Chapter 4

Grace Eclipsed: Salvation by Nature

The First Prong of the Eclipse-of-Grace Charge, and Why the Biblical Hope Answers It

The Argument on the Table

There is a kind of universalism that says you are already divine and only need to remember it. McClymond is right to reject it. So does this book, and for the same reason he does.

In Chapter 1 we met McClymond's master charge: the effort to extend grace to every person has, across the centuries, ended by emptying grace of its meaning. What looks like all-grace turns out to be no-grace.¹ That charge has three prongs. The first is the one before us now. McClymond calls it "salvation by nature." In his capstone chapter, "The Problem of Grace in Christian Universalism," he lays it out with real care.

The argument runs like this. In the gnostic and esoteric traditions, the human soul contains a spark of the divine. The soul came forth from God, and it will go back to God, because that is its nature. If the innermost self is already part of God, then it cannot be lost. It cannot be damned. It cannot need saving, not really, because it was never in any true danger. And if nothing was ever truly lost, then nothing needs to be graciously given. Grace becomes an empty word.²

Notice what McClymond is saying. He is not claiming that every universalist holds the spark-of-the-divine teaching. He knows better than that. But he is claiming that the gnostic version of universalism represents the deepest pattern: the soul is divine, so grace is unnecessary, so the cross becomes decorative. Where this pattern holds, he says, universalism has eclipsed grace at its root.⁴

I want to take this charge seriously, because it deserves to be taken seriously. But I also want to show, step by step, that it does not reach the universalism this book defends.

Why This Charge Has Force

McClymond is not swinging at air. The spark-of-the-divine teaching is real, and its history is long.

The second-century gnostics taught versions of it. The Valentinians held that at least some people carry within them a spiritual substance that came from the divine realm and will return to it.⁵ The church fathers saw the problem right away. Irenaeus, writing against the gnostics in the 180s, accused them of teaching salvation by nature (Greek kata physin, "according to nature"). His objection was twofold. First, if the soul saves itself by being what it is, then faith and obedience become unnecessary. Second, if people already contain the means of their own return to God, then the Savior becomes unnecessary too.⁶

McClymond traces this same pattern across nineteen centuries. He finds it among the Cathars, in Western esotericism broadly, in the theosophy of Jakob Böhme, in Lady Anne Conway, in Sadhu Sundar Singh, and in the Russian theologian Sergei Bulgakov.⁷ Singh, for example, wrote that "this divine spark or element cannot be destroyed" and that it will "assuredly compel" every sinner to return to God. McClymond rightly notes that this sounds exactly like the kata physin that Irenaeus warned about.⁸

Here is what makes the charge strong. Against the gnostic and esoteric versions, it is not just strong. It is correct. If the soul is a piece of God that floats back to God by its own nature, then grace is gone. The cross is gone. Faith is gone. The whole gospel architecture collapses, because there is nothing to save and no one who needs saving. I share McClymond's alarm about this, and I think every careful universalist should.

And the problem is not just ancient. McClymond shows that wherever someone teaches that the deepest truth about a person is that they are already united to God, the same result follows. The cross becomes a lesson, not a rescue. Faith becomes a nice idea, not a lifeline. Sin becomes a misunderstanding, not a rebellion. If the divine spark "cannot be destroyed," and if it will "assuredly compel" the sinner to return, then salvation is just a sorting process. Paper, plastic, aluminum, each finding its bin.³⁸ A cosmic recycling center has no room for grace.

So before I answer the charge, let me be clear: where the spark-of-the-divine teaching is present, McClymond's critique is earned. The question is narrower. Does the same critique reach a universalism that keeps the cross, demands faith, and locates the ground of hope not in the soul's nature but in the Savior's work? I believe it does not.

The Response

1. The Biblical Hope Holds the Opposite

The first and most direct answer is this: the universalism this book defends holds the exact opposite of the spark-of-the-divine teaching. There is no inner divinity waiting to unfold. There is no helium balloon. The sinner is not a fragment of God on its way home. The sinner is a creature, made by God but distinct from God, and that creature is dead in sin.

Paul says it plainly:

And you were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience. (Ephesians 2:1–2, ESV)

Dead. Not sleeping. Not momentarily confused about their own divinity. Dead. Paul goes on: "among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind" (Ephesians 2:3).⁹ Notice the phrase "by nature." Paul uses nature language here, but he uses it to describe our condition before grace, not our means of salvation. We are children of wrath by nature. We are children of God by grace.

