Chapter 21

The Creeds of Universalism

Did Universalism Rewrite the Faith?

A. The Argument on the Table

If you want to know what a movement really believes, read its creed. Not its marketing. Not its best preacher on a good Sunday. Its creed. The confession it writes down when it has to tell the world what it stands for.

James De Young does exactly this in Chapter 8 of Exposing Universalism. He lines up the creeds that organized Universalism produced in America from the late 1700s through the early 1900s. And he asks a sharp question: what happens when you compare them to the historic creeds of the church?¹

The answer, he argues, is damning. The universalist confessions quietly drop or weaken one historic article after another. The Trinity fades. The full deity of Christ becomes “spiritual authority and leadership.” The atonement disappears. The necessity of personal faith in Christ goes unmentioned. Scripture “contains a revelation” rather than being one. By the time you reach the 1899 statement, the whole confession has been trimmed to five vague principles that could be signed by a Unitarian as easily as a Christian.²

De Young walks through these documents one by one. The Philadelphia Creed of 1790 speaks of God as “infinite in all his perfections.” But it reduces those perfections to “all modifications of infinite, adorable, incomprehensible and unchangeable love.” God’s holiness, His justice, His wrath against sin: all become forms of love. The Mediator “will finally restore the whole human race to happiness.” No mention of the need for faith. No mention of repentance. The Holy Spirit’s role is reduced to making known to sinners a salvation they already possess.⁴

The Winchester Profession of 1803 is even thinner. Three short articles. Scripture “contains a revelation” of God. God “will finally restore the whole family of mankind to holiness and happiness.” And “holiness and true happiness are inseparably connected.” That is the whole confession. No Trinity. No atonement. No resurrection. No Spirit. No faith. The Profession was a modification of the 1790 Philadelphia Articles. It was accepted at Winchester, New Hampshire, and remained the denomination’s standard “profession” through the whole nineteenth century.⁵

The charge is pointed. If universalism produced its own creeds, and those creeds walked away from the historic faith, then the movement has shown its true colors. It did not just expand the reach of the gospel. It rewrote the gospel itself.

And here is where I have to begin with a concession that may surprise you: for much of the Universalist movement, De Young is right.

B. Why This Argument Has Force

A creed that drops the Trinity is no longer Christian in any recognizable sense. A confession that leaves out faith in Christ as the means of salvation has abandoned the heart of the gospel. A movement that merges with the Unitarians and then adopts the Humanist Manifesto has made a public choice about where it belongs.⁶

De Young is documenting a real trajectory. The American Universalist denomination started with something close to evangelical roots. Its earliest figures, John Murray and Elhanan Winchester, still preached a broadly Trinitarian, Christ-centered message.⁷ But within two generations, the movement was sliding. Hosea Ballou rejected the vicarious atonement and pushed the whole denomination toward Unitarianism.⁸ By 1961 the Universalists had formally merged with the Unitarians. By the 1930s many had already embraced the Humanist Manifesto. They were described as “the most basic of humanists.”⁹ One of their own writers captured the spirit around 1920: “Universalists are often asked to tell where they stand. The only true answer to give to this question is that we do not stand at all, we move.”¹⁰

The 1878 Boston statement is the most revealing. De Young highlights its core claim: that “divine justice” is “born of love and limited by love.” One must obey love for God and neighbor, it says. “Until such obedience is forthcoming, one will be disciplined for as long a period as may be necessary.” It then declares that “repentance and salvation are not limited to this life.” And the whole document cites not a single verse of Scripture. De Young notes pointedly that “there is not one verse of Scripture cited; not even one reference is given.”¹¹

De Young’s verdict is severe but, I think, fair. The creeds omit faith, omit the Spirit, omit the Trinity, and omit Scripture. The 1917 Declaration of Social Principles took one more step, defining the gospel as meeting social needs rather than proclaiming the need for personal regeneration. By that point the movement had redefined salvation itself.¹²

This is not a false charge. It happened. A movement that began by preaching that God’s love would finally win every sinner ended by abandoning the Savior whose love was supposed to do the winning. The creeds tell the story. And De Young is right that anyone considering universalism today should read those creeds carefully and ask: is this where the road leads?

