Chapter 8
Does the Larger Hope Bind the God Who Gives It?
Karl Barth hoped that all would be saved. He said so in private. He gestured toward it in print. But when asked point-blank whether universal salvation could be taught as Christian doctrine, he pulled back. And the reason he pulled back was not cowardice. It was reverence. To say that God must save everyone, Barth believed, is to put God under obligation. It is to presume on a grace that can only be received, never demanded.1
Michael McClymond, in his capstone chapter in The Devil's Redemption, picks up Barth's caution and aims it at every confident universalist. If even the twentieth century's greatest theologian of grace would not make the hope a doctrine, McClymond argues, then what right do lesser theologians have to do so?2 The charge is precise. It is not that the hope is wrong. It is that the hope becomes presumption the moment you turn it into a dogma.
McClymond, Deploying Barth's Caution
"Karl Barth noted that assertive or dogmatic universalism, which he generally referred to as apokatastasis, is a threat to the freedom and self-sufficiency of God as presented in the Bible. Barth wrote, 'It is His concern what is to be the final extent of the circle [of salvation]. If we are to respect the freedom of divine grace, we cannot venture … the doctrine of the so-called apokatastasis. No such right or necessity can legitimately be deduced. Just as the gracious God does not need to elect or call any single man, so He does not need to elect or call all mankind.'"
Michael McClymond, The Devil's Redemption, 2:1001–1002Read that sentence again: "No such right or necessity can legitimately be deduced." This is Barth's worry. The moment you claim a right to universal salvation, you have stopped receiving grace and started demanding it. The moment you call it a necessity, you have bound the God who is free.
McClymond sees this as a decisive blow against any universalist who speaks with confidence, not just hope. He is not alone. Barth's caution has shaped an entire tradition of cautious hopers, from Balthasar's careful "dare we hope?" to contemporary theologians who affirm the possibility of universal salvation while refusing to say more. The message is plain: if even Barth would not teach it, you should not either.3
And I want to grant something up front: the worry is real, and it comes from a friend of grace, not an enemy. Barth spent his career defending God's freedom against every system that would tame it. His refusal to dogmatize the hope was not hostility toward universalism. It was theology done on its knees. That posture deserves a serious answer, not a dismissal.
I feel the weight of Barth's caution. It names a danger that has swallowed more than one universalist theology.
The danger is this: when you say that God must save all, you have turned grace into a law. Grace, by its nature, is free. It is given, not owed. The entire gospel stands on the fact that God did not have to come for us. He chose to. The cross was not forced on Him. He went willingly. If we now turn around and say that God is required to finish what He started, required by some higher principle of love or logic or justice, then we have placed God beneath a rule. And a God beneath a rule is not the God of Scripture.4
This is not a straw man. Some universalists really do speak this way. David Bentley Hart argues that a rational soul cannot finally reject God. The refusal, Hart says, would be irrational, and an irrational refusal cannot be a free choice. So God's victory is a fact of metaphysics, not merely a hope.5 Against that kind of universalism, Barth's worry bites hard. I answer Hart more fully in Chapter 5. But I name it here because some universalists really have bound God.
And the danger runs deeper than Hart. McClymond traces the problem through centuries of universalist thought. Where Barth's theology of election made God essentially gracious rather than contingently so, it shifted the framework. Grace was no longer something God chose to give. It was built into the fabric of who God is. And if grace is built in, if it is structural, then it starts to look like necessity. That is the worry in its sharpest form.
Plain Words
Apokatastasis (Greek, "restoration of all things"): the early Christian term for the final salvation and restoration of every creature. Barth used the word to mean specifically a necessary or inevitable outcome, and it was in that sense that he rejected it.6 Aseity: God's complete self-sufficiency. He does not need the world, and nothing outside Him adds to His fullness. Dogmatic universalism: the claim that God must save all, as a matter of obligation or logic, as opposed to the hope that He will.
The question for this chapter, then, is narrow. I am not asking whether universalism is true. I am asking whether the universalist can hold the hope with confidence and still honor the freedom of God. Can you say more than "I hope," and less than "God must"? I believe you can. Here is how.
The first thing to say is the most important. This book does not say that God is obligated to save all. It does not say that some higher law compels Him. It says that God freely wills to save all, and that because He is perfectly wise and perfectly loving, He will freely succeed.7
The difference matters. When a child trusts that her father will come home, she is not putting him under a contract. She is trusting his character. She knows who he is. She has seen what he does. And because she knows him, she expects him to keep his word. That is not presumption. It is faith.
