Chapter 31
The Honesty Argument and the Nature of Conditional Warning
If a parent warns a child away from a cliff, and there is a net at the bottom, is the parent a liar? Most people would say no. The cliff is real. The fall would hurt. The warning is sincere. But the child is also loved by someone who has prepared a rescue.
That simple picture sits at the heart of one of the most pointed objections to Christian universalism. And I want to take it seriously, because it touches something I care about as much as the critic does: the honesty of Jesus Christ.
Jesus warned us about hell. He did it often, and He did it gravely. He spoke of a fire that is not quenched. He spoke of the narrow gate and the broad road that leads to destruction. He told His listeners that it would be better to lose a hand or an eye than to be thrown into Gehenna (Greek Geenna, the valley of burning).1 No honest reader can soften these words into nothing. I do not want to soften them. I believe they are true.
The question is what follows from their truth. Germain Grisez and Peter F. Ryan, two Catholic moral philosophers, pressed the argument in a sharp form. McClymond picks it up and uses it against the evangelical universalism of Robin Parry.2 The claim is plain: if no one finally ends in hell, then Jesus' warnings described a danger that does not really exist. And a warning about a nonexistent danger is either a mistake or a lie. Jesus does not make mistakes, and He does not lie. So hell must be final for at least some.
I hear the weight of this argument. It does not come from a scholar who misunderstands universalism. It comes from serious believers who revere the same Christ I revere and who think that my position, if it were right, would make Him less than truthful. That charge stings, and it should sting. I want to sit with it before I answer it.
The Honesty Argument in McClymond’s Own Words
McClymond writes: “Jesus repeatedly warned of the danger of refusing God’s offer of grace and the peril of delaying one’s response.” He then quotes Grisez and Ryan: “Jesus would have been dishonest had he tried to motivate people by warnings that were not truthful information about their prospects if they failed to heed his warnings.”3
— Michael McClymond, The Devil’s Redemption, 2:997
I want to grant two things up front. First, the truthfulness of Christ is not negotiable. If universalism required me to say that Jesus spoke falsely, I would abandon universalism before I would say that. Second, a warning about a danger that truly cannot happen would be hollow. The whole question, then, is whether universalism turns Jesus' warnings into that kind of lie. I am going to argue that it does not.
This argument has force because it holds two things that every Christian holds: Jesus is truthful, and His words carry weight. If His warnings mean nothing, then His authority means nothing. No one who takes Jesus seriously can shrug at this.
And Grisez and Ryan push the point further. They argue that warnings are a kind of promise about consequences.4 "If you do not repent, you will perish." That sentence looks like a conditional prediction. If the condition is met (no repentance) and the consequence never arrives (no one perishes), then the prediction was false. A false prediction from the lips of the Son of God is a scandal.
Add to this the sheer intensity of Jesus' language. He does not speak of hell in cool, measured tones. He says it would be better to have a millstone hung around your neck and be drowned in the sea than to cause a little one to stumble.5 He says to fear the One who can destroy both soul and body in Gehenna.6 He paints a picture of worms and fire.7 That kind of language does not sound like a description of something temporary. It sounds final.
And the warnings are not rare. They run through the Gospels: the broad road to destruction (Matthew 7:13), the tree thrown into the fire (Matthew 7:19), the weeds gathered and burned (Matthew 13:40–42). Again and again, Jesus returns to the theme of a final reckoning that sorts and separates. A universalism that cannot take these words seriously has no right to call itself biblical.
Against the esoteric and sentimental versions of universalism, this objection lands hard. If someone says that hell is just a metaphor, or that judgment is an illusion, or that the fire-language is a relic of a primitive age, then Grisez and Ryan are right to say that Jesus has been made a peddler of empty threats. Any universalism that drains the warnings of their real content deserves this charge.
Plain Words
Conditional statement: a sentence of the form “if X, then Y”—the outcome depends on what happens first. Performative language: words that do not just describe but do something—a warning is not a weather report; it is an act that aims to change the hearer’s behavior. Prophecy of doom: a biblical announcement of coming judgment, often conditional on the hearer’s response.
The question, then, is whether conservative biblical universalism falls under the same charge. I do not think it does. And the reason is simpler than the objection expects.
The first thing to say is the most important. On the view this book defends, hell is real. The judgment is real. The fire is real. The suffering is real.
This is not a metaphor. The purifying fire of God's judgment (the fire that this book identifies with the divine presence itself; see Chapter 24) genuinely awaits those who refuse grace in this life. It is genuinely terrible. No one walks through it lightly. No one looks back on it and calls it nothing. The warnings Jesus gave describe a road that people really travel, and the suffering on that road is real.8
This is the place where the universalism this book defends parts company with the sentimental version. The "everyone's basically fine" brand of universalism does empty the warnings. It says there is no fire. Conservative biblical universalism says there is a fire, and it burns, and you should do everything in your power to avoid it. The difference between the two positions is the difference between a cliff with no bottom and a cliff with a very hard landing. Both are worth warning about. Both deserve fear.
When Jesus says, "Unless you repent, you will all likewise perish," He is telling the truth.9 The unrepentant really do perish. The judgment really does fall on them. The universalist hope is not that the judgment never comes. It is that even after judgment falls, God's love and the power of the cross keep working until every soul freely yields.10
Here is the move I think the honesty argument misses. It treats Jesus' warnings as unconditional predictions: "Some of you will end in hell forever, and that is a fixed fact about the future." But that is not how biblical warnings work. They are conditional: "If you continue on this road, this is where it leads."
