Chapter 2

“What Sort of Universalist Are You?”

The Smorgasbord Objection and the Boundary That Answers It

A. The Argument on the Table

A skeptic once asked me point blank: “Which universalism do you mean? The one that says all roads lead to God, or the one that says Christ saves everyone?” It was a fair question. The honest answer divides the field in two. And until you draw that line, the debate goes nowhere.

The question is fair because the word “universalism” covers wildly different things. It names the mystical hope that every human soul carries a divine spark and returns to God by nature. It names the pluralist idea that every religion is a path to the same summit. It names the sentimentalist hunch that a loving God would never let anyone suffer. And it names the carefully argued, biblically grounded conviction that God will, through Christ and by grace, bring every person to free and saving faith. These are not minor variations. They disagree on God, on Christ, on the cross, on Scripture, on sin, and on judgment. The only thing they share is the ending.

Michael McClymond knows this. In chapter 11 of The Devil’s Redemption, he surveys the full landscape of contemporary universalism and displays it in all its variety. He looks at Carlton Pearson’s “gospel of inclusion,” Thomas Talbott’s philosophical case, Robin Parry’s evangelical reading, Rob Bell’s popular revisionism, C. Baxter Kruger’s Trinitarian approach, and the charismatic preachers who turned grace into license.¹ James De Young presses the same point from a different angle: the universalists cannot agree among themselves, and many have left the creeds behind.²

The implied charge is sharp: a position this scattered cannot be the church’s teaching.

I want to grant the force of this. McClymond is not making it up. The universalist family really is this messy. Many of its members have abandoned the creeds, the cross, or the authority of Scripture. Some have drifted into New Thought mysticism. Others have traded Christ for a vague cosmic love. The catalog of chaos is real.

But here is the question this chapter answers: does the chaos of the counterfeits disprove the creedal hope? Or does it simply prove that a label is not a doctrine?

B. Why This Argument Has Force

This objection bites because it is true in so many cases. The word “universalist” has been claimed by pluralists, gnostics, sentimentalists, and orthodox believers all at once. The label alone settles nothing. When someone tells you, “I’m a universalist,” you still know almost nothing about what they believe.

Consider the range. Carlton Pearson denied the need for atonement. He taught that humanity is “made of the same substance as Divinity” and that everyone is “innately, internally, and eternally divine.”⁴ That is not just a different shade of universalism. It is a different religion. Philip Gulley and James Mulholland denied the unique deity of Jesus, writing that God was present in Jesus “in the same way God wishes to be present in all of us.”⁵ John Crowder moved from Trinitarian Christocentrism into what McClymond calls “assertive universalism of the gnostic-esoteric variety.”⁶

Put these figures next to Robin Parry, who confesses the full deity of Christ, grounds his case in careful New Testament exegesis, and insists on postmortem suffering before final restoration.⁷ Put them next to Thomas Talbott, who argues from the character of a holy and loving God, not from mystical intuition.⁸ Put them next to Gregory of Nyssa, who helped write the Nicene Creed and held the hope of the restoration (Greek apokatastasis, “the restoration of all things”) on fully Trinitarian and creedal grounds.⁹

The distance between Pearson and Parry is not a gap. It is a canyon. And McClymond is right to point at it. Notice that the difference is not about tone or emphasis. It is about the basic content of the Christian faith. Pearson says you are already divine. Parry says you need to be saved by Christ. Pearson says the cross is unnecessary because there was never a real separation from God. Parry says the cross is the ground of the whole hope. These two men hold opposite theologies. Calling them both “universalist” is like calling a Unitarian and a Nicene Trinitarian both “Christian” without qualification. The word covers the contradiction; it does not resolve it.

