Chapter 26 — The Choice-and-Freedom Texts

“Choose life.” Two words. They look like the end of the conversation. If the choice is real, then some people must be free to choose death. And if they are free to choose it forever, then universalism is finished before it starts. This is the objection I respect the most, because I believe freedom is real. I hold it as tightly as any traditionalist does. So I cannot brush this aside. I have to show that the hope keeps freedom intact, not that freedom does not matter.

James De Young presses this point hard in Exposing Universalism. His Chapter 10, “The Appeal to Texts Dealing with Choice and Freedom,” builds a case from the whole sweep of Scripture. God sets life and death before His people and tells them to choose.¹ He warns that the choice has real consequences. He respects the freedom of those who refuse Him. De Young argues that any view of salvation that guarantees every person will say yes must, in the end, override the very freedom these texts assume.

I want to say plainly: I agree with De Young that God has given us real freedom. I agree that a “yes” to God that is forced is no “yes” at all. I hold what philosophers call libertarian free will. That means I believe every person, at the moment of choice, really could have chosen differently.³ So the objection cannot be ducked. The question is whether the hope of universal salvation requires God to override that freedom. I am going to argue that it does not.

De Young also presses the point with a vivid example. At the cross, Jesus promised paradise to one thief but not the other. The second thief refused. De Young argues that Jesus respected that refusal. He writes that universalism claims Jesus’ love will “finally win him over to repentance after he is punished a while in hell,” and he answers bluntly: “This is not love winning him over but the pain of punishment crushing him.”⁴ The freedom was honored, even at the cost of the man’s soul. Universalism, De Young says, is not willing to pay that cost.

I want to sit with that for a moment. De Young is right about one thing: a universalism that relies on pain to break the will is not the universalism I hold. If the picture is a God who tortures souls until they give in, then the charge of coercion sticks. But that is not what I am arguing. I am arguing that the unveiled love and truth of God, not punishment, is what finally wins every heart. The distinction matters, and I will build on it below.

B. Why It Has Force

This objection has real weight. It draws on a simple logic that anyone can feel. If a choice is genuine, then the wrong option must be truly available. A menu with only one item is not a choice. A vote where only one candidate is allowed is not an election. If God arranges things so that every person inevitably says yes, then has He really left the door open for anyone to say no?

These are not decorative appeals. They assume that the hearers really can refuse. Some did refuse. The wilderness generation died outside the promised land because they chose poorly. The text does not soften that. God forgave them when they repented, but He still did not let them enter Canaan.⁵ The choice was real, and the loss was real.

De Young sharpens the point further. He charges that universalism is “more deterministic and coercive than any expression of evangelical belief, including Calvinism.”⁶ That is a bold claim. But the logic is straightforward. Calvinism says God predestines some to salvation. Universalism, on De Young’s reading, says God predestines all. If predestination of some restricts freedom, predestination of all restricts it even more.

De Young is not finished. He also asks a question that sticks: “If universalism is correct, why would God have to be patient if he will bring all to repentance after death after all?”³⁷ That is drawn from 2 Peter 3:9, where Peter says God is patient, “not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance.” If all are destined to repent eventually, De Young asks, why does God delay? Why is patience needed? The question assumes that patience only makes sense if some might truly be lost. It is a fair reading.

De Young also presses the 1 Timothy warnings. Paul warns that some will “desert the faith” and follow “deceiving spirits” (1 Timothy 4:1). He warns that others have “wandered away to follow Satan” (1 Timothy 5:15). He ends the letter with a warning about those who have “strayed from the faith” (1 Timothy 6:20–21). De Young’s argument is cumulative: the sheer weight of warning language in a single letter assumes that real, permanent loss is possible.³⁸

Against certain versions of universalism, I think this lands. A universalism that says no one can possibly refuse, that the rational will is forced by its own nature to return to God, that refusal is a metaphysical impossibility, does face this charge head-on. But that is not the universalism I hold. The question is whether there is a version that keeps freedom fully real. I believe there is.

C. The Response

1. The Hope Keeps Freedom; It Does Not Override It

Here is the first thing to say, and it matters more than anything else in this chapter. The universalism I defend does not claim that God forces anyone. It claims that God persuades everyone.⁷

There is a vast difference between the two. A parent who locks a child in a room until the child agrees has overridden the child’s will. A parent who keeps the door open, keeps explaining, keeps loving, and waits for the child to come around freely has not. The second parent may be confident that the child will come. She may even know her child well enough to be nearly certain. But the confidence does not make the eventual “yes” unfree. It makes it anticipated.

Scripture gives us a God who woos, draws, and persuades. “I led them with cords of kindness, with the bands of love” (Hosea 11:4). “God’s kindness is meant to lead you to repentance” (Romans 2:4). These are not the verbs of coercion. They are the verbs of courtship.⁸ And the universalist claim is simply this: a God whose love is infinite, whose wisdom is perfect, and whose patience has no limit will eventually win every heart, not by twisting arms, but by shining light until no one prefers the dark.

Consider what De Young himself grants about God’s desire. He cites 1 Timothy 2:4, where Paul says God “desires all people to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth.” De Young reads this as a sincere wish that human freedom may prevent from being fulfilled.³⁹ I read it differently. I read it as the stated goal of a God whose resources include not only a sincere wish but also infinite patience, perfect wisdom, middle knowledge, and the unveiled glory of His own presence. A wish that powerful, backed by resources that vast, is not easily defeated.

