Chapter 12

Does Universalism Trivialize Evil?

The Illusionist Drift, the Gospel of Inclusion, and the Fire That Refuses to Pretend

A. The Argument on the Table

Carlton Pearson once said that evil is only good misunderstood.¹ Read that sentence again. If that is what universalism means, then a death camp is a misunderstanding. A child sold into slavery is a lesson in balance. The word universalism should be burned and its ashes scattered. I refuse it. This book refuses it. And so does McClymond, who calls Pearson's teaching exactly what it is: the grotesque extreme of a drift he finds running through the whole universalist tradition.

The charge is simple and sharp. McClymond argues in his capstone chapter, "The Eclipse of Grace," that universalism tends to trivialize evil.² If all roads lead home, then the darkest road is not finally dark. If every sinner ends up saved, then sin never had the last word, and maybe it never had a real word at all. The tendency, he argues, shows its hand most clearly in the illusionist drift. Barth declared sin an "ontological impossibility."³ Pearson went further: good and evil "complement each other," atonement means their "unification," and evil "would not exist were it not part of God."⁴

De Young presses a related version of the charge. He devotes a section of his book to the claim that universalists "trivialize hell" by denying its centrality, treating it as metaphor, subjecting it to opinion polls, and stripping it of real stakes.⁶ For De Young, if you remove the finality of hell, you gut the seriousness of evil. Both critics point the same direction: a theology that guarantees a happy ending for everyone will, sooner or later, stop treating evil as though it matters.

I grant a large part of this. Where it lands, it lands hard. Pearson's teaching is not a fringe misread. It is the kind of conclusion a universalism without boundaries will produce. And I share McClymond's revulsion at it. The question is whether his charge reaches the hope I hold.

B. Why This Charge Has Force

This is no straw man. McClymond names something real. A universalism with no serious doctrine of sin, no real judgment, and no costly atonement does trivialize evil. And history proves it.

Pearson is the loudest case, but not the only one. Gulley and Mulholland reject traditional atonement theology in favor of what McClymond rightly calls "fiat forgiveness": God simply decides to forgive, and the cross was not required.⁷ If the cross was not needed, then sin was not that serious. If sin was not that serious, then evil shrinks. You can trace the line from premise to conclusion without much effort.

The illusionist drift runs deeper than any single author. Barth, for all his brilliance, described sin as an "impossible possibility" and declared that Christ's coming had rendered it "ontological impossibility."⁸ McClymond observes that this creates "an empirical problem," since even a glance at the daily news reveals that the sinful person is still very much with us.⁹ If evil is unreal in principle, then the incarnation, the cross, and the resurrection become solutions to a problem that never existed. McClymond is right to say that "illusionism may be the most problematic" of all responses to evil, "since it conflicts with the profound seriousness regarding sin and evil that one finds in Scripture and Christian tradition."¹⁰

I want to be honest about why this drift keeps happening. The temptation is understandable. When you believe that God's love is stronger than every evil, it is easy to slide from "evil will be overcome" to "evil was never really there." The slide feels like faith. It feels like trust. But it costs you the cross, and a universalism that costs you the cross has lost the one thing that makes it Christian. If sin is not real, then the Son of God died for nothing. If evil is an illusion, then Golgotha is theater. That is a price no biblical believer should pay.³⁵

So I grant the premise. A universalism that drifts toward illusionism will trivialize evil. Pearson's "gospel of evil" proves it. The question I want to press is this: does the charge reach a universalism that keeps evil real, judgment severe, and the cross costly? I do not think it does. And in five moves, I want to show why.

C. The Response

1. The Book's Doctrine of Judgment Is Severe, Not Soft

The universalism I hold does not wave evil away. It burns it out.

The fire of God's judgment in this book is real, agonizing, and just. It is not a slap on the wrist. It is not a warm feeling of divine acceptance. It is the full, unveiled presence of a holy God falling on everything in the sinner that resists Him. The Eastern Orthodox tradition calls this the divine-presence model: the same love of God that is heaven for the willing is agony for the rebel.¹¹ R. Zachary Manis, who is himself no universalist, describes the fire as the inescapable encounter with God's holiness. The sinner does not escape into darkness; the sinner stands in the light and feels every corner of his rebellion exposed.¹²

This is the opposite of trivializing evil. Evil is taken so seriously that it must be destroyed, not quarantined. The fire does not leave the sinner in a comfortable corner of the cosmos to go on sinning forever. It hunts the sin down and kills it. The rebel is not coddled. The rebel is refined. And the refining, on the witness of Scripture, is fearsome.