De Young sharpens the point by looking at the universalists’ own creeds. From the Philadelphia Convention of 1790 through the Winchester Profession of 1803 to the Boston statement of 1899, organized universalism progressively softened and then dropped the historic articles of the Christian faith. De Young notes the consistent pattern: no mention of the need for personal faith in Christ, a thinning of the Trinity, and a slide toward what became, by 1961, a formal merger with Unitarianism.¹⁰ One universalist writer from around 1920 put it bluntly: “Universalists are often asked to tell where they stand. The only true answer to give to this question is that we do not stand at all, we move.”¹¹

That is a devastating admission, and I do not run from it. Wherever universalism has meant moving away from the creeds, this book agrees with McClymond and De Young: it was not a step forward. It was a collapse.

Even Robin Parry, one of the most careful evangelical universalists working today, grants the point. In his direct reply to McClymond’s theological critique, Parry concedes that some of McClymond’s argument “has real bite for certain breeds of universalism.” Purgatorial universalism, he warns, if not spelled out with care, runs the risk of making “Christ unnecessary for salvation.”⁴² The concession matters, because it comes from inside the creedal camp. The universalists this book stands with are not pretending the counterfeits do not exist. They see them, they name them, and they pull away from them.

The question is whether that collapse defines the whole family.

C. The Response

1. Two Universalisms, Not One

The deepest fault line in the universalist family is not about denominations or centuries. It is doctrinal. And it cuts the field cleanly in two.

On one side are the forms of universalism that reach their happy ending by trading away the things that make the gospel Christian. They give up the cross. They dissolve the need for personal faith. They replace the authority of Scripture with mystical intuition, esoteric knowledge, or the spirit of the age. They deny the real severity of God’s judgment. They treat sin as an illusion or a stage rather than a rebellion.

On the other side is a universalism that keeps every one of those things and reaches the larger hope through them, not around them. It confesses the Trinity and the full deity of Christ. It holds the cross as a real, costly, objective atonement. It insists that every person who is saved is saved through personal faith in Jesus Christ. It affirms the full authority of Scripture. It takes sin, judgment, and the purifying fire with complete seriousness. And it argues that the biblical gospel, taken to its end, saves all.

The first kind is a counterfeit. The second is the one this book defends.

This is not my private distinction. McClymond himself draws exactly this line. In his Appendix G, he sorts the types of Christian universalism and notes that some are “clearly Christocentric” while others are “definitely plurocentric.”¹² He recognizes that Parry and Kruger remain “clearly committed” to the unique divinity of Jesus.¹³ He sees that the chaos is not between different shades of one position. It is between different religions wearing the same name.

My argument is simply this: the chaos proves his critics need a boundary. It does not prove the bounded hope is false.

This is not a private framework. In the third edition of The Evangelical Universalist, Parry maps what he calls “the intellectual geography of universalisms.” He identifies several distinct types, from the broad sense in which all Christians affirm that the gospel is for every people-group, to the specific claim that God will save every person. A universalist, he writes, “could maintain all the central elements of orthodox Christian faith.” Universalism “is quite compatible with belief in the Trinity, in creation, fall, and redemption, in the inspiration of scripture.”⁴³ Trevor Hart drew the same line even earlier. His essay “Two Distinct Types” distinguishes “pluralist universalism” from “Christian universalism” as categorically different things.⁴⁴ The boundary is not invented for convenience. It is recognized by the very scholars McClymond surveys.

2. The Marks of the Biblical Hope

So what are the marks? What separates a biblical, creedal universalism from the counterfeits that share its label? I want to be as plain as I can.

The universalism this book defends holds every one of the following without qualification:

Notice what this means. I am not saying that everyone floats home regardless of what they believe. I am not saying that all religions lead to God. I am not saying that faith in Christ is optional. I am saying that all will, in the end, freely come to that faith. The requirement is not lowered. The scope of grace is widened. Paul put the principle in a single verse: “For the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation for all people” (Titus 2:11).¹⁴

This is what I mean by the “boundary.” Not a hedge around a private opinion, but a doctrinal test: does this version of universalism keep the gospel, or trade it?

Jesus said, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me” (John 14:6). The universalism I hold does not soften that claim. It sharpens it. If Jesus is the only way, and if God desires all people to be saved (1 Timothy 2:4), then the question is not whether Christ is needed. The question is whether God can bring every person to Christ. I believe He can. I believe He will. But I believe it because of the cross, not in spite of it.