Paul says it plainly: “It is God who works in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure” (Philippians 2:13). Notice: God works in us to will. Not to override our will, but to work within it. The willing is still ours. The power behind it is His.⁹

2. Middle Knowledge Makes Free Certainty Possible

Here is where a powerful idea earns its place. Theologians call it middle knowledge, a concept from the sixteenth-century Jesuit Luis de Molina.¹⁰ The plain idea is this: God knows not only what each person will do, but what each person would do in any situation God might place them in.

Timothy Stratton, a philosopher who has written at length on what he calls “mere Molinism,” lays out the framework carefully. God’s knowledge operates in three logical moments. First, He knows all necessary truths. Second, He knows what every free creature would do in every possible situation. Third, in light of that knowledge, He decides which world to create.¹² The second moment is the key. It gives God a map of every free choice before He makes a single one actual. Kenneth Keathley makes the same point: from the set of all possible worlds that could exist, God knows which ones would accomplish His will. He then freely chooses one and knows what will happen in it. In the Molinist model, God controls all things, yet humans keep real freedom.⁴⁴

Now apply this to the freedom objection. If God knows what each person would freely do in each possible set of circumstances, then He can arrange the circumstances, including those that come after death, in which each person freely chooses Him. No arm is twisted. No will is overridden. The person really does choose. But God, who knows the person better than the person knows herself, presents the truth in just the right way, at just the right time, with just the right clarity.¹³

Jerry Walls calls this optimal grace. Writing in Purgatory: The Logic of Total Transformation, Walls insists that such grace “is deeply personal and individual in the sense that God knows how best to elicit a positive response from each person, without destroying or overriding their freedom. What would be highly effective in converting one person might make another more resistant.” God does not pour out some generic measure of goodness. He knows each soul as a unique person and presents the truth in the way most likely to win a free “yes.”¹⁴ It is not a sledgehammer. It is a key, cut to fit the exact lock. And the lock opens from the inside.

Here is where something striking happens with the very text De Young uses. Stratton examines the Deuteronomy 30 passage himself and reaches the opposite conclusion from De Young. Moses tells Israel that the command “is not too difficult for you or beyond your reach.” He sets before them “life and death, blessings and curses” and says, “Now choose life.” Stratton reads this as clear evidence of libertarian freedom: both options are genuinely available at the moment of choice. The Israelites really do possess the ability to choose either way.⁴⁵ So far, De Young would agree. But notice what Stratton does with this. He argues that these choice texts prove libertarian freedom is real, and that middle knowledge is the only way to preserve both libertarian freedom and God’s sovereign plan. The very passage De Young quotes against universalism actually builds the Molinist case for it.

Stratton himself does not endorse universalism. He is careful to note that distinction.¹⁵ But the framework he builds shows that free certainty is not a contradiction. A God who knows every “what if” can be certain of the outcome without eliminating the freedom of the chooser. The certainty is in God’s knowledge, not in the removal of the creature’s will. (For more on how this answers the worry that hell only hardens the heart, see Chapter 28.)

3. A Free “No” Is Real but Not Necessarily Final

De Young is right that people really do say no to God. The Bible is full of it. Pharaoh said no. The wilderness generation said no. The Pharisees said no. The rich young ruler said no. I do not dispute any of that.

The question is whether a free “no” spoken today, in ignorance, in pain, in rebellion, is the same as a final “no” spoken forever. This is where Thomas Talbott’s work presses a sharp point. Talbott argues that a choice made in ignorance is not the same as a choice made with full information.¹⁶ A teenager who refuses to study may regret that choice at thirty. A patient who refuses surgery because she misunderstands the risks may accept it once the doctor explains clearly. The refusal was real. The freedom was real. But the refusal was not final, because it was built on a foundation that crumbled once the truth came in.

Apply this to the soul standing before God. In this life, we refuse God amid a tangle of bad information, wounded emotions, cultural baggage, and half-understood doctrine. The atheist may be rejecting a cartoon version of God she was taught as a child. The addict may be choosing the bottle because he cannot see past his pain. Their “no” is real, and I take it seriously. But it is not informed. It is not a clear-eyed refusal of infinite love fully revealed.¹⁷

Talbott presses this into a dilemma that has never been adequately answered. Either a person is fully informed about who God really is, or she is not. If she is not, then her rejection is clouded by ignorance, and God can remove that ignorance without touching her freedom. If she is fully informed, then, as even William Lane Craig concedes, the revelation would be so compelling that rejection becomes impossible. Either way, a free rejection of the true God, fully revealed, is incoherent. The very conditions that make refusal understandable (ignorance, deception, bondage to unhealthy desire) are conditions God can address without coercion. Remove them, and the motive for refusal vanishes.⁵⁰

De Young himself notes the relationship between knowledge and faith. He agrees that “adequate and correct… knowledge is essential” for the exercise of saving faith.⁴⁰ The disagreement is not over whether knowledge matters. It is over whether God will provide that adequate knowledge to every soul, in this life or beyond it.

4. Informed Freedom Changes Everything

This is the move that makes the hope of universal salvation more than wishful thinking. Refusing God in ignorance is one thing. Refusing God face-to-face, with every illusion removed, is another thing entirely.

Think about what judgment means on the biblical picture. It is the moment when every secret is revealed (Romans 2:16). It is the moment when every person stands before the living God in His full glory. The masks come off. The lies dissolve. The self-deception that sustained a lifetime of rebellion is stripped away in an instant. And what remains is the raw, unveiled reality of who God is and what He has done.