This is the opposite of the gnostic claim. The gnostic says: by nature, you are divine and therefore saved. Paul says: by nature, you are lost and therefore in need of a Savior. The universalism I hold starts where Paul starts. Every person is genuinely lost. Every person genuinely needs the cross. Every person must come to genuine faith in Jesus Christ. The claim is not that the soul saves itself. The claim is that God's grace is so relentless, so patient, so wise, that it will finally reach every soul it seeks.¹⁰

2. Salvation Is the Contingent Work of Christ

McClymond's analysis of biblical grace is good. He notes that grace in both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament has four marks: it is a gift (unmerited), it rests on God's freedom in giving, it implies a real relationship between giver and receiver, and it is something received, not produced from within.¹¹ He draws on the Hebrew words for grace (Hebrew hen, "gracious favor") and loyal love (Hebrew hesed, "loving-kindness"), and on the Greek word for grace (charis, "free, undeserved gift").¹² His point is that these four marks all vanish in the spark-of-the-divine teaching.

He is right. And every one of those four marks is fully present in the universalism this book defends.

Salvation is a gift. No one earns it. Paul says: "For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast" (Ephesians 2:8–9).¹³ That verse does not get smaller when you extend its reach to every person. It gets bigger. The gift is still a gift, still unmerited, still free. It is simply given to more people.

Paul reinforces the point to Titus: "He saved us, not because of works done by us in righteousness, but according to his own mercy, by the washing of regeneration and renewal of the Holy Spirit" (Titus 3:5).^13b Notice what drives salvation here: not the soul's hidden divinity, not human effort, but God's mercy, applied through regeneration by the Spirit. That is exactly the mechanism McClymond says universalism loses. The universalism this book holds keeps it firmly in place.

Salvation rests on God's freedom. God did not have to save anyone. He chose to. And on the view I hold, He freely chose to save all, not because He was required to, but because He is love (1 John 4:8) and because His will is to bring every rebel home.¹⁴ This is the contingency McClymond rightly demands. Nothing here is automatic. Nothing unfolds from the nature of the soul. Everything depends on what God freely did in Christ.

Salvation is relational. It requires a real encounter between the person and God. No one drifts into heaven asleep. The person must turn, must trust, must receive. I hold that this encounter happens for some in this life and for others in the encounters that follow death, at the judgment, in the presence of the risen Christ.¹⁵ But whenever it happens, it is a real meeting with a real Savior, not a cosmic sorting machine. McClymond worries that universalism dissolves the personal quality of grace. But a grace that finds each rebel individually, meets each one in the particular circumstances of their resistance, and wins each one through a personal encounter with the living Christ is as personal as grace can be.

And salvation is received, not produced from within. The sinner does not generate salvation out of some hidden divine core. The sinner receives it, as a gift, from the God who gives it. Paul's testimony applies to every saved person: "By the grace of God I am what I am" (1 Corinthians 15:10).¹⁶ The gnostic says: salvation rises from within. The biblical universalist says: salvation comes from without, from the God who made me, who died for me, and who will not stop until He has me.

3. Universal Scope Is Not Salvation by Nature

This is the move I think McClymond misses, and it is the heart of this chapter.

There is a difference between saying how people are saved and saying how many people are saved. The "how" is grace, through faith, by the cross. The "how many" is the question universalism answers. And the universalist answer to "how many" does not change the "how."¹⁷

Think of it this way. A Calvinist says God saves some people by His sovereign grace. An Arminian says God offers saving grace to all but only some accept it. Neither is accused of teaching salvation by nature. Both keep the mechanism of salvation in the hands of God and the cross. The biblical universalist says God's grace is so persistent that it finally wins every human heart. The mechanism is the same: cross, Spirit, faith. The scope is wider. That is all.¹⁸

McClymond's charge works only if the reason everyone is saved is something in human nature rather than something in God's grace. But the reason I hold that all will be saved is not that every soul carries a divine spark. It is that God's love is patient enough, wise enough, and powerful enough to win every "yes" without forcing any of them.¹⁹

The engine of universal salvation, on this view, is not the self-sufficiency of the soul. It is the sufficiency of the Savior. Those are opposites.

Here is another way to see it. McClymond correctly identifies that in the gnostic model the soul needs nothing outside itself. It carries its own ticket home. But the biblical universalist says the exact opposite. The soul is helpless. It cannot save itself. It cannot even want to be saved apart from the work of the Spirit. Jesus said: "apart from me you can do nothing" (John 15:5).³⁹ The universalist simply adds: and God will not leave any soul in that helplessness forever. He will come for it. He will bring Christ to it. He will grant the faith it cannot produce on its own.