I think you can. But the proof of that claim is not a theory. It is a creed. So let me state mine.

C. The Response

1. The Full Creed, Unrevised

The universalism defended in this book confesses the Apostles’ Creed, the Nicene Creed, and the Chalcedonian Definition without a single revision. Not with qualifications. Not with footnotes that quietly empty the words. In full.

I believe in one God, the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth. I believe in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God, true God from true God, begotten not made, of one substance with the Father. I believe He was incarnate of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, and was buried. I believe He rose bodily on the third day. I believe He ascended into heaven, sits at the right hand of the Father, and will come again to judge the living and the dead. I believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord and giver of life. I believe in one holy, catholic, and apostolic church, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and the life of the world to come.¹³

Every one of those lines is held without reservation. The Trinity is not weakened. The deity of Christ is not softened to “spiritual authority and leadership.” The atonement is not reduced to moral example. The resurrection is bodily. The judgment is real. And the hope of universal salvation does not require me to change a syllable.

Compare this to what De Young found in the universalist creeds. The Winchester Profession mentions “one God, whose nature is Love.” That is true as far as it goes. But it says nothing about Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. It says nothing about Christ’s deity. The Nicene Creed says, “God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God.” That is not a vague nod toward love. That is a claim about the being of the Son. It is the claim Arius denied, the claim the council of 325 died on hills over. This book holds it without flinching.¹⁴

De Young’s universalist creeds dropped the Trinity. This book confesses it. They left out faith. This book insists that every person is saved through personal faith in Jesus Christ.¹⁵ They weakened Scripture’s authority to “containing a revelation.” This book affirms the full inspiration and authority of the Old and New Testaments.¹⁶

Paul put the gospel in a creed-like formula that predates his own letters. He wrote: “that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures” (1 Corinthians 15:3–4). Christ died for our sins. He was raised bodily. Both are in accordance with the Scriptures. This is the core the universalist denomination slowly abandoned. This is the core this book keeps.

I hold every article De Young says the universalists abandoned. And I still hold the hope.

2. The Denominational Drift Is Real, and It Is Disowned

Let me be plain about what happened to the Universalist movement. It abandoned the faith. I do not defend it. I do not soften it. And I do not carry it.

McClymond tells the story with care. The American Universalists began as “an evangelical, trinitarian, Christ-and-cross-centered, and Bible-quoting movement.” Their opinions appealed to Protestants conflicted over Calvinist teachings on predestination and the unfree will. But within the first couple of generations, the theological character shifted. Hosea Ballou insisted that God’s love for humanity was not tied to Christ’s coming. Christ became, in McClymond’s words, “theologically dispensable.” The movement set out on a path that led into Unitarianism. As McClymond concludes, “the effort to universalize grace undermined the need for a unique, historical Savior.”¹⁷

That trajectory is exactly the counterfeit this book separates itself from. The line between biblical and counterfeit universalism, drawn in Chapter 2 and developed throughout, runs directly through this history. The Unitarian Universalists sit on one side of that line. The universalism of this book sits on the other. We do not share a creed. We do not share a theology. We share only a name.

De Young is right that the movement’s creeds departed from the faith. He is wrong to assume that every universalist must answer for that departure. The slide into Unitarianism was the clear result of a theology that loosened the link between grace and Christ. It does not follow that a theology which tightens that link, insisting that every soul is saved through Christ, through the cross, through faith, will follow the same road.

3. What the Creeds Do Not Settle

Here is the move De Young never makes. He never asks what the historic creeds actually say about the duration of judgment.