The same logic holds here. When I say that God will, in the end, bring every person to saving faith in Jesus Christ, I am not deducing a conclusion from an abstract principle. I am trusting the God who said He desires all to be saved (1 Timothy 2:4), the God who said He is not willing that any should perish (2 Peter 3:9), the God who promised that in Christ all will be made alive (1 Corinthians 15:22). My confidence rests on His revealed will, not on my demand.8
Barth himself saw this when he was at his clearest. In his own words, "I don't believe in universalism, but I do believe in Jesus Christ, the reconciler of all." He was not putting his faith in a system. He was trusting a Person. That is also what I am doing, with one difference: I am willing to follow the trust further than he would go.
The Line Between Confidence and Presumption
Confidence trusts a person's character and promises. Presumption claims a right over that person. The universalist who says "God will save all, because that is who He has shown Himself to be" is trusting. The universalist who says "God must save all, because logic requires it" is presuming. This book stands on the first.
This is not a dodge. I hold the hope as conviction, not as bare possibility. But the ground of my conviction is who God is, not a claim that He owes me anything. And that distinction is exactly what Barth was trying to protect.9
Barth's worry assumes that confidence in a universal outcome turns grace into something owed. But does it? Consider an ordinary promise. If I tell my children I will take them to the park on Saturday, they can count on it. They can be confident. They can plan for it. But their confidence does not turn my promise into an obligation imposed on me from the outside. The promise came from me, freely. Keeping it is an act of faithfulness, not of compulsion.10
Now apply that to God. Scripture is full of God's own stated desire for the salvation of all. Paul writes:
"This is good, and it is pleasing in the sight of God our Savior, who desires all people to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth. For there is one God, and there is one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus, who gave himself as a ransom for all." (1 Timothy 2:3–6, ESV)
Peter adds:
"The Lord is not slow to fulfill his promise as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance." (2 Peter 3:9, ESV)
These are not ambiguous. God wants all to be saved. He desires it. He is patient because He is not willing for any to be lost. To trust that He will accomplish what He desires is not to bind Him. It is to take Him at His word.11
George Sidney Hurd makes this point sharply in The Triumph of Mercy. The Greek word for "desires" in 1 Timothy 2:4 (Greek thelō, "to will, to purpose") is not the language of a faint wish. Marvin Vincent, as Hurd notes, calls it "a determined purpose." And Paul is not the only voice. In Isaiah 45, God swears an oath by Himself: "To Me every knee will bow, every tongue will swear allegiance." That is not a hope that might fail. It is a vow from a mouth that does not lie.37 Trusting a vow is not the same as imposing a rule.
And notice what kind of God we are trusting. Not a distant principle. A Father. The same God who told Israel He would never forget them, even if a nursing mother could forget her child (Isaiah 49:15). The same God who said His steadfast love endures forever. The same God who leaves the ninety-nine to find the one. When a child trusts that kind of Father, she is not binding Him. She is responding to Him.
A grace that flows from God's own free promise is still grace. The child who trusts her father's word has not seized control. She has received a gift and believed it. That is what the confident universalist does. Not demanding. Trusting.12
McClymond uses Barth's refusal to dogmatize universal salvation as a weapon against confident universalists. But there is a fact McClymond does not dwell on. Barth equally refused to dogmatize a populated hell.13
Barth's famous line was: "I do not teach it, but I also do not not teach it."14 That is not a rejection of universal salvation. That is a refusal to close the question in either direction. Barth did not say, "Hell will be populated." He did not say, "Some will certainly be lost." He said, in effect, "I will not presume to tell God what He must do, in either direction."
If Barth's caution about divine freedom cuts against confident universalism, it cuts just as sharply against confident traditionalism. The pastor who declares from the pulpit that some of his neighbors will spend eternity in conscious torment is making the same kind of claim Barth resisted. He is telling God what God must do. He is closing a circle that Barth wanted to leave open.15
Think about what the traditionalist claims. He says that the same God who desires all to be saved will consign billions to an eternity of suffering. He says this with full confidence and preaches it without qualification. But he never asks Barth's question of himself: "Am I binding God?" If divine freedom means God is free to save more than we expect, then it also means God is free to damn fewer than the traditionalist insists. The argument from divine freedom, honestly applied, opens a door that McClymond only uses to close one.
The Symmetry of Barth's Caution
If asserting that God must save all threatens divine freedom, then asserting that God must damn some threatens it equally. Barth saw this. His caution was not a vote for hell. It was a refusal to bind God in either direction. McClymond uses only one half of that caution.
McClymond himself observes that Barth's interpreters have debated for decades whether Barth was really a universalist. Tom Greggs, in a careful study, concluded that Barth's own theology logically entails universal salvation, even as Barth rejected the principle that would make it necessary. As Greggs puts it, Barth did not reject the hope. He rejected a principle. He rejected the idea that any abstract rule could stand above God and dictate His action.16 That is a rejection I share. No principle stands above God. But God's own revealed character and promises are not a principle imposed on Him from the outside. They are who He is.
