Chapter 5 — Grace Eclipsed: Salvation by Necessity

David Bentley Hart writes that a rational soul cannot finally reject God. It is a dazzling argument. I do not think it is true, and saying why is how this book keeps grace free.

The previous chapter answered McClymond’s first prong: the charge that some universalisms make salvation automatic by rooting it in the soul’s own divine nature. This chapter takes up his second: the charge that other universalisms make salvation necessary. Not earned by what you are, but owed by the structure of reality itself. If all must be saved as a matter of metaphysics or logic, then salvation is not a gift. It is an entailment. And a necessary outcome, McClymond argues, is not grace.¹

McClymond traces this pattern across several traditions. In Karl Barth’s doctrine of universal election, the union of God and humanity is not a fact that came to be when Mary conceived the child Jesus, but an eternal, metaphysical truth. If Godmanhood is eternal, McClymond writes, then it is “simply how or who God is.” The grace of incarnation fades as it becomes a natural or essential fact about God.² In the German idealist tradition, especially in Hegel, everything is absorbed into the sphere of the necessary. There is no room for gift, no room for the contingent, no room for grace freely given.³

I want to be honest about this charge from the start. Against strict necessitarianism, McClymond is largely right. If salvation is an entailment built into the fabric of being, it is hard to see how it remains a gift. And if it is not a gift, the cross becomes a footnote to a metaphysical fact. That is a real problem. The question is whether it reaches every form of universalism, or only a particular one.

Why This Charge Has Force

Grace, in the Bible, is the free and unearned favor of God. The Hebrew word often translated “grace” (Hebrew hen, “the kind turning of one person to another”) points to a disposition that is personal, heartfelt, and voluntary. The related term (Hebrew hesed, “loving-kindness”) always carries, as McClymond notes, “an element of spontaneous freedom” that “cannot be reduced to what is owed or to a duty.”⁵ Grace, by definition, is what God did not have to do.

That is what makes the necessity charge so serious. If all are saved because they must be saved, then salvation is no longer something God freely gives. It is something the universe requires of Him. The cross becomes an illustration of a principle already in place. Faith becomes a formality, because the outcome was never in doubt and could never have been otherwise.

I share this concern. I have read the necessitarians carefully, and I understand the pull of their logic. But I have also watched what happens when that logic is pressed to its end. It turns God into a prisoner of His own nature, bound to save not because He freely wills it but because the structure of reality leaves Him no alternative. It empties the cross of its costly freedom. And it dissolves the very thing that makes grace amazing: that God chose to do what He did not have to do.⁶

The New Testament presses the same note. The Greek word for grace (Greek charis, “favor, gift”) carried in secular usage the sense of a ruler’s demonstration of favor. It was personal, free, and directed toward a particular person. Paul’s whole theology of salvation runs on this: “For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God” (Ephesians 2:8, ESV). A gift that is owed is no gift. A grace that is required is no grace.⁴¹

McClymond is especially sharp when he traces the necessity problem through specific thinkers. He shows how Schleiermacher’s universal election defined God as essentially gracious rather than contingently so.³⁷ Once grace becomes part of God’s essence rather than His free will, it stops being what the Bible means by grace. He shows how Barth’s later theology pushed in the same direction: the God-who-is of the early Barth became the God-who-is-for-us of the later Barth, and the gap between “is” and “is for us” narrowed until the saving relationship looked less like a free act and more like a metaphysical given.⁴²

Where McClymond and I agree is the diagnosis. Where we part company is the scope. He aims this charge at all universalisms. I aim it only at the necessitarian ones. The version of the hope I hold is built on a different foundation entirely, and I want to show what that foundation looks like.

The Response

1. This Book Is Not Necessitarian

The first thing to say is the most important: the universalism this book defends does not rest on necessity. It rests on the character and freedom of God.

God saves all not because He must, but because He freely wills to save all. The difference is everything. A king who pardons a prisoner because the law compels him does something different from a king who pardons a prisoner because his heart moves him to mercy. The first act is an entailment. The second is grace. This book holds the second.

Paul puts the freedom of God on full display. “He works all things according to the counsel of his will” (Ephesians 1:11). Not according to the counsel of metaphysical necessity, but according to His will. The same apostle asks, “Who has given a gift to him that he might be repaid?” (Romans 11:35). The answer is no one. God is not repaying a debt to the universe. He is freely pouring out what freely overflows from His own character.⁷

The distinction between “God freely wills this” and “reality requires this” may sound abstract. It is not. It runs right through the middle of the gospel. Consider the cross itself. If the incarnation and the atonement are eternal metaphysical facts, as some readings of Barth suggest, then Calvary is not the free, costly self-giving of a God who chose to suffer. It is the playing-out of a script that was always going to run. That is a very different cross. The cross this book defends is the one Paul describes: the act of a God who “did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all” (Romans 8:32). The word “gave” implies freedom. A gift forced is no gift.⁴⁵

My conviction that all will be saved is not the conclusion of a syllogism. It is the confidence of a child who knows his father’s heart. I believe God will finally win every person because I believe in this God, the God who leaves the ninety-nine to find the one, the God who runs to meet the prodigal, the God who does not break the bruised reed. And I believe He has the wisdom, the patience, and the love to do it without forcing a single heart.⁸

2. Hart, with Respect

I cannot write this chapter without naming the most brilliant necessitarian in the conversation: David Bentley Hart.

