Chapter 7
Does the Larger Hope Corrupt the Doctrine of God?
Some universalists tell a grand story. God goes out from Himself in creation and comes home to Himself at the end. The whole drama of the world, on this telling, is really the drama of God. He splits Himself apart, scatters Himself into the world, and then gathers Himself back together. Universal salvation is not the rescue of lost creatures. It is God's own self-recovery.
The story is beautiful. It is also wrong. And the biblical hope does not need it.
Michael McClymond sees this story running through the whole history of universalism. In the capstone chapter of The Devil's Redemption, he calls it the "primal drama" or "divine drama." He traces it from second-century gnosis through Origen, through the Jewish Kabbalah, through the theosophy of Jakob Böhme, through Hegel and Schelling, all the way into the twentieth century.1 His charge is pointed: wherever this drama appears, it corrupts the doctrine of God. It turns the perfect, complete, free God of Scripture into a God who needs the world, struggles within Himself, and cannot be whole without us.2
McClymond on the "Divine Drama"
McClymond argues that across nineteen centuries of universalist thought, a recurring myth appears: the story of divine self-alienation and self-return. In gnostic systems, a crisis within God or the divine realm causes a fall and a scattering, followed by a return to the source. In Origen, preexistent souls fall from union with God and are finally restored. In Kabbalah, the "shattering of the vessels" scatters divine light, which must be gathered back. In Böhme, God comes to exist through struggle with the chaos of the Ungrund. In Hegel, the self-alienation and self-reconciliation of Spirit runs through the cross. In every case, universal salvation is bound up with a God who is somehow incomplete or at risk.3
Summarized from McClymond, The Devil's Redemption, 2:1013–1015
McClymond's point is that this myth places the drama in the wrong place. The Bible places risk and danger in the human sphere, not in God. A God who must go through conflict and self-recovery is not the God of Scripture. He is the God of Hegel.4
I want to say something that may surprise you: McClymond is largely right here. Where universalism rests on a story of divine self-alienation, the doctrine of God really is corrupted. I reject that story as firmly as he does.
The question is whether the biblical hope needs it. I do not think it does. And that is what this chapter will show.
The force of McClymond's argument comes from a simple observation: a God who needs the world is not the God of the Bible.
Think about what the divine-drama myth does. It says that God, in some deep sense, is not complete without creation. He goes out from Himself in order to find Himself. The world is not His free gift. It is His necessary project. He has to create in order to become who He is. And He has to save everyone in order to get all of Himself back.
If that were true, salvation would not be a gracious rescue. It would be God doing maintenance on His own being. The cross would not be a free act of love. It would be a step in a process that God was bound to take. Prayer would lose its urgency. Missions would lose their point. Why plead with a God who is already working out His own self-recovery on schedule?5
McClymond puts it well. He argues that the "inverted theology" of universalism places risk, danger, and contingency within God, while removing them from the human sphere. The real drama, he says, is not "up there" but "down here." It is human life, lived in the light of eternity, that is an "epic call to adventure, prayer, danger, and exertion."6
This is a strong point, and it carries a weight that a careful universalist ought to feel. If the outcome of the whole cosmic story is guaranteed by the structure of God's own being, then the human story loses its urgency. Why preach? Why pray? Why labor over the soul of a friend, if God is already grinding His way to the finish through a process no one can stop?
He is right that a God divided against Himself is not the God of the Bible. He is right that the Hegelian and Böhmist systems import process and struggle into a God who is beyond both. He is right that some universalist thinkers have built their hope on a picture of God that the church's own creeds do not support.7
And there is a deeper worry still. If God's own being is the stage of the drama, then creation is not a gift. It is a symptom. The world exists because God needed to express Himself, or to test Himself, or to heal Himself. On that view, we are not loved for our own sakes. We are instruments in a divine process. That is not the gospel. The gospel says God made us out of love and saved us at a cost that was real for Him, even though He did not have to bear it.
The question hanging over this chapter is simple: does the charge reach every universalism, or only those versions that run on the divine-drama myth? I believe it reaches only the counterfeits. The biblical, creedal hope rests on a very different God: not a God who needs us back, but a God who freely gives Himself to us.
Plain Words
Divine drama (or "primal drama"): The idea that God Himself goes through a process of conflict, self-splitting, and self-recovery, and that the history of the world is really the story of God putting Himself back together. Aseity (Latin aseitas, "self-existence"): God's complete self-sufficiency; He depends on nothing outside Himself for His being. Impassibility: The teaching that God is not subject to suffering or emotional turmoil caused by forces outside Himself. Classical theism: The traditional Christian doctrine of God as perfect, complete, free, unchanging in His nature, and independent of the world He made.
Here is the first thing I want to say plainly: the universalism I hold does not rest on a divine drama. It does not need one. It never did.