The Nicene Creed confesses that Christ “will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead.” That is real and final judgment. This book affirms it without reservation. But notice what the Creed does not say. It does not say “will come to torment endlessly.” It does not say “will come to divide the human race into two permanent groups.” The words are simpler than that. The Creed says: “will come to judge.”¹⁸

The Apostles’ Creed says the same. Christ “shall come to judge the quick and the dead.” The judgment is affirmed. The outcome and the duration are not specified.¹⁹

Conservative biblical universalism differs from the traditional position on one point: the outcome of that judgment. It holds that God’s judgment is real, severe, and purifying. And it ends in the restoration of every person through faith in Christ. This is about what happens after judgment, not about whether judgment occurs. The creeds affirm the judgment. They leave the outcome open. And that is the space in which the larger hope has always lived.²⁰

Think about what the creeds actually settled. The Council of Nicaea met to resolve the Arian controversy. Is the Son fully God, or a created being? The Creed answers: fully God, true God from true God, of one substance with the Father. Chalcedon met to settle the relationship of Christ’s two natures. The Definition answers: two natures, one person, without confusion. These are the questions the creeds were written to decide. The duration of punishment after the final judgment was not one of them.²¹

This matters because De Young’s argument works only if the creeds settle the question of endless punishment. If they do, then any deviation is heresy. But they do not. They settle the fact of judgment. They leave the nature, purpose, and duration of what follows to biblical and theological argument. That is exactly what this book provides.

Some readers will point to the Athanasian Creed, which includes damnatory clauses. But serious historians have raised sharp questions about this document. It was composed in Latin, though Athanasius himself wrote in Greek. Neither Athanasius nor his contemporaries ever mention it. It is absent from every ecumenical council on record and was not attributed to Athanasius until the ninth century in the West. It remained unknown in the East until the eleventh century. One historian noted that “the earliest Church Fathers have very little to say about the last judgment, but generally stress its centrality.” The point stands. The Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds are silent on the duration of punishment.⁴⁷

4. The Universalist Who Helped Write the Creed

If the creeds and universal salvation could not coexist, we should expect something specific. The church father who did the most to shape the Nicene Creed should be the last person to hold the hope. But the opposite is true.

Gregory of Nyssa was one of the three Cappadocian Fathers whose theological work gave us the mature doctrine of the Trinity. He defended the full deity of Christ against Arianism in his extended treatise Against Eunomius. He was honored as a canonized saint and a pillar of orthodoxy. And he held, in multiple writings, that God would finally restore all things.²²

McClymond himself acknowledges the complexity. Gregory “was specially honored, along with his fellow Cappadocians Basil and Gregory of Nazianzus, for the major role he played in the development of the orthodox doctrine of the Trinity.”²³ Gregory’s hope of restoration (Greek apokatastasis, “the restoration of all things”) was close to Origen’s in its scope. Yet Gregory was never condemned for it. He rejected Origen’s teaching on preexistent souls. He affirmed a bodily and fleshly resurrection. And he placed the hope of final restoration squarely inside the Nicene confession, not outside it.²⁴

Gregory’s biblical argument for the restoration appears in his treatise on 1 Corinthians 15:28. He reads the subjection of all things to Christ as happening through Christ’s body, the church. When every creature has become one body and is joined in Christ, Gregory wrote, Christ will bring His body into subjection to the Father. McClymond notes that Gregory interprets this subjection as occurring “in and through Christ’s body or the church.” Gregory wrote: “By uniting us to himself, Christ is our unity.” This is a reading of Scripture, grounded in the Pauline text. It is not a speculative flight from it.²⁵

Gregory was not alone. His fellow Cappadocian, Gregory of Nazianzus, was himself in all likelihood a universalist. And it was Nazianzus who was appointed to preside over the Second Council of Constantinople in 381. That was the very council that finalized the Nicene Creed. The later Second Council of Nicea honored Gregory of Nyssa with the title “father of the fathers.”⁴⁵ Consider another fact. Epiphanius of Salamis, the so-called “hammer of heretics,” listed as many as eighty heresies in his time. The restoration of all things (Greek apokatastasis, “restoration”) was not among them.⁴⁶ If the church’s own heresy hunters did not condemn the hope, and the church’s own creed-makers held it, the claim that universalism amounts to a different religion does not hold.

