teaching a "salvation by nature" (Greek kata physin; Latin propter substantiam)—a salvation that depends on what the soul is rather than on what God does. See McClymond, The Devil's Redemption, V 1, pp. 220–229.
↑ 4. The distinction matters: in this book's model, the purifying fire is the divine presence—the unveiled love of God experienced as torment by those still in rebellion and as joy by the willing. It is God who does the work, not the soul's own suffering. The cross of Christ is the ground of reconciliation; the fire is its application. For the divine-presence model, see R. Zachary Manis, Sinners in the Presence of a Loving God; the full treatment is in Chapter 24.
↑ 5. Pearson's own words make the point plainly. He writes that human beings are "innately, internally, and eternally divine" and that "everybody is saved already." He cites Ralph Waldo Trine's In Tune with the Infinite (1897) and the anonymous A Course in Miracles (1975) as influences—works that fall into the broad New Thought tradition. McClymond documents this trajectory in The Devil's Redemption, V 2, pp. 945–947. The contrast with biblical universalism is total: Pearson says the separation from God is an illusion; this book says the separation is real, and the cross is the only bridge across it.
↑ 6. David Bentley Hart, That All Shall Be Saved: Heaven, Hell, and Universal Salvation (Yale University Press, 2019). Hart's second and third meditations, on the New Testament afterlife language and on the nature of the person, supply some of the sharpest linguistic and anthropological observations this book draws on. His rendering of kolasis as "chastisement" rather than "punishment" in Matthew 25:46, his observation that no single New Testament term maps onto the English word "hell," and his retrieval of the patristic range of eschatological views are used throughout.
↑ 7. This is the contribution of middle knowledge (Molinism) to the book's case. If God knows what each person would freely choose in any circumstance He might place them in, He can compose the single most persuasive feasible sequence of appeals for each soul—without coercing the choice. Jerry Walls calls this "optimal grace": grace that is "deeply personal and individual," fitted to each heart. See the full development in Chapters 26 and 28; and Timothy Stratton, Human Freedom, Divine Knowledge, and Mere Molinism, 2nd ed. (Wipf & Stock).
↑ 8. McClymond's own taxonomy demonstrates this. He distinguishes the gnostic-esoteric strand (ch. 2), the Origenist strand (chs. 3–4), the Böhmist strand (ch. 5), the Anglo-American strand (ch. 6), the German-Russian strand (chs. 7–8), the Barthian and post-kenotic strand (ch. 9), the Catholic strand (ch. 10), and the contemporary evangelical strand (ch. 11). He knows they are different. His capstone thesis—the eclipse of grace (ch. 12)—is meant to cover all of them. But the threads are too different for one net to hold them all, and the evangelical, creedal strand is the one that slips through.
↑ 9. The phrase comes from Acts 3:21: "the restoration of all things" (Greek apokatastasis pantōn), the ancient name for the hope. And from 1 Corinthians 15:28: "that God may be all in all." And from Colossians 1:19–20: "For in him 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." The blood. That is the line between the two universalisms.