"For our God is a consuming fire." (Hebrews 12:29, ESV)

The God of this book consumes. What He consumes is not the person but the evil in the person. The distinction matters enormously. Sharon Baker writes of a fire that purifies rather than annihilates. The flames are not punitive in a bare retributive sense; they are the holy love of God, relentless against everything in us that is false.¹³ That is not soft. That is not sentimental. That is a fire before which even the bravest sinner trembles.

The Greek word the New Testament uses for "torment" in its fire-passages is basanizō, and its original meaning is revealing. The root sense is not torture but testing: to rub against a touchstone, the way a refiner tests whether a piece of metal is genuine gold.⁴⁰ The fire tests. The fire proves. The fire separates the real from the counterfeit. And the Greek word for "fire" itself, pur, is the root from which English draws pure, purify, and purification. The biblical fire consumes what is consumable, as one early Christian writer put it, and leaves what cannot be shaken.⁴¹

Consider the Apostle John's vision of the risen Christ in Revelation 1. His eyes were "like a flame of fire" (Revelation 1:14). John, the beloved disciple, the one who had leaned on Jesus' chest, fell at His feet "as though dead" (Revelation 1:17). If the friend of Jesus cannot stand before His unveiled glory, what will the rebel experience? The fire in this book is not a metaphor for mild correction. It is the white-hot holiness of the living God, and nothing impure survives in it. (For a full treatment of the fire and the lake of fire in Revelation, see Chapter 24.)

2. Evil Is Real, Not an Illusion

Let me say it plainly. Evil is real. Sin is real. The suffering evil causes is not a stage prop. It is not a divine teaching tool dressed up in costumes. It is not "good misunderstood."

The classical Christian tradition teaches that evil is a privation, a lack, a turning away from the good that God made. Augustine held this. So did Gregory of Nyssa. So does David Bentley Hart, who insists that evil has no substance of its own but is horribly, terribly real in its effects.¹⁴ Hart presses a point that matters for this chapter: because God creates freely and out of nothing, evil cannot be a "thing" that comes from anywhere. It is the defect where a real good is lost or refused. And because creation has a final cause, the story cannot end with an unreconciled remainder, a permanent corner where evil has won. That is not illusionism. That is the logic of a good God who finishes what He starts. The child abused in a trafficking ring is not experiencing a lesson in balance. The Holocaust survivor is not waking from an illusion. Isaiah's warning stands with its full weight:

"Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness." (Isaiah 5:20, ESV)

Pearson calls evil good. This book calls that a betrayal. The "gospel of evil" that McClymond rightly skewers is the very thing biblical universalism defines itself against. Notice the logic. Pearson reaches his conclusion by dissolving the distinction between good and evil. The universalism I hold reaches its conclusion by insisting on that distinction. Evil is so real that it must be overcome. It is so deadly that it took the cross to deal with it. It is so stubborn that it takes the purifying fire to finish the job. A theology that blurs evil into good has left the Christian faith behind.¹⁵

Paul's command is the test: "Abhor what is evil; hold fast to what is good" (Romans 12:9). Not balance the two. Not learn from both. Abhor the one and hold fast to the other. This is the moral universe the biblical universalist inhabits.

Jesus was the most severe critic of evil who ever lived. He called the religious hypocrites "whitewashed tombs" (Matthew 23:27). He said it would be better for a person to have a millstone hung around his neck and be drowned in the sea than to cause a child to sin (Matthew 18:6). He wept at the tomb of Lazarus, not because death was an illusion but because it was an enemy (John 11:35). A universalism that says evil is "good misunderstood" cannot stand in the same room as the Jesus of the Gospels. He never misunderstood evil. He hated it. He fought it. He died to defeat it. And the universalism I hold says He will finish what He started.³⁶

3. Stakes Without Endlessness

Here is the core move. McClymond assumes that if evil is finally defeated, it was not truly serious. I think this confuses two different things.

Think of a disease. A cancer that kills a patient over eighteen agonizing months is serious. Nobody at the funeral says it was trivial. But now imagine that a cure is found, that the cancer is destroyed, and the patient restored to health. Does the cure trivialize the disease? Does the healing make the suffering unreal? Of course not. The disease was deadly. The treatment was brutal. The cost was enormous. And the ending was good.

This is exactly the logic of biblical universalism. Evil is the disease. The cross is the cure. The purifying fire is the surgery. The restoration is the healing. At every stage, evil is treated with lethal seriousness. The fact that the treatment works does not mean the disease was trivial. It means the Physician was good.