I do not believe God goes out from Himself in creation and comes back to Himself in salvation. I believe God is perfect, complete, and fully Himself from all eternity. He made the world not to fill a gap in His own being, but as an overflow of love. Creation adds nothing to God. He was not lonely before He made us. He was not broken before He saved us.
Paul says this with striking clarity in his sermon at Athens:
"The God who made the world and everything in it, being Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in temples made by man, nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mankind life and breath and everything." (Acts 17:24–25, ESV)
Read that last phrase again: "as though he needed anything." God is not served by us as if He were lacking something. He is the giver, not the receiver. The Psalmist makes the same point with blunt poetry:
"If I were hungry, I would not tell you, for the world and its fullness are mine." (Psalm 50:12, ESV)
A God who is hungry for the world is not the God of Psalm 50. The hope I defend begins here: God saves all not because He needs us back, but because He loves us freely. That distinction matters more than anything else in this chapter.8
McClymond calls the church to recover what he calls the "undramatic God" of the Bible and the classical tradition.9 I agree. And I want to show that a biblically grounded universalism is perfectly at home with this God.
The classical Christian tradition teaches that God in Himself is wholly free and independent of the world. He created all things from nothing. He did not shape pre-existing matter. He did not carve the world from His own substance. He spoke, and it was. The world depends on Him for every breath. He depends on it for nothing.10
This teaching has deep roots. The First Vatican Council, responding to the rise of German idealist philosophy, reaffirmed that God's essence is not the essence of all things and that God created "not with the same necessity by which he necessarily loves himself" but by a free act of will.11 Karl Barth, though he disagreed with Rome on much, agreed on this: "Why should God not also be able, as eternal Love, to be sufficient unto himself? In His life as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit He would in truth be no lonesome, no egotistical God even without man, yes, even without the whole created universe."12 Thomas Torrance put it even more simply: "The world needs God to be what it is, but God does not need the world to be what he is."13
Bruce Marshall brings the whole tradition to a clear point. Creation and reconciliation, he writes, "must be free acts of the Triune God, and as free acts they must be contingent." God might not have created a world. Having created one, He might not have reconciled it when it fell. Each person of the Trinity "would be the person he is, the person with whom we are allowed to become acquainted in time, even if there were no creatures." Since Nicaea, Marshall argues, Christian theologians have "uniformly insisted" on this.14 The God of the Nicene Creed is not a God who needs the world in order to be Himself.
Notice that both Barth and Torrance were friends of the larger hope, or at least its near neighbors. Barth hoped for universal salvation, even as he refused to teach it as doctrine (see Chapter 8). Torrance held a generous eschatology. Neither of them needed a divine drama to get there. They built their hope on the freedom and love of the complete God, not on a God who was working out His own salvation alongside ours.15
The universalism I hold stands with Barth and Torrance here, not with Hegel and Böhme. God is fully God with or without us. He chose to make us and to save us out of freedom, not necessity. The hope of universal salvation does not require smuggling process or conflict into the inner life of the Trinity.
The Key Distinction
McClymond is right that many universalisms have rested on a corrupted doctrine of God. He is wrong that all universalisms must. The biblical hope starts not with a God who needs us, but with a God who freely gives Himself. Creation is His gift. Salvation is His gift. That the gifts reach everyone does not make them less free. It makes them more complete.
Why does God save? The divine-drama myth says: because He needs to recover Himself. The biblical answer says: because He loves freely.
This is not a small difference. It is everything.
When John writes that "God is love" (1 John 4:8), he does not mean that God is a being who lacks something and reaches out to fill the gap. He means that love is the overflow of who God already is. The next verse makes this clear: "In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him" (1 John 4:9, ESV). God's love is a sending, a giving, an outpouring. It flows from fullness, not from need.16
James says the same thing with different words: "Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change" (James 1:17, ESV). Notice: no variation, no shadow, no change. The giving does not deplete God. The loving does not cost Him His completeness. He gives out of a fullness that never runs low.
McClymond himself points in this direction, even though he does not draw the universalist conclusion. In a striking passage, he proposes that instead of speaking of the "kenotic God" (the self-emptying God), we should speak of the "plerotic God" (from the Greek plērōma, "fullness"). In a plerotic view, he writes, the stress would lie "not on metaphysical deficiency but on the fullness, completeness, and overflow of the Father's existence in the existence of the Son and of the Spirit."17
I want to borrow McClymond's own word and turn it to the hope he opposes. The God who saves all is the plerotic God. He saves out of overflow, not out of hunger. His love reaches everyone not because He is desperate, but because He is generous beyond measure. The sun does not shine because it needs the earth to see it. It shines because that is what the sun does. So God loves. He loves because He is love. And His love, unchecked and undefeated, reaches every person He has made.18
McClymond himself, drawing on philosophers Leszek Kolakowski and William Desmond, distinguishes what he calls the "erotic" from the "agapeic" model of God. In the erotic model, God is lacking something and creates the world to complete Himself. The world fulfills God just as God fulfills the world. McClymond rightly says that the God of Böhme, Hegel, Whitehead, and much of current kenotic-relational theology fits this erotic pattern. But the agapeic model, McClymond writes, "holds that God created the world out of a sufficiency or even a surplus of being, happiness, and goodness." He quotes Augustine: "We exist because God is good."36
That is exactly the God on whom the hope of this book rests. The agapeic God does not need us. He gives Himself to us because giving is what love does. And if that love reaches every creature He has made, it is not because He is filling a hole in His own being. It is because His goodness has no limit.