Every chapter of this book applies that test to a different objection. The objection lands on the counterfeit, or it does not. When McClymond critiques a universalism that has abandoned the cross, I agree with him. When his critique is then stretched to cover the biblical, creedal version, I show that the premise does not reach. That is the engine of this whole book.

3. The Counterfeits, Named Plainly

Let me name them. If the boundary is to mean anything, the counterfeits cannot remain vague.

Religious pluralism. The idea that all religions are equally valid paths to God, and that Christ is not the unique Savior. Its clearest modern voice is John Hick.¹⁵ This is the deepest error, because it makes the cross unnecessary. The Bible is unambiguous: “There is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved” (Acts 4:12).¹⁶

Gnostic and esoteric universalism. The spark-of-the-divine teaching, in which the soul is a fragment of God that returns to God by nature, not by grace. This is the strand McClymond traces from second-century gnosis through Kabbalah to the modern esoteric universalists, and this book refuses it as plainly as he does.¹⁷ Pearson’s claim that humanity is “innately, internally, and eternally divine” is exactly this teaching in modern dress.

Böhmist and theosophical universalism. The theological dualism that places a dark principle within God himself. Jakob Böhme taught that God contains both light and darkness, and that creation emerges from the conflict between them. This book rejects it outright: “God is light, and in him is no darkness at all” (1 John 1:5). Chapter 18 takes this on directly.¹⁸

Sentimental universalism. The “everyone is basically fine” assumption. No doctrine of sin, no cross, no judgment, no fire. The feel-good version that dissolves everything hard in the Christian message. This book’s severe doctrine of the purifying fire is the direct answer to this.¹⁹

Antinomian universalism. The charismatic-Pentecostal “free to sin and still be loved” strand that McClymond catalogs. Benjamin Dunn’s “Pauline antinomianism,” as McClymond calls it, dismissed the Gospels and turned grace into permission.²⁰ Paul already answered this: “Are we to continue in sin that grace may abound? By no means!” (Romans 6:1–2). Chapter 39 addresses this strand in full.

Unitarian Universalism (the denomination). It has abandoned the Trinity, the deity of Christ, and in most forms the authority of Scripture. It became a post-Christian movement. This book reclaims the word “universalism” from that hollowing out.

And then there is a position I handle with more care.

4. The Incoherence Belongs to the Counterfeits, Not the Creed

Now come back to McClymond’s catalog of chaos. He is right that “the various types of universalism start from disparate assumptions, offer different arguments, and seem to have little in common with one another.”²² But look at what is actually in that catalog. Pearson denies the atonement. Gulley and Mulholland deny the unique deity of Jesus. Crowder drifts into gnostic esotericism. Dunn dismisses the Gospels.

These are the views this book also rejects.

Strip them away and what is left? The conservative strand: Gregory of Nyssa, who confessed the full Nicene faith. Talbott, who argues from the holiness and love of God. Parry, who builds his case from careful New Testament exegesis. George Sidney Hurd, who defends universal restoration text by text. David Burnfield, who traces the hope through the earliest fathers.²³ These thinkers do not agree on every detail. They disagree, for instance, on the mechanism of postmortem transformation. Parry sees suffering as purgative. Talbott sees God using increasing levels of pressure to bring each person to a decision.²⁴ Those are real differences. But they are differences of mechanism, not of creed. Every one of these thinkers confesses the Trinity, the deity of Christ, the real atonement, and the authority of Scripture.

Burnfield says it plainly in his opening pages: “Patristic Universalism is the belief that God desires all men to be saved and achieves this desire through His Son Jesus Christ.” He draws a firm line: “While some forms of universalism have sprung up that teach there is no hell and that all truth is relative, this is not the universalism I’m defending.”³⁸ He then lays out what his universalism teaches: sin will be punished, salvation comes only through faith in Christ, God continues to reach people even after death, and everyone will stand before the judgment seat. Those are not the marks of a liberalized gospel. They are the marks of a rigorous, text-driven faith that differs from the traditional view only on the ending.