What would truly trivialize evil? Leaving it in place forever. An eternal hell, on the traditional view, means that evil is never fully defeated. It is walled off and contained, but it goes on and on. The screams never stop. The rebellion never ends. The darkness holds its ground in a permanent ghetto of the cosmos. If anything trivializes evil, it is the teaching that God's best response to it is an eternal stalemate, a corner of creation where sin wins and grace does not reach.¹⁶

The universalist says something harder and more hopeful: evil will be ended. Not walled off. Not contained. Ended. "The last enemy to be destroyed is death" (1 Corinthians 15:26). Destroyed, not tolerated. That is what taking evil seriously looks like when God has the last word.

I think this point deserves more weight than it usually gets in the debate. On the traditional view of hell, evil is never finally defeated. God wins in heaven, but evil holds its territory in hell. The rebellion continues. The suffering continues. The sinners remain sinners forever. God's victory is partial. His creation is permanently scarred. How does that take evil more seriously? It takes evil as permanent, which is not the same thing as taking it seriously. Taking it seriously means refusing to let it stand. The Bible ends with a vision of a world where every tear is wiped away (Revelation 21:4). Not a world where tears are walled off in a separate room.³⁷

4. Justice Is Satisfied and Transformed

A common version of the charge goes like this: if all are restored, then justice has not been served. The torturer and the victim end up in the same place. How can that be fair?

But this assumes that justice means only retribution, only paying back suffering for suffering. The biblical picture is richer. God's justice in the prophets is not mainly about punishment. It is about setting things right. Amos thunders, "Let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream" (Amos 5:24). The stream does not merely punish the oppressor; it cleanses the land. It restores what was broken.¹⁷

Restorative justice, rightly understood, takes sin more seriously than retribution does in one respect. Retribution is content to punish. It locks the offender away and moves on. Restorative justice refuses to move on. It insists that the damage be repaired, the offender changed, the victim made whole. It will not settle for a world in which evil persists behind a wall. It demands that evil be undone.

Think of it in terms of what a parent wants when a child has done real wrong. A good parent does not want the child locked in a room forever. A good parent wants the child to understand, to repent, to change, and to make it right. That is harder than punishment. It costs more. It demands more of both the parent and the child. And it takes evil more seriously, because it refuses to let the wrong stand. It insists on a world where the wrong has been righted. As the Anglican theologian Gerald Bray puts it, even God's wrath and punishment must be understood in the context of His love; they are not separate from it but are expressions of it, the way a good parent's discipline is always enacted from the position of loving authority.⁴² The purifying fire is God's parenting at its fiercest. He will not let His children remain in their evil. He loves them too much for that, and He takes their sin too seriously.³⁹

On this view, the torturer and the victim do not "end up in the same place" in any morally equivalent sense. The victim is healed and vindicated. The torturer passes through the fire. Every act of cruelty is faced, confessed, burned away. The torturer comes out the other side a different person, made new by the relentless love that would not stop until the evil was gone. The road to restoration is not the same length for every traveler. Jesus said plainly that some will receive few blows and others many (Luke 12:47–48).¹⁸ The fire is not uniform. It is fitted to what must be burned.

Paul's warning about the judgment seat captures this well: "Each one's work will become manifest, for the Day will disclose it, because it will be revealed by fire, and the fire will test what sort of work each one has done" (1 Corinthians 3:13, ESV). The fire is real. The test is serious. And the outcome, Paul says, is that some are saved "only as through fire" (1 Corinthians 3:15). Saved, yes. But not without cost.¹⁹

5. Pearson Is a Cautionary Tale the Book Tells with Sorrow

I need to say a word about Carlton Pearson, because McClymond is right that his story matters.

Pearson was once a bishop in the Church of God in Christ, a gifted preacher with a five-thousand-member church in Tulsa. He moved from that world into a theology that called the Bible partly "expired," called God "not Jesus," described himself as "pantheistic," and said that "everybody is saved already."²⁰ He lost about ninety percent of his congregation. He left his denomination. He ended up in a congregation connected to New Thought.²¹

I tell this story with genuine sadness. Pearson's pain was real. His questions about eternal torment were honest questions that many believers share. But his answers left the Christian faith behind. He did not land on biblical universalism. He landed on something closer to New Thought metaphysics, where evil is illusion, separation from God is impossible, and the cross is unnecessary. McClymond traces his sources to Ralph Waldo Trine's In Tune with the Infinite and the anonymous A Course in Miracles.²² These are not Christian sources. They are the esoteric tradition dressed in evangelical clothing.

