Chapter 18

Böhme and the Dark Principle in God

When God Is Light, Theosophy Has No Purchase

The Argument on the Table

Jakob Böhme taught that there is darkness inside God. A churning ground of wrath sits at the root of the divine being, and from it both creation and evil pour out. Across twelve dense chapters and more than a thousand pages, Michael McClymond traces the cobbler-mystic’s influence into the bloodstream of modern universalism. His case is plain: Böhme is one of the two great headwaters of the universalist river. The other is Origen. And Böhme’s contribution is the more dangerous, because it imports a vision of God that no orthodox Christian can accept.

The Bible says the opposite in five words. “In him is no darkness at all” (1 John 1:5). That ends the matter for me. The biblical hope never needed Böhme, and this chapter will say so, loudly. But before I do, I want to give McClymond his full case. He has earned the hearing.

McClymond devotes chapter 5 of The Devil’s Redemption to Böhme and the Böhmists. He documents, with formidable learning, a vision of God that is alien to anything the church has confessed.¹ In Böhme’s system, the Trinity does not stand on its own. It emerges from a deeper, stranger matrix called the Ungrund (German for “Un-ground” or “Abyss”). Even the personal God, Böhme taught, rises out of this formless depth.² And within the God who rises, there are two opposed principles: a dark first principle of wrath and fire, and a light second principle of love. The present world is the third principle, a blend of the two.³

Let me concede at the start what McClymond gets right. Böhme really did influence later universalism, and the influence was wide. McClymond traces a chain that runs from Böhme through John Pordage and Jane Lead to the Petersens, and from there to Elhanan Winchester and the early Anglo-American universalist movement.⁵ A second chain runs from Böhme through William Law to Thomas Erskine and George MacDonald, and from MacDonald, at least as a literary influence, to Thomas Talbott.⁶ These are real lines of contact. I do not dispute them. What I dispute is the conclusion McClymond draws from them.

Why This Argument Has Force

Böhme’s doctrine of God is alarming, and it should be. If a vision of the divine places a “dark principle” at the root of God, then the God of that vision is not the God of the Bible. He is a compromised deity, struggling within himself, generating evil out of his own depths. Any theology built on that foundation is built on ruin.

And McClymond shows that some universalism really was built on it. Böhme himself was probably not a full universalist. His writings contain passages that affirm an ongoing duality of heaven and hell.⁷ Robin Parry, in A Larger Hope, makes the point even more strongly. He argues that Böhme’s eternal hell was not a side note but an integral feature of his system. If reality at its deepest level is a permanent duality of wrath and mercy, then to eradicate hell would risk destroying the balance at the heart of the whole theology. Universalism, Parry writes, “is to all appearances incompatible with Böhme’s own system of thought as he himself presented it.”⁴³

Yet Böhme’s later works did shift toward what McClymond calls “a kind of love monism,” where the dark principle began to recede.⁸ In The Election of Grace, Böhme reversed his earlier position, writing that God is “the Eternal only Good, and a beginning of every good Thing or Will; neither is it possible that any Evil at all can penetrate into him.” He even denied that the “Beginning of Division and Separation” arose in God. He rejected, in other words, the very thing he had taught in The Signature of Things.³⁶

His followers took the next step. The common move among Böhmists was to push the darkness down and lift the love up. William Law, the most influential English Böhmist, devoted ten years to studying Böhme’s writings. He came out the other side a universalist. On his deathbed he spoke of “the fire of love within, which has burned up everything contrary to itself.”³⁷ If God is wholly good, the Böhmists reasoned, and if every soul is destined to return to union with God, then every person will in the end be saved.⁹ The reach of the influence was vast. In Germany, Böhme shaped Hegel and Schelling. In Russia, his ideas became a common thread linking Vladimir Solovyov, Nicolas Berdyaev, and Sergei Bulgakov, all of whom held some form of universalism.³⁸

So the charge has teeth. Where universalism roots itself in Böhme’s theosophy, it inherits a doctrine of God that no creedal Christian can hold. The “first principle” in Böhme corresponds to the Father and to the “dark-fire world.” The “second principle” corresponds to the Son and to the “light world.”¹⁰ That is not the Trinity of the Nicene Creed. That is a drama of opposed forces inside the Godhead. McClymond is right to call it out.