This is not salvation by nature. This is salvation by a grace so thorough that it does not leave a single soul behind.

4. Creation Is Not Emanation

Behind the spark-of-the-divine teaching lies a particular view of how the world relates to God. In Neoplatonic and gnostic thought, the world emanates from God the way light radiates from a lamp. Everything that exists is, in some sense, a piece of God flowing outward. And if it flowed out, it will flow back. Salvation is just the return trip.²⁰

The Bible tells a different story. God did not emanate the world. He created it. He made it freely, out of nothing (Latin ex nihilo, "from nothing"), by an act of His will.²¹ The world is not a piece of God. It is something other than God, brought into being by God, loved by God, but distinct from God. The creator-creature distinction is one of the load-bearing walls of Christian theology, and it stands firm here.

When I say that God will save all people, I am not saying they will float back to their source like sparks returning to a fire. I am saying that the God who made them freely will redeem them freely. He will do it through the cross. He will do it by the Spirit. He will do it by bringing each person to genuine faith. And because He is the God who "works all things according to the counsel of his will" (Ephesians 1:11), He will succeed.²²

The difference matters for the end of the story. In the emanation model, salvation is the universe contracting back into the divine. Individuality disappears. Persons dissolve into the One. In the creation model, salvation is the Creator restoring what He made. Persons remain persons. The redeemed are distinct creatures in the presence of their distinct Creator. They do not merge with God. They are loved by God. They worship God. That is the biblical picture, and it is the picture this book holds.⁴⁰

This is not emanation running its course. This is grace running its course.

5. Grace Is More Gracious Here, Not Less

McClymond's deepest concern is that universalism cheapens grace. I want to flip that concern on its head. On the view I hold, grace is not cheapened. It is intensified.

Consider the traditional view McClymond defends. Grace is real, but its scope is limited. It reaches some. It does not reach others. The love of God meets an absolute boundary at the gates of hell.

Now consider the biblical universalism this book defends. Grace is still real. It is still unmerited, still costly, still the work of the cross. But it does not stop. It keeps pursuing. It finds the most hardened rebel, the most determined sinner, the soul that has been running from God for ages, and it does not give up. It stands in the fire with that soul, burning away what is false, until the person sees God clearly and freely says yes.²³

Which picture makes grace bigger? The one where grace saves a portion and writes off the rest? Or the one where grace pursues every lost soul to the very end?

Paul seems to see it the way I do. He writes that "the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation for all people" (Titus 2:11).²⁴ And he tells the Corinthians: "By the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace toward me was not in vain" (1 Corinthians 15:10). Grace that finally wins every rebel is not cheap grace. It is the most expensive grace there is. It cost the cross. It costs the fire. It costs the patience of a God who will not rest until every creature He loves has freely come home.²⁵

Dietrich Bonhoeffer warned the church about "cheap grace," and he was right to warn. But cheap grace is grace without cost, grace without the cross, grace without repentance. That is precisely what the gnostic spark-of-the-divine delivers. The biblical universalist delivers the opposite: grace that costs everything, demands everything, and wins everything.²⁶

Engagement with Specific Scholars

McClymond's analysis of the spark-of-the-divine teaching is among his strongest contributions. His tracing of the gnostic pattern from the Valentinians through Kabbalah, through Böhme and the Western esoteric tradition, through Swedenborg and Singh, is careful and persuasive.²⁷ Where I part from him is not in his reading of the counterfeit but in his application of it. He treats the spark-of-the-divine pattern as representative of universalism as such. I think it is representative of a sub-Christian strand that the best modern universalists reject as firmly as he does.

George Sidney Hurd, in The Universal Solution, reframes the universalist hope in explicitly grace-centered terms. Far from softening human depravity, Hurd insists on it. He affirms that every descendant of Adam comes into the world "spiritually stillborn in relation to God and therefore unable to contribute in any way towards his own salvation." Even saving faith, he writes, "must be received as a gift from God through regeneration due to man's spiritual blindness."²⁸ That is not the language of a divine spark waiting to unfold. It is the language of Ephesians 2, and it sounds like McClymond's own definition of grace. What makes Hurd a universalist is not that he waters down depravity but that he extends the reach of the grace that answers it. He argues that God's irresistible grace, the very grace Calvinists reserve for the elect, will "ultimately draw all" to Christ, citing John 12:32 and noting that the Greek word for "draw" (helkō) "expresses something much stronger than a simple attraction."^28b The engine of universal salvation, in Hurd's telling, is not the nature of the soul but the nature of God.