Oliver Crisp, in a 2003 essay, pressed the same point from the other side. If Barth is right that Christ's atonement is universal in scope and that all humanity is elected in Christ, then their salvation "simply cannot be uncertain." The appeal to divine freedom, Crisp argued, does not rescue Barth from the universalism his own theology requires.17 McClymond himself notes that Barth's precise language denies "the right or necessity" of universal salvation, not "the result or outcome."18 In other words, Barth's caution may protect God's freedom without actually denying the universal result.
I draw a lesson from all of this. Barth was right to protect God's freedom. He was right to refuse any system that binds God. But the hope of universal salvation does not have to be that kind of system. And Barth's own theology kept leaning toward the hope, even as he refused to name it as dogma.19
There is a difference between three kinds of claims. The first says, "I wish all would be saved." That is sentiment. The second says, "Logic requires that all be saved." That is presumption. The third says, "God has shown us who He is, and the God revealed in Jesus Christ is one who will not rest until every lost sheep is found." That is faith.20
The confidence I hold is of the third kind. It does not come from a philosophical system. It does not come from wishful thinking. It comes from the character of God as revealed in Scripture, above all as revealed at the cross. The God who sent His Son to die for sinners while they were still enemies (Romans 5:8) is the God who finishes what He starts.
Paul puts the question as sharply as anyone:
"For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord." (Romans 8:38–39, ESV)
Paul does not say he hopes nothing can separate us. He says he is sure. And his confidence is not in a principle. It is in a Person. He trusts the love of God in Christ Jesus. That is exactly the kind of confidence I hold about the scope of salvation. Not a demand. A trust. Rooted in who God has shown Himself to be.21
Consider the cross. At Calvary, the God who did not need us came for us anyway. He came not because He was obligated, but because He loved. And the scope of that love, as Paul declares, is "the world" (2 Corinthians 5:19), "all" (1 Timothy 2:6), "every creature" (Colossians 1:23). When I say I am confident He will finish the job, I am not adding something to the cross. I am believing what the cross already says about who God is.
This is also where Barth's own early theology stands with us. He insisted on God's aseity (Greek aseitas, "self-existence"). God is complete in Himself. His engagement with the world is pure overflow, not lack.22 I affirm every word of that. And I add: a God who gives from overflow gives without limit. A God who loves without lack loves without reservation. That is not binding. That is His nature set free.
And now the concession I always owe, because Barth's worry touches the one place where I cannot give a perfect answer.
I believe God will succeed with every soul. But I cannot prove it, because human freedom is real, and a real "yes" requires a possible "no." I will not pretend otherwise. The bare logical possibility that some creature could refuse God forever cannot be ruled out by force. This is the honest residue of the free-will commitment, and it is the thing Barth's caution rightly protects.23
What I can say is this: the possibility is overwhelmed in practice. A perfectly loving and all-knowing God, with eternity to work, with full knowledge of what each person would freely do, can compose for every soul the most fitting appeal it could ever receive. He meets each person in His own unveiled presence. He gives all the time eternity allows. And because He is who He is, I believe every heart will freely yield. Not because it must. Because He is that good.24
That is not a binding decree. It is a hope held with conviction, and held with humility. I do not claim to have cornered God. I do not claim to know the future with the certainty of mathematics. I claim to know a Person, and to trust what He has shown me about Himself. That kind of confidence leaves room for mystery. It leaves room for surprise. But it does not leave room for despair, because the God it trusts has never abandoned anyone He loves.
The freedom Barth wanted to protect is still here. God is not bound by my theology. He is free. And I trust that His freedom, rightly understood, is the very thing that will bring all things home.
Binding God, or Trusting Him?
Barth worried that a dogmatic teaching of universal salvation (Greek apokatastasis, "the restoration of all") would bind God's freedom and presume on His grace. That worry is valid against any system that places God under obligation. The universalism this book defends does not do that. It does not say God must save all, compelled by logic or metaphysics. It says God freely wills to save all, has promised to do so, and will succeed because of who He is. Trusting a promise is not the same as demanding a right. The counterfeits that bind God are real, and this book refuses them. But a hope grounded in the revealed character of a free and loving God is not presumption. It is faith.
McClymond's use of Barth is selective, and knowing where is important. He draws heavily on Barth's chapter 9 material, where the great Swiss theologian warned against any doctrine giving humanity a "right" to salvation.25 That much is accurate. But McClymond also spends nearly a hundred pages documenting the ways Barth's own theology of universal election points toward a universal outcome. He quotes Bruce McCormack's summary that in Barth's scheme, "all human beings are … elect in Jesus Christ," and that the Spirit simply awakens them to what is already the case.26 He notes that Hans Urs von Balthasar came to see Barth's rejection of universalism as "ultimately rhetorical."27 McClymond's own chapter shows, page after page, that Barth leaned toward the conclusion he refused to name.