James tells us that even the demons believe and shudder (James 2:19). They know who God is. The question is not whether full knowledge compels belief. It does not. Even with full knowledge, the will remains free.¹⁸ But full knowledge does remove the conditions that made refusal seem rational. The person who refused God because she thought He was a tyrant now sees that He is not. The person who chose sin because he thought it would satisfy now sees that it did not. The fog lifts, and the choice looks very different in the light.

Here is where the parable of the prodigal son comes alive. The younger son did not come home because his father forced him. He came home because reality broke through. “He came to himself” (Luke 15:17). The Greek phrase (Greek eis heauton elthon, “coming to himself”) is striking. It implies that the son’s rebellion was a kind of being beside himself, and his repentance was a return to sanity.⁴¹ The father did not drag him. The truth about his situation did the work. And if God’s unveiled presence is the fullest truth any creature can encounter, then the conditions for “coming to oneself” are at their strongest there.

Jesus Himself says, “If anyone’s will is to do God’s will, he will know whether the teaching is from God” (John 7:17). The connection between willing and knowing runs deep. Remove the barriers to knowledge, and you change the landscape of the will.¹⁹ That is not coercion. That is clarity. (For more on the timing and nature of postmortem encounter, see Chapter 27.)

5. The Honest Residue

I owe the reader honesty here, and I intend to give it. The position I hold, libertarian free will, means I cannot guarantee universal salvation the way a strict necessitarian can. David Bentley Hart argues that a rational will cannot finally choose against its own good, which would make universal salvation a metaphysical certainty.²⁰ I respect Hart enormously, and I lean on his linguistic and patristic work throughout this book. But I part from him on this point. I believe freedom is real enough that a creature really could hold out against God forever, at least in bare logical possibility.²¹

So here is my honest position. I hold universal salvation as an overwhelming confidence, not as a metaphysical lock. I believe that a perfectly loving, perfectly wise, perfectly patient God, armed with full knowledge of what every soul would freely do in every possible situation, will in the end win every heart. The odds, if you will allow the word, are staggeringly in love’s favor. But I will not pretend that the bare possibility of final refusal has been removed by force.²²

And if that one possibility were ever to become real? My fallback is conditional immortality, not eternal conscious torment. A God who cannot win a soul would let it go in mercy, not hold it in agony forever. That fallback is important, because it shows that the hope does not require me to deny freedom or to embrace endless suffering. The worst-case scenario, for the universalist who keeps freedom, is not endless hell. It is an end.²³

D. Engagement with Specific Scholars

De Young’s case rests on two pillars. The first is the biblical witness. Scripture commands people to choose, warns them of the consequences of refusal, and records many who refused. I have granted all of that. The choice is real. The second pillar is more pointed. De Young argues that God Himself has willed the freedom to refuse. “God has willed that people have the capacity to will contrary to God’s will.”²⁴ That is a powerful sentence. I agree with it. But I draw a different conclusion from it. God giving us the capacity to refuse does not mean God will let that refusal stand unchallenged forever. A father who gives his child freedom to run into the street does not stop calling the child back.

De Young also presses the thief-on-the-cross example. Jesus promised paradise to the repentant thief and was silent about the other. De Young concludes that universalism “is not content to respect both Jesus’ decision and the thief’s choice.”²⁵ But notice what De Young does not say. He does not say the unrepentant thief is beyond hope. He says Jesus was silent about him in that moment. Silence is not a sentence. The story captures a snapshot, not a final destiny.

Timothy Stratton’s Molinist framework provides the philosophical backbone for the reply. His “mere Molinism” is defined by two pillars: humans possess libertarian free will, and God possesses middle knowledge.²⁶ On this framework, God does not need to override anyone’s will. He simply knows which circumstances would lead each person to choose freely, and He brings those circumstances about. Stratton draws a careful line: to predestine is to ensure something will happen; to determine is to force it by prior causes. Molinism holds the first without the second.⁴⁶ The choice remains genuine. The outcome reflects God’s wisdom, not His force.

Kenneth Keathley, writing from within the Southern Baptist tradition, affirms that Molinism “affirms God’s genuine desire for all to be saved in a way that is problematic for Calvinism.”⁴⁷ Keathley is no universalist. But his framework shows something the freedom objection misses. On the Molinist view, God can be both sovereign and genuine in His desire that all be saved, without overriding freedom. The universalist simply presses the logic one step further: a God with that desire and that knowledge will not rest until the desire is fulfilled.

Kirk MacGregor goes further still. In Molinist Philosophical and Theological Ventures, he argues that if God knows through middle knowledge that there are feasible worlds where all eventually embrace Him, an all-loving God would create one. He cites Ken Perszyk’s claim that “Molinism is well suited for universalism,” Robin Parry’s judgment that Molinism “fit[s] very well with universalism,” and R. Zachary Manis’s observation that “Molinism and universalism would seem to be a match made in heaven.”⁴⁸ MacGregor himself contends that, given libertarian freedom, Molinism provides the only way God could guarantee universal salvation.

R. Zachary Manis, who holds a traditional view of hell and is no universalist, reaches a striking conclusion in Sinners in the Presence of a Loving God. After working through the logic carefully, he writes that “Molinism and universalism may well be a match made in heaven, Molinism and anti-universalism are, if not quite a match made in hell, at least ill-wed.” The anti-universalist Molinist faces a problem she cannot solve: if God knows how to save everyone and has the power to arrange circumstances accordingly, why does He create anyone He knows will be lost? Manis finds no adequate answer. That an opponent of universalism reaches this conclusion gives the argument weight that no amount of in-house advocacy can match.⁵¹

Talbott presses the question from the other side. He asks: can anyone be said to have made a truly informed rejection of God? If not, then the finality of the “no” is an open question, not a settled fact.²⁷ Talbott’s point is not that freedom is an illusion. It is that the conditions for a truly free rejection of God have never been fully met in this life. Ignorance, pain, and deception cloud the will. Remove those, and the landscape of choice shifts.