Hart argues in That All Shall Be Saved that the rational will, properly understood, cannot finally choose against its own good. A soul that rejects God forever would be choosing its own destruction, and such a choice, Hart insists, would not be free at all. It would be a kind of madness, a failure of reason so complete that it cannot count as a genuine exercise of the will. For Hart, therefore, universal salvation is not just hopeful. It is certain. It follows from what reason and freedom actually are.⁹

Hart’s own words make the argument vivid. Drawing on the classical distinction between the “natural will” (the rational ground of all desire, which aims at the Good) and the “gnomic will” (our deliberative capacity, which can stray), Hart concludes that a liberated soul could will only one thing: union with God. We are, he writes, “doomed to happiness, so long as our natures follow their healthiest impulses unhindered.” He compares God’s pull on the freed soul to a spring of fresh water in the desert for a man dying of thirst. To refuse to drink, Hart says, would not be freedom but the sign of a deeper slavery.⁴⁸

It is a powerful argument, and I want to treat it fairly. Hart is not making a sloppy case. He is pressing a deep philosophical question: can a free being rationally and knowingly choose permanent self-destruction? His answer is no, and he grounds that answer in a careful reading of the classical Christian understanding of the good, the true, and the beautiful.

But I part company with him here. And saying where, and why, is what lets this book answer McClymond’s necessity charge at the root.

I hold libertarian free will. That means I hold that a genuine “yes” requires a possible “no.” Not a likely “no.” Not an expected “no.” But a possible one. If the “no” is impossible in principle, then the “yes” is not free in the way the Bible seems to mean when it invites, warns, pleads, and calls. Hart may be right that a fully rational will would never choose permanent self-destruction. But I am not sure we can rule it out by philosophical argument alone. Freedom, I think, includes the terrifying capacity to act against one’s own deepest good.¹⁰

Think of it this way. The addict who reaches for the bottle knows it is killing him. The spouse who walks out on a family knows the cost. Human beings regularly choose what harms them, knowingly, stubbornly, over and over. Hart’s answer is that such choices are not fully rational, and therefore not fully free. But I worry that this moves the goalposts. If every self-destructive choice is, by definition, unfree, then “freedom” has been redefined to include only the right answer. That is not the freedom the prodigal son exercised when he demanded his inheritance and walked away. He was free, and he was wrong, and the father let him go.⁴³

So the certainty in this book is a different kind of certainty. I do not say all must be saved. I say all will be saved, because the God who knows every heart will meet each person with exactly the appeal that draws them freely home. The distinction matters. “Must” is logic. “Will” is trust.

3. Hart Is a Source, Not a Counterfeit

I need to say this plainly, because this chapter walks a fine line. This book parts from Hart on the philosophy of freedom. It does not part from him on the gospel.

Hart affirms the full deity of Christ, the Trinity, the bodily resurrection, the authority of Scripture, and the real and costly atonement of the cross. He is fully orthodox by the standards of the ancient creeds. His linguistic, exegetical, and patristic work is among the most valuable resources this book draws on. His observations about the New Testament’s afterlife language, about the corrective meaning of the punishment-word (Greek kolasis, “correction, pruning”), and about the temporary scope of the age-words (Greek aiōnios, “pertaining to an age”) inform several chapters of this book (see Chapter 22 and Chapter 24).¹¹

The point is this: Hart is a creedal, Trinitarian, orthodox Christian whose universalism starts from the gospel and the texts. He is a source for this book, not a counterfeit. The author uses Hart’s work gratefully. The single place this book declines to follow him is on the question of whether freedom can be constrained by definition. That divergence is genuine, but it is a family disagreement within orthodoxy, not a boundary violation.¹³

McClymond, to his credit, recognizes that Hart is no gnostic and no liberal. But he treats Hart’s necessitarianism as proof that universalism inherently tends toward eclipsing grace. I read the evidence differently. Hart’s necessitarianism is one way to ground the hope, and I decline it. But there are other ways to ground the same hope, and the one I hold keeps grace free.

4. Free Certainty, Not Forced Certainty

Here is the heart of my answer to the necessity charge. The universalism this book defends holds that God will certainly save all, but not because He must. He will save all because He is wise enough, loving enough, and patient enough to draw every free heart to Himself, without ever overriding a single will.

How? The answer runs through two ideas that work together: middle knowledge and optimal grace.

Middle knowledge (God’s knowledge of what each person would freely choose in any situation He might place them in) means that God is not guessing. He knows every heart. He knows what appeal, what encounter, what sequence of events would most powerfully draw each person toward a free “yes.” And He has the wisdom and the power to arrange exactly those encounters, across the whole span of a person’s existence, including the encounters that follow death.¹⁴

Optimal grace (the term comes from Jerry Walls) is grace that is “deeply personal and individual.” It is not a one-size-fits-all offer shouted into the void. It is the precise, fitted, perfectly timed appeal that meets each soul where it is. For one person, it is a word of tenderness. For another, it is the fire of holy confrontation. For another, it is the slow erosion of every false comfort until only God remains.¹⁵

Put these together, and you get a hope that is certain without being necessary. The outcome is certain because I trust the Shepherd who goes after the lost sheep until he finds it (Luke 15:4). It is not necessary, because at every step the sheep remains free to run further, and the Shepherd remains free to keep pursuing. Nothing in the metaphysics forces the outcome. Everything in the character of God makes it overwhelmingly likely.