Robin Parry, writing as "Gregory MacDonald" in The Evangelical Universalist, takes a step that Barth would not. Parry holds the hope with full conviction, not as bare possibility. He describes himself as a "confident universalist" and insists that his confidence rests on the biblical hope that "does not disappoint" (Romans 5:5), not on wishful thinking.28 Parry represents the kind of confident universalism that McClymond's Barthian objection most directly targets. And yet Parry does not bind God. He trusts God's promises. That is the distinction McClymond's argument does not make room for.
Parry tackles the divine-freedom objection head-on. He grants that there is "a very noble theological instinct" behind the worry that universalism threatens God's freedom. But then he shows that the argument collapses even on its own terms. The critic concedes that God does desire to save all and that God is able to save all. Once you grant those two things, Parry observes, the conclusion follows. The critic is "wheeling divine freedom into the argument at the wrong point."28b God's decision to love and save is not forced on Him from the outside. It is who He is. And a freedom that requires God to be able to act against His own nature is, Parry argues, not freedom at all. It is the freedom for God not to be God.
In Appendix 5 of the third edition, Parry presses the point further. McClymond worries that if God's nature as love means He will certainly act with grace, then the choice "is not free and consequently not grace." Parry's answer is precise: no outside force is making God do anything He does not want to do. God chooses to be gracious because that is who He is. His acts are "simultaneously free and motivated by who God is." The freedom Barth wanted to protect is not the freedom of arbitrary choice. It is God's "complete freedom to be God, unhindered by anyone and anything." If that freedom is confused with raw arbitrariness, Parry notes (drawing on John Milbank's student Michael Hanby), the result is something "unintelligent and ultimately unfree," more like "a spasm than an act of volition."28c
Parry extends the point to divine aseity. God did not need to create; creation was a free gift. But once God freely chose to create, the destiny of that creation will match His nature as love. To deny this, Parry argues, is as unintelligible as saying God might choose to stop existing. "This is not a limitation on God but simply an expression of God's divine perfection."28d God is free, and His freedom is the freedom to act in accord with His own perfection.
George Sidney Hurd, in A Defense of Biblical Universalism, argues from the texts rather than from any abstract principle. Hurd's case rests on what God has declared: that He desires all to be saved, that Christ gave Himself as a ransom for all, that every knee will bow, and that God will be all in all. In The Triumph of Mercy, Hurd gathers the Isaiah 45 oath, the Jeremiah 31 promise ("they all shall know Me, from the least to the greatest"), and the 2 Peter 3:9 patience, and reads them together. God is not a wisher. He is a swearer of oaths. And an oath from a God who cannot lie is the strongest ground for trust there is.29 The confident universalists McClymond worries about are, in practice, far less interested in binding God than in believing Him.
What is striking, when you lay the scholars side by side, is how much agreement there is on the core principle. Barth, Parry, Hurd, and Colwell all affirm divine freedom. None of them want to bind God with a logical chain. The disagreement is narrower than McClymond suggests. It is about how far trust in God's revealed character can go before it becomes presumption. And the answer, I think, is plain. You cross the line when you appeal to a principle above God. You stay within it when you trust the God who spoke.
On the other side, McClymond is right that Barth's theology contains a tension. John Colwell tried to resolve it by suggesting that Barth's election doctrine allows for universal salvation as a contingent result of God's free decision, not a deduction from an abstract principle.30 That distinction is close to what I am defending. The result is the same. The ground is different. Grace remains free.
This is the sharpest version of the charge. If I say I am confident that God will save all, have I not in practice committed myself to a doctrine? And if the doctrine binds God, does the confidence not bind Him equally?
No. Here is why. A doctrine of universal salvation in the necessitarian sense says the outcome is required by the structure of reality. My confidence says the outcome follows from God's free character and free promises. The difference is in the ground. I trust a Person. A necessitarian trusts a system. If God were somehow to reveal that my hope was wrong, I would grieve, but I would not say He had broken a law. A necessitarian would have to say that reality itself had failed. Those are different things.31
"If You Are Sure God Will Save All, You Have Bound Him After All."
The objection confuses two kinds of certainty. I am sure because I trust who God is, not because I have locked Him into a contract. The certainty of trust is different from the certainty of compulsion. A wife who is sure her husband loves her is not binding him. She is trusting him. The same is true of the confident universalist trusting the God who has shown us who He is in Christ.
This pushback says I should follow Barth all the way, stop at hope, and decline to hold conviction. There are good Christians who take that position. Balthasar held it for most of his career, speaking of "grounds to hope" but not of certainty.32
I respect that posture. In many ways, it is the safest one. It offends nobody. It presumes nothing. And if Barth's caution were the only data point, it might be enough to stop me.