And this is the point. Pearson is the very thing the boundary exists to guard against. When McClymond says universalism trivializes evil and points to Pearson, I agree. Pearson's version does trivialize evil. It dissolves evil into "good misunderstood." It replaces the cross with "at-one-ment" understood as the merging of good and evil. It is precisely the counterfeit that the biblical universalist must refuse, and refuse loudly.²³

But notice what has happened. McClymond takes the worst case, presents it as representative, and lets the charge fall on the whole tradition. That is the move I challenge. Pearson's illusionism is as far from Gregory of Nyssa as it is from Augustine. The question is not whether some universalism trivializes evil. Of course it does. The question is whether this universalism, the one that keeps the cross, the fire, and the full reality of sin, trivializes evil. It does not.

D. Engagement with Specific Scholars

McClymond's treatment of Pearson in section 11.2 is, I think, one of the strongest passages in The Devil's Redemption. He lets Pearson speak in his own words, and those words are damning. Pearson says that evil and good "complement each other," that "evil would not exist were it not part of God," and that we should embrace the coexistence of both.²⁴ McClymond connects this to the gnostic-esoteric idea that the only real evil is separation and the only real good is unity. He is right. This is not Christianity. This is the ancient heresy wearing modern clothes.

Where McClymond goes wrong, in my view, is in treating this as the natural endpoint of all universalism. Pearson does not represent Talbott, who holds the cross as the center of God's reconciling work. He does not represent Gregory of Nyssa, who affirmed the full creed and held evil as a genuine turning away from God's good. He does not represent this book, which holds that evil is so real that nothing less than the consuming fire of God's presence can end it.²⁵

Sharon Baker's Razing Hell offers an important counter-witness. Baker writes as a universalist who takes the fire of judgment with full seriousness. Her reading of hell's imagery is not soft or sentimental. She turns to Isaiah's message from God: "I will smelt away your dross as with lye and remove all your alloy" (Isaiah 1:25), and argues that the fire of God's presence works the same way the goldsmith's fire does. It burns off impurities and leaves only the pure and righteous behind. Baker's phrase for this encounter is telling: God's love is "the most grueling judgment."²⁶ R. Zachary Manis, who is not a universalist, makes a similar case for the divine-presence model: the fire is God Himself, and standing in His presence with unconfessed sin is the most terrifying thing a human being can face.²⁷ Both of these voices show that a theology of final restoration can keep a doctrine of judgment that takes evil with deadly seriousness.

David Bentley Hart insists that evil is genuine privation and rebellion. He refuses the illusionist option as firmly as McClymond does. Hart's argument is that evil is real in its effects and horrifying in its consequences, but it has no final ontological standing because it is a turning away from being, not a thing in itself.²⁸ This is the classical Christian position, shared by Augustine, the Cappadocians, and Thomas Aquinas. It does not trivialize evil. It locates evil precisely: real, destructive, deadly, and in the end unable to outlast the God who is Being itself.

This matters because McClymond sometimes writes as though any denial of evil's permanence is a form of illusionism. But there is a vast difference between saying evil is unreal (Barth's tendency) and saying evil is unable to last forever (Gregory of Nyssa's hope). Gregory held evil as terribly real. He also held that it could not outlast God's goodness, because evil is a parasite on good and parasites die when the host is purified.³⁸ That is not illusionism. That is a strong doctrine of God's sovereignty over everything that opposes Him.

Robin Parry presses this exact point in his direct response to McClymond's theological critique. In Appendix 5 of The Evangelical Universalist, Parry argues that the privation-of-good metaphysic that McClymond credits to Augustine was already at work in the Origenist tradition long before Augustine. And it was that very metaphysic that generated the universalist conclusion. One reason hell could not be eternal, according to Origen and Gregory, is that an everlasting hell would mean "sinners falling short of their created nature in creation such that God can never be all in all. He would only ever be all in some."⁴⁴ In other words, eternal hell does not defeat evil. It eternalizes evil. It gives sin a permanent address in God's creation. For the patristic universalists, that was the real trivialization: a theology that lets evil persist forever is a theology that has stopped taking evil's destruction seriously.

Parry also develops the fire-as-divine-presence connection with care. Drawing on the same divine-presence model that Manis explores at the philosophical level, Parry shows how the varied biblical fire-images converge: fire as divine presence, fire as punishment, fire as purification. The human experience of God's holy presence, he writes, "will vary depending on the state that one is in when one encounters it." For the one still sold to sin, that encounter "is experienced as like burning wrath, retributive punishment, and consuming fire," and it "strips away all the illusions we create around ourselves about how sin is 'not all that bad.'"⁴⁵ That is not a sentimental picture. It is a picture of evil taken with full seriousness, met with a holiness that refuses to leave it in place.