A conditional statement is honest when the condition-and-consequence link is real. "If you touch that stove, you will be burned." That is true and honest even if I then grab your hand before you touch it. The connection between touching and burning is real. The warning was sincere. What changed was not the truth of the warning but the outcome, because something intervened. In this case, love intervened.11
The Bible gives us a case so clear that it reads like a test of this very principle: Jonah and Nineveh.
“Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!” (Jonah 3:4, ESV)
That is about as unconditional as a warning gets. No "unless." No "if." Just a flat declaration: forty days, and you are done. And Nineveh repented, and God relented, and Nineveh was not overthrown.12
Was Jonah a liar? Was God dishonest for sending a warning that did not come to pass? No one says so. The warning was the means God used to bring about the repentance. The threat was real. The city was in real danger. The destruction would have come if they had not turned. And the very act of warning was part of God's plan to save them.
Notice something else about the Jonah story. Jonah himself was angry that the warning did not come true. He wanted the destruction to fall. He thought mercy made him look foolish. God's answer was patient and pointed: "Should I not pity Nineveh, that great city?" (Jonah 4:11). The book of Jonah ends with a question, not a theorem. And the question is about the reach of mercy, not the mechanics of threat fulfillment. The whole book stands as a rebuke to those who think a warning that is not carried out to the letter is a failure.
The Jonah Principle
God sent Jonah to announce destruction. Nineveh repented. The destruction did not come. No one calls the warning dishonest. The warning was the means by which God accomplished mercy. If a warning can be sincere when repentance averts the outcome, then the mere fact that an outcome is averted does not make the warning a lie.
Jeremiah states the principle in general terms:
“If at any time I declare concerning a nation or a kingdom, that I will pluck up and break down and destroy it, and if that nation, concerning which I have spoken, turns from its evil, I will relent of the disaster that I intended to do to it.” (Jeremiah 18:7–8, ESV)
This is not a special case. It is a standing principle of how God's warnings work. A divine threat of judgment is always open to mercy. The warning is not less honest for that. It is more honest, because it tells the truth about a real danger while leaving room for the character of the One who warns.13
Grisez and Ryan treat warnings as descriptions of fixed future facts. But that is not what a biblical warning is. A biblical warning is a speech act. It does something. It aims at a result. And the result it aims at is repentance.14
Think about how Jesus frames His warnings. "Unless you repent, you will all likewise perish" (Luke 13:3). The word "unless" is doing all the work. Jesus is not reporting what will happen. He is pressing the hearer to act. The warning is a tool of rescue, not a record of doom.
Thomas Talbott makes this point sharply. He argues that Jesus' warnings function as conditional prophecies, not as descriptions of a settled future.15 The prophet does not say, "This is what will happen no matter what." The prophet says, "This is what will happen if you do not turn." The whole point of the warning is that the hearer might turn. If no one could possibly avoid the threatened end, the warning would be cruel, not honest. It would taunt people with a fate they cannot escape.
We see this again with Hezekiah. Through Isaiah, God told the king: "Set your house in order, for you shall die and not recover" (2 Kings 20:1). Hezekiah prayed. God added fifteen years to his life.16 Was Isaiah's word dishonest? No. The word described the real trajectory. Prayer changed the trajectory. And the word was part of what moved Hezekiah to pray.
Or consider Moses at Sinai. God told Moses He would destroy Israel for the golden calf and start over. Moses interceded. God relented (Exodus 32:9–14). Was God's threat a bluff? No. The threat described what Israel deserved. The intercession opened a door the threat alone could not. Warning, prayer, and mercy worked together toward an outcome no single piece could produce alone.
The pattern is consistent. Prophetic doom-sayings are God's way of provoking people to repent, pray, and turn. They are honest about the real consequences of a real path. They are not locked-in forecasts that must come true in order to be true.17
Here is a point the critic may not expect. This principle is not a universalist invention. Thomas Schreiner and Ardel Caneday, two conservative Calvinist scholars, argue in The Race Set Before Us that God uses warnings as means to bring about perseverance. On their Calvinist reading, no true believer will ever actually perish, yet the warnings about damnation are genuine. They state plainly that the truthfulness of a warning does not depend on whether the thing warned about actually comes to pass.17b If Calvinists can hold that God sincerely warns the elect of damnation while intending that none of them will perish, the universalist can hold the same about all people. The logic is identical. Only the scope has widened.
Kenneth Keathley, from within the Molinist tradition, notes that prophecies throughout Scripture were given in conditional terms so that the dire outcomes would not have to come to pass.17c William Lane Craig goes further, arguing that Schreiner and Caneday's view implicitly relies on divine middle knowledge (God's knowledge of what each person would freely do in any given situation): God knows what means, including warnings, will keep His people on course.17d If divine middle knowledge is the engine behind sincere-but-averted warnings, then the universalist hope has a ready-made home for the same principle on a universal scale (see Chapter 26 and Chapter 28).
Now look at what Jesus actually says, and notice what He does not say.