The incoherence McClymond finds is the incoherence of a word being used for incompatible things. That is a problem for the label. It is not a problem for the doctrine the label is stretched to cover.

Parry makes the principle explicit in his reply to McClymond. He works with what he calls a “minimalist version” of universalism and applies a simple test: if McClymond’s criticism “applies to some versions of universal salvation but not to others then it is not a criticism of universal salvation per se.”⁴⁵ That is exactly the move this book makes with every objection it answers. The question is never “Is there a universalism this objection defeats?” There almost always is. The question is whether the objection defeats the biblical, creedal version. When it does not, the objection has reached its limit.

McClymond’s own taxonomy shows why the boundary works. He notes that some of the figures he surveys are “clearly Christocentric,” while Pearson’s approach is “multi- or interreligious.”²⁵ He admits that Parry’s version is “evangelical” in character and rooted in the biblical text.²⁶ His own data supports the distinction I am drawing.

5. Why the Boundary Is the Engine of This Book

This is not a chapter that stands on its own and then is forgotten. The boundary drawn here powers every chapter that follows.

Every time McClymond or De Young raises an objection to universalism, this book asks one question of it: which universalism does this objection target? When the answer is the counterfeit, I agree with the critic and say so. When the answer is the biblical hope, I show that the premise does not reach. That single move, made forty times with forty different arguments, is the architecture of the entire defense.

Consider what this means in practice. McClymond’s “eclipse of grace” charge (Chapter 1) says that universalism replaces the gracious work of Christ with nature, necessity, or self-expiation. Against gnostic universalism, which teaches that the soul is divine by nature? The charge lands perfectly. Against biblical universalism, which teaches that salvation is the contingent, gracious work of Christ? The charge misses, because the premise does not apply. The answer is always the boundary: state which universalism the critic is actually hitting, and show that the one this book holds is the opposite of it.

De Young’s charge about the creeds (Chapter 21) says that universalists rewrote the historic faith. Against organized Universalism, which merged with Unitarianism? The charge is devastating. Against the universalism of Gregory of Nyssa, who helped draft the Nicene Creed? It does not apply.²⁷

That is the pattern. And it works because the distinction is not invented for convenience. It is a real doctrinal line between positions that share a label but share almost nothing else.

The apostle John gave the early church the principle behind this move: “Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God” (1 John 4:1). You do not burn down every building because arsonists exist. You test. You distinguish. You keep what is sound and name what is not. That is all the boundary does.²⁸

D. Engagement with Specific Scholars

McClymond’s taxonomy in chapter 11 of The Devil’s Redemption is organized by figure. He gives Pearson his own section (§11.2), Talbott his own (§11.3), Parry his own (§11.4), Bell and Kruger theirs (§11.5), and the charismatic preachers theirs (§11.6).²⁹ The result is a vivid display of the diversity. But it also has a quiet effect: the careful thinkers are placed side by side with the careless ones, and the impression left is that universalism as a whole is an unstable compound.

I want to be fair about what McClymond sees. He notices that Talbott “seems profoundly suspicious of the institutional church” and that he builds his case from “the text of the Bible, shorn of past interpretations, together with his own philosophical reasoning.”³⁰ That is a real observation, and Talbott’s relationship to church authority is a genuine intra-universalist debate. Chapter 34 takes it up directly. But being suspicious of institutional authority is a Protestant habit, not a heresy. Luther was suspicious of it too.

De Young approaches the issue differently. His chapter 8 on “the creeds of universalism” traces the American universalist confessions from 1790 to the modern era and shows a clear pattern of doctrinal thinning.³¹ His evidence is strong. The creeds really did drop the need for personal faith in Christ. They really did soften the doctrine of God. The 1899 conditions of fellowship, which one historian called “a masterpiece of theological dexterity,” were so general they could be signed by almost anyone.³² De Young is right to read this as a departure from Christian orthodoxy.