Andrew Hronich carries the Molinist argument further in Once Loved, Always Loved, building a case that middle knowledge and universal restoration are not only compatible but mutually reinforcing. Hronich argues that a decision to reject God forever cannot be both free and fully informed, because rational freedom requires true knowledge and true sanity of mind. Without both, the will is not wholly free. So the conditions that make a “no” to God understandable are the very conditions that disqualify it from being final. Hronich further argues that God can “weakly actualize” a world where everyone freely responds to grace, simply by not instantiating any individual who would forever resist, or by arranging postmortem circumstances where each soul freely turns.²⁸ If God knows the counterfactual truth about every soul, and if He is relentless in love, then the most natural outcome is that every soul will find its way to the “yes.” The freedom is real. The pursuit is real. And the pursuit does not stop at the grave.

McClymond himself echoes the concern when he says that universalism tends toward a determinism dressed in the language of love.²⁹ Against a universalism that removes the possibility of refusal by metaphysical decree, he is right. But the version I defend keeps the possibility and argues that it will not, in the end, be taken.

Where do the battle lines fall? De Young and McClymond stand on one side, arguing that real freedom requires the real possibility of permanent loss. Hart stands on the other extreme, arguing that the rational will cannot finally choose against its own good. I stand in the middle. I agree with De Young that freedom is real. I agree with Hart that God’s love is inescapable in its reach. But I hold the two together: freedom is real enough to refuse, and love is patient enough to outlast every refusal. That is the narrow ridge this book walks.

E. Counter-Objections

I think the answer is no, and here is why. Consider an ordinary case. A good teacher knows her student well. She knows that the student learns best through stories, not lectures. So she teaches through stories. The student understands, and freely chooses to apply the lesson. Has the teacher manipulated the student? Of course not. She has used her knowledge of the student to communicate effectively. That is good teaching, not coercion.³⁰

God’s knowledge is infinitely deeper than any teacher’s. But the principle is the same. Using knowledge to present the truth in the most compelling way is not the same as forcing someone to accept it. The person still decides. The light still shines, and the eyes still open freely. If this counts as “manipulation,” then every persuasive appeal in history, including the gospel itself, is manipulation. That drains the word of meaning.³¹

A second objection follows: “A guaranteed outcome plus real freedom is a contradiction. If the outcome is certain, how can the choices along the way be free?”

This objection rests on a confusion that Stratton addresses head-on. He calls it the modal fallacy: treating certainty as though it were necessity. God’s knowledge of what someone will freely choose does not mean the person must choose it. Certainty is an epistemic property, not a causal force.⁴⁹ Think of it this way. A loving husband knows his wife well enough to predict, with near certainty, that she will say yes if he proposes in a certain way. His confidence does not make her acceptance unfree. It reflects his knowledge of her, not his control over her.³² God’s knowledge is perfect where the husband’s is partial. But the structure is the same. Knowing what someone will freely do is not the same as making them do it.

Robin Parry, drawing on philosopher Eric Reitan, offers a vivid way to see why. Imagine a box of pennies all facing heads-up, and glue on the heads-up side so that any penny that lands tails-up stays there. Shake the box over and over. On each shake, each heads-up penny has a chance of flipping. Given enough time, every penny ends up tails-up. No individual shake was forced. Each flip was a chance event. But the outcome, over enough rounds, was certain. Freedom at each step; inevitability across the whole. If God has all of eternity and each free soul has even a slight openness to grace, the math runs in love’s direction.⁵²

Stratton drives the point home: to predestine is to ensure that something will happen; to determine is to force it by prior causes. Molinism affirms the first without the second.³³ That distinction is what separates this hope from every form of determinism, including the kind De Young rightly worries about.

A third objection cuts closer. “Your fallback to conditional immortality admits that universalism is not actually certain.” Yes, it does. I have said so plainly. What I hold is not a logical proof. It is a confidence grounded in who God is, what He knows, and how He loves.³⁴

But I would press the point back. The traditionalist also cannot prove that anyone will be lost forever. No one has seen the end. We are all reasoning from the character of God and the witness of Scripture. The question is which portrait of God does better justice to the whole of what Scripture says about His love, His knowledge, His patience, and His purpose. I believe the hope wins on those terms.

F. Conclusion and the Boundary

So where does this leave us? The choice-and-freedom texts are real. I have not tried to soften them. When Moses says “choose life,” the choice is genuine. When Joshua says “choose this day,” the option of refusal is truly on the table. When the unrepentant thief dies unreconciled, his freedom has been honored, not overridden.

But the texts prove that freedom is real. They do not prove that freedom will produce a final, unbreakable “no” in the face of infinite love fully revealed. That is the step the objection has to take, and it is the step I believe fails. A God who knows every “what if,” who presents Himself to every soul in perfect clarity, who has all of eternity to work, and who “works in you both to will and to work for his good pleasure” (Philippians 2:13), is a God whose love will not be finally refused.³⁵

I hold this with conviction, not with overclaim. The honest residue remains: libertarian freedom means the bare possibility of final refusal cannot be ruled out. If it ever were actual, my fallback is conditional immortality, not eternal torment. But I believe, with everything I have learned about the character of God, that the possibility will never be taken. The light is too bright. The love is too persistent. The God who calls “choose life” is the same God who “desires all people to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth” (1 Timothy 2:4). He will not rest until every prodigal comes home. And not one of them will be dragged.