He warns of the fire. He warns of the worm. He warns of the outer darkness. He warns of the weeping and the gnashing of teeth. Every one of these images is fearsome. Not one of them specifies the claim "and this will never, ever end for any person who enters it."18
That is the disputed point. The warnings establish the severity and the reality of judgment. They do not, by themselves, establish its eternal duration. That extra claim comes from a reading of the word usually translated "eternal" (Greek aiōnios, which can mean "pertaining to the age to come" rather than "unending"; see Chapter 22).19 And it comes from a theological assumption: that once judgment falls, mercy stops. But Scripture never says mercy stops. The cross does not expire.
Mark 9:48 speaks of fire that is "not quenched" (Greek asbestos, "unquenchable"). That word means the fire cannot be put out by the person in it. It does not mean the fire burns forever without purpose. Isaiah 66:24, which Jesus is quoting, describes the fate of dead bodies, not living souls in unending torment.20 The fire does its work, and its work is thorough. No one quenches it from outside. But the question of whether its purpose is restorative or merely retributive is exactly what is being debated.
In fact, the very next verse in Mark points in a direction the traditionalist reading cannot easily absorb. After the fearsome warning about the worm and the fire, Jesus adds: "For everyone will be salted with fire" (Mark 9:49). That word "for" (Greek gar) ties the statement back to the Gehenna warning. Robin Parry and George Sidney Hurd both observe that if everyone must pass through eschatological fire, then Gehenna is one mode of purification, clearly the mode to avoid at all costs.20b The warnings remain urgent. But the fire has a purpose, and the purpose is not endless torment. It is purification.
The honesty argument assumes that the warnings mean "endless conscious torment with no hope of release." If that is what they mean, then the argument follows. But the book has been arguing, chapter by chapter, that this is not what they mean. The warnings mean that the fire is real, the danger is severe, and the road through judgment is dreadful. None of that requires the fire to burn without purpose or without end.21
One more thing needs to be said, because the honesty argument has a deeper edge. It whispers: if everyone is saved in the end, then nothing is really at stake. The warnings are paper tigers.
But that is not true. Even on the universalist reading, the stakes are enormous.
The person who refuses grace in this life really does face the fire. The suffering is not a stage effect. The years of rebellion, the damage done to others, the corrosion of the soul by sin, the agony of standing before the holy God with nowhere to hide — all of that is real.22 The person who heeds the warning and repents now avoids all of it. The person who does not heed it walks straight into it.
Imagine a doctor who warns a patient: "If you do not stop drinking, your liver will fail." The patient does not stop. The liver fails. Months of agony follow. A transplant saves his life. Was the doctor dishonest? Of course not. The warning described a real danger. The rescue does not undo the suffering that happened on the way.23
I want to press this point, because it matters pastorally. The universalist hope is sometimes caricatured as if it means nothing bad ever happens. That is not what I believe. What I believe is that the worst suffering a soul can experience is to stand before the holy God in unrepentant sin, and that Jesus used every vivid image He had to warn us away from it. The fire burns. The darkness is real. The weeping is real. The only thing the universalist hope adds is that the fire is not the last word. But the fire is every bit as terrible as Jesus said it was.
The Stakes Are Real
A warning does not become dishonest because love also prepares a rescue. The suffering is real. The loss is real. The years spent in the fire are years that could have been spent in worship. No one who takes the universalist hope seriously should speak of judgment lightly. The hope of final mercy does not erase the horror of the road that leads through fire.
So the warnings are not empty. They describe a real danger, a real road, and real suffering. They call the hearer to repent now and avoid the worst. That the worst is not the absolute last word does not make the warning dishonest. It makes the God who warns a God who does not give up on His creatures even after they have walked the road He begged them not to walk.24
McClymond's use of the Grisez-Ryan argument carries weight because the two Catholic philosophers press the point with care. Grisez (1929–2018) was a leading Catholic moral philosopher at Mount St. Mary's University, and Ryan, a Jesuit, was his longtime collaborator. Their article "Hell and Hope for Salvation" argued that both universalism and double predestination undermine the Christian's ability to hope for salvation in the way Scripture calls for.25 I respect its seriousness.
Where I think they go wrong is in treating all warnings as predictions. A prediction says, "This is what will happen." A warning says, "This is what will happen if you do not change." The Bible makes this distinction clearly in Jeremiah 18 and in the book of Jonah. Once you see it, the honesty argument does not reach the universalist hope. It reaches only a universalism that denies the reality of judgment.
Robin Parry, the evangelical universalist McClymond is directly engaging in this section of The Devil's Redemption, admits candidly that Jesus did not teach universalism. Parry says his aim is the "more modest one of showing that what [Jesus] did teach does not formally contradict universalist claims."26 McClymond reads this as a lawyerly dodge. I read it differently. Parry is being honest about the shape of the evidence: Jesus' warnings establish the severity and reality of judgment, and they do not by themselves settle whether judgment is endless or restorative. That is not dodging. That is reading carefully.27
In the third edition of The Evangelical Universalist, Parry makes a further point. He notes, following Talbott, that Jesus left many truths for the Spirit to unfold later (John 16:12). If it was hard enough for the early church to accept grace extending to the Gentiles, how much more scandalous would universal salvation have been? Jesus neither affirmed nor denied it. But if the Spirit-given revelation of Paul leads in universalist directions, we should read Jesus' warnings within that larger framework, not against it.27b Parry also observes that in preaching contexts, the singular focus of Jesus' warnings should remain on the urgency of the moment. But in doctrinal reflection, we may set those warnings within God's wider saving purpose without weakening the warnings themselves.27c This pastoral care has ancient roots. Parry notes that Origen himself recognized that some truths are best disclosed carefully, lest lazy hearers misuse the hope as a license to sin.27d A warning can carry its full weight even when the one who gives it knows that mercy reaches further than the warning itself discloses.