This is the model that matters. Gregory did not rewrite the Creed to fit his universalism. He held the Creed in its fullness and reached the hope through it, not around it. He is the proof that De Young’s charge, though accurate about the American denomination, does not apply to universalism as such. One of the architects of the Nicene faith is our strongest witness. I discussed his legacy more fully in Chapter 15, but his role here is specific. If the father who helped forge the creed also held the hope, then the creed and the hope are not at war.²⁶

5. The Creed as a Boundary Marker

The universalist creeds De Young exposes are useful. They draw the line for us.

Any universalism that cannot confess the Nicene Creed without revision is not the universalism of this book. If a confession weakens Christ’s deity to “spiritual leadership,” that is the counterfeit. If it reduces the atonement to an example, that is the counterfeit. If it drops the Trinity, the bodily resurrection, the authority of Scripture, or the necessity of personal faith, that is the counterfeit. The creeds De Young catalogs belong to a movement that made exactly those compromises.²⁷

Full creedal confession is one of the clearest tests that separates biblical universalism from its imitators. This is developed fully in Appendix B, where the marks of each universalism are laid side by side. Here the point is simpler: the test exists. De Young gives it to us, and we pass it.

Robin Parry, in The Evangelical Universalist, third edition, states the case plainly. Universalism “is quite compatible with belief in the Trinity, in creation, fall, and redemption, in the inspiration of scripture, in incarnation, in mission, and so on.” A universalist, he writes, “could maintain all the central elements of orthodox Christian faith.” The question is simple. Does a given universalist actually hold those elements? The ones De Young documents did not. The one this book defends does.⁵⁰

Can you confess the Nicene Creed without crossing your fingers? Can you say, without qualification, that Christ is true God from true God? That He was crucified for our salvation? That He rose bodily? That He will come to judge? Can you say it and mean every word?

The Unitarian Universalists cannot. The universalist denomination that wrote those creeds could not, by its own admission.²⁸ But the universalism of this book can. And it does.

D. Engagement with Specific Scholars

De Young’s treatment of the universalist creeds is thorough and mostly fair. He walks through the Philadelphia Creed of 1790, the Winchester Profession of 1803, the 1878 Boston statement, and the 1899 conditions of fellowship. At each step he notes what is missing: the explicit Trinity, the necessity of faith, the full authority of Scripture. His evaluation is blunt. The 1878 statement, he argues, subordinates God’s justice to His love, affirms that salvation can occur after death, and cites no Scripture at all. He calls the whole system heresy.²⁹

I agree with his evaluation of those creeds. But I disagree that they represent universalism as a whole.

George Sidney Hurd, in A Defense of Biblical Universalism, presses exactly this distinction. Hurd points out that De Young “categorizes all Universalists as Liberals or Progressives.” According to De Young, they all “deny the inspiration and infallibility of Scripture, the deity of Christ and His penal substitutionary atonement.” But this, Hurd argues, gets conservative universalists wrong. Hurd himself holds all of those doctrines. He reaches the hope of final restoration through them, not by leaving them behind.³⁰

Hurd makes a further point that sharpens the issue. The kind of doctrinal erosion De Young documents is not a problem unique to universalists. “Rationalism and Relativism have caused many to depart from the high view of Scripture,” Hurd writes, “in every branch of Christianity and not only among the Universalists. The doctrinal deviations De Young opposes are not exclusive to the Universalists but are also promoted by many Annihilationists and Traditionalists.” The departure from Scripture is a church-wide problem, not a universalist one.³¹

This is the reply that De Young never quite engages. He documents the creeds of the American denomination and treats them as the creeds of universalism as such. But that is like documenting the liberal wing of Presbyterianism and calling it the theology of Calvin. The question is whether the movement’s tradition exhausts the universalist tradition. It does not. The Cappadocian strand existed before Winchester, before Ballou, before the Unitarian merger. It continues after them. And its creed is the Nicene, not the Winchester Profession.

McClymond, writing with more scholarly care, is more honest about the complexity. He traces the slide from Murray and Winchester through Ballou and into Unitarianism with genuine historical detail. His account of how three competing systems within American Universalism refuted one another is striking. Murray’s “ultra-universalism” said there was no postmortem punishment at all. Winchester’s restorationism taught temporary suffering before restoration. Ballou’s Enlightenment-influenced position challenged both. Murray privately referred to Winchester’s followers as “Pharisaical Universalists” and wrote, “According to these gentlemen, every man must finally be his own Saviour!”³² The internal disputes show that the movement was never the unified creed-abandoning bloc De Young suggests.