Where Böhme’s influence can be shown, then, the concern is real. A God who is half-dark is not a God you can trust with every last soul. He is as likely to devour as to save. McClymond puts it sharply by listing the “common esoteric teachings” that cluster around Böhmist thought: crisis within the Godhead, evil within the Godhead, temporality and process within the Godhead.¹¹ These are not safe ideas. They are theologically toxic. And if they form the soil from which universal salvation grows, then the plant itself is poisoned.

If. That is a very large word. The question is whether the biblical hope for the salvation of all in Christ grows in that soil at all. I am going to argue that it does not.

The Response

1. We Refuse the Dark Principle Outright

The first and most important thing to say is the shortest. I reject any dark principle in God. Completely. The God I worship is the God of 1 John 1:5:

This is the message we have heard from him and proclaim to you, that God is light, and in him is no darkness at all.

No darkness at all. Not a residue. Not a shadow-side. Not a churning ground of wrath from which the world bleeds into being. The God of the Bible is pure light, pure goodness, pure holiness. James makes the same point with equal force:

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)

There is no flicker in God. No swing between darkness and light. No inner war. Habakkuk puts it in terms of God’s moral character: “You who are of purer eyes than to see evil and cannot look at wrong” (Habakkuk 1:13). And the psalmist declares that “there is no unrighteousness in him” (Psalm 92:15).¹²

This is where I stand with McClymond, not against him. He is right that Böhme’s God is not the Christian God. He is right that a dark ground within the divine being is incompatible with orthodoxy. I do not soften this. The universalism I defend builds on a God who is unmixed goodness, whose every act comes from love, and whose wrath is itself the work of holy love against sin. Böhme’s metaphysical darkness has no home here.¹³

2. Influence Is Not Endorsement

McClymond shows that Böhme influenced many later universalists. That is true. But the conclusion he draws does not follow. That Böhme was a universalist (or near-universalist) does not make universalism Böhmist. That Böhme was also a Christian does not make Christianity Böhmist. That Böhme held some truths does not mean his errors come attached to his truths.

This is the genetic fallacy at work, and Chapter 3 has already named it. You cannot refute a conclusion by tracing it to a bad source. The conclusion stands or falls on its own grounds. Plenty of true ideas have been held by deeply confused people. Plenty of false ideas have been held by brilliant ones.¹⁴

Consider the line McClymond traces: Böhme influenced William Law, who influenced Thomas Erskine, who influenced George MacDonald, who influenced Thomas Talbott.¹⁵ Each step in this chain is real. But what exactly traveled along it? Did Talbott adopt Böhme’s Ungrund? His dark-fire principle? His alchemical theology? Of course not. Talbott builds his case from the love of God revealed in Scripture, from the logic of divine goodness, and from the text of Romans 11:32. He argues from the Bible and from philosophy, not from theosophy.¹⁶ The genealogy McClymond maps does not tell you what Talbott believes. It tells you which books sat on whose shelf.

A doctrine that originated in error may still be true if better reasons support it. A doctrine that originated in truth may still be false if its reasons collapse. What matters is the argument. McClymond’s own discipline of church history should make him cautious here. Plenty of orthodox doctrines were shaped by thinkers who held unorthodox positions on other matters. We do not reject everything Athanasius said about Christ because his temperament was fierce. We do not reject Augustine’s trinitarianism because he held views about sexual desire that few today would share.¹⁷

Robin Parry presses this point further and turns McClymond’s own evidence against his conclusion. The key section of McClymond’s chapter is §5.4, where he traces the Böhmist shift toward universalism. But look carefully at what that section actually shows. It shows that Böhme’s admirers became universalists by rejecting his dark principle. They replaced his duality of eternal wrath and eternal mercy with a view of God as pure light and love. And that move pointed them toward universal salvation. As Parry observes, this is not a theology derived from Böhme. “It is an orthodox fix to such a theology. So if anything, this argument points in the exact opposite direction from McClymond’s thesis.”⁴⁴