Talbott brings the conditional-warning argument into sharper focus. He argues that the function of Jesus' warnings is to call people to repentance, not to describe an unalterable future state. A warning that cannot be escaped is not a warning; it is a sentence. And Jesus is clearly calling people to escape.28 Talbott also draws out a distinction that matters here: the difference between a warning about a possible outcome and a prediction of an inevitable one. A parent who says "You will hurt yourself if you climb that tree" is issuing a warning, not a prophecy. The parent is not committed to the claim that the child will inevitably fall. The parent is committed to the claim that the tree is genuinely dangerous. Jesus' warnings work the same way.
In his broader theology, Talbott argues that God has a "two-fold strategy" for sinners. God sent His Son to pioneer the way of repentance and sacrifice. But for those who refuse that path, God has a second approach: in their distance from Him, they will experience His love as a consuming fire, as wrath and punishment, and in the end as a means of correction.28b If that is right, then Jesus' warnings describe the second strategy. They tell the truth about a road that people really walk. And the road, however dreadful, is still within the reach of God's love.
George Sidney Hurd presses the same point from the biblical data, noting that God’s prophetic threats in the Old Testament are overwhelmingly conditional and that the New Testament nowhere suspends that pattern.29 In The Universal Solution, Hurd argues that God’s warnings are instruments of His "severe mercy" toward the rebellious. Even when His people fail, God's gifts and callings remain irrevocable (Romans 11:29). The warnings are how God holds onto His own, not evidence that He lets them go.29b
One more voice deserves mention, because it comes from a quarter no universalist would think to cite. As Kenneth Keathley notes, Schreiner and Caneday hold that the warnings addressed to believers are genuine even though no true believer will perish. Dale Moody criticized this as "Arminianism that has lost its nerve," reducing warnings to bluffing.29c But that is exactly the charge against the universalist reading. The universalist answer is the same: the warnings are not bluffs, because the danger is real, the consequences are real, and the warnings are the means by which God moves people to turn. The universalist extends the scope of the rescue. The logic of the warning does not change.
Gerry Beauchemin, in Hope Beyond Hell, adds a further layer by drawing attention to the prophet Jeremiah’s summary of divine wrath: “The fierce anger of the Lord will not turn back until He fully accomplishes the purposes of His heart” (Jeremiah 30:24, NIV). That word “until” reveals something about the nature of divine wrath. It is measured. It has a goal. It ends when the goal is reached.29d Sharon Baker notes that Jesus regularly uses hyperbolic language to shock His hearers, much as He demands that followers "hate" their families (Luke 14:26) without anyone taking the command literally. The same rhetorical strategy applies to the Gehenna sayings: they drive home the urgency of the demand, not the physics of the afterlife.29e
Even R. Zachary Manis, writing from within the ECT tradition, observes that the New Testament contains texts that seem to contradict each other on whether Jesus came to judge. John 3:17 says He came "not to condemn the world" while John 9:39 says He came "for judgment." Manis resolves the tension through the divine-presence model: Christ's presence is both salvation and judgment, depending on the posture of the one who encounters it.29f If that is right, then warning and mercy are not opposites. They are two faces of the same love.
On the other side, Derek Tidball argues that the New Testament's "accent falls on the significance of this life and the decisions made here."30 I think Tidball is partly right. This life matters enormously, and the decisions made here have real consequences (see Chapter 14). What I deny is the further claim that decisions made here are the absolute and final word on a person's eternal destiny, with no possibility of mercy beyond the grave. That further claim is the disputed point, not a settled datum.
“Jonah’s Warning Was Averted by Repentance Before Death—That Does Not Transfer to Postmortem Hope”
This is a fair point. Nineveh repented before the forty days were up, while they were still alive and free to choose. The universalist hope involves people repenting after death, often after severe judgment. Can the Jonah principle stretch that far?
I think it can, because the principle at work in Jonah is not about the timing of repentance. It is about the nature of warnings. The principle is: a warning is a sincere conditional statement, and an averted outcome does not make the warning false. Whether the repentance comes before death, at the moment of death, or in the presence of God after death does not change the logic. The warning was true. The repentance was real. The outcome was averted by mercy. What matters is whether the warning described a real danger, and it did.31
"If everyone is saved, the warning's threat is idle." This objection says: if you know in advance that the fire is not the final stop, then the warning has no teeth. But this confuses the universalist hope with the hearer's knowledge. The hearer does not know that mercy will reach beyond the grave. The warning comes to a person who does not know what God will do next. It is honest information about a real danger. The fact that God has purposes beyond the warning does not make the warning itself false any more than a surgeon's warning about the pain of surgery is made false by the healing that follows.32
And notice: even if the hearer did know the full universalist hope, the warning would still have teeth, because the suffering is real. Knowing that surgery will save your life does not make the surgery painless. Knowing that the fire is restorative does not make you want to walk into it.