But I have more data than Barth's caution. I have the universal-scope passages that Chapter 25 will examine. I have the corrective meaning of the judgment-words in Chapter 22. I have the character of God and the sufficiency of the cross. I have Paul's own confidence that nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ. Barth's reticence was shaped by his own complex theology of election and by the specific debates of mid-twentieth-century Protestant theology. My conviction is shaped by the full witness of Scripture. And that witness gives me more than hope. It gives me warrant for conviction, held with the humility the subject demands.33
I also note this: bare hope, honestly examined, is often unstable. The person who says "I hope all will be saved but I really do not know" is often one step from giving up the hope entirely, because the opposing tradition is loud and the pressure is real. Hunter Coates presses this point in Grace Abounds. When you push the hopeful universalist, Coates argues, he must choose: either God cannot bring about universal salvation (which limits His power), or God will not because some greater good requires eternal loss (which concedes the debate to infernalism), or God does bring it about, which is simply universalism. Bare hope, without a ground, slides toward one of the first two options.38 A hope grounded in specific texts and the revealed character of God can hold. A hope grounded only in sentiment folds at the first strong wind. The choice is not between humility and arrogance. It is between grounded confidence and unfounded wish. I choose the grounded kind.
A fair question. Am I saying God is "free" in some hollow sense that lets me still claim He will do what I want? No. God's freedom means that nothing outside Him determines what He does. No law above Him, no metaphysical necessity beneath Him, no human demand beside Him compels His action. His love, His promises, and His saving will flow from His own nature, freely chosen and freely expressed. This is not a novel definition. The analytic tradition in philosophy of religion confirms it. A perfectly rational God always acts for a reason, and reasons are what make an action free. An action with no reason at all would be arbitrary, not free.34
When I trust that He will save all, I am trusting something that belongs to Him, not something imposed on Him. The distinction is between external compulsion and internal character. A good parent is "free" to abandon her children, in the sense that no outside force stops her. But because of who she is, she never will. Her faithfulness is not a loss of freedom. It is freedom expressed through love. The same is true, infinitely more, of God.
That is what divine freedom means, and it is untouched by my confidence. I have not chained God. I have described Him. And the description comes from His own self-portrait in Scripture, not from my wishes.
Barth was right about one thing: no theology should bind God. No system should put Him under obligation. No human claim should reduce grace to a rule. On that, I stand with Barth, with McClymond, and with every theologian who has insisted that God is free.
But Barth was also a man caught in a tension of his own making. His theology of universal election pointed toward a universal result. His reverence for divine freedom made him refuse to say so. He hoped, but he would not teach.35
I think we can do better, not by being less reverent, but by being more honest about what Scripture says. God desires all to be saved. Christ gave Himself as a ransom for all. In Christ, all will be made alive. Nothing in all creation can separate us from the love of God. These are not vague sentiments. They are promises. And trusting a promise is not the same as binding the One who made it.
The universalism this book defends does not chain God. It trusts Him. It says: You are free, and Your freedom is the very ground of our hope, because a God this good, this wise, this patient, and this loving will not stop until every lost child is found. That is not presumption. That is the gospel taken to its end.
To the worried reader who has felt Barth's caution and wondered whether any confident universalism can survive it: your caution is good. Hold onto it. Never let any theologian, this one included, put God under obligation. But do not let that caution silence the texts. Do not let it mute the character of the God who came down, who bled, who rose, and who said "I am making all things new." Trust is not the same as presumption. Hope held in faith is not the same as a demand made in pride.
The question Barth raised is serious. So is the answer. God's freedom is not threatened by the larger hope. It is the engine of it.36
We will return to related questions in Chapter 5, where the necessitarian charge is answered head-on, and in Chapter 9, where the question of whether universalism has rational ground meets its full reply.
↑ 1. McClymond, The Devil's Redemption, 2:1001. McClymond introduces this point under the heading "The Problem of God in Christian Universalism" (§12.2), where he positions Barth's caution as the capstone of his theological critique.
↑ 2. McClymond, The Devil's Redemption, 2:1001–1002. McClymond treats Barth's refusal to dogmatize apokatastasis as a concession from within the universalist camp itself, making it a powerful tool against subsequent universalists who speak with more confidence than Barth would allow.
↑ 3. Barth's worry is not the complaint of a theologian hostile to the larger hope. Barth himself privately expressed the hope of universal salvation and publicly gestured toward it in numerous passages. His caution was born of reverence, not rejection. See McClymond, The Devil's Redemption, 2:749–860, for the full treatment of Barth's position.
↑ 4. The classical doctrine of divine aseity (God's self-existence and complete self-sufficiency) entails that God acts from fullness, never from lack or obligation. See Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I, q. 3, a. 4. Barth himself affirmed this in his earlier volumes: "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." McClymond, The Devil's Redemption, 2:761.