I want to return, briefly, to De Young’s charge that universalism is more coercive than Calvinism. I think he has it backward. The universalism I defend says God offers every soul the most compelling possible invitation, fitted to its nature and delivered in His own presence. Which of these, Calvinism’s selective grace or the universal hope, sounds more like the God who says, “As I live, declares the Lord God, I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but that the wicked turn from his way and live” (Ezekiel 33:11)?

De Young assumes that a guarantee of the outcome eliminates the freedom of the process. I have argued the opposite. The outcome is not guaranteed by force. It is anticipated with confidence, because the God who pursues every soul knows exactly what each soul needs. The “yes” is real. The love is real. And the freedom, from first breath to final “yes,” is never removed.

The door stands open. “The Spirit and the Bride say, ‘Come.’ And let the one who hears say, ‘Come.’ And let the one who is thirsty come; let the one who desires take the water of life without price” (Revelation 22:17). That is the universalist hope: not that the door is locked and everyone is forced through, but that the door is open and the voice that calls is irresistible, not because it overpowers, but because it is true.³⁶

One more thing needs to be said, because it matters pastorally. The freedom objection often comes from people who are worried about someone they love. A parent whose child has walked away from the faith. A widow whose husband died angry at God. A friend whose brother took his own life. They ask: “Did they choose, and is that choice final?” I want to say to them what I believe is true. The choice was real. The pain is real. But a God who knows every heart, who has all of eternity, and who never stops loving, is not finished with them. The one who said “choose life” is the same one who goes after the lost sheep “until he finds it” (Luke 15:4). That “until” has no expiration date.⁴²

This chapter has answered one argument. Thirty-nine others stand beside it. For the no-second-chance texts, see Chapter 27. For the worry that hell only hardens the heart, see Chapter 28. For whether Jesus’ warnings would be dishonest if hell is not final, see Chapter 31. And for the cumulative case, see Chapter 40.

Notes

↑ 1. De Young, Exposing Universalism, ch. 10, “The Appeal to Texts Dealing with Choice and Freedom.” De Young begins by noting universalism’s appeal to God’s purpose texts (Isa 14:24–27; 46:9–11; Eph 1:9–12) and argues that these affirm God’s plan without promising the salvation of every individual.

↑ 2. De Young, Exposing Universalism, ch. 10, “Can God’s Wish Be Thwarted? Yes.” De Young grounds human freedom in the imago Dei (Gen 1:26–27) and argues that the will to choose, even against God’s preferred will, is part of what it means to be made in His image.

↑ 3. Libertarian free will, as Timothy Stratton defines it, is “the opportunity to exercise an ability to choose among a range of alternative options in a situation where antecedent conditions are insufficient to causally determine the outcome.” Stratton, Human Freedom, Divine Knowledge, and Mere Molinism, 2nd ed. (Wipf & Stock). This is the same freedom that Moses assumes in Deuteronomy 30. The author’s commitment is stated in the theological framework of this book (§2.5): “God never overrides human free will. He woos, draws, persuades, purifies—but He does not coerce.”

↑ 4. De Young, Exposing Universalism, ch. 10. De Young writes: “Apparently Jesus’ own love did not extend so far as to violate his sense of justice and holiness when it was violated by the one who refused to repent. He respected his freedom to reject him.”

↑ 5. Numbers 14:20–35. De Young draws on this passage (ch. 10) to show that even repentance did not undo the temporal consequences of the wilderness generation’s refusal, arguing that “unbelief dooms one to a destiny, seemingly disproportionate … which is unchangeable even with repentance.”

↑ 6. De Young, Exposing Universalism, ch. 10, “Universalism More Deterministic and Coercive Than Calvinism.” The full charge: “Universalism is more deterministic and coercive than any expression of evangelical belief, including Calvinism with its emphasis on divine election and predestination.”

↑ 7. The distinction between persuasion and coercion is central to the libertarian universalism defended in this book. See §2.5: the saving “yes” must be genuine, and a genuine “yes” requires a possible “no.”

↑ 8. On the theme of divine wooing and persuasion, see Hosea 2:14–15; Song of Solomon (read as allegory of God and Israel); Jeremiah 31:3, “I have loved you with an everlasting love; therefore I have continued my faithfulness to you.”

↑ 9. Philippians 2:12–13, ESV. The “working in” language (energeōn, “to work within, to energize”) describes divine enablement, not divine compulsion. Paul pairs it with “work out your own salvation with fear and trembling” (v. 12), which assumes active human participation.

↑ 10. Luis de Molina, Concordia liberi arbitrii cum gratiae donis (1588). Molina argued that God possesses knowledge of counterfactuals of creaturely freedom (scientia media, “middle knowledge”)—knowledge that falls logically between His knowledge of all possibilities and His knowledge of what He decrees.

↑ 11. Stratton, Human Freedom, Divine Knowledge, and Mere Molinism, 2nd ed. (Wipf & Stock), chs. 1–3. Stratton lays out the three logical moments of God’s knowledge and the “two-pillar” definition of mere Molinism: (1) humans possess libertarian free will, and (2) God possesses middle knowledge. These two pillars are all the framework requires.

↑ 12. Stratton, Human Freedom, Divine Knowledge, and Mere Molinism, ch. 2. The three “logical moments” are: (1) natural knowledge (all necessary truths), (2) middle knowledge (counterfactuals of creaturely freedom), and (3) free knowledge (what God decrees to actualize). Stratton stresses that these are logical, not chronological, moments: “there never was a time when God had middle knowledge but did not have free knowledge.”