That is a stunning reversal. McClymond’s own narrative shows that the road to universalism ran through the rejection of Böhme’s most dangerous idea, not through its embrace. Jane Lead, the English Böhmist who launched the universalist movement among Böhme’s followers, knew she was breaking new ground. She admitted openly that Böhme had not taught universal salvation and offered an apology for the departure. “I must own that Jacob Behmen did open a deep Foundation of the Eternal Principles, and was a worthy Instrument in his Day,” she wrote. “But it was not given to him, neither was it Time for the unsealing of this Deep.”⁴⁵ Lead rejected Böhme’s claim that darkness has eternal roots in God. She wrote plainly that sin and evil began in time and will come to an end. That is not Böhme’s theology. It is the opposite of Böhme’s theology.

Parry puts it with quiet irony: “It is perhaps ironic that the move to embrace universal salvation among some of Böhme’s admirers and to reject Böhme’s teaching on eternal hell and evil’s origin in God’s dark principle was precisely the move that brought sections of ‘Böhmism’ closer to Christian orthodoxy.”⁴⁶ The Böhmists did not import a dark-ground universalism into the church. They dropped the dark ground in order to hold universal salvation. Influence ran through these figures. But what was carried forward was the conclusion (universal salvation), shorn of the very premise (the dark principle) that McClymond finds most alarming.

3. Wrath Is Not a Dark Principle

Here is a distinction that matters enormously, and I want to draw it with care. Böhme placed wrath inside God as a metaphysical principle. It was part of the furniture of the Godhead. In The Signature of Things, he wrote that God is called God “according to the Light of his Love” but is “an angry jealous God, and a consuming Fire” according to the darkness.¹⁸ This was not a response to human sin. It was a permanent structure of the divine being. McClymond rightly notes that for Böhme, there is both “eternal love” and “eternal wrath” in God, and this idea is “alien to mainstream Christian theology.”¹⁹

The Bible teaches something completely different. God’s wrath is real. I believe that, and I want no one to think I am softening it. But biblical wrath is not a dark principle. It is the personal, holy, and purposeful response of a good God to evil. It comes from God’s love, not from some rival root beside it. A good parent who sees her child in danger is angry at the danger, not because she has a “dark side,” but because she loves. The anger and the love come from the same place.²⁰

McClymond himself draws this distinction in his description of mainstream Christian theology: “divine wrath is God’s time-bound and contingent expression of opposition to creaturely sin, not—like the attribute of divine love—an eternal and unconditional reality within God.”²¹ Exactly so. I agree with him. Wrath is God’s reaction to sin. It is not God’s nature. Love is the nature. Wrath is what love does when it meets evil.

This distinction is the heart of the boundary this chapter draws. Böhme’s theology treats wrath as an eternal, structural, metaphysical feature of the divine life, linked to the kabbalistic “emanations of the left.”²² Biblical theology treats wrath as the holy response of a God who is entirely good and entirely loving. These two accounts have nothing in common except the word “wrath.”

Think of it this way. In Böhme, wrath exists before any creature sins. It is part of what God is. In Scripture, wrath is always a response to what creatures do. Romans 1:18 says the wrath of God “is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men.” Notice: against ungodliness and unrighteousness. Not against nothing. Not as a permanent state of the divine interior. Wrath answers sin. It does not sit in God’s living room waiting for something to do.

This matters for universalism in a very specific way. Conservative biblical universalism stands on the second account. When the universalist says that God’s judgment purifies and eventually saves, the fire in question is the fire of a perfectly good God who loves too much to let evil have the final word. There is no dark principle feeding that fire. There is only love, fierce and relentless.

4. The Biblical Hope Has a Different Source

McClymond tells a compelling story about the historical channels through which universalism spread in the modern West. He identifies Böhme and Origen as the two great tributaries.²³ But a story about channels is not a story about foundations. Water flows through many pipes. The pipe does not create the water.