This is where the category of gift returns, and this time it answers McClymond directly. McClymond noted that Hegel could not incorporate gift or grace into his system, because Hegel rejected the contingent and absorbed everything into the necessary. McClymond’s own observation cuts in the direction of this book’s answer. A system that has no room for gift cannot support grace. But a freely-willed outcome is all gift. God does not owe it. Creation does not demand it. The lost do not deserve it. Every person who is finally saved is saved by grace through faith, and that grace was freely given by a God who could have walked away but did not.⁴⁷

For a fuller treatment of how middle knowledge and libertarian free will work together, see Chapter 26. For how optimal grace answers the objection that hell only hardens the heart, see Chapter 28. Kirk MacGregor goes further: any universalism that keeps libertarian freedom, he argues, requires something like middle knowledge. Without it, a God who respects real freedom has no way to guarantee the outcome. With it, God can sovereignly arrange the world so that every free creature comes home without a single will being overridden.⁴⁹

5. This Answers McClymond at the Root

Now I can state the reply to McClymond’s necessity charge in a single sentence: the version of universalism he faults for making grace necessary is the one this book does not hold.

McClymond’s argument has a clear logical shape. He says: necessitarianism makes salvation owed, not given. I agree. He says: if salvation is owed, grace is eclipsed. I agree again. He says: therefore universalism eclipses grace. And there I stop. The conclusion follows only if all universalism is necessitarian. It is not.³⁹

The universalism I defend keeps every element of contingency that McClymond demands. Salvation is the free work of Christ, applied by the Holy Spirit, received through grace-enabled faith, in each person’s own time. No person is saved by the structure of being. Every person is saved by the cross. The hope is that the God who did not spare His own Son will, by His own free resolve, bring every rebel to the point where that rebel freely bows. Not because the universe requires it. Because God chooses it.¹⁷

Paul does not ground the “mercy on all” in a metaphysical entailment. He grounds it in the unsearchable riches, wisdom, and knowledge of God. No one has advised God. No one has put God in debt. The mercy flows from Him. It is not owed to Him. That is the grace this book defends, and it is the grace McClymond’s charge does not touch.

The Voices in the Conversation

McClymond’s case against the necessitarian impulse runs most deeply through his treatment of Karl Barth. In The Devil’s Redemption, he devotes extensive attention to Barth’s doctrine of universal election and its implications. His reading is careful: Barth himself denied teaching a dogmatic restoration of all things (Greek apokatastasis, “the restoration of all things”). Barth wrote that “no such right or necessity can legitimately be deduced” for the final salvation of all.¹⁹ But McClymond argues that Barth’s own theological reasoning pushes past his stated caution. If Christ’s saving solidarity with humanity is eternal and unbreakable, then every person is already and forever joined to the Savior.³⁴ The freedom Barth claimed to protect, McClymond contends, was overridden by the logic Barth’s own system set in motion.²⁰ The scholarly debate over this reading, traced through Jüngel, McCormack, Hunsinger, and Molnar, only confirms the trajectory: the later Barth’s election doctrine pushed toward a union of God and humanity that is pre-temporal and, in some readings, eternal.³⁵

I think McClymond reads Barth perceptively on this point. His observation that Barth’s election doctrine “eternalizes the God-man” is a fair one. If the incarnation is an eternal truth rather than a contingent event, then grace-as-gift is harder to preserve. Oliver Crisp reached a similar conclusion: Barth’s appeal to divine freedom does not successfully offset the universalist pull of his own theology.²¹

Wilfried Härle put the problem in its starkest form. Once God’s eternal free decision for universal reconciliation has been made, Härle argued, “the Incarnation, the Resurrection and universal salvation were a logical necessity.” That is exactly the collapse McClymond diagnoses. An eternal decision, once granted, generates a chain of necessity. The free act becomes the first domino, and everything after it falls by logic, not by love.³⁶

But notice what this tells us. It tells us that the necessity problem is a specific problem for a specific theological structure. It is a problem for Barth’s eternal Godmanhood. It is a problem for Hegel’s absorption of the contingent into the necessary. It is a problem for any system in which salvation follows from the nature of being itself. It is not a problem for a universalism that grounds the hope in God’s free decision to love and in His knowledge of how to win every heart without force.²²

The difference can be stated simply. In Barth’s system, humanity is already and forever united with Christ. The decision has been made before history begins. There is, in McClymond’s words, an “always-already completed and realized union.” In the system this book defends, nothing is already completed until each person freely receives the gift. The cross is finished. The offer is real. But the “yes” must be given, person by person, in genuine freedom. That is why the hope can be certain without being necessary. The outcome depends on God’s faithfulness, not on a pre-temporal ontological fact.⁴⁴

Thomas Talbott’s universalism, which McClymond engages at length, is harder to classify on this question. Talbott argues that a perfectly loving God would not allow anyone He loves to be lost forever. That argument is sometimes read as necessitarian, but Talbott’s own case depends on the nature of love, not on metaphysical structure. Talbott holds that our free choices determine the form God’s perfecting love will take. If we continue in disobedience, God shuts us up to the consequences of our choices, and we experience His love as severity. If we repent, we experience that same love as kindness. In this picture, freedom is not overridden. It is met by a God who adjusts His appeal to each heart.²³