↑ 13. This application of middle knowledge to universal salvation is the author’s own extension of the Molinist framework. For a parallel argument, see Andrew Hronich, Once Loved, Always Loved, on the compatibility of middle knowledge and universal restoration.

↑ 14. Jerry Walls, Purgatory: The Logic of Total Transformation, ch. 5. Walls defines optimal grace: “Such grace is deeply personal and individual in the sense that God knows how best to elicit a positive response from each person, without destroying or overriding their freedom. What would be highly effective in converting one person might make another more resistant. The notion of optimal grace assumes that God knows and loves each of us as individuals as well as members of the larger human race, and values each of us as unique persons.” See also the Hell excerpt (ch. 5, “Hell and Human Freedom”) in which Walls argues that God provides each person with the “optimal amount of influence toward good which God can exercise on that person’s will without destroying his freedom.” James Beilby, Postmortem Opportunity, pp. 44–45, contrasts Walls’s “optimal grace” with Terrance Tiessen’s “sufficient grace,” noting that Tiessen defines sufficiency as merely “enough to justify God’s condemnation,” while Walls’s concept is infinitely better suited to a God who loves His lost sheep.

↑ 15. Stratton, Human Freedom, Divine Knowledge, and Mere Molinism. Stratton is explicit that his Molinist framework does not commit him to universalism. The author uses the framework with that caveat noted.

↑ 16. Thomas Talbott, The Inescapable Love of God, chs. 8–10. Talbott argues that a choice made in ignorance cannot be treated as a final, fully autonomous rejection. He writes that if God wills for us “exactly what, at the most fundamental level, we want for ourselves,” then once a person learns through experience that evil is always destructive, “an intelligible motive for such rebellion no longer seems even possible.” Robin Parry develops this line of reasoning in The Evangelical Universalist, 3rd ed., pp. 28–31, noting that Talbott’s “fully informed” concept means not just that information has been communicated but that it is epistemically compelling for the person: “the disciples were informed by the women who went to the empty tomb that Christ was risen, but this information was communicated to them in a far more compelling way in their own encounter with the risen Lord.”

↑ 17. This does not mean ignorance excuses sin. It means that the finality of a refusal made in ignorance is an open question. The wilderness generation sinned and bore consequences, but the question of their eternal destiny is a different matter from the temporal judgment they experienced.

↑ 18. James 2:19, ESV. The point is carefully limited: knowledge of God does not automatically produce saving faith. The demons “believe” in the sense of acknowledging the facts, but they do not trust and surrender. The question for universalism is whether the full, unveiled presence of God, unlike the demons’ mere factual awareness, creates conditions in which the will is drawn but not compelled.

↑ 19. John 7:17, ESV. The Greek ean tis thelē to thelema autou poiein, gnōsetai, “if anyone wills to do His will, he will know,” ties willingness to knowledge. The relationship is reciprocal: genuine openness leads to recognition of the truth.

↑ 20. David Bentley Hart, That All Shall Be Saved (Yale, 2019), fourth meditation. Hart argues that the rational will, rightly understood, is ordered toward the good, and that a final rejection of the good would be irrational. He writes that the more one is “in one’s right mind,” the more “inevitable is one’s surrender to God.” See also Hunter Coates, Grace Abounds (Resource Publications / Wipf & Stock, 2024), ch. 11, who distinguishes libertarian free will from what he calls “classical free will” (the power to choose the good that is in our nature to choose) and maps the debate across the universalist spectrum.

↑ 21. For the author’s departure from Hart on this point, see §2.5 and Chapter 5. Hart is a source, not a counterfeit; his orthodoxy is fully acknowledged, and his linguistic and patristic contributions are used throughout this book. The divergence is on the philosophy of freedom only.

↑ 22. The language of “overwhelming confidence” rather than “metaphysical certainty” is deliberate. The author holds universal salvation as more than bare hope and less than logical proof. The ground of the confidence is the character and knowledge of God, not a philosophical demonstration. See §2.5 and the discussion in Chapter 5.

↑ 23. For the relationship between the author’s universalism and conditional immortality as fallback, see §2.2. Both views reject eternal conscious torment. The single difference is the ending: CI says some may finally be destroyed; universalism says all are finally won.

↑ 24. De Young, Exposing Universalism, ch. 10, “Can God’s Wish Be Thwarted? Yes.”

↑ 25. De Young, Exposing Universalism, ch. 10. The full context is De Young’s discussion of the two thieves crucified with Jesus (Luke 23:39–43), where he argues that Jesus honored the unrepentant thief’s freedom to reject Him.

↑ 26. Stratton, Human Freedom, Divine Knowledge, and Mere Molinism, chs. 3–5. Stratton’s “mere Molinism” is defined by two pillars: (1) God possesses middle knowledge, and (2) humans possess libertarian free will. Both are affirmed in this book. Stratton and Erasmus formalize this in “Two Pillars of Molinism.”

↑ 27. Thomas Talbott, The Inescapable Love of God, ch. 9. Talbott argues that a fully informed rejection of God is incoherent: the very conditions that render a rejection intelligible (ignorance, deception, bondage to unhealthy desires) are “also obstacles to free choice of the relevant kind.” He presses the point against Craig in ch. 12: “Either I am fully informed concerning who God is and the consequences of rejecting him, or I am not. If I am not fully informed, then I am in no position to reject the true God… and if I am fully informed, then (as Craig himself insists) I am incapable of rejecting the true God freely. So in neither case am I free to reject the true God.”