↑ 5. David Bentley Hart, That All Shall Be Saved (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019), Fourth Meditation. Hart argues that the rational will, by its nature, is oriented toward the Good; an eternal refusal of the Good would be irrational, and therefore not truly free.
↑ 6. McClymond, The Devil's Redemption, 2:804. McClymond observes that Barth "used such words as apokatastasis and 'universalism' not merely to refer to a final outcome but to denote a necessary or inevitable outcome." This is a narrower definition than the word's patristic usage, where it often denoted simply "restoration" without the implication of metaphysical necessity.
↑ 7. This distinction between divine obligation and divine intention is basic to the theology of grace. Grace that flows from God's free will is not less certain for being free. As the Apostle Paul puts it, God works "all things according to the counsel of his will" (Eph. 1:11, ESV).
↑ 8. 1 Timothy 2:3–6; 2 Peter 3:9; 1 Corinthians 15:22. The full exegetical treatment of the "all" texts belongs to Chapter 25. David Burnfield, Patristic Universalism, 2nd ed. (2016), ch. 4, observes that the Arminianist reading of 1 Timothy 2:4 ("God desires it but cannot accomplish it") reduces the Almighty to a God who wills what He cannot perform. The Calvinist reading ("all" means "all kinds of people") drains the passage of its scope. The universalist reading takes both the desire and the scope at face value.
↑ 9. Barth himself distinguished between a "right" to salvation (which no one has) and the free divine decision to save. See McClymond, The Devil's Redemption, 2:804, where McClymond notes that "what Barth specifically denies is the 'right or necessity' of final salvation for all, not the result or outcome of final salvation for all."
↑ 10. The analogy of promise-keeping is of course imperfect. Human fathers sometimes fail to keep their word. The point is that keeping a free promise is an act of faithfulness, not compulsion. In God's case, His faithfulness is perfect (2 Tim. 2:13).
↑ 11. Calvin himself noted the force of the 1 Timothy 2:4 passage, though he restricted its scope. The universalist reading takes the passage at its plain sense. See the full discussion in Chapter 25. Hurd, The Triumph of Mercy, ch. 2, observes that the two Greek words for "will" (thelō and boulomai) both appear in the key universalist texts: Paul says God "desires" (thelō) all to be saved (1 Tim. 2:4), and Peter says God is "not willing" (boulomai) that any should perish (2 Pet. 3:9). Hurd then gathers the Isaiah texts (14:24; 46:10–11) to show that neither God's thelō nor His boulê can be frustrated.
↑ 12. George Sidney Hurd makes a similar distinction between trusting God's declared will and imposing a philosophical system on God. See Hurd, A Defense of Biblical Universalism, ch. 1; and The Triumph of Mercy, ch. 2, where he draws on Isaiah 45:21–24 ("I have sworn by Myself … every knee will bow") and argues that this is not a passive desire but a sworn oath from a God who does not lie. Gerry Beauchemin, Hope Beyond Hell, ch. 1, makes a complementary point: translators who reduce God's "will" to a mere "desire" in 1 Timothy 2:4 "negate the force of His words" and "make His 'will' into a mere 'desire' to conform to their limited view of God."
↑ 13. Barth was emphatic on this: "Should the teaching about hell be a part of the gospel proclamation? No, no, no! The proclamation of the gospel means, rather, the proclamation that Christ has defeated hell." Quoted in McClymond, The Devil's Redemption, 2:750.
↑ 14. McClymond, The Devil's Redemption, 2:749. The epigraph to ch. 9: "I do not teach it, but I also do not not teach it." This is Barth's most famous formulation of his ambivalent position.
↑ 15. The symmetry of Barth's caution is rarely noticed by those who deploy it against universalism. If divine freedom means God must not be bound to save all, it equally means He must not be bound to damn any. The traditionalist who asserts a populated hell with dogmatic certainty makes the same structural error Barth warned against.
↑ 16. Tom Greggs, "Jesus Is Victor: Passing the Impasse of Barth on Universalism," Scottish Journal of Theology 60, no. 2 (2007): 196–212. Quoted and discussed in McClymond, The Devil's Redemption, 2:806. Greggs concludes that Barth "rejects apokatastasis not because of a limitation of his hope … but rather a rejection of a principle." Barth's own formulation: "I don't believe in universalism, but I do believe in Jesus Christ, the reconciler of all."
↑ 17. Oliver Crisp, "On Barth's Denial of Universalism," Themelios 29 (2003): 18–29. Discussed in McClymond, The Devil's Redemption, 2:805. Crisp formulates Barth's election doctrine as three premises and shows that adding divine freedom as a fourth premise creates an inconsistency: "their soteriological status simply cannot be uncertain, as per (iv). This seems fatal to the consistency of Barth's position."