Robin Parry presses the same distinction in the third edition of The Evangelical Universalist, where he answers McClymond’s eclipse-of-grace charge head-on. Parry grants that if grace is understood as contingent (an act of God’s will, not His essence), universal salvation is still “fully compatible with such a view.” A universalist could hold that God does not have to save all but has, as a free act of sovereign love, chosen to do so, and that this choice is revealed in the death and resurrection of Christ for all. How, Parry asks, would that eclipse grace? He then goes further. Most universalists, Parry included, hold that God’s being love means it is “unintelligible” to think God will abandon anyone to sin forever. Does that make grace no longer free? Parry insists it does not: God does not have to show us grace “in the sense that he is under some obligation to us.” That is fully compatible, he says, with the claim that God acts with grace “because of who God is in God’s very essence.” Nobody and nothing outside of God is making God be gracious. God is gracious because God wills to be gracious, and God’s will is an expression of who God is as the God of love.⁵⁰

Parry’s observation sharpens the reply. McClymond worries that grounding grace in God’s essence turns it into something God has to give, and what God has to give is no longer a gift. Parry answers: the “has to” is misleading. God is not being compelled by any outside being, principle, or standard. He is freely acting in accordance with His own character. As the Book of Common Prayer puts it, God is “the same Lord, whose property is always to have mercy.” God’s freedom is His complete freedom to be God, unhindered by anyone and anything. If that freedom always expresses itself as grace toward sinners, it is because grace is who God is, not because a metaphysical law forces His hand.⁵¹

My own position sits at a deliberate distance from necessitarianism. I hold libertarian free will. I hold middle knowledge. I hold that the certainty of universal salvation is grounded in the moral character and sovereign wisdom of God, not in a logical entailment. This places the hope in a different category from the versions McClymond targets. His charge strikes the necessitarian structure. My foundation is not that structure.²⁴

Counter-Objections

Three objections press back against everything I have just said. Each is serious, and each deserves a direct answer.

“If God certainly saves all, it makes no difference whether you call it necessary or certain. Grace is still owed.”

This is the strongest pushback, and I want to take it slowly. The objection says that calling the outcome “certain” rather than “necessary” is just changing the label. If God will save all, and this is settled from eternity, then the result is the same: nobody’s salvation is genuinely at stake, and grace becomes a formality.

But the difference is not academic. It runs all the way down. A necessary outcome flows from the structure of reality. A certain outcome can flow from the character and resolve of a free agent. Consider a parent who says, “I will never give up on my child.” That is not a statement about metaphysics. It is a statement about love. The parent could, in principle, walk away. The freedom is real. But the parent will not walk away, because of who the parent is. That is exactly how this book understands God’s saving purpose. It is certain because God is faithful, not because the universe is rigged.²⁵

And Paul does not seem troubled by the combination. “If we are faithless, he remains faithful, for he cannot deny himself” (2 Timothy 2:13). God’s faithfulness is anchored in His own character, not in a debt He owes us. Paul calls this faithfulness, not necessity. So do I.²⁶

“Libertarian freedom cannot guarantee a universal yes without sliding back into necessity.”

This objection says: if freedom is genuine, then the universal “yes” cannot be guaranteed. At some point, either you admit the outcome is necessary (and freedom is an illusion), or you admit some might say “no” forever (and universalism fails).

I grant the logical force of this. It is the one open question I have flagged since the beginning of this book. The bare logical possibility that some free creature might refuse God forever cannot be ruled out by philosophical argument. I do not pretend otherwise.²⁷

But logical possibility is not probability, and probability is not outcome. A perfectly loving God, with full knowledge of what each person would freely do in any conceivable situation, with eternity to work, and with His own unveiled presence as the most persuasive appeal any creature could receive, can compose for every soul the most compelling possible sequence of encounters. I believe this is what He does. I believe the result is that every knee freely bows and every tongue freely confesses. Not because the “no” is impossible. Because the love is that good, and the Lover is that wise.²⁸

This is not a proof. It is a conviction grounded in the character of God. And it is precisely this gap between proof and conviction that keeps grace free. If I claimed to prove that all must be saved, McClymond’s charge would land. I claim to trust that all will be saved, because I trust the One who saves.²⁹

“You only avoid Hart’s conclusion by smuggling in coercion.”

This one comes from the other side. Some who share Hart’s necessitarianism suspect that any universalism relying on God’s “persuasion” or “optimal grace” is secretly coercive. If God arranges every circumstance to maximize the chance of a “yes,” is the creature really free?

It is a fair question, and I think the answer is yes. Persuasion is not coercion. A teacher who knows her student well, who presents the lesson in the way most likely to produce understanding, is not overriding the student’s mind. She is honoring it. A parent who knows his child’s temperament and approaches a hard conversation with exactly the right tone is not manipulating the child. He is loving wisely. God’s optimal grace does the same. He meets each person where they are, with what they most need to hear, at the time they are most ready to hear it. The “yes” that follows is genuine, because the heart was ready, not forced. Jerry Walls makes a point that strengthens this distinction. Walls argues that God’s optimal grace does not remove options or impose ever-increasing torment. It is, rather, the precise appeal, lovingly and clearly communicated, that gives each person “every opportunity as made possible by the death and resurrection of Christ.” Damnation, on Walls’s model, only results from “the persistent choice to reject optimal grace.” This is not pressure that breaks the will. It is love that opens the eyes.³⁰

Jesus himself modeled this. He did not shout the same sermon at every crowd. He told parables to some, asked questions of others, and wept over Jerusalem. He tailored His appeal to the heart in front of Him. If that is coercion, then every good evangelist, every loving parent, and every patient friend is guilty of it too.³¹

There is a world of difference between a manipulator who removes your options and a lover who knows your heart. The first takes away freedom. The second honors it by speaking the precise word that helps you see clearly. God’s optimal grace belongs to the second category. He does not drug the will. He clears the fog. And when the fog lifts, the soul sees what it has always been looking for, and it runs to Him freely.