↑ 28. Andrew Hronich, Once Loved, Always Loved. Hronich develops a rigorous case that Molinism and universal restoration are not only compatible but mutually reinforcing. He argues that “rational freedom stipulates that true freedom necessitates true knowledge and true sanity of mind to be qualified as such. In the absence of either of these… one is not wholly free. In other words: a decision to reject God forever cannot be both free and fully informed.” On the Molinist mechanism, Hronich contends that God can “weakly actualize” a world where every person freely repents, by arranging circumstances (including postmortem ones) in which each soul freely responds to grace. He further argues that “given that God desires all men to be saved, what is to prevent God from actualizing one of these worlds?”

↑ 29. McClymond, The Devil’s Redemption, ch. 12, §12.3 (“The Problem of Grace”). McClymond argues that universalism tends to reduce salvation to something other than the free, contingent work of Christ. On the freedom issue specifically, the concern overlaps with De Young’s: if all are saved inevitably, grace is no longer grace but necessity.

↑ 30. The teacher analogy is a standard one in Molinist literature. See Kirk R. MacGregor, Molinist Philosophical and Theological Ventures (Pickwick / Wipf & Stock, 2022), for a collection of essays applying middle knowledge across a range of philosophical and theological questions, including the distinction between “strong actualization” (God causing an event directly) and “weak actualization” (God arranging circumstances in which a free creature acts).

↑ 31. William Lane Craig has pressed this point in his defense of Molinism: if God’s providential arrangement of circumstances to achieve His purposes counted as coercion, then every act of divine providence would be coercive, which would make the concept meaningless. Craig is represented at naming level; for a full treatment, see his The Only Wise God (Baker, 1987) and Divine Foreknowledge and Human Freedom (Brill, 1991).

↑ 32. The marriage-proposal analogy is used to illustrate how knowledge of a free choice does not cause that choice. See also Alvin Plantinga’s distinction between foreknowledge and causal determination in God, Freedom, and Evil (Eerdmans, 1977).

↑ 33. Stratton, Human Freedom, Divine Knowledge, and Mere Molinism. Stratton writes that “predestination and determinism are not synonymous. To predestine is to ensure or ordain something will happen. To determine (in the relevant philosophical sense) is to necessitate it via antecedent conditions. Molinism affirms that God predestines all that comes to pass. But it denies that he determines all that comes to pass in the necessitarian sense.” This distinction is what separates the hope defended in this book from every form of coercive determinism.

↑ 34. See §2.5 for the author’s full statement of this position. The argument is that a perfectly loving and all-knowing God, with eternity to work and full knowledge of what each person would freely do, can compose for every soul the most persuasive possible appeal, offered in His own unveiled presence, until even the hardest heart freely yields.

↑ 35. Philippians 2:13, ESV. See also 1 Timothy 2:3–4 (“God our Savior, who desires all people to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth”) and 2 Peter 3:9 (“The Lord is … patient toward you, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance”).

↑ 36. Revelation 22:17, ESV. The open invitation at the close of the biblical canon is fitting: the last word of Scripture is a call, not a lock. “Come.” The universalist hope is that this call will, in the end, be heard by every soul.

↑ 37. De Young, Exposing Universalism, ch. 10, “The Witness of Peter against Universalism.” De Young connects 2 Peter 3:9 to 3:7 (“the day of judgment and destruction of the ungodly”) and argues that the text affirms a final, unchangeable judgment for some.

↑ 38. De Young, Exposing Universalism, ch. 10. De Young surveys the warnings in 1 Timothy 1:5–6, 1:19–20, 4:1, 5:8, 5:15, and 6:20–21 to build a cumulative case that apostasy is a real and permanent danger.

↑ 39. De Young, Exposing Universalism, ch. 10, “Can God’s Wish Be Thwarted? Yes.” De Young grants that the Greek thelο (“to wish, to will”) expresses a genuine divine desire, but argues that God’s other attributes (holiness, justice) and the reality of human freedom limit the fulfillment of that desire.

↑ 40. De Young, Exposing Universalism, ch. 10. De Young writes: “Adequate and correct, but not complete, knowledge is essential. Failure to act on one’s knowledge will leave one apart from God.”

↑ 41. Luke 15:17, ESV. The phrase eis heauton elthon (“coming to himself”) is a Semitic idiom for regaining one’s senses. It implies that the prodigal’s rebellion was a departure from his true self, and that repentance was a return to sanity, not a surrender under coercion. The father’s posture throughout the parable is one of watching, waiting, and running to meet the returning son (v. 20), not of chasing, capturing, or forcing.

↑ 42. Luke 15:4, ESV. The shepherd leaves the ninety-nine “until he finds it” (heοs heuriskenei auto). The “until” is open-ended. It ends in finding, not in giving up. The universalist reads this parable as a window into the character of God: He does not abandon the search.

↑ 43. De Young, Exposing Universalism, ch. 10, “Universalism More Deterministic and Coercive Than Calvinism.” De Young adds that universalism “finds itself at odds with both biblical revelation and reason” because it makes love coercive and justice subordinate.

↑ 44. Kenneth Keathley, Salvation and Sovereignty: A Molinist Approach (B&H, 2010), p. 19. Keathley summarizes the Molinist framework: “From the infinite set of possible worlds that could happen (God’s natural knowledge), there is an infinite subset of feasible worlds which would accomplish His will (God’s middle knowledge). God freely chooses one of the feasible worlds, and He perfectly knows what will happen in this actual world (God’s free knowledge).” Keathley notes that Scripture teaches both a high view of divine sovereignty and a robust view of human freedom, and that Molinism “is the one view of providence that holds to a consistent view of both biblical teachings.”