↑ 18. McClymond, The Devil's Redemption, 2:804. This is McClymond's own observation, and it is an acute one. He notes that many of Barth's readers "miss the narrowness of what Barth is denying."
↑ 19. McClymond himself notes that Barth's interpreters from the 1980s onward increasingly came to see his rejection of universalism as rhetorical rather than substantive. Balthasar wrote that Barth's protestations "remain, as W. Kreck says, 'ultimately rhetorical.'" McClymond, The Devil's Redemption, 2:801.
↑ 20. The threefold distinction here (wish, philosophical necessity, trust in revealed character) maps roughly onto what McClymond calls the three "problems" of universalism: sentiment (§12.4), the problem of God (§12.2), and the problem of grace (§12.3). The third option is the one this book occupies.
↑ 21. Romans 8:38–39, ESV. Paul's confidence here is not abstract. It is christological. It is grounded in the love of God "in Christ Jesus our Lord." That specificity is exactly the grounding this book claims for the larger hope.
↑ 22. Barth wrote: "God could be everything only for Himself (and His life would not on that account be pointless, motionless and unmotivated, nor would it be any less majestic or any less the life of love)." Church Dogmatics II/1. Quoted in McClymond, The Devil's Redemption, 2:761.
↑ 23. The one open question of this book. See the full treatment of free will and the "possible no" in Chapter 26.
↑ 24. The concept of "optimal grace" (Jerry Walls) and middle knowledge (Molina, Stratton) undergirds this confidence. God knows what each person would freely do in any situation and can compose the most fitting appeal for each soul. Kirk R. MacGregor, Molinist Philosophical and Theological Ventures (Pickwick, 2022), ch. 12, argues that Molinism is the only philosophical model that could furnish a guarantee of eventual universalism: "If and only if" there are feasible worlds where all are eventually freely saved, God in His goodness would choose to create such a world and could reveal its outcome in Scripture. Neither simple foreknowledge nor open theism can supply such a guarantee. See the full treatment in Chapter 26 and Chapter 28.
↑ 25. McClymond, The Devil's Redemption, 2:749–860 (ch. 9, "Debating Universal Election").
↑ 26. Bruce McCormack, summarized in McClymond, The Devil's Redemption, 2:806–807. McCormack's view is that the Holy Spirit's role is "a work of awakening" humanity to what is already the case, not making effective what would otherwise be ineffective.
↑ 27. Balthasar wrote that Barth's protestations against universalism "remain … 'ultimately rhetorical.'" McClymond, The Devil's Redemption, 2:801.
↑ 28. Robin Parry (writing as Gregory MacDonald), The Evangelical Universalist, 3rd ed. (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2026), 4–5. Parry writes: "I believe we can affirm the restoration of all things with confidence. If I use the language of ‘hope’ in this context it is only in the biblical mode of the ‘hope that does not disappoint’ (Rom 5:5), not a ‘wishful’ mode." Parry builds his case from biblical exegesis, not philosophical necessity, and represents a confident evangelical universalism grounded in the texts.
↑ 28b. Parry, The Evangelical Universalist, 3rd ed., 265. Parry states the argument: "While it is true that (a) God is love and does desire to save all people, and that (b) God is sovereign and is able to save all people, we must resist the desire to draw the logical conclusion that (c) all will thus be saved. Why? Because, we are told, to do so would compromise God’s freedom." His answer: "even if we grant that God does not have to love or save anyone (let alone everyone), as soon as we confess that (i) God, in his freedom, has indeed chosen to love people and desires to save them… and that (ii) God is able to bring this salvation about… then it does follow that (iii) all will be saved." He adds a sharp parallel: "Consider this parallel example: ‘God is truth but we must not say that he cannot lie because this would compromise his freedom.’ Biblical writers did not think in this way." See also David Congdon, The God Who Saves (2017), who argues that the divine-freedom objection "begs the question against the universalist" by presupposing that God’s will is a will to condemn. Discussed in Beilby, Postmortem Opportunity, 312–313.
↑ 28c. Parry, The Evangelical Universalist, 3rd ed., 296–298 (Appendix 5, "A Response to Michael McClymond’s Theological Critique of Universalism"). Parry responds to McClymond’s worry that grounding grace in God’s nature as love removes the freedom, and thus the grace, from grace: "God does not have to be gracious because he is being compelled to be by any outside being or principle or standard. Nobody and nothing is making God do anything that God does not want and choose to do. God is gracious because God chooses to be." The Hanby quotation is from Michael Hanby, No God, No Science? (2013), 311, cited by Parry at p. 297. On the philosophical framework, see also From Divine Timemaker to Divine Watchmaker (Routledge Studies in Analytic and Systematic Theology), ch. 1, which argues that a perfectly rational God "always acts for a reason" and that reasons do not deny God’s freedom but are what make an action free. Kevin Timpe’s "Reasons-Constraint on Free Choice" confirms the point: an agent who has no reason for an action is incapable of freely choosing it.