Grace Stays Free

Grace stays free precisely because this book refuses necessity. The hope this book holds is confident, but it is not compelled. It is the confidence of someone who knows the Shepherd, not the confidence of someone who has solved a mathematical equation.

McClymond writes that the graciousness of grace has always been linked to divine actions viewed as contingent rather than necessary. He is right. And the universalism this book defends keeps exactly that contingency. The cross was God’s free act. The resurrection was God’s free act. The pursuit of every lost soul across the ages, past death and through judgment, is God’s free act. Nothing in the structure of being required it. Everything in the heart of God compelled it, the way love compels the lover who is free to walk away but will not, because love is who he is.³²

Jesus does not say He must lose nothing. He says it is the will of the Father. The will of a free God, who freely gave, and who freely holds on. The charge of the next chapter is that universalism eclipses grace by replacing the cross with self-expiation (Chapter 6).³⁸ For the question of divine freedom in full, see Chapter 8. For the deeper exploration of whether the engine of universalism is a system or the love of God, see Chapter 10. And for the fullest treatment of how middle knowledge and free will together answer the freedom objection, see Chapter 26.⁴⁰

Grace is not eclipsed. It is not made automatic. It is not turned into an entailment. It is the costly, free, relentless love of a God who did not have to save anyone and chose to save everyone. That is the hope. And it stands.

When I say “chose,” I mean it. This is a God who chose to create, chose to love, chose to pursue, chose to die, chose to rise, and chooses still to knock on every closed door in the universe. He is not compelled by the architecture of being. He is moved by the depth of His own heart. And His heart, unlike ours, does not tire, does not forget, and does not give up. The grace that saves all is the most expensive grace there is, because it never stops costing God something until the last rebel is home.⁴⁶

Notes

↑ 1. McClymond, The Devil’s Redemption, 2:1025–28. McClymond develops the necessity charge as the second of his three prongs in §12.3, “The Problem of Grace in Christian Universalism.” The four sub-headings (“I am saved because I am divine,” “I am saved because I am human,” “I am saved because I suffer,” “I am saved because God so wills it”) map the different ways grace is eclipsed. The necessity charge falls chiefly under the second and fourth.

↑ 2. McClymond, The Devil’s Redemption, 1:24. McClymond’s exact framing: “The ideas of eternal Godmanhood in Russian Sophiology and the analogous teaching in Barth create problems for a doctrine of grace. In this view, the union of humanity and divinity is not a contingent fact that came to be at a particular point in time … but is instead an eternal, metaphysical truth.”

↑ 3. McClymond, The Devil’s Redemption, 2:655. On Hegel: “Hegel rejects the merely contingent or accidental and wishes to absorb everything into the sphere of the necessary. There is a third category, though, which Hegel does not consider, and this is the category of gift.”

↑ 4. McClymond, The Devil’s Redemption, 1:24.

↑ 5. McClymond, The Devil’s Redemption, 2:1025. McClymond’s word study of hen, hesed, and charis appears at the opening of §12.3 and establishes the biblical baseline against which the eclipse is measured.

↑ 6. For the author’s full statement of libertarian free will and the one open question, see the master theological commitments in the introduction and the fuller treatment in Chapter 26.

↑ 7. Ephesians 1:11 (ESV); Romans 11:35 (ESV). Paul’s doxology in Romans 11:33–36 is itself an argument that God’s saving purpose flows from His own unsearchable counsel, not from any obligation imposed on Him from outside. The text insists that God is the creditor, never the debtor.

↑ 8. Luke 15:4 (the one lost sheep); Luke 15:20 (the father who runs to meet the prodigal); Isaiah 42:3 (the bruised reed). The parables of Luke 15, read as a unit, depict a God whose response to the lost is not passive waiting but active, costly pursuit.

↑ 9. Hart, That All Shall Be Saved (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019), Fourth Meditation, “What Is Freedom? A Reflection on the Rational Will.” Hart’s argument turns on the classical Christian understanding of the will as a rational appetite for the Good. Drawing on Maximus the Confessor, he distinguishes between the “natural will” (our intrinsic orientation toward God as the Good) and the “gnomic will” (our deliberative capacity, which can stray). A will that definitively rejects the Good, on his account, is not exercising freedom but demonstrating its absence.

↑ 10. Timothy Stratton, Human Freedom, Divine Knowledge, and Mere Molinism: A Biblical, Historical, Theological, and Philosophical Analysis, 2nd ed. (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2026), ch. 12. Stratton argues that genuine freedom requires the ability to do otherwise and that libertarian freedom is necessary for rational inference and moral responsibility. His “Free Thinking Argument” contends that if all human thoughts and actions are determined, then even the reasoning process that leads to determinism is itself determined, undermining rational evaluation. Stratton himself is not a universalist, but his philosophical framework provides the foundation the author appropriates for the hope.