“Jesus’ ‘Better to Lose an Eye’ Implies a Fate Worth Any Cost to Avoid—That Means Final”
Jesus says: “If your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away. For it is better that you lose one of your members than that your whole body be thrown into Gehenna” (Matthew 5:29, ESV).33 The objection reads this as proof that the alternative to self-discipline is a final, hopeless fate. Why else would Jesus urge such extreme measures?
But the language of extreme avoidance does not require the consequence to be endless. A doctor who says, “It is better to amputate now than to let the infection spread and spend months in agony,” is not saying the agony would last forever. The doctor is saying the agony is so terrible that any cost to avoid it is worth paying. Jesus is saying the same: the fire is so real and so dreadful that any present sacrifice is worth making to avoid it. The urgency does not prove the duration. It proves the severity.34
Here is where I stand after sitting with this argument.
Jesus' warnings are true, grave, and sincere. They describe a real danger. They call for real repentance. They are not metaphors, not scare tactics, and not empty threats. The fire they describe is a fire that real people really enter, and the suffering they describe is suffering that real people really endure.
But a warning does not have to describe a hopeless, unending fate in order to be honest. It has to describe a real and avoidable danger. And the judgment of God is exactly that: real, avoidable in its worst form by present repentance, and dreadful beyond words for those who refuse. That God in His mercy, in His own time and in His unveiled presence, may yet bring even the warned soul through the fire to faith does not make the warning false. It makes the God who warned a God whose love does not stop at the edge of the fire He told you to avoid.35
Empty Threat, or Sincere Warning?
The honesty argument asks: if hell is not final, was Jesus lying? The answer depends on what kind of universalism you hold. A universalism that says the fire is not real, that judgment is an illusion, or that sin has no real consequences — yes, that universalism makes the warnings dishonest. McClymond and Grisez and Ryan are right to reject it. But a universalism that says the fire is real, the suffering is real, and God’s love keeps working even after the fire falls — that universalism does not make Jesus a liar. It makes Him a warn-er whose love is larger than the fire. The objection wounds the counterfeit. It does not reach the biblical hope.
Jonah preached destruction. God brought mercy. No one calls Jonah a liar. Jesus warned of fire. The universalist hope is that mercy will reach even through the fire. The warnings keep all their weight. They lose only the claim that the fire has no purpose and no end, which is the disputed point, not the given one.
I sometimes think about the parent with the cliff. Suppose the child does fall. Suppose the net catches the child, but the fall is terrifying and the landing is painful. Does the child say, "You lied to me about the cliff"? No. The child says, "You warned me. I should have listened. Thank God for the net." And the parent says, "I warned you because I love you. The net was there because I love you. Both were true at the same time."
Read McClymond's sentence again: Jesus warned of the danger of refusing God's offer of grace. Yes. And grace is the word that matters. The One who warns is the One who offers grace. If His grace is large enough to reach beyond the grave, beyond the fire, beyond the worst that sin can do, then the warning is not contradicted by the grace. The warning is one of the tools grace uses to bring people home. The knock on the door. The voice that says: turn now, and spare yourself what is coming. And if you do not turn now, the knock does not stop.36
That is not dishonesty. That is love that will not quit. And the warnings are the first word of that love, spoken in dead earnest, by a Christ who meant every syllable. (See also Chapter 14 for the "no difference" worry, and Chapter 22 for the word-study on the age-words.)
↑ 1. The Greek Geenna (Γέεννα) derives from the Hebrew Gē Hinnōm, the Valley of Hinnom south of Jerusalem, associated with the burning of children to Molech (2 Kings 23:10; Jeremiah 7:31–32) and with the prophetic imagery of God’s consuming judgment. By the Second Temple period, Gehenna had become the standard Jewish term for the place of fiery punishment after death. See Chapter 32 for a full treatment of Jesus’ Gehenna sayings.
↑ 2. McClymond, The Devil’s Redemption, 2:997. The Grisez–Ryan argument is deployed within McClymond’s extended engagement with Robin Parry’s evangelical universalism (§11.4).
↑ 3. McClymond, The Devil’s Redemption, 2:997, quoting Germain Grisez and Peter F. Ryan, S.J., “Hell and Hope for Salvation,” New Blackfriars 95, no. 1059 (2014): 606–615.
↑ 4. Grisez and Ryan treat divine warnings as truthful conditional statements about the consequences that will follow if the hearer persists in sin. Their argument is that a universalist cannot take these conditionals seriously, because on the universalist view the threatened consequence is never truly final. See Grisez and Ryan, “Hell and Hope for Salvation,” 608–610.
↑ 5. Matthew 18:6; Mark 9:42; Luke 17:2.
↑ 6. Matthew 10:28. The Greek is apolesai (απολέσαι), “to destroy, to bring to ruin.” The word denotes a destruction or undoing, not necessarily endless preservation in torment.
↑ 7. Mark 9:48, quoting Isaiah 66:24. The imagery of the worm (skōlēx, σκώληξ) and unquenchable fire (asbestos, ἄσβεστος) originally described the fate of corpses in the Valley of Hinnom, not living souls in conscious torment. The image is of consuming judgment, not endless preservation.