↑ 28d. Parry, The Evangelical Universalist, 3rd ed., 297–298. Parry writes: "God’s decision to create is free, and a universal grace-gift of be-ing to the world.… Creation did not have to be, but if creation is to be it cannot but be the creation of the God who is love. This means that the eschatological destiny of creation will be one in accord with divine love." He compares denying this to claiming God could choose to stop existing: both are unintelligible, not because something constrains God from the outside, but because they would contradict who God is.
↑ 29. George Sidney Hurd, A Defense of Biblical Universalism (2019), ch. 1; and The Triumph of Mercy (2014; 2nd ed. 2018), ch. 2. Hurd's case proceeds from the universal-scope texts and the declared saving will of God, not from a system that binds God. In The Triumph of Mercy, Hurd marshals Isaiah 14:27, 46:10–11, 45:21–24, Jeremiah 31:34, and 2 Peter 3:9 to show that God's will to save is not a wish but a sworn purpose. See also Hurd, The Universal Solution (2016), which reframes the Calvinist–Arminian debate to show that the universalist reading resolves the impasse over divine sovereignty and human freedom.
↑ 30. John Colwell, "The Contemporaneity of the Divine Decision," in Universalism and the Doctrine of Hell, ed. Nigel M. de S. Cameron (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1991). Discussed in McClymond, The Devil's Redemption, 2:803. Colwell argues that Barth "can avoid the charge of universalism without logical contradiction because he understands the decision of election in dynamic rather than static terms."
↑ 31. The distinction between personal trust and systemic necessity is basic to the epistemology of religious belief. For a treatment of warrant in religious epistemology, see Alvin Plantinga, Warranted Christian Belief (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).
↑ 32. Hans Urs von Balthasar, Dare We Hope "That All Men Be Saved"?, trans. David Kipp and Lothar Krauth (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1988). Balthasar was careful to speak only of "hope," not of "certainty," in deference to the tradition. McClymond notes that Barth's universal election doctrine was one factor that moved Balthasar toward his position. McClymond, The Devil's Redemption, 2:20.
↑ 33. The full treatment of whether universalism has biblical warrant belongs to Chapter 9 and Chapter 30.
↑ 34. On divine freedom as the freedom to act according to one's own nature and will rather than the freedom of arbitrary choice, see the Nicene affirmation that the Son is "begotten, not made," freely proceeding from the Father's nature. God's nature is not a constraint imposed on Him from outside; it is who He is. The philosophical framework is helpfully stated in From Divine Timemaker to Divine Watchmaker (Routledge Studies in Analytic and Systematic Theology), ch. 1: "God is perfectly rational if and only if God always acts for a reason." Since "moral considerations are reasons for acting," God's perfect goodness and perfect rationality work together. Kevin Timpe's "Reasons-Constraint on Free Choice" confirms the point: an agent with no reason whatever for an action is incapable of freely choosing it. Reasons do not limit God. They are what make His actions free rather than arbitrary. See also Mawson: "a perfectly good person always does what he has most objective reason to do."
↑ 35. McClymond, The Devil's Redemption, 2:859–860. McClymond himself notes that Barth's doctrine of election is "weakly argued, even though it is relentlessly reasserted through hundreds of pages of text."
↑ 36. 1 Corinthians 15:22–28, ESV. Paul's vision of the end, in which God becomes "all in all," is the fullest statement of the hope this chapter trusts. Whether that vision requires the salvation of every creature or permits exceptions is the question of the whole book.
↑ 37. George Sidney Hurd, The Triumph of Mercy (2014; 2nd ed. 2018), ch. 2. Hurd cites Marvin Vincent's observation that thelō in 1 Timothy 2:4 "indicates a determined purpose," not a bare wish. Hurd then draws on Isaiah 45:22–23: "I have sworn by Myself, the word has gone forth from My mouth in righteousness and will not turn back, that to Me every knee will bow, every tongue will swear allegiance." The word that comes from God's mouth in righteousness, Hurd argues, is not a hope that might fail. It is the declared purpose of a God who does not lie (Titus 1:2).
↑ 38. Hunter Coates, Grace Abounds: A Holistic Case for Universal Salvation (Resource Publications / Wipf & Stock, 2024), ch. 16 ("Shall We Only Hope?"). Coates argues that the "hopeful universalist" faces a trilemma: either (1) God cannot bring about universal salvation, which limits His omnipotence; (2) God will not because some greater good requires eternal loss, which concedes the debate to infernalism; or (3) God does bring it about, which is universalism. Coates concludes that "the HU defender has a tricky situation on their hands" and that biblical hope (Greek elpis) is not vague wishing but expectant trust in a promise.