↑ 11. Hart, That All Shall Be Saved, esp. the second and third meditations, on New Testament afterlife language and the meaning of kolasis. The present chapter uses Hart’s work at naming level; for the full lexical discussion, see Chapter 22.

↑ 12. For the technical development of middle knowledge and its three logical moments (natural knowledge, middle knowledge, and free knowledge), see Stratton, Human Freedom, Divine Knowledge, and Mere Molinism, chs. 13–15, and the fuller treatment in Chapter 26. Kenneth Keathley, Salvation and Sovereignty: A Molinist Approach (Nashville: B&H, 2010), ch. 1, describes Molinism as the view that “God perfectly accomplishes His will in free creatures through the use of His omniscience.” William Lane Craig calls middle knowledge “the single most fruitful theological concept I have ever encountered” (quoted in Keathley, p. 7). Kirk R. MacGregor, Molinist Philosophical and Theological Ventures (Eugene, OR: Pickwick / Wipf & Stock, 2022), ch. 1, provides the complementary philosophical-biblical case and argues that “any form of universalism that embraces libertarian human freedom requires Molinism.”

↑ 13. The boundary treatment of Hart is developed in Chapter 2 and Appendix B. The key distinction: Hart is fully creedal (Trinitarian, incarnational, affirming the atonement and the resurrection), so his necessitarianism is an intra-orthodox disagreement, not a departure from the faith.

↑ 14. The concept of middle knowledge goes back to the sixteenth-century Jesuit Luis de Molina, who argued that God knows not only what will happen and what could happen, but also what would happen in any conceivable set of circumstances. This “middle” knowledge (Latin scientia media) sits between God’s natural knowledge of all possibilities and His free knowledge of what actually occurs. Keathley explains the three-moment model in terms of “could, would, and will”: God knows all that could happen (natural knowledge), which of those scenarios would result in persons freely responding as He desires (middle knowledge), and what will happen in the world He freely chose to create (free knowledge). See Keathley, Salvation and Sovereignty, ch. 1; Stratton, Human Freedom, chs. 13–15.

↑ 15. Jerry L. Walls, Purgatory: The Logic of Total Transformation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). Walls writes: “Such grace is deeply personal and individual in the sense that God knows how best to elicit a positive response from each person, without destroying or overriding their freedom. What would be highly effective in converting one person might make another more resistant.” Walls insists that God “truly desires to save all persons, and does not extend the offer of grace merely in a cursory fashion so that everyone has some minimal chance, in order to establish God’s justice in damning them if they reject it.” This stands in stark contrast to the notion of merely “sufficient grace” (sufficient to justify condemnation). As Walls emphasizes, optimal grace means God “knows each of us as individuals and understands how best to speak to us and reveal himself to us so that we will return his love.” See also Walls, Hell: The Logic of Damnation (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1992), chs. 4–5.

↑ 16. The analogy of the fire chief is deliberately imperfect: unlike a human rescuer, God has infinite time, infinite knowledge of each person’s heart, and infinite creativity in His appeals. The point of the analogy is narrow: certainty of outcome grounded in resolve and character is a different thing from certainty grounded in logical necessity.

↑ 17. Romans 8:32 (ESV): “He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things?” Paul’s reasoning here moves from the greater gift (the cross) to the lesser (everything else), not from a metaphysical necessity to a logical conclusion.

↑ 18. Romans 11:32–36 (ESV). The “all” in v. 32 is the subject of a fuller treatment in Chapter 25. For the present chapter, the relevant point is Paul’s doxological language: God’s mercy to all is grounded in His unsearchable wisdom, not in any obligation.

↑ 19. McClymond, The Devil’s Redemption, 2:804. McClymond notes the narrowness of what Barth specifically denies: “It is important to note Barth’s precise language: that ‘no such right or necessity can legitimately be deduced.’ What Barth specifically denies is the ‘right or necessity’ of final salvation for all, not the result or outcome of final salvation for all.”

↑ 20. McClymond, The Devil’s Redemption, 2:1028. McClymond argues that Barth’s teaching on the always-already completed union of Christ with every person “ultimately fails to offset” the universalist implications: “Whatever my state of faith or unbelief, whatever my character in terms of virtue or vice, the human solidarity idea expresses the notion that I am already and forever conjoined with the Savior, Jesus Christ, and for this reason ‘I am saved because I am human.’”

↑ 21. Oliver Crisp, “On Barth’s Denial of Universalism,” Themelios 29, no. 1 (2003). Crisp concludes that Barth’s appeal to divine freedom does not allow him to escape the universalist implications of his own theological reasoning. McClymond cites Crisp’s essay in The Devil’s Redemption, 2:804.

↑ 22. The distinction between necessity-based and character-based grounding is developed more fully in Chapter 10, where the charge that universalism’s engine is a “system” rather than the love of God is answered directly.