The distinction between love-as-gift and love-as-need is the hinge of this whole chapter. If God's universal saving love is an overflow of fullness, then universal salvation does not corrupt the doctrine of God. It honors it. For a fuller treatment of why the engine of this hope is love and not a metaphysical system, see Chapter 10.
In the divine-drama myth, the cross is a moment in a cosmic process. It is one stage in God's self-recovery. It has to happen, not because God freely chose it, but because the logic of the system requires it.
That is not the cross of the New Testament.
In the New Testament, the cross is the free, costly, self-giving of a God who did not have to act at all. He could have left us. He chose not to. He could have stayed in the fullness of His own being, and He would have lost nothing. But He sent His Son anyway. "God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us" (Romans 5:8, ESV).19
Barth put it memorably. God "could have remained satisfied with the fullness of His own being. If He had willed and decided in this way, He would not have suffered any lack. He would still be eternal love and freedom. But … He has willed and decided otherwise."20
That "otherwise" is the gospel. God did not have to save anyone. He chose to. And the cross is where that choice cost Him the most. On the universalist reading I hold, what the cross purchased is not a limited ticket but a finished work that reaches every person (see Chapter 4 and Chapter 6). The scope of the atonement is universal, but the act is still free. God was not forced to save all. He freely willed to. He was not completing Himself. He was pouring Himself out.21
This matters because it answers McClymond's concern at its root. If the cross is a free act and not a necessary stage in a cosmic process, then universal salvation can be held without turning God into a God who needs the world. The hope rests on freedom, not on fate.
Let me be direct. I reject the divine-drama systems that McClymond catalogs, and I do so for the same reasons he does.
I reject the gnostic myth that the soul is a particle of divine light that returns to God by nature (see Chapter 4). That is not salvation. That is physics.
Böhme's teaching that God comes into being through a struggle with the dark Ungrund, and that evil has a source in God Himself, has no place in a biblical faith. "God is light, and in him is no darkness at all" (1 John 1:5, ESV). For a full treatment of Böhme and the dark principle, see Chapter 18.22
I reject Hegel's idea that the Trinity is a process of self-alienation and self-reconciliation, in which the death of Jesus is really the death of God as a stage in Spirit's self-realization. This is philosophy dressed in Christian clothes. It is not the gospel.23
The Schellingian notion that God must limit Himself in order to create, and that creation is a moment in God's own self-determination, is equally foreign to Scripture. The God of Genesis 1 speaks the world into being out of nothing. He does not carve it from Himself.24
I reject the Sophiology that turns divine Wisdom into a quasi-divine entity that falls and must be restored. Wisdom in the Bible is not an unstable divine emanation. Wisdom is God's own attribute, stable and generous (Proverbs 8; James 1:5).25
McClymond is right about every one of these. Where universalism rests on such systems, the doctrine of God really is harmed. But the conservative, biblical universalism I hold rests on none of them. It rests on the creedal God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, perfect, complete, free, and loving. It reaches the hope of universal salvation not through a myth of divine self-recovery, but through the revealed character of a God whose saving will is as wide as His love. That road runs through Scripture and the cross, not through Hegel and Schelling.
A Plerotic, Not Kenotic, Hope
McClymond himself suggests that Christian theology should speak of the "plerotic God" rather than the "kenotic God," stressing fullness and overflow rather than self-emptying and deficiency. This is a beautiful insight. A universalism built on the plerotic God does not corrupt the doctrine of God. It honors the overflow. God's love reaches all not because He is emptying Himself into the world, but because His fullness has no limit and His generosity has no boundary.
McClymond's catalog of divine-drama systems is, in my judgment, one of the most valuable sections of The Devil's Redemption. He traces the myth with patient scholarship across gnostic, kabbalistic, Böhmist, idealist, Russian, and modern kenotic theologies. He shows that the pattern repeats: God is divided, the world is a stage in His self-recovery, and salvation is the final reunion. Where this pattern governs the hope of universal salvation, the doctrine of God is compromised. I agree with this conclusion and have said so plainly.26
McClymond himself notes that there are forms of universalism that "do not readily fit this pattern." He names the high-Calvinist universalists James Relly and John Murray, who believed in universal salvation as a deduction from divine sovereignty, not from any divine drama. But McClymond calls this a "minor development" and sets it aside.27 I think this dismissal is too quick. The existence of universalisms that need no divine drama shows that the charge does not reach the hope itself. It reaches one set of foundations for the hope, and a bad set at that.