The hope for the salvation of all in Christ does not rest on the Ungrund. It rests on the love and power of God revealed in the cross. It rests on the scope of the atonement: “He is the propitiation for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the sins of the whole world” (1 John 2:2). It rests on the universal scope texts: “For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive” (1 Corinthians 15:22). It rests on God’s revealed intention: “who desires all people to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth” (1 Timothy 2:4).²⁴

These texts do not come from Böhme. They come from Paul and John. The patristic universalists who read them before Böhme was born did not need theosophy to get there. Gregory of Nyssa held the final restoration of all things. He helped write the Nicene Creed. He never heard of the Ungrund.²⁵ Clement of Alexandria taught a purifying, restorative view of divine judgment in the second century. Böhme would not be born for another fourteen hundred years.

Isaac the Syrian, in the seventh century, held that divine “wrath” and divine “love” name the same attribute experienced differently by the righteous and the wicked. McClymond himself notes the parallel between Isaac’s view and that of William Law. But Isaac had no contact with Böhmism. He preceded it by nine centuries. He reached his position from the same place Gregory did: from the character of God revealed in Scripture and in the person of Christ.³⁹

Chapter 15 documents these early voices. Chapter 3 addresses the genetic-fallacy problem at length. The point here is narrower: the roots of biblical universalism are not in Silesian mysticism. They are in Scripture, and in a tradition of reading Scripture that predates Böhme by more than a millennium. When McClymond tells the story of modern universalism, he begins with Böhme and Origen. But the arguments for universalism do not begin there. They begin with Genesis 12:3 (“in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed”), with Psalm 22:27 (“all the ends of the earth shall remember and turn to the LORD”), and with the great universal-scope passages in Paul. Böhme is a chapter in the history of the doctrine. He is not the foundation of it.

5. Classical Theism, Not Dualism

The doctrine of God that supports conservative biblical universalism is classical theism. It is the doctrine shared by the church fathers, the medieval theologians, and the Protestant Reformers. God is simple. God is good without qualification. God is not composed of opposed principles. There is no rival force within the divine nature. No shadow-side. No dialectic of darkness and light struggling toward resolution.²⁶

Böhme’s system is, in many ways, the direct opposite of classical theism. Where classical theism holds that God is entirely self-sufficient, Böhme has God emerging through a process of self-birthing from the Ungrund. Where classical theism holds that God is pure act, Böhme has God developing and becoming. Where classical theism affirms divine simplicity, Böhme fills the divine being with opposed forces. F. C. Baur saw the problem clearly. He noted that for Böhme, God is “eternally self-bearing or self-birthing.” The Trinity is not a stable, self-sufficient reality but “the outcome of an eternally transpiring and never-completed process.”⁴⁰ Cyril O’Regan has argued that Böhme represents the “alpha point” for reintroducing ancient Valentinian gnosis into modern thought.²⁷ That is a fair description of the problem.

McClymond makes a related point worth noting. Böhme’s God was “radically kataphatic” in the wrong direction. He applied images of physical birth, desiring, and development to God “so as to suggest that these images strictly described or applied to God.” He showed “little or no awareness of any theological analogy.” The disapproving chief pastor of Görlitz, Gregorius Richter, complained that Böhme had “reduced God to sulphur and mercury.”⁴¹ Classical Christian theology has always held that human language about God is analogical. We say God is “good” and mean it, but we also know that God’s goodness exceeds anything our word “good” can capture. Böhme trampled that careful balance.

The universalism I defend begins from the opposite end. God is wholly good, wholly wise, wholly loving. Because God is good without qualification, He cannot be satisfied with an outcome that leaves some of His creatures suffering endlessly without purpose. Because God is wise, He knows how to reach each person in the way most suited to win a free “yes.” Because God is love, He will not stop. The hope for universal salvation does not require a dark ground within God. It requires the absence of one. A God who is pure light is the only God who can be trusted to save every last soul.²⁸

Chapter 7 addresses the “problem of God” that McClymond raises, including the charge that universalism depends on a divine drama of self-alienation and self-return. That charge lands on Böhme’s system. It does not land on a universalism rooted in the self-sufficient, unchanging love of the biblical God. Paul writes that God “dwells in unapproachable light” (1 Timothy 6:16). That light has no dark floor beneath it.