Robin Parry, in A Larger Hope? Volume 2, fills in a detail McClymond and De Young overlook. The Trinitarian-to-Unitarian shift was not inevitable for every universalist congregation. The First Universalist Church in Providence, Rhode Island, founded in 1821, has remained Trinitarian to this day and publicly affirms both the Apostles’ Creed and the Nicene Creed.³⁴ One congregation is not a trend. But its survival over two centuries is a quiet rebuke to the claim that universalism must always end in creedal collapse.

The real story, as Parry tells it, is that the shift happened because of specific intellectual forces. The anti-traditional spirit of the early movement played a role. So did the influence of Enlightenment rationalism on Ballou, and the broader Unitarian current that was already gaining respectability in New England. “Universalism, which in Christian circles had almost always been trinitarian before this point, became associated in the minds of many with unitarian theology,” Parry observes. The ground for the shift was “prepared by the movement’s focus on individual Spirit-filled believers interpreting Scripture for themselves and its ultra-reformational hostility to the authority of church tradition.”³⁵ The denomination drifted not because it believed in final restoration. It drifted because it let go of the anchors that kept its view of Christ, its view of Scripture, and its view of the Trinity in place.

Robin Parry presses this point even further in his direct response to McClymond. In Appendix 5 of The Evangelical Universalist, third edition, Parry argues that the connection between belief in universal salvation and the denomination’s later theological moves was indirect. The link was not the doctrine of restoration itself, but the “attitude of mind” that was willing to break with long-held traditions. In the late 1700s, universalism was widely believed to be heretical. To embrace it required a readiness to reject established teaching. That same independent, anti-traditional spirit also opened the door to Unitarianism. Ballou’s theology, Parry notes, was shaped from the start by deist rationalism. It was that, not his belief in final restoration, that led him to reject the Trinity.⁴⁸

Parry adds a comparison that sharpens the argument. Similar drift toward Unitarianism and unorthodox Christology occurred among Presbyterians and Congregationalists in the eighteenth century. “Are we to conclude from this,” he asks, “that the strict Calvinism of the Westminster Confession of Faith is a game-ending move?” His point is that none of the movement’s slide was a direct result of believing in final restoration. Unless McClymond can show precisely how the doctrine of restoration leads to the loss of other doctrines, the chess analogy fails.⁴⁹

The Nicene Creed itself stands as a witness. Its text makes no statement about the duration of punishment. It affirms Christ as judge. It affirms the resurrection of the dead. It affirms the life of the world to come. These are confessions a conservative universalist makes with full conviction. Paul tells us that God “has fixed a day on which he will judge the world in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed” (Acts 17:31, ESV). The creed confesses the appointed judge. It does not say whether His judgment ends in endless suffering or in final restoration.³⁶

E. Counter-Objections

1. “The Creed’s ‘Judge the Living and the Dead’ Implies a Permanent Verdict”

The strongest form of this objection says: judgment in the Creed is a final sentence, not a process. To call it corrective or temporary is to empty the Creed of its force.

But the Creed says Christ will judge. It does not say the sentence is irreversible. It does not say the purpose of the sentence is only retributive. Judgment is real in any reading. The difference is over what God’s judgment is for. This book holds that the judgment is severe, searching, and purifying. It burns away sin. It does not preserve sinners in endless agony. The Creed allows both readings, because it settles the fact of judgment without specifying its duration or its goal.³⁷

2. “Historic Universalist Bodies Show Where This Always Ends Up”

This is the trajectory argument, and it has emotional force. If the Universalists went from the Winchester Profession to the Humanist Manifesto in less than 150 years, why should we trust that your version will hold?³⁹

Two answers. First, the slide happened precisely because early Universalism loosened the creedal anchors. Ballou rejected the atonement. The 1899 confession dropped explicit Trinitarian language. The movement drifted because it let go of the things that hold a Christian theology in place.⁴⁰ Conservative biblical universalism takes the opposite approach. It grips the anchors harder, not softer. The Trinity, the deity of Christ, the atonement, the necessity of faith, the authority of Scripture: these are not negotiable. If the denomination drifted because it released them, the answer is to hold them fast.