David Bentley Hart's first meditation in That All Shall Be Saved offers a picture of God that stands sharply against the divine-drama myth. For Hart, God is not a being alongside other beings. God is the infinite Good that all rational wills, by their nature, seek. God does not need the world to complete Himself. Rather, every creature exists only as a participation in God's own goodness.28 Hart's theology of God is deeply classical, drawing on the Cappadocian fathers and on the Platonic tradition of the Good as the source and end of all things. In his first meditation, Hart argues that the doctrine of creation is itself "an affirmation of God's absolute dispositive liberty in all his acts." Creation can add nothing to God. God's being does not depend on the world's. The only "necessity" in the act of creation is that nothing can hinder God from expressing His own goodness.37 I part from Hart on the question of whether universal salvation is metaphysically necessary (see Chapter 5), but on the doctrine of God he is an ally, not a target.29
Thomas Talbott, the philosopher McClymond presses hardest, grounds the hope not in a myth of divine self-recovery but in the revealed love of God. For Talbott, the engine of universal salvation is the simple claim that a perfectly loving God would not rest while any of His children remained lost. That is a claim about God's character, not about God's inner metaphysical process. It does not require a divine drama. It requires only the God who is love.30 Talbott goes further. He insists that the Scriptures nowhere hint at God's mercy allowing something that His justice would not, or at His justice demanding something that His mercy does not. The doctrine of divine simplicity backs him up: God is not divided into competing attributes. His love and His justice are not separate forces pulling in different directions. They are one.38
Robin Parry, in the third edition of The Evangelical Universalist, takes McClymond's "problem of God" head-on. In his Appendix 5, Parry agrees that drama-within-God theologies are worth critiquing. He shares McClymond's concern that they "seek to say more about God than we can know on the basis of revelation" and that they risk "bringing conflict into the inner life of the undivided God." But Parry insists that McClymond picks out an issue with a few universalists and then applies it to all of them. Most historical universalists, Parry writes, would be "astonished at this accusation," because the claim that God is undivided, pure goodness, and at no risk from evil is a recurring motif in universalist arguments across two thousand years.39
Parry presses two ironies that deserve attention. The first is that the language of "risk" in relation to God belongs not to universalists but to certain traditionalists, who speak of God "risking" failure in His purposes for creation. The second is sharper still: the doctrine of penal substitution, as it is often taught, introduces the kind of intra-divine conflict McClymond warns against. On that telling, God's love pulls in one direction and His justice pulls in another, and the cross resolves the inner tension. Parry argues that universalism is proposed precisely to avoid this division. All God's acts, on the universalist account, are acts of undivided holy and just love.40
Parry adds a historical correction that matters for this chapter. McClymond traces a line from Böhme to modern universalism through the divine-drama myth. But Parry argues that the actual direction ran the other way. Böhme himself believed in eternal hell, and his theology included a dark principle within God. It was Böhme's followers who removed the dualistic vision, rejected any darkness in God, and affirmed Him as pure light, goodness, and love. That move toward orthodoxy is what enabled them to hold universal salvation. So, Parry writes, "rather than universalism introducing a Böhmist division within God it actually inspired its removal. Salvation is not about God's self-therapy."41
I stand with Hart, Talbott, and Parry on this point: the classical doctrine of God does not oppose the hope of universal salvation. It supports it. A God who is perfectly complete, perfectly free, and perfectly loving is exactly the God who would save all, precisely because His love is gift, not need.
McClymond's own analysis, interestingly, includes resources that point in this direction even as he deploys them against universalism. He cites Gregory of Nazianzus on the need for apophatic reserve, the humility of not claiming to know too much about God's inner life. "The begetting of God must be honored in silence," Gregory wrote. "The manner of his generation we will not admit that even angels can conceive, much less you."35 That caution is wise. But notice: it cuts against the divine-drama systems, not against the simple biblical claim that God loves all and wills to save all. The conservative universalist is not speculating about God's inner metaphysics. He is reading 1 Timothy 2:4 and believing it.
I understand why someone would say this, but it confuses two different things. A parent who searches for a lost child is not incomplete without the child. The parent's being does not depend on the child. But the parent's love is such that it cannot rest while the child is lost. The parent is whole. The parent is also relentless. God's relentless pursuit of every soul is not a sign of incompleteness. It is a sign of the kind of love that overflows from a complete and generous heart.31
"A God who must get everyone back is a needy God."