↑ 8. The divine-presence model of hell, developed at length in Chapter 24, holds that the “lake of fire” is God’s own unveiled presence, experienced as torment by those who resist His love. The suffering is real precisely because the presence is real. R. Zachary Manis develops a similar model from within an ECT framework; see Chapter 24 for discussion.
↑ 9. Luke 13:3, 5. Jesus repeats the warning twice in this passage for emphasis.
↑ 10. The universalist hope rests on texts such as 1 Corinthians 15:22–28 (“as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive”), Colossians 1:19–20 (God reconciling “all things” through the cross), and 1 Timothy 2:3–6 (God desires all to be saved). See Chapter 25.
↑ 11. The analogy of a sincere conditional warning whose outcome is averted by a subsequent act of love is developed by several universalist writers. Thomas Talbott, The Inescapable Love of God, 2nd ed. (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2014), treats Jesus’ warnings as conditional prophecies whose function is to provoke repentance, not to describe an unalterable future state.
↑ 12. Jonah 3:4–10. Jonah’s proclamation is one of the clearest cases of a divine warning that did not come to pass because the hearers responded. God “relented of the disaster that he had said he would do to them, and he did not do it” (Jonah 3:10).
↑ 13. Jeremiah 18:7–8. This passage establishes the general principle that God’s pronouncements of judgment are conditioned on the hearer’s response. It is the Old Testament’s own explanation of how prophetic doom-sayings work.
↑ 14. On the performative nature of prophetic speech, see J. L. Austin’s foundational work on speech acts, How to Do Things with Words (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962). Austin distinguishes locutionary acts (what a sentence says), illocutionary acts (what a sentence does, such as warning, promising, commanding), and perlocutionary effects (the result the act aims to produce in the hearer). A warning’s illocutionary aim is to provoke avoidance; its truth does not depend on the threatened event occurring.
↑ 15. Thomas Talbott, The Inescapable Love of God, 2nd ed. (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2014). Talbott argues that Jesus’ eschatological warnings function as conditional prophecies within the broader context of God’s revealed purpose to reconcile all things.
↑ 16. 2 Kings 20:1–6; Isaiah 38:1–5. Hezekiah’s case is a second clear biblical example of a divine pronouncement of doom that was rescinded in response to prayer, confirming the conditional nature of such pronouncements.
↑ 17. The pattern of conditional judgment-oracle runs throughout the prophets: Amos 7:1–6 (twice God “relented” in response to the prophet’s intercession); Joel 2:13–14 (“Who knows whether he will not turn and relent?”); Exodus 32:9–14 (God relents of the threatened destruction of Israel after Moses intercedes). The prophetic tradition is saturated with the principle that declared judgment is open to mercy.
↑ 17b. Thomas R. Schreiner and Ardel B. Caneday, The Race Set Before Us: A Biblical Theology of Perseverance and Assurance (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2001), as summarized in Kenneth Keathley, Salvation and Sovereignty: A Molinist Approach (Nashville: B&H Academic, 2010), 179–184. Schreiner and Caneday liken biblical warnings to road signs that “caution against conceivable consequences, not probable consequences.” They state that conditional warnings “in themselves do not function to indicate anything about possible failure or fulfillment. Instead, the conditional warnings appeal to our minds to conceive or imagine the invariable consequences that come to all who pursue a course of apostasy from Christ.” Their key principle: “The truthfulness of a warning or admonition does not depend on whether or not the thing supposed may come to pass.” This is a Calvinist argument for the very principle the universalist relies on.
↑ 17c. Keathley, Salvation and Sovereignty, 35–36. Keathley notes that “often prophecies were given in conditional terms with the intent that they would succeed as warnings so that the prophecies would not have to come to pass. Occasionally the conditionality was implied rather than stated. The classic example is Jonah’s prophecy to Nineveh of its impending destruction.” See also his treatment of Isaiah 38:1–5 (Hezekiah) and Amos 7:1–6 on the same page range.
↑ 17d. William Lane Craig, as discussed in Keathley, Salvation and Sovereignty, 186–187. Craig argues that Schreiner and Caneday’s position implicitly employs divine middle knowledge (Latin scientia media): God knows what means, including warnings, will keep His people on course and deploys those means within a world He has chosen to actualize. Craig writes: “The classical defender of perseverance must, it seems, if he is to distinguish his view from Molinism, hold to the intrinsic efficacy of God’s grace and, hence, the causal impossibility of the believer’s apostasy. But in that case, the warnings of Scripture against the danger of apostasy seem to become otiose and unreal.” Craig concludes that the Means-of-Salvation view is, in fact, a Molinist perspective. If he is right, then the principle at work in sincere-but-averted warnings is the very principle of middle knowledge that this book develops in Chapters 26 and 28.
↑ 18. This is the point Robin Parry makes when he writes that his aim is not to show that Jesus taught universalism, but to show that His teachings do not formally contradict it. See McClymond, The Devil’s Redemption, 2:962, quoting Parry. The warnings establish the severity; the duration is the interpreted element.
↑ 19. See Chapter 22 for the full word-study on aiōn, aiōnios, and the Hebrew ʼōlām. The claim that aiōnios can denote the quality of the age to come rather than unending duration is not a modern invention; it has ancient support in patristic usage and in standard lexical entries.