Engagement with Specific Scholars

McClymond’s treatment of Böhme is his most impressive piece of historical archaeology, and it deserves genuine respect. His chapter 5 covers Böhme’s system, his followers, and his influence with a thoroughness that no single-volume study of universalism has matched. He draws on the interpretations of F. C. Baur, Sergius Bulgakov, Howard Brinton, and Cyril O’Regan to build a multi-angled portrait.²⁹ The portrait is persuasive. Böhme’s theology was strange, speculative, and at key points heretical. His doctrine of the Trinity was either modalistic or a form of unitarianism of the Second Person. His view of Jesus leaned toward docetism.³⁰ McClymond is on solid ground when he catalogs these errors.

David Bentley Hart, writing from an Eastern Orthodox perspective, has offered one of the strongest modern statements of God as pure goodness and pure being. In Hart’s framework, God is not one being among others but the infinite fullness of being itself. Evil has no ontological standing in God. It is a privation, a turning away, a failure to be. Hart insists that goodness, truth, and beauty are not divine attributes among others but are identical with the divine essence.³¹ This is exactly the classical vision of God that Böhme’s system dismantles. And it is the vision on which conservative universalism rests.

Hart reaches his universalist conclusion not through theosophy but through the classical doctrine of God. Because God is infinite goodness, no rational creature can find permanent rest in the refusal of goodness. That argument, whatever one makes of its necessitarian edge, has nothing to do with the Ungrund. I part from Hart on the freedom question (see Chapter 5), but I stand with him on the doctrine of God. There is no shadow in the divine being. There is no raw material for evil hiding behind the Trinity. The classical, patristic, creedal God is pure light, and that pure light is the foundation of the hope.

McClymond is aware of this. He knows that modern universalists like Talbott, Parry, and Hart do not build on Böhme. But his genealogical argument asks the reader to see a deep structural continuity beneath the surface differences. I think he asks too much. The continuity is a shared conclusion (universal salvation), not a shared premise (a dark ground in God). Shared conclusions do not prove shared premises. Countless thinkers have arrived at the same destination from wildly different starting points.³²

Hans Martensen, a Danish bishop and Böhme sympathizer, saw the core problem from inside. McClymond records that Martensen believed it was “ethically problematic to have a first principle (i.e., God) that was beyond good and evil.” Unless God is “unambiguously good from the beginning,” Martensen argued, you cannot say “in an unqualified way that God is holy, good, and loving.”⁴² Exactly right. And the conservative biblical universalist says amen to Martensen. God is unambiguously good. That is not a concession to Böhme. It is a refusal of him.

Robin Parry has offered the most careful recent engagement with McClymond’s Böhme thesis. He grants that McClymond’s historical work is valuable and that Böhme’s influence was real. But he argues that McClymond has “misunderstood and overplayed the nature of that influence.” The chain of transmission is real. The chain of ideas is not. Parry observes that McClymond’s own evidence undermines his thesis: Johann Georg Gichtel, the most orthodox of the early Böhmists, believed in eternal hell and came to oppose Jane Lead’s universalism.⁴⁷ The Böhmists who did embrace universal salvation did so by abandoning Böhme’s dark principle, not by developing it. Alan Gregory’s work on William Law makes the same point: Law “abandons all the most obviously heterodox elements in Boehme’s theology,” and what is “most striking” about his Böhmism is “the absence of almost everything that the Romantics and German Idealists were to admire in Boehme.”⁴⁸ The universalism that actually traveled through these channels was not Böhmist universalism. It was universalism from which the Böhmist toxins had been filtered out.

Parry presses the point even harder in the third edition of The Evangelical Universalist. McClymond worries that most universalisms depend on a drama within God, what he calls a Böhmist “dialectic of divine self-differentiation and divine self-reconciliation.” Parry replies that this charge picks out a problem in a few universalists and tars all of them with it. In fact, it is a recurring theme in universalist writing, ancient and modern, that God is undivided, pure goodness, at no risk from evil. The Böhmist followers who became universalists removed the dualistic vision of God. They made God pure light, goodness, and love. And that very move took away any need for the kind of intra-divine drama McClymond finds alarming.⁴⁹