The word "must" is doing all the work here, and it points in two very different directions. If "must" means that God is under some external constraint, forced by a logic He did not choose, then yes, that would be a needy God. I reject that picture. But if "must" means that God's love is so deep and so free that He will not give up on anyone He has made, then the "must" comes from within His own character, not from outside. A God who freely and gladly pursues every lost sheep is not needy. He is faithful.
This is the sharpest version of the objection, and it deserves a careful answer. The objector is saying: if God is already complete, why would He care whether all are saved? If nothing is missing from His being, what drives the pursuit?
The answer is love. Love does not come from lack. A mother who has everything she needs still grieves over a wayward child. Her grief does not mean she is incomplete. It means she is loving. In the same way, God's universal saving will does not stem from a deficiency in His being. It stems from the abundance of His love. Romans 11:35–36 says it with breathtaking sweep: "Who has given a gift to him that he might be repaid? For from him and through him and to him are all things." God owes nothing to anyone. He is repaid by no one. And yet from Him and through Him and to Him are all things. That "to him" is the hope, and it flows from fullness, not from need.32
This is true, and I have said so openly. McClymond is right that the mainstream of historical universalism has often carried a divine-drama element. The Origenist, Böhmist, and idealist strands did build on a corrupted doctrine of God. But the existence of a bad foundation does not prove that no good foundation is possible. Gregory of Nyssa held the hope of universal restoration without any divine-drama myth. He held it within the full Nicene creed. So did Clement of Alexandria before him, in a different key.33 The patristic stream shows that the hope can stand on orthodox ground. That most versions have not stood there does not mean that none can.
A God Who Needs, or a God Who Gives?
McClymond's "problem of God" is real and serious, but it targets a specific set of universalisms: those built on the myth of divine self-alienation and self-return. This myth corrupts the doctrine of God by making Him incomplete, unstable, and dependent on the world. The conservative, creedal universalism this book defends holds the opposite: God is perfect, complete, and free. He saves all not to recover Himself but to share His fullness. The God of the Nicene Creed, the God of Acts 17 and Psalm 50 and Romans 11, is the plerotic God, the God of overflow. His hope is not built on divine need. It is built on divine generosity.
The doctrine of God is not harmed by the hope of universal salvation. It is harmed by the myth of divine self-alienation, and that myth is one I reject.
God does not need us. He chose us. He did not create because He was empty. He created because He was full. He did not send His Son because He had to heal a wound in His own being. He sent His Son because He is love, and love gives.
I think this is where McClymond's catalog, for all its value, makes a serious mistake. He documents the corrupted versions with such thoroughness that the reader begins to think the corruption is inseparable from the hope. But it is not. The corruption belongs to the systems that built the hope on a faulty doctrine of God. Strip away the systems. Plant the hope in the creedal God. You still have universal salvation, but now it rests on solid ground.
When Paul tries to say something about the scope of God's work, he reaches for the widest words he can find. "For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be glory forever" (Romans 11:36, ESV). The God of this verse is not a God who needs the world. He is a God whose giving is so vast that all things come from Him and all things return to Him. That return is not God's self-recovery. It is worship. It is the free, glad, homecoming of creatures who were made by love and saved by love.
The problem of God, as McClymond states it, is a real problem for the systems he names. It is not a problem for the hope I hold. The God on whom this hope rests is the undramatic God, the plerotic God, the God who is complete in Himself and who saves out of freedom and overflow. His love is gift, not lack. His pursuit is generosity, not need. And His hope, held humbly and gratefully, is that every creature He has made will freely come home to the love that made them.
For the related question of whether universalism runs on a metaphysical system rather than on the love of God, see Chapter 10. For the specific case of Böhme and the dark principle in God, see Chapter 18. The next chapter takes up a related worry: whether confident universalism threatens God's freedom. That is the objection Karl Barth himself raised, and it deserves a careful hearing. See Chapter 8.34
↑ 1. McClymond, The Devil's Redemption, 2:1013–1015. McClymond's survey of the "divine drama" or "primal drama" spans gnostic, Origenist, kabbalistic, Böhmist, Hegelian, Schellingian, and Russian Sophiological systems, showing how each version tells a story of divine self-alienation and self-return.
↑ 2. McClymond, The Devil's Redemption, 2:1017–1018. McClymond frames this as the central "problem of God" in universalist theology, arguing that the primal-drama myth conflicts with the biblical picture of God and with the classical theological tradition.
↑ 3. McClymond, The Devil's Redemption, 2:1013–1015. For the gnostic version, see the fall and restoration of Sophia within the divine Pleroma. For Origen, see the preexistent souls' fall and return. For Kabbalah, see the "shattering of the vessels" (shevirat ha-kelim) in the Lurianic tradition. For Böhme, see the struggle with the Ungrund. For Hegel, see the self-alienation and self-reconciliation of Geist. McClymond traces the pattern across all these systems with impressive range.