↑ 20. Isaiah 66:24. In the original context, the “worm” and “fire” consume the corpses of the rebels after God’s final victory. The bodies are dead; the imagery is of the completeness and thoroughness of God’s judgment, not of living souls preserved in agony. See Chapter 32 for a fuller treatment.
↑ 20b. Robin Parry (Gregory MacDonald), The Evangelical Universalist, 3rd ed. (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2026), 160–161. Parry writes: “Presumably, if everyone must pass through eschatological fire to enter the kingdom (compare Matt 3:11), then Gehenna is only one mode of such purification and, clearly, the mode to avoid at all costs.” He notes that the connecting word “for” (gar) in Mark 9:49 ties the “salted with fire” statement directly to the preceding Gehenna warning in vv. 42–48. Craig Evans objects that Gehenna cannot be purifying because there is no escape from it, but Parry observes that this begs the question. George Sidney Hurd draws attention to the same passage, citing Simcha Paul Raphael (a professor of Jewish studies at Temple University), who notes that in Jewish tradition “Gehenna served as a realm of purgation and purification. . . . And after this experience, the soul is sufficiently purified and able to enter the supernatural postmortem realm of Gan Eden.” Hurd notes that while many rabbis believed Gehenna functioned as a place of purification for some, Jesus extends it to all. See also Chapter 24 on the purifying-fire model.
↑ 21. The distinction between the severity of judgment (which the warnings establish) and the duration of judgment (which is the disputed point) is central to the universalist reading of these texts. It is not a weakening of the warnings; it is a refusal to add to them what they do not say.
↑ 22. On the reality and severity of the fire, see Chapter 12 (universalism does not trivialize evil) and Chapter 24 (the lake of fire as God’s purifying presence).
↑ 23. The medical analogy has limits, of course. The fire of God’s judgment is not a mechanical procedure; it is the experience of standing before infinite holiness in a state of rebellion. But the structural point holds: a warning about real suffering is not made false by a rescue that follows the suffering.
↑ 24. This is the pastoral heart of the reply. See Chapter 14 for the fuller answer to the worry that universalism empties the present of seriousness.
↑ 25. Germain Grisez and Peter F. Ryan, S.J., “Hell and Hope for Salvation,” New Blackfriars 95, no. 1059 (2014): 606–615. Their article supplements Ralph Martin’s Will Many Be Saved? What Vatican II Actually Teaches and Its Implications for the New Evangelization (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2012).
↑ 26. McClymond, The Devil’s Redemption, 2:962, quoting Robin Parry.
↑ 27. McClymond calls Parry’s approach “a lawyerly approach to the Bible” (The Devil’s Redemption, 2:962). The description has some bite: Parry does treat the text with the precision of a legal brief. But careful reading and lawyerly evasion are not the same thing. The question is whether Parry’s distinction is a real one or an artifice, and I think it is real.
↑ 27b. Parry, The Evangelical Universalist, 3rd ed., 160. Parry writes: “We also need to recall, as Tom Talbott reminds us, that there were many important truths that Jesus did not explicitly teach his disciples during his earthly ministry but that became clearer in the following years—truths they were not ready for at the time (John 16:12).” He continues: “Jesus neither explicitly affirmed nor denied universal salvation. However, we should not infer from this that universalism is an un-Christian idea incompatible with Jesus’ ministry. If later Spirit-given revelation leads in universalist directions, as I have argued it does, then we need to understand the ministry of Christ in that light.”
↑ 27c. Parry, The Evangelical Universalist, 3rd ed., 167. Parry writes: “The singular focus of such biblical warnings is on the importance of acting now, before it is too late. And in our preaching of such texts that should normally be our focus too. . . . In doctrinal and systematic theological discussions we may well wish to set such warnings within a wider universalist framework, but in the context of preaching for obedience to God in specific matters such mitigation is often unnecessary and can even be unhelpful.” Parry also notes the important principle that “salvation after judgment is possible” (167), and that we cannot go from the claim that failure to repent leads to judgment to the claim that this is the end of the story.
↑ 27d. Parry, The Evangelical Universalist, 3rd ed., 160, citing Origen, Commentary on Romans 5.1.7 (via Tom Greggs, “Exclusivist or Universalist?,” 321). Origen writes that Paul “is thus acting as a wise steward of the word” to “conceal and obscure the goodness of God in the universalist passages . . . in order that the weaker are not tempted to fall back into sin.” Parry observes that Origen, like Paul, is a pastoral theologian: “There are contexts in which bringing out the full glory of universalist hope is appropriate and contexts in which it is not.”
↑ 28. Thomas Talbott, The Inescapable Love of God, 2nd ed. (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2014). Talbott’s treatment of warnings as instruments of God’s redemptive purpose is among the most developed in the universalist literature.
↑ 28b. Talbott, The Inescapable Love of God, as discussed in R. Zachary Manis, Sinners in the Hands of a Loving God: The Scandalous Promise of the Very Good News (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2019), 322. Manis summarizes Talbott’s “two-fold strategy”: “On the one hand, he sent his Son in the flesh to defeat, in some unexplained mystical way, the powers of darkness and to pioneer the way of salvation . . . a way of repentance, forgiveness, and personal sacrifice. On the other hand, for those who refuse to step into his ordained system of repentance, forgiveness, and personal sacrifice, he has an alternative strategy: in their estrangement from God, they will experience his love as a consuming fire; that is, as wrath, as punishment, and, in the end, as a means of correction.” Manis goes on to develop his own divine-presence model of hell, which, though held within an ECT framework, carries striking affinities with the universalist reading at this point. See Chapter 24 for the full treatment of Manis’s model.