↑ 45. Stratton, Human Freedom, Divine Knowledge, and Mere Molinism, ch. 13. Stratton reads Deuteronomy 30:11–20 as “clear biblical support for libertarian freedom.” Moses tells Israel the command is “not too difficult for you or beyond your reach” and sets before them alternative possibilities. Stratton argues that both options are genuinely available at the moment of choice: “Moses is clear that they possess the ability to do it, and that it’s not even ‘too difficult’ for them to make this choice in the actual circumstance in which they find themselves.” He also reads Ezekiel 33:5 and 33:11 as implying both human libertarian freedom and God’s middle knowledge, since the text contains counterfactual reasoning: if they had heeded the warning, they would have saved themselves.

↑ 46. Stratton, Human Freedom, Divine Knowledge, and Mere Molinism. Stratton writes: “God can guarantee and ensure an outcome without determining it. That’s the beauty of divine providence operating through middle knowledge.” He distinguishes between “fixes” meaning God determines all events (the Calvinist picture) and “fixes” meaning God ensures or guarantees outcomes by knowing what free creatures would do. The Molinist affirms the second without the first.

↑ 47. Keathley, Salvation and Sovereignty, pp. 42–54, 152–154. Keathley writes that Molinism “affirms God’s genuine desire for all to be saved in a way that is problematic for Calvinism.” He argues that texts such as 1 Timothy 2:4, 2 Peter 3:9, and John 3:16 express an unconditioned and unrestricted divine desire for universal salvation. Keathley is not a universalist, but his conclusion points in the universalist direction: “The Molinist can affirm without qualification that God is ‘not wanting any to perish but all to come to repentance’ (2 Pet 3:9).”

↑ 48. Kirk R. MacGregor, Molinist Philosophical and Theological Ventures (Pickwick / Wipf & Stock, 2022), ch. 2. MacGregor writes: “It is rather straightforward to establish that Molinism shows eventual universalism to be logically possible. Suppose God knows in his middle knowledge that there are feasible worlds where all eventually embrace God, either on earth or in hell. If there are such worlds, an all-loving God would, in my judgment, create one if he decides to create a world at all.” He cites Ken Perszyk’s claim that “Molinism is well suited for universalism” and Robin Parry’s judgment that Molinism “fit[s] very well with universalism,” and R. Zachary Manis’s observation that “Molinism and universalism would seem to be a match made in heaven.” MacGregor further argues that, given libertarian freedom, Molinism provides the only way God could guarantee universal salvation.

↑ 49. Stratton, Human Freedom, Divine Knowledge, and Mere Molinism. Stratton addresses the modal fallacy directly: “Some assume that if God infallibly knows how someone will freely choose, then that person must lack the ability to choose otherwise. But this confuses certainty with necessity. Certainty is an epistemic property, not a causal force. God’s foreknowledge of free choices is based on his middle knowledge—what creatures would do freely in specific situations—not on a causal decree that necessitates their choices.”

↑ 50. Thomas Talbott, The Inescapable Love of God, ch. 12. Talbott impales Craig on a dilemma: ignorance makes rejection intelligible but not fully free; full information makes rejection free but not intelligible. Craig himself concedes the second horn when he writes that “for some people the degree of revelation that would have to be imparted to them in order to secure their salvation would have to be so stunning that their freedom to disobey would be effectively removed.” But as Talbott notes, if both ignorance and the removal of ignorance are incompatible with the relevant kind of freedom, “then there can be no freedom of the relevant kind” to reject God. Robin Parry, The Evangelical Universalist, 3rd ed., pp. 30–31, adds that the irony runs deeper: “the only way for God to keep the damned continually choosing to resist him forever is by shielding them from the real consequences of their actions, thus denying them the possibility of making a fully informed decision. But by doing this, God is arguably interfering with their freedom!”

↑ 51. R. Zachary Manis, Sinners in the Presence of a Loving God, pp. 120–34 (“Providence, Freedom, and God’s Creation of the Damned”). Manis is not a universalist; he defends a traditional view of hell as eternal conscious experience of God’s presence (a “choice model” in which the damned prefer defiance to submission). What gives his concession weight is precisely this: even from within his own framework, he concludes that “Molinism and universalism may well be a match made in heaven, Molinism and anti-universalism are, if not quite a match made in hell, at least ill-wed.” The anti-universalist Molinist must accept either that God does not do everything in His power to save everyone (compromising divine goodness) or that there is no feasible world in which all are saved (a claim Manis calls “metaphysically dubious at best”).

↑ 52. Robin Parry, The Evangelical Universalist, 3rd ed., pp. 31–32, drawing on Eric Reitan (“A Guarantee of Universal Salvation?”; “Universalism and Autonomy”; “Human Freedom and the Impossibility of Eternal Damnation”). Reitan’s penny analogy shows that even if each individual choice retains a libertarian element, the cumulative outcome over infinite time converges on universal salvation. Parry notes that “even if the odds are changed to, say, a 1 percent chance,” the argument still holds given enough time. The analogy respects the random, indeterminate element in libertarian choice at each step while showing that the aggregate result is overwhelmingly certain.

The Choice-and-Freedom Texts

A. The Argument on the Table

B. Why It Has Force

C. The Response

1. The Hope Keeps Freedom; It Does Not Override It

2. Middle Knowledge Makes Free Certainty Possible

3. A Free “No” Is Real but Not Necessarily Final

4. Informed Freedom Changes Everything

5. The Honest Residue

D. Engagement with Specific Scholars

E. Counter-Objections

F. Conclusion and the Boundary

Notes