↑ 4. McClymond, The Devil's Redemption, 2:1017–1018. His language of "inverted theology" captures the charge precisely: risk and contingency belong to the human sphere, not to God.
↑ 5. This is the force of McClymond's observation that if the divine drama guarantees the outcome, "earthly life is no longer a place of risk and contingency, because the final outcome of the still-unfolding heavenly conflict is declared in advance." McClymond, The Devil's Redemption, 2:1017.
↑ 6. McClymond, The Devil's Redemption, 2:1018. McClymond's full statement is worth reading in context: he argues that human life, lived in the light of eternity as the Bible presents it, is "an epic call to adventure, prayer, danger, and exertion, for one's own salvation and for the salvation of others."
↑ 7. McClymond's critique of divine drama has both a methodological dimension (the violation of apophatic reserve in speaking of God's inner life) and a substantive dimension (the conflict with the biblical and classical picture of God). See The Devil's Redemption, 2:1016–1018. Kevin Vanhoozer's observation that theologians should "proceed most carefully (i.e., non-speculatively) where even angels fear to tread" is quoted by McClymond in support of the methodological critique.
↑ 8. Acts 17:24–25 and Psalm 50:9–12 together establish what systematic theologians call divine aseity: God's complete self-sufficiency. The universalism defended in this book presupposes aseity, not its denial.
↑ 9. McClymond, The Devil's Redemption, 2:1017–1018. McClymond's phrase "the undramatic God of the Bible and the classical tradition" is central to his case. He contrasts the undramatic God (within whom there is no division, conflict, or tragedy) with the dramatic human sphere (where there is risk, uncertainty, conflict, contingency, and evil).
↑ 10. The doctrine of creation ex nihilo (from nothing) is foundational here. As Georges Florovsky argued, the world was made neither from something "inside" God (a divine emanation) nor from something "outside" God (pre-existing matter) but from nothing. This rules out both emanationism and dualism. See McClymond's summary in The Devil's Redemption, 2:839.
↑ 11. McClymond, The Devil's Redemption, 2:1018. The First Vatican Council (1869–70), Dei Filius, canons 3–5, rejected the identification of God's substance with all things, the notion that creatures emanated from the divine substance, and the view that God created with the same necessity by which He loves Himself.
↑ 12. Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, cited in McClymond, The Devil's Redemption, 2:1019. Barth's point is that God's trinitarian life is fully complete and fully loving even without any creatures at all.
↑ 13. Thomas F. Torrance, cited in McClymond, The Devil's Redemption, 2:1019. Torrance adds: "The Fatherhood of God is in no way dependent on or constituted by relation to what he has created outwith himself."
↑ 14. Bruce Marshall, cited in McClymond, The Devil's Redemption, 2:1019–1020. Marshall's argument is that since the Council of Nicaea, Christian theologians have "uniformly insisted" that the identities of the three divine persons "are the same as they would be even if the three had not decided to create and give themselves to us." This is a strong version of the classical teaching on God's independence from creation.
↑ 15. On Barth's hope for universal salvation alongside his refusal to teach it as doctrine, see Chapter 8. Torrance's eschatology was generous without being explicitly universalist; the point here is that both theologians grounded their view of salvation in the freedom and self-sufficiency of God, not in a divine drama.
↑ 16. 1 John 4:8–10. The distinction between love as overflow (from a God who is already complete) and love as need (from a God who must fill a gap) is central to this chapter's defense.
↑ 17. McClymond, The Devil's Redemption, 2:1024. McClymond develops the "plerotic" concept in contrast to the "kenotic" models of Bulgakov and Balthasar, arguing that "within the intra-trinitarian life of God—so far as we understand it—there is no competition, no give-and-take, no fixed sum of available deity." He appeals to the Nicene Creed's language of the Son as "God from God, Light from Light" as a picture of overflow, not depletion. The Greek plērōma ("fullness") is the cognate; cf. Colossians 2:9.
↑ 18. The analogy of the sun is ancient; Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite used a version of it in The Divine Names (IV.1–4) to describe God's goodness as a self-diffusive overflow that reaches all things without being diminished.
↑ 19. Romans 5:8, ESV. The initiative lies entirely with God: He acts "while we were still sinners," not in response to our movement toward Him. This is the opposite of the divine-drama model, in which salvation is God's own return to Himself.
↑ 20. Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, cited in McClymond, The Devil's Redemption, 2:1019. The passage continues: God "would not have suffered any lack. He would still be eternal love and freedom. But … He has willed and decided otherwise." Barth's emphasis on divine freedom is central to his entire theology.