Hurd makes the distinction sharp. He writes that "Pelagianism is self-salvation" and that "a Pelagianist cannot be said to be saved, since biblical salvation requires a Savior outside of oneself." Biblical universalists, he insists, "would agree with the Calvinist in that all are not only born sinners in Adam but born dead in our sins and totally dependent upon being made alive by grace through Jesus Christ." The difference is the reach: "the same all who die in Adam will, in due time, be made alive in Christ."^28c That is as far from the gnostic spark as you can get. It is Calvinist soteriology with the gate thrown open.

Thomas Talbott argues that God's love is the real ground of the hope. In The Inescapable Love of God, Talbott builds his case not on any claim about the soul's hidden divinity but on the biblical claim that God loves every person He has made and is both willing and able to bring every beloved child home. For Talbott, the cross is the proof that God's love goes to the uttermost. The bond between a loving God and His creatures is not a gnostic spark. It is a personal relationship in which God's own happiness is bound up with the good of each person He has made.²⁹

Robin Parry, writing as "Gregory MacDonald" in the third edition of The Evangelical Universalist, takes on McClymond's eclipse-of-grace charge head-on. Parry's response is sharp and worth hearing at length, because he names the logical gap in McClymond's argument: the leap from "grace for one" to "no grace for all." If giving an undeserved gift to one person is a genuine act of grace, Parry asks, what makes it less gracious to give that same gift to everyone?^29b

Parry presses the point further. McClymond uses the helium-balloon analogy to show how the divine spark eliminates grace. Parry answers that McClymond has not set up the analogy in a Christian form. In a Christian version, sin turns the balloon to lead. Even though it contains helium, it cannot rise on its own. In Christ, God transforms our fallen nature so that the balloon can ascend again. Far from making Jesus Christ unnecessary, this makes Him absolutely essential.^29d That reply is exactly right, and it lands on the same ground Hurd and Talbott occupy. The universalism McClymond is most afraid of is not the one his ablest opponents actually hold.

The early church knew the difference between these two kinds of universalism. Irenaeus rejected the gnostic version in the strongest terms. He accused the Valentinians of teaching a salvation that bypassed faith, obedience, and the Savior himself. McClymond cites Irenaeus approvingly, and so do I.³⁰ But the same early church also produced Gregory of Nyssa, who held the final restoration of all things while affirming the full Nicene Creed, the real atonement, and the necessity of faith. Nyssa's hope was built on the cross, not on the spark. That is the strand this book stands in.³¹

McClymond himself seems uneasy with Gregory. He suggests that Gregory's universalism might amount to "to be human is to be saved," which would be a form of salvation by nature.³² But that reading misunderstands Gregory's claim. Gregory is not saying that human nature is secretly divine. He is saying that God, who made human nature, will not rest until He has redeemed it. The ground is still grace, not nature.

Recent scholarship supports this reading. Mario Baghos has argued that Gregory framed the restoration "within the person of Christ and his Church," so that it remains a matter of each person's free choice in communion with the Savior, not an automatic process built into human nature.⁴¹ Gregory's own sister Macrina, as Gregory presents her in On the Soul and the Resurrection, speaks of choices that continue after death and of the purifying fire that burns away sin. That is not the language of an automatic return. It is the language of a God who pursues.

The early church, in short, knew how to tell the two universalisms apart. Irenaeus rejected the gnostic kind. Gregory held the creedal kind. McClymond uses Irenaeus against universalism but struggles with Gregory. The distinction Irenaeus drew is the same one this book draws (see Chapter 2 and Appendix B).

Counter-Objections

"If Salvation Is Certain, It Is Automatic, Which Is Salvation by Nature in Disguise"

This is the sharpest pushback, and I want to give it its full weight. The argument goes like this: if you say that all people will certainly be saved, then their salvation is guaranteed. And if it is guaranteed, it is automatic. And if it is automatic, it is no different from the gnostic teaching that the soul returns to God by its own nature.