↑ 29. George Sidney Hurd argues that the conditional pattern of divine warnings runs through both testaments and that the New Testament nowhere signals a departure from this pattern. See Hurd, A Defense of Biblical Universalism: A Biblical Response to James B. De Young’s Book “Exposing Universalism”. Hurd’s treatment of the warning passages is grounded in careful interaction with the texts De Young marshals against universalism.
↑ 29b. George Sidney Hurd, The Universal Solution: Presenting Biblical Universalism as the Solution to the Debate between Calvinists and Arminians (2016), ch. 5 (“Perseverance of the Saints/Savior”), especially the sections “God’s Severe Mercy towards the Weak or Obstinately Rebellious Elect” and “Warnings under the New Covenant presuppose a Mixed Multitude.” Hurd writes that even when God’s people “show themselves to be unfaithful, God doesn’t change — He remains faithful” (citing 2 Timothy 2:13), and he pairs this with the irrevocability of God’s gifts and calling (Romans 11:29). On this reading, warnings are instruments of God’s faithfulness, not evidence of His readiness to abandon.
↑ 29c. The Moody quotation (“Arminianism that has lost its nerve”) appears in Keathley, Salvation and Sovereignty, 184. Keathley also notes that Schreiner and Caneday “strongly affirm that a Christian can know he is saved based on God’s promises, although various New Testament warning passages threaten him with final condemnation if he does not persevere in godly faith and life.” The structural parallel with universalism is striking: the warnings are real, the danger they describe is real, and the outcome is governed by a prior divine commitment to save.
↑ 29d. Gerry Beauchemin, Hope Beyond Hell: The Righteous Purpose of God’s Judgment (Olmito, TX: Malista Press, 2007). Beauchemin catalogs the Old Testament pattern of purposeful judgment throughout, drawing special attention to Jeremiah 30:24 (“until He fully accomplishes the purposes of His heart”) and to passages such as Psalm 119:71 (“It is good for me that I have been afflicted, that I may learn Your statutes”) and Deuteronomy 4:27–31 (“When you are in distress … you will return to the Lord … For the Lord … is a compassionate God”). The consistent pattern is that God’s wrath is measured, purposeful, and aimed at restoration.
↑ 29e. Sharon Baker, Razing Hell: Rethinking Everything You’ve Been Taught About God’s Wrath and Judgment (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2010), 134–135. Baker observes that Jesus regularly uses hyperbolic language to shock His hearers into attention, citing His demand that followers “hate” their families (Luke 14:26) as a clear case where no listener would take the command literally. She argues that the same rhetorical strategy applies to the Gehenna sayings: they use extreme imagery to drive home the urgency of the moral demand, but “we can tell when Jesus obviously uses hyperbolic language. And if the literal interpretation gives us very unusual results, we can figure that Jesus is using hyperbole or metaphor.” The diversity of the images Jesus employs (flames and outer darkness, which taken literally would be contradictory) confirms the figurative register.
↑ 29f. R. Zachary Manis, Sinners in the Hands of a Loving God, 369–370. Manis observes that several New Testament texts seem to contradict each other on whether Jesus came to judge: “God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him” (John 3:17) stands alongside “For judgment I have come into this world” (John 9:39). Manis argues that the divine-presence model resolves the tension: Christ’s presence is both salvation and judgment, experienced differently depending on the posture of the one who encounters it. If that is right, then warning of judgment and offering salvation are not opposite acts. They are two descriptions of what happens when the same holy love meets a person who has and has not yet yielded to it.
↑ 30. McClymond, The Devil’s Redemption, 2:997, summarizing Derek Tidball.
↑ 31. The objector is right that the Jonah case involves pre-mortem repentance, and the universalist hope involves postmortem repentance. The two cases are not identical. But the principle established by Jonah—that a divine warning is sincere even when the threatened outcome is averted by subsequent mercy—does not depend on the timing of the repentance. What matters is whether the warning-consequence link is real, and it is.
↑ 32. The objection might be pressed harder: “But on universalism, God knows in advance that everyone will be saved, so He knows the threat will never be carried out to finality.” The reply is that even an omniscient parent who knows the child will eventually learn the lesson still warns sincerely, because the warning is one of the means by which the learning happens. The sincerity of the warning is in its function, not in whether the warner privately expects the worst to be the last word.
↑ 33. Matthew 5:29–30; cf. Matthew 18:8–9; Mark 9:43–48.
↑ 34. The extreme-avoidance language shows that the consequence is terrible, not necessarily that it is endless. A consequence can be terrible enough to warrant any sacrifice to avoid it without being infinite in duration. The severity is what drives the urgency, and the universalist affirms the severity.
↑ 35. This is the book’s consistent position on the character of God: see Chapter 7 and Chapter 10. The God who warns is the God who loves, and neither cancels the other.
↑ 36. The image of the knock that does not stop echoes Revelation 3:20 (“Behold, I stand at the door and knock”) and anticipates the book’s conclusion in Chapter 40.