Parry tackles this same argument head-on in his Appendix 5 reply to McClymond. McClymond compares belief in universal restoration to a chess move whose long-term consequences the player does not foresee. The doctrine, he writes, “seems to be a game-ending move that ends up undoing other doctrines such as the doctrine of the atonement and perhaps also the doctrine of Jesus’s divinity.” His proof is the American Universalist denomination, which started as an evangelical body and slid into Unitarianism. Parry’s answer is historically grounded and pointed. The actual story, he argues, “seems to me to be much more complicated than that.” The link between universal salvation and the denomination’s other departures was indirect. What opened the door was not the doctrine of restoration itself but “the attitude of mind that was willing to contemplate” it. The same Enlightenment-shaped, tradition-questioning posture drove many Presbyterians and Congregationalists to similar drift, and none of them held a universalist eschatology. “Are we to conclude from this,” Parry asks, “that the strict Calvinism of the Westminster Confession of Faith is a game-ending move that was not fully appreciated at the time?”⁴⁶

Talbott presses the same logic from the other direction. If McClymond’s chess-move reasoning holds, the same argument works in reverse: the Augustinian doctrine of eternal torment could just as easily be called a “game-ending move that ends up undoing other doctrines.” Talbott notes that he knows “many people who started out with a firm belief in an eternal hell and then ended up throwing out the whole ball of wax.”⁴⁷ The slope, it turns out, is not a one-way street. Every doctrine in the Christian system can be mishandled. That is an argument for holding doctrines carefully, not for abandoning the ones that have sometimes been mishandled.

But the departure belongs to organized Universalism as a denomination, not to the theological position this book holds. The creedal universalists I stand with, the ones whose work I draw on throughout this book, confess the Nicene faith without revision. Parry’s The Evangelical Universalist builds its case on the structure of Revelation, the universal-scope passages, and the open gates of the New Jerusalem. Talbott’s The Inescapable Love of God argues from the character of God revealed in Scripture. Hurd’s A Defense of Biblical Universalism answers De Young’s own book point by point, from the texts.³³ Burnfield’s Patristic Universalism shows that the hope was held by thoroughly orthodox fathers.³⁴ These are not rebels against the creed. They confess everything in it. They differ only on the outcome of God’s judgment, a matter the creeds do not settle.

Hurd puts the problem with De Young’s approach directly. De Young, Hurd writes, “categorizes all Universalists as Liberals or Progressives.” He claims they “deny the inspiration and authority of the Bible, the penal substitutionary atonement of Christ, the need for one to put their faith in Christ.” This, Hurd insists, is a misrepresentation. The only doctrine that changed for him was eschatology: the duration and outcome of God’s judgment. Everything else stood.³⁹ Even Augustine, Hurd notes, conceded that there were “very many” in his day who, “though not denying the Holy Scriptures, do not believe in endless torments.”⁴⁰ The conservative universalist is not a modern invention. He has been around as long as the church.

Hart requires a word of his own. His That All Shall Be Saved is the most philosophically ambitious defense of universalism in recent memory. He argues that a rational will, fully informed, simply cannot choose misery over joy forever. I think this is stronger than the evidence allows. Freedom must be real, and a real “yes” requires a possible “no” (see Chapter 26). But Hart’s Trinitarian theology is sound. His linguistic work on the New Testament afterlife language is careful and valuable. His reading of the fire as a purifying encounter with God’s love, not a retributive dungeon, opens doors this book walks through gratefully. Hart names his lineage in the opening of his first meditation. He “fell early under the influence” of Gregory of Nyssa, Origen, Isaac of Nineveh, and other patristic universalists “who seemed to me to possess an especially sane understanding of the ‘good tidings.’”⁴¹ That is not the language of a man who has drifted from the creed. It is the language of a man who has rooted himself in its earliest soil. I use Hart as a source throughout. I part from him on one philosophical point. I do not place him among the counterfeits.³⁷

McClymond treats Hart as part of the incoherent smorgasbord. I treat him as a fellow defender working from different philosophical premises but the same creed. The difference between disagreeing about the philosophy of freedom and disagreeing about the deity of Christ is the difference between an in-house argument and a different religion. The boundary lets you see which is which.