The Calvinist faces the same question and answers it the same way. On the Reformed view, God's election of the saved is certain. No elect person will be lost. But the Calvinist does not call this salvation by nature. He calls it sovereign grace. The certainty does not come from the nature of the soul but from the will and power of God. The biblical universalist makes the same move, on a wider scale. The certainty of universal salvation comes from the character of God, not from any hidden divinity in the human soul.³³

"Universalists Do Talk About Every Soul's Deep Kinship with God"

This is fair. Some universalists do use language about the soul's kinship with God, its being made in the image of God, its deep connection to its Creator. Does that not slide into the very spark-of-the-divine teaching McClymond warns against?

It does not, as long as the distinction between image and identity is kept clear. The Bible teaches that every person is made in the image of God (Genesis 1:27). That is a statement about how we were made, not about what we are made of. Being made in the image of God is not the same as being made of the substance of God. An image reflects its source; it is not a fragment of it.³⁴ When universalists appeal to the imago Dei (Latin, "image of God") as a ground of hope, they are saying that God values every creature He stamped with His likeness and will not abandon any of them. That is a claim about God's loyalty to His creation, not a claim about the soul's divinity.

The difference is real and testable. Ask: does this person believe the soul needs saving, or not? The gnostic says no: the soul is already divine, already safe, already home. The biblical universalist says yes: the soul is lost, ruined by sin, incapable of saving itself. The soul needs the cross. It needs faith. It needs the work of the Spirit. The image of God in the sinner is not a spark that saves. It is a stamp that tells us the sinner is worth saving. Those are different claims, and they lead to different gospels.⁴²

"You Cannot Have Both Certainty and Contingency"

This objection says that if salvation is contingent on God's free choice, and if people must genuinely choose to believe, then it cannot also be certain that all will be saved. Contingency and certainty cancel each other out.

But they do not. Consider a parent who knows her child deeply, who knows what the child loves and fears, who knows exactly how to reach the child in a moment of crisis. That parent may be confident that her child will come around. Her confidence is not based on ignoring the child's freedom. It is based on knowing the child perfectly and loving the child relentlessly.³⁵

Now expand that to God. If God has middle knowledge, as I believe He does, then He knows what every person would freely choose in any situation He might place them in. He can arrange each person's encounters so that every soul meets the most persuasive appeal it could receive, without forcing the choice.³⁶ If that knowledge is real, then certainty and contingency are not enemies. They are partners. God is certain that all will freely come, because He knows what each person would freely do. The choice is still free. The outcome is still certain. Grace holds them together. (For the full case, see Chapter 26.)

Conclusion: Grace Magnified, Not Eclipsed

McClymond has done the church a real service by exposing the gnostic strand in the universalist tradition. The spark-of-the-divine teaching is dangerous. It does empty grace. And wherever it surfaces in the modern universalist movement, it should be named and refused.

But the biblical hope does not rest on the spark of the divine. It rests on the cross of Christ. It does not teach that the soul saves itself by being what it is. It teaches that God saves the soul by doing what only He can do. It does not make grace unnecessary. It makes grace everything.

I think of the father in the parable of the prodigal son (Luke 15:20). That father did not sit in his house and wait for the son's inner divinity to bring him home. He watched the road. He saw the son from a long way off. He ran to meet him. He threw his arms around the filthy, broken boy and kissed him. He put a ring on his finger and shoes on his feet. Everything about that reunion is grace: the watching, the running, the embrace, the ring. Nothing about it is nature. The son did not float home. The father came out to get him.⁴³

The universalist hope is just this: the Father will come out to get every son and daughter. He will not stop watching the road until the last one appears on the horizon.

So where does this leave us? McClymond's first prong is sharp and serious. Against the gnostic counterfeit, it is fatal. Against the biblical hope, it does not land. The soul is dead in sin, and the grace of God in Christ is the only thing that can raise it. That grace, I believe, will finally raise them all.

The second prong, the charge that grace is eclipsed by necessity, is the subject of Chapter 5. The third prong, the charge that grace is eclipsed by self-expiation, is the subject of Chapter 6. And the broader question of whether the cross recedes in the universalist hope is addressed squarely in Chapter 37. But the foundation is here. Grace is not eclipsed by nature, because the hope I hold is built on grace all the way down.

Jesus said: "You must be born again" (John 3:7).³⁷ That command makes no sense if the soul is already divine. You do not tell a spark of God that it must be born again. You tell a lost creature. The universalist hope is that every lost creature will hear that call, will meet the Savior who makes it, and will finally, freely, gratefully say yes. Not because they had to. Not because it was in their nature. Because God, in His grace, would not let them go.