↑ 23. Talbott, The Inescapable Love of God, 2nd ed. (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2014), esp. chs. 3–5 and 12. Talbott develops the argument from divine love and the informed-freedom dilemma. His reading of Romans 11:22 is especially relevant here: “Note then the kindness and the severity of God: severity toward those who have fallen, but God’s kindness toward you, provided you continue in his kindness.” For Talbott, our free choices determine how God will respond to us in the immediate future. If we continue in disobedience, God will shut us up to our disobedience, forcing us to experience the consequences. In that way, we experience God’s perfecting love as severity. Talbott’s case is more properly described as an argument from love and rationality than as a strict metaphysical necessitarianism. McClymond engages Talbott extensively in The Devil’s Redemption, 2:959–76 (§11.3).

↑ 24. For the author’s philosophical commitments on free will, middle knowledge, and optimal grace, see the theological commitments in the introduction (§§2.5, 2.9) and the extended treatment in Chapter 26 and Chapter 28.

↑ 25. The parent analogy is deliberately limited: a human parent may fail despite resolve, while God has the resources (infinite wisdom, infinite patience, middle knowledge) never to fail. The analogy’s point is restricted to the distinction between necessity and resolve.

↑ 26. 2 Timothy 2:13 (ESV). Paul’s statement is especially powerful because it acknowledges human faithlessness as a real condition, not a theoretical one. Even when we fail, God’s faithfulness remains. The ground of that faithfulness is not obligation but identity: “he cannot deny himself.”

↑ 27. See the discussion of the “one open question” in the introduction (§2.5) and the fuller treatment of why this openness does not undermine the hope in Chapter 26. The author’s candor on this point is deliberate: acknowledging the logical possibility of final refusal is what distinguishes this universalism from Hart’s necessitarianism and what answers McClymond’s charge.

↑ 28. Philippians 2:10–11 (ESV): “at the name of Jesus every knee should bow … and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord.” The universalist reading of this text is developed in Chapter 25. For the present chapter, the point is that Paul envisions a universal outcome grounded in the exaltation of Christ, not in a metaphysical theorem.

↑ 29. The distinction between proof and conviction is important theologically. Proof operates in the domain of logic and demonstration. Conviction, in the biblical sense, operates in the domain of faith and trust. The author’s universalism belongs to the second domain, which is why it can coexist with libertarian freedom in a way that necessitarianism cannot.

↑ 30. The distinction between persuasion and coercion is foundational to the entire middle-knowledge framework. Stratton, Human Freedom, Divine Knowledge, and Mere Molinism, 2nd ed. (Wipf & Stock, 2026), ch. 12, argues that libertarian freedom is not merely the ability to choose but the ability to choose among genuinely available alternatives. God’s optimal grace operates entirely within the category of what Stratton calls “freedom-permitting” rather than “freedom-overriding” divine actions. Keathley likewise insists that God “does not make or cause” the creature’s choice but “infallibly assures” it through omniscient arrangement (Salvation and Sovereignty, ch. 5). Walls makes the complementary point: optimal grace means God “truly desires to save all persons, and does not extend the offer of grace merely in a cursory fashion so that everyone has some minimal chance, in order to establish God’s justice in damning them if they reject it.” The substance and spirit of the gospel must be faithfully represented, honest misunderstanding cleared up, and patience and care taken “to make sure that the response that is elicited is actually to the gospel, and not a distortion or caricature of the gospel” (Walls, Purgatory). Only the “persistent choice to reject optimal grace” leads to damnation.

↑ 31. Luke 19:41 (Jesus weeps over Jerusalem); Mark 10:21 (Jesus looks at the rich young man and loves him); John 4:7–26 (Jesus’s individually tailored conversation with the Samaritan woman). Each encounter shows a Savior who matches his appeal to the person in front of him.

↑ 32. McClymond, The Devil’s Redemption, 1:24. The phrase about contingency and necessity is the very one the author agrees with and turns: the grace this book defends preserves exactly the contingency McClymond calls for, because it rests on God’s free resolve, not on a metaphysical law.

↑ 33. John 6:37–39 (ESV). The “all that the Father gives me” is sometimes read restrictively (only the elect), but the universalist reading takes “all” in its broadest scope, in light of John 12:32 (“I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself”). The present chapter’s point is narrower: Jesus grounds the certainty of the outcome in the Father’s will, not in a logical entailment.

↑ 34. McClymond, The Devil’s Redemption, 2:757. McClymond cites John Macken’s observation that Barth’s language about the reality of humanity in Jesus Christ suggests “something akin to the hypostatic union between the humanity of Christ and his divinity.” If that reading is correct, then the union of every person with Christ is not a contingent saving act but an ontological given, and grace is correspondingly diminished.

↑ 35. McClymond, The Devil’s Redemption, 2:762. McClymond traces the debate over whether Barth held to an eternal Godmanhood through the scholarship of Jüngel, McCormack, Hunsinger, and Molnar. The result is a contested reading, but the trajectory is clear: the later Barth’s election doctrine pushed his theology toward a union of God and humanity that is pre-temporal and, in some formulations, eternal.

↑ 36. Wilfried Härle, as quoted in McClymond, The Devil’s Redemption, 2:757: “Once God’s eternal free decision for universal reconciliation had been made, pure transcendence was no longer possible and the Incarnation, the Resurrection and universal salvation (apocatastasis panton) were a logical necessity.” This is the clearest statement of the problem: if the decision is eternal, the outcome is necessary, and grace is eclipsed.

↑ 37. McClymond, The Devil’s Redemption, 1:20. McClymond’s observation that in Barth’s universal election “God was now defined as essentially gracious rather than contingently so” is the decisive turn: essential grace is no longer, strictly speaking, grace in the biblical sense, because it is no longer free.