↑ 21. On the universal scope of the atonement as the free application of a finished work, see Chapters 4 and 6. The key claim is that the cross is sufficient for all (1 John 2:2), efficient for all (on the universalist reading), and free in both its accomplishment and its application.
↑ 22. On Böhme's theology and the "dark principle" (Ungrund) in God, see Chapter 18. McClymond's treatment in The Devil's Redemption, ch. 5, is thorough. The biblical rejection of any darkness in God is absolute: "God is light, and in him is no darkness at all" (1 John 1:5, ESV).
↑ 23. On Hegel's "Christocentrized" and "crucicentrized" version of the dialectic of divine self-alienation, see McClymond, The Devil's Redemption, 2:646–647 and 2:1014–1015. Hegel's identification of the Son of God with the world and his expansion of kenosis into a total metaphysical principle of divine self-manifestation through self-negation are departures from Nicene Christology.
↑ 24. On Schelling's idea that God as the Absolute must become "self-limited" in order to create, so that the world attains its apokatastasis and "God may be all in all," see McClymond, The Devil's Redemption, 2:1014. This co-determining relation between God and the world is exactly what the doctrine of creation ex nihilo rules out.
↑ 25. On Russian Sophiology and the ambiguous divine/nondivine status of Sophia in the thought of Vladimir Solovyov and Sergius Bulgakov, see McClymond, The Devil's Redemption, 2:720–727 and 2:1014–1015. Florovsky's critique of Solovyov's "all-unity" is telling: it makes God incomplete apart from the world, so that God and the world become "codetermining factors."
↑ 26. McClymond, The Devil's Redemption, 2:1013–1018. This chapter's concession is deliberate: where the divine-drama myth governs the hope, the doctrine of God is harmed. The defense does not require denying this. It requires showing that the hope can stand on other ground.
↑ 27. McClymond, The Devil's Redemption, 2:1015–1016. McClymond acknowledges the high-Calvinist universalism of Relly and Murray as not fitting the divine-drama pattern, but dismisses it as "a minor development" with almost no following. Whether it was historically minor does not settle whether it is theologically viable.
↑ 28. David Bentley Hart, That All Shall Be Saved (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019), First Meditation. Hart's doctrine of God draws on the Cappadocian fathers and on the Platonic tradition of the Good as the transcendent source of all being. On the distinction between Hart's classical theism and his necessitarian conclusion (which this book does not follow), see Chapter 5.
↑ 29. The divergence with Hart on necessity is real and important: Hart holds that universal salvation is metaphysically necessary because the rational will cannot ultimately refuse the Good; this book holds that universal salvation is the overwhelming conviction grounded in God's character and revealed will, while keeping libertarian freedom real. See the discussion in Chapter 5 and in the master theological commitments (the "one open question," §2.5 of the governing framework).
↑ 30. Thomas Talbott, The Inescapable Love of God, 2nd ed. (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2014). Talbott's argument centers on the character of God as revealed in Christ, not on a metaphysical system. His trilemma — that God is perfectly loving, perfectly powerful, and that some are eternally lost forms an inconsistent triad — is a claim about God's character, not about His inner metaphysical process. McClymond engages Talbott extensively in The Devil's Redemption, §11.3.
↑ 31. The parable of the lost sheep (Luke 15:3–7) and the parable of the lost coin (Luke 15:8–10) both depict a searcher who is not incomplete but who searches with relentless energy. The shepherd does not need the one lost sheep to be a shepherd. He searches because of who he is. Jesus' point is about the character of God, not about a deficiency in God.
↑ 32. Romans 11:35–36, ESV. Paul is quoting and expanding on Job 41:11 and Isaiah 40:13–14. The rhetorical question ("Who has given a gift to him that he might be repaid?") establishes God's absolute self-sufficiency. The doxological conclusion ("For from him and through him and to him are all things") wraps the universal scope in worship, not in metaphysical necessity.
↑ 33. Gregory of Nyssa held the hope of the apokatastasis while affirming the full Nicene creed without qualification. He helped write the creed. His universalism was not built on a divine drama but on the goodness and sovereignty of God; see his Catechetical Oration, chs. 26 and 35. On the patristic stream generally, see Chapter 15. Clement of Alexandria held a restorative view of punishment grounded in God's pedagogical love; see Stromata VII.2 and Paedagogus I.8.
↑ 34. On the related charge that universalism threatens the freedom of God by binding Him to save all, see Chapter 8. On the charge that the engine of universalism is a metaphysical system rather than the love of God, see Chapter 10. On Böhme and the dark principle specifically, see Chapter 18. Together, these chapters answer McClymond's §12.2 in its full scope.