Then Parry notes an irony. It is not universalists, he says, who typically speak of internal conflict in God. It is certain traditionalists. The doctrine of penal substitution, as it is often taught, presents God facing a tension between love and justice. God loves sinners but His justice demands punishment. Christ steps in to resolve the conflict. Now Parry calls this a “slight caricature,” but the theology is often put that way. If anyone introduces a drama of opposed forces within the Godhead, Parry suggests, perhaps the critique should be aimed there. Universalism, by contrast, is proposed as a way to avoid splitting God’s inner life. All God’s acts are acts of undivided holy and just love. Conflict is the thing universalists typically refuse to bring into the divine life.⁵⁰ I think Parry’s point lands, and it matters for this chapter. The universalism I defend does not divide God. It unites every divine attribute in a single, coherent purpose: to bring all things home.

Counter-Objections

“A God who saves through suffering already has darkness woven in.” This objection confuses the source of the suffering with the character of the Sufferer. When a firefighter enters a burning building, the fire is not inside her. She walks into it from outside, and she walks in because she is brave and good. When God enters the suffering of judgment (as the divine-presence model of Chapter 24 describes it), He enters as light, not as darkness. The suffering that sinners experience in His unveiled presence is not God’s dark nature leaking out. It is the pain of rebellion meeting perfect holiness. A doctor setting a broken bone causes pain, but the pain does not mean the doctor is cruel. It means the bone needs setting.³³

“You cannot purge the influence just by quoting one verse.” Fair enough. I am not quoting just one verse. I am quoting a whole biblical witness. James 1:13 says God “cannot be tempted with evil, and he himself tempts no one.” James 1:17 says every good gift comes from the Father of lights, “with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change.” Habakkuk 1:13 says God is “of purer eyes than to see evil.” Psalm 92:15 says “there is no unrighteousness in him.” Paul says He “dwells in unapproachable light” (1 Timothy 6:16). This is not one verse. It is the whole testimony of Scripture about the character of God. It is also the testimony of the Nicene Creed, the Chalcedonian Definition, and the vast weight of the classical Christian tradition. Against this witness, Böhme’s Ungrund has no standing at all.³⁴

Conclusion and the Boundary

McClymond has done the church a service with his portrait of Böhme. He has shown, with care and precision, where theosophy corrupts the doctrine of God. I take his warning seriously. But the warning proves too much if it is taken to stain every universalism with Böhme’s darkness. The hope I hold is older than Böhme. It is rooted in the Scriptures that Böhme re-imagined beyond recognition. It confesses a God who is wholly good, wholly sovereign, and wholly committed to the restoration of every soul through the finished work of Christ.

There is no dark ground beneath the God I worship. There is no churning abyss behind the Trinity. There is no rival principle of wrath struggling against love. There is light. Fierce, uncompromised, unapproachable, saving light. And that light does not quit.

Notice what the rejection of the dark ground actually does for the universalist case. It strengthens it. A God who carries darkness within Himself might have reasons to preserve evil forever, because evil is part of His own nature. A God who is pure light has no such reason. Pure goodness has only one relation to evil: it opposes it, heals it, and destroys it. A God of unmixed goodness is the only God who would pursue every last rebel until the rebellion ends. The dark ground gives you endless dualism, heaven and hell locked in permanent stalemate. The pure light gives you hope.

The God who is pure light is the God who can be trusted to finish what He started. “He who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ” (Philippians 1:6). That promise rests not on Böhme but on Paul. Not on theosophy but on the gospel. Not on a dark principle but on the love that burns as bright as the character of the One who holds it.

The case against universalism that draws on Böhme is a case against the wrong universalism. McClymond demolishes theosophy, and I am glad he does. But theosophy is not the hope. The cross is the hope. And the cross stands in the light.

On this, McClymond and I agree more than he knows. Our difference is not about the nature of God. It is about what a God of pure light will finally do with the creatures He loves. Chapter 3 examines the genetic argument broadly. Chapter 7 takes up the “problem of God” charge in full. And the whole book, chapter by chapter, answers the question that Böhme’s shadow cannot darken: Is the grace of God strong enough, wise enough, and patient enough to save them all? I believe it is. And that belief has never needed the dark ground.³⁵