E. Counter-Objections

“Drawing a boundary just lets you disown the embarrassing universalists.”

I can see why it looks that way. But the boundary is not a PR strategy. It is a doctrinal commitment. I disown the gnostic universalism of Pearson because I believe it is false, not because it is embarrassing. The question is always whether the cross, the creeds, and the authority of Scripture are kept or traded. Where they are traded, I say so, and I say it before I answer any critic. That is the whole point of stating the argument at full strength first: I concede the hit, then show that the hit falls on a view I do not hold.

And let me say plainly: the counterfeits are not just embarrassing. Some of them are harmful. A universalism that teaches people they are already divine by nature discourages the repentance that leads to life. A universalism that makes sin costless empties the moral law of its seriousness. I do not distance myself from these for rhetorical convenience. I distance myself from them because they are wrong, and because they hurt people. The boundary is not a debating tactic. It is a confession of what I believe the gospel actually says.

“You are No-True-Scotsman-ing your own side.”

The No True Scotsman fallacy happens when you redefine a group ad hoc to exclude a counterexample. That is not what the boundary does. The boundary is stated up front, with specific doctrinal marks, before any counterexample arises. It is the same kind of doctrinal line every tradition draws. The Nicene Creed is not a “No True Scotsman” fallacy against Arians. The Chalcedonian definition is not a “No True Scotsman” against Nestorians. Drawing a doctrinal line around a position and specifying what it requires is just theology.³⁵

Here is the test: can the boundary be stated in advance, with clear criteria, applied consistently? It can. The six marks I named above apply without exception. Pearson fails them. Parry meets them. The line is not moving.

F. The Boundary Is Not a Dodge

McClymond’s smorgasbord objection is fair. The word “universalism” has been used for too many things. But the answer to confusion is not surrender. It is clarity.

The boundary is not a dodge. It is a discipline. And here is the thing McClymond’s own work proves without meaning to: his catalog of the counterfeits is one of the best tools available for drawing the line. Every chapter of The Devil’s Redemption that exposes a false version of universalism does this book a service, because this book refuses those versions too. The defense is not opposition. It is discrimination: agree where the critique is right, show where it overreaches, and keep the two universalisms apart.

I suspect McClymond would say that the line is harder to hold than I make it sound. He might say that every universalism starts out creedal and drifts. The historical record gives him some warrant. The organized Universalist denominations really did thin out their theology over time. De Young’s chapter 8 proves it. But a tendency is not a destiny. That some holders of an idea drifted does not mean the idea requires the drift. Nicene Christianity has had its own drifters. The test is not whether anyone has ever gone wrong from here; it is whether the position itself requires going wrong. And the position this book holds is built on the very doctrines the counterfeits abandoned.

Paul urged the church to hold to the faith “once for all delivered to the saints” (Jude 3). That is the faith this book confesses. It adds to it a single conviction: the God who delivered that faith will not rest until He has brought every person He ever made to receive it freely, through Christ, by grace, in His own unveiled presence.

That conviction is the larger hope. It is coherent. It is creedal. And it survives McClymond’s catalogue of the counterfeits because it was never one of them.

Here is what I want the reader to take from this chapter. The word “universalism” is a mess. I grant it. But the hope behind the word, when it is grounded in the cross, the creeds, and the authority of Scripture, is not a mess. It is the claim that the God who gave His Son for the world will not lose a single person He died for. Not because faith does not matter, but because God is patient enough, wise enough, and loving enough to bring every person to it. That hope does not need to apologize for its strange cousins. It needs only to state what it believes and show that the objections against it fall on someone else’s door.

Appendix B provides the full reference for the boundary: every mark, every counterfeit, and every figure placed on the right side of the line. The reader who wants the boundary at a glance can start there. The reader who wants it proven, argument by argument, has the next thirty-eight chapters.

God “desires all people to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth. For there is one God, and there is one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus, who gave himself as a ransom for all” (1 Timothy 2:4–6). One God, one mediator, one ransom, all people. The hope is bounded by the gospel. And it is as wide as the love that spoke it.³⁶