Second, the trajectory argument is itself a version of the genetic fallacy. The fact that one version of universalism ended in humanism does not mean every version will. Calvinism has also produced liberal offspring. Presbyterianism has split between conservative and progressive wings. Parry documents “similar drift to unitarianism, unorthodox Christologies, and exemplarist atonement theologies among numerous Presbyterians and Congregationalists in the eighteenth century.” No one concludes from this that Reformed theology must lead to liberalism.⁴¹ The test is not where a word ended up in one historical stream. The test is the theology itself. Does it hold the creeds? Does it hold the cross? Does it hold the authority of Scripture? This one does.

3. “The Creeds Condemn Universalism, Even If They Do Not Say So Explicitly”

Some readers will point to the Fifth Ecumenical Council of 553, which is often cited as the church’s formal rejection of the restoration of all things (Greek apokatastasis). I addressed the 553 condemnation in detail in Chapter 16. The short version is that the anathemas of 553 targeted a specific Origenist system, including preexistent souls and a cyclical cosmology, that this book does not hold. Gregory of Nyssa, who held the hope without those speculations, was never condemned. And the scope and authority of the 553 anathemas have been debated by scholars for centuries.⁴²

F. Conclusion

De Young hands us a catalog of failure. The universalist creeds he documents are a record of how a movement lost its theology. The Philadelphia Creed of 1790 weakened Scripture’s authority. The Winchester Profession of 1803 dropped the Trinity. The 1878 Boston statement subordinated justice to love and cited no Scripture at all. The 1899 fellowship conditions reduced the whole confession to five vague sentences. And by the mid-twentieth century, the Universalists had adopted the scriptures of Buddhism, Hinduism, and Taoism alongside the Bible.⁴³

That is a real story, and it matters. But it is not our story.

The universalism defended in this book stands on the other side of every line De Young draws. He says the universalist creeds dropped the Trinity. We confess it. He says they abandoned the atonement. We hold it as real, costly, and central. He says they eliminated the need for faith. We insist that every soul is saved through personal faith in Jesus Christ. He says they weakened Scripture. We build our case on it.

The test is simple. Can a universalist stand before the congregation, recite the Nicene Creed, and mean every word? The Unitarian Universalists cannot. The universalism of this book can. That is the line. And it is drawn not by us alone, but by the creed itself.

Beloved, although I was very eager to write to you about our common salvation, I found it necessary to write appealing to you to contend for the faith that was once for all delivered to the saints. — Jude 3, ESV

The faith once delivered is the faith we contend for. Not a revised version. Not an updated edition stripped of its hard parts. The same faith the councils confessed, the same faith Gregory of Nyssa held while he also held the hope of restoration. The creed and the hope are not enemies. They never were.

Jesus told His followers to baptize “in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit” (Matthew 28:19). That Trinitarian formula is the DNA of the creed. The universalist denomination let it go. The hope defended here will not. Jude tells us to contend for the faith once delivered. Paul tells us that the mystery of godliness (Greek eusebeia, “reverence, godliness”) was “manifested in the flesh, vindicated by the Spirit, seen by angels, proclaimed among the nations, believed on in the world, taken up in glory” (1 Timothy 3:16). That is a confession of the incarnation, the vindication, the proclamation, and the ascension of Christ. Conservative universalism confesses all of it. And it adds one conviction the creeds leave room for: that the proclamation does not stop until every knee bows freely, every tongue confesses willingly, and God is all in all.⁴⁴

What De Young proves is that some universalism rewrote the creed. What this chapter proves is that ours did not. And that distinction is the boundary this whole book exists to draw.

The cumulative case continues in Chapter 40. For the full boundary between the two universalisms, see Appendix B. And the reading now turns from the history to the words themselves. In the next chapter, everything hangs on a single Greek word.