The patristic tradition developed this insight with a vivid image. When a refiner applies heat to silver, the dross rises to the surface and is skimmed away. The heat does not destroy the metal; it returns the metal to its pure, original state. The fire of God's judgment works the same way. It does not annihilate the person. It removes the impurities, the rebellion, the dross of sin, so that the person God created emerges clean. The prophet Malachi saw this: "He will sit as a refiner and a purifier of silver, and He will purify the sons of Levi and refine them like gold and silver" (Malachi 3:2–3). Jesus pressed the same logic: "Everyone will be salted with fire" (Mark 9:49). If that fire were merely destructive, then everyone would be destroyed. The fire salts, preserves, purifies.⁴³

De Young's charge that universalists "trivialize hell" is aimed mostly at popular-level authors like McLaren and Bell.²⁹ His criticism of their methods is sometimes fair. But his assumption that every universalist handles hell as carelessly as his weakest examples is the same move McClymond makes with Pearson. The strongest universalists do not trivialize hell. They redefine its purpose without softening its reality.

E. Counter-Objections

"Restoration means the torturer and the tortured end in the same place." I addressed this above, but let me add one thing. The Bible's own logic allows it. The Apostle Paul persecuted the church. He stood by while Stephen was stoned (Acts 7:58). He breathed threats and murder against the disciples (Acts 9:1). And Paul ended up in glory. Does the restoration of Paul trivialize what he did to Stephen? No. Grace does not make sin trivial. Grace makes sin forgivable. And the road from persecutor to apostle runs through blinding light, three days of darkness, and a complete remaking of the man.³¹ The road for the worst sinners in the fire will be longer and harder. But the principle is the same: real sin, real judgment, real transformation.

And notice: "the same place" is misleading. The victim arrives at glory through vindication. The torturer arrives through agony. They meet on the far side of the fire, but they did not travel the same road. The torturer's road ran through every act of cruelty relived, confessed, and burned away. That is not the same journey, even if the ending is the same city.

"Calling the fire 'severe' does not change that it is temporary." True, the fire is not eternal on the view I hold. But temporary does not mean trivial. Childbirth is temporary. Surgery is temporary. The refining of gold is temporary. The severity of an experience is not measured by its duration but by its intensity and its cost. A thousand years of the purifying presence of God (to use a biblical image, not a literal calendar) would be more severe than any human punishment. Nobody who takes this fire seriously could call it trivial, however long or short it lasts.³² Jerry Walls makes a related point about the logic of the objection itself: if deathbed repentance does not trivialize a lifetime of choices, then restoration after death should not do so either. Every decision still shapes the person and the cost of the return. The further a person has walked from God, the further he must walk back.⁴⁶

F. Conclusion

Does universalism trivialize evil? Some universalisms do. Pearson's does. The illusionist drift in Barth's theology pushes that direction. Any version that dissolves the reality of sin, removes the cross, or treats evil as a misunderstanding trivializes evil by definition.

But biblical universalism, the kind this book defends, does the opposite. It treats evil as so serious that it required the death of God's Son to deal with it. It treats sin as so stubborn that it takes the consuming fire of God's own presence to burn it out. It treats judgment as so real that Jesus warned about it in the most terrifying language the Gospels contain (Matthew 18:6–7).³³ And it holds restoration not as the cheapening of evil but as its final destruction. Evil is not tolerated in a corner. Evil is ended.

The hope is not that evil does not matter. The hope is that evil does not win. God is stronger than the worst we have done and the worst that has been done to us. The cross proves it. The fire finishes it. And the day will come when there is "no more death, no more mourning, no more crying, no more pain" (Revelation 21:4), not because these things were illusions but because they were real enemies that the living God destroyed.³⁴

That is what taking evil seriously looks like when the story has a God in it. The charge of trivializing evil falls on the counterfeit. The biblical hope stands, severe and compassionate, refusing to call evil good and refusing to let evil last.

I want to close with something personal. I did not come to universalism because I wanted evil to be easy. I came to it because I believed that a God who is truly good would not settle for containing evil. He would destroy it. He would chase it to the last corner, the last heart, the last refusal, and He would burn it out. Not because He does not care about justice, but because He cares about justice so much that He will not rest until it is done. That is a harder God than the one who gives up on half His children and locks them in a dark room forever. And it is the God I find in Scripture.

McClymond is right that Pearson's universalism trivializes evil. Let the church say so. But let the church also see that there is another universalism, one that stands where the prophets stood, where Paul stood, where Gregory of Nyssa stood, and says: evil is real, judgment is severe, the cross is everything, and God will finish what He started. (For the full treatment of the purifying fire and the lake of fire in Revelation, see Chapter 24. For the antinomian charge and the "gospel of inclusion," see Chapter 39. For the cumulative case that grace is not eclipsed, see Chapter 40.)