↑ 38. For McClymond’s treatment of the purgationist universalists (the third prong of the eclipse of grace), see the next chapter, Chapter 6. The three prongs (nature, necessity, self-expiation) are summarized together in Chapter 1.

↑ 39. De Young, Exposing Universalism, ch. 5 (the excursus on reason and hell), presses a related point: if universal salvation is built into the structure of things, then reason itself demands it, and the entire apparatus of warning, judgment, and repentance in the New Testament becomes theater. The author’s libertarian framework answers this concern: the warnings are real because the freedom is real.

↑ 40. The cumulative case of the book is gathered in Chapter 40. The necessity charge is one of the strongest prongs of McClymond’s critique, and the distinction between necessitarian and freely-certain universalism is one of the most important moves in the author’s defense.

↑ 41. Ephesians 2:8 (ESV). McClymond’s word study in The Devil’s Redemption, 2:1025, traces the secular Greek usage of charis as “demonstrations of a ruler’s favor.” The New Testament usage carries this further: grace is not abstract benevolence but the specific, personal, freely-willed favor of God toward sinners who do not deserve it.

↑ 42. McClymond, The Devil’s Redemption, 1:20. McClymond’s key observation: in Barth’s universal election, “God was now defined as essentially gracious rather than contingently so.” The implication, which McClymond draws out through the rest of the chapter, is that essential grace is no longer strictly grace in the biblical sense.

↑ 43. Luke 15:12–13 (ESV). The prodigal son’s departure is presented in the text as a genuine, self-chosen act, not as an example of irrationality that disqualifies his freedom. The father lets him go, which is precisely the freedom Hart’s system struggles to account for.

↑ 44. McClymond, The Devil’s Redemption, 2:1028. The phrase “always-already completed and realized union” captures the heart of the problem: in Barth’s framework, there is nothing left for God to do in saving each person, because the saving union is already ontologically in place.

↑ 45. Romans 8:32 (ESV). The verb “gave up” (Greek paredōken) is the same word used of Judas’s betrayal; Paul deliberately echoes the costly, freely-chosen character of God’s act. See also Galatians 2:20, where Paul uses the same verb of Christ who “loved me and gave himself for me.”

↑ 46. Revelation 3:20 (ESV): “Behold, I stand at the door and knock.” The image of a God who knocks rather than breaks down the door is itself the refutation of necessitarianism. He could force the door. He does not. He knocks, and knocks, and knocks, and His persistence is not compulsion but love.

↑ 47. McClymond, The Devil’s Redemption, 2:655. McClymond’s observation about Hegel’s inability to accommodate gift or grace (“There is a third category, though, which Hegel does not consider, and this is the category of gift”) is one of the most penetrating points in the entire book. The author turns it: a universalism that runs on gift rather than necessity preserves exactly the category McClymond says Hegel lost.

↑ 48. Hart, That All Shall Be Saved, Fourth Meditation. Hart writes that the rational soul “could freely will only its own union with God, and thereby its own supreme beatitude. We are, as it were, doomed to happiness, so long as our natures follow their healthiest impulses unhindered.” His comparison to the spring of fresh water appears in the same section: the refusal to drink “would be not an act of freedom on his part, but only a manifestation of the delusions that enslave him.” These formulations show why the author parts company: Hart defines freedom so that only the right answer counts as genuinely free, which this book’s libertarian commitment resists.

↑ 49. MacGregor, Molinist Philosophical and Theological Ventures, ch. 1. MacGregor argues that “any form of universalism that embraces libertarian human freedom requires Molinism.” The logic is tight: if freedom is genuine, the universal outcome cannot be guaranteed by metaphysical necessity; it can only be secured by a God who knows what each person would freely do in every conceivable circumstance and who sovereignly arranges the world accordingly. This is precisely the framework Keathley describes as God “meticulously setting the table so that humans freely choose what He had predetermined” (Keathley, Salvation and Sovereignty, ch. 5).

↑ 50. Robin Parry, The Evangelical Universalist, 3rd ed. (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2019), Appendix 5, “A Response to Michael McClymond’s Theological Critique of Universalism,” pp. 295–96. Parry’s argument appears in “Round 3” of his response, where he addresses McClymond’s component 3 (that grace is freely given, not necessitated). Parry concedes this is “the one that comes closest to hitting home” among McClymond’s arguments. His reply distinguishes between grace as something owed to us (which it is not) and grace as an expression of who God is in God’s very essence (which it may be without ceasing to be grace). The claim “God does not have to show us grace in the sense that he is under some obligation to us” is Parry’s own formulation.

↑ 51. Parry, The Evangelical Universalist, 3rd ed., p. 296. Parry invokes Talbott’s observation about 2 Timothy 2:13: “If we are faithless, he remains faithful—for he cannot deny himself.” If God’s faithfulness is grounded in who God is, then it would seem that God’s promise-keeping is a necessary truth. McClymond’s view, Parry notes, would seem to imply “that God does not keep his promises freely.” Parry’s conclusion: God’s freedom is “his complete freedom to be God, unhindered by anyone and anything.” To demand that God could act contrary to His own nature in order to prove grace is free is to confuse divine freedom with caprice. The Book of Common Prayer quotation (from the Prayer of Humble Access, 1662) is Parry’s.