↑ 35. Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 29.8 (the Third Theological Oration), cited in McClymond, The Devil's Redemption, 2:1016. McClymond uses Gregory's apophatic reserve to argue that the divine-drama theologies say more about God's inner life than any theologian can properly claim to know. Kevin Vanhoozer adds that theologians should "proceed most carefully (i.e., non-speculatively) where even angels fear to tread." The conservative universalist agrees: the hope rests on God's revealed character, not on speculation about intra-trinitarian processes.
↑ 36. McClymond, The Devil's Redemption, 2:1032–1033. McClymond draws on Leszek Kolakowski and William Desmond for the erotic/agapeic distinction. Kolakowski describes the erotic deity in vivid terms: God creates the universe so that He might develop through it, needing His alienated creatures to complete His own perfection, so that at the culmination of cosmic evolution He is not what He was at the beginning. The agapeic model, by contrast, holds that creation flows from a divine surplus. Augustine's De natura boni captures the agapeic principle in a single sentence. Desmond, as McClymond notes at 2:655, argues that Hegel's deity is a "counterfeit double" whose narrative begins in eros and cannot end in agape. The erotic deity cares for himself, not for others, and so subverts the biblical picture of God's other-regarding love.
↑ 37. David Bentley Hart, That All Shall Be Saved (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019), First Meditation. Hart writes that the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo is "an affirmation of God's absolute dispositive liberty in all his acts—the absence, that is, of any external restraint upon or necessity behind every action of his will." He continues: "one must still affirm that it is free, that creation can add nothing to God, that God's being is not dependent on the world's, and that the only 'necessity' present in the divine act of creation is the impossibility of any hindrance being placed upon God's expression of his own goodness in making the world." This is drawn from a lecture Hart originally delivered at the University of Notre Dame in July 2015, later published as "God, Creation, and Evil: The Moral Meaning of Creatio ex Nihilo," Radical Orthodoxy: Theology, Philosophy, Politics 3 (2015): 1–17, and reprinted in Hart, The Hidden and the Manifest (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2017).
↑ 38. Talbott's argument on divine simplicity is developed throughout The Inescapable Love of God, 2nd ed. (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2014), especially chs. 4 and 6. Stephen Jonathan, Grace beyond the Grave, 96–97, summarizes Talbott's position: his thesis is "built upon love being God's essential nature insisting that the Scriptures do not even hint at God's mercy allowing something that his justice would not, or that his justice should demand something that his mercy does not." Jonathan notes that Daniel Strange, a Calvinist critic, and Wayne Grudem both support the point that divine simplicity guards against pitting God's attributes against one another. See also R. Zachary Manis, Sinners in the Presence of a Loving God: A Theology of the Final Option, 107, who fairly summarizes the basic universalist argument: "There is a general consensus among universalists . . . that God possesses both the will and the power to bring about, in one way or another, the highest good of each and every human being whom He creates." Manis himself is no universalist; his summary is valuable for that reason.
↑ 39. Robin Parry (Gregory MacDonald), The Evangelical Universalist, 3rd ed. (Eugene, OR: Cascade / Wipf & Stock, 2026), Appendix 5, "A Response to Michael McClymond's Theological Critique of Universalism," Section IV ("Does Universalism Introduce Division Within the Indivisible God?"), 286–289. Parry writes: "McClymond's description here seems to me to pick out an issue with a few universalists and to tar all universalists with it. Looking at historical universalists, I think the majority would be astonished at this accusation. Indeed, it is a recurring motif in universalist arguments—ancient, medieval, modern, and contemporary—that God is undivided, pure goodness, at no risk from evil." Parry's Appendix 5 is the most direct published response to McClymond's theological critique from within the evangelical universalist tradition.
↑ 40. Parry, Evangelical Universalist, 3rd ed., 288–289. Parry's first irony: "There are few universalists, past or present, that I hear talking about risk, either in God or creation. That is the kind of talk I usually hear from (certain) traditionalists, especially those with Arminian leanings." His second: "Contrary to what McClymond's arguments lead me to expect, it is not universalists I hear speaking of internal division within God; rather, it is certain traditionalists. The intra-divine drama of divine self-reconciliation that I was made most familiar with as a young Christian was via the doctrine of penal substitution." Parry's point is not to reject penal substitution, but to show that the charge of dividing God's inner life can be turned back on the accuser.
↑ 41. Parry, Evangelical Universalist, 3rd ed., 287–288. Parry writes: "most of them [Böhme's followers] made some critical adjustments to Böhme's theology, removing his dualistic vision of God. Böhme had insisted that both good and evil originate in God, the one source of everything. But many of his followers modified his vision of God so that God was now understood as pure light, goodness, and love, with no darkness or evil at all. It was precisely this move (towards orthodoxy, I might add) that enabled them to reconcile some of Böhme's other ideas with universal salvation." This is a correction to McClymond's genealogy that matters: the movement from Böhme toward universalism was a movement away from the dark principle in God, not a deepening of it.