Chapter 37 — When the Cross Recedes

For thirty-six chapters I have been meeting his objections one by one. I have been granting what he gets right and showing where his charge does not reach the biblical hope. But here the posture shifts. On this point he is not wrong about a counterfeit that the biblical version escapes. He is right about something that matters to me, too. If the cross of Christ recedes from the center of any universalism, that universalism has abandoned the gospel. Full stop.

McClymond presses this charge in the capstone chapter of The Devil’s Redemption, his section on “The Problem of Grace in Christian Universalism.”¹ He sorts the entire history of universalist theology into four claims about how people are saved. Each one, he argues, replaces the free, gracious work of Christ with something else.² He frames them this way: “I am saved because I am divine” (the gnostic spark); “I am saved because I am human” (the eternal Godmanhood of Barth and the Sophiologists); “I am saved because I suffer” (the purgatorial self-expiation of the Böhmists and the restorationists); and “I am saved because God so wills it” (ultra-universalism, the fiat reversal of all consequences at death).³

Notice what is missing from every one of those sentences. The cross. In none of them is the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ doing the saving work. Calvary becomes background scenery, not the ground of forgiveness. McClymond calls this the deepest symptom of the eclipse of grace.

I have quoted McClymond at length in earlier chapters to argue with him. Here I quote him to agree.

His conclusion is blunt. All four of these approaches fail the test of biblical grace. He writes that the effort to extend grace to all has ended up undermining grace to any.³⁸ The irony is that the theology most eager to celebrate God’s generosity ends up with no real gift at all. Because if the soul returns home by its own nature, or by cosmic law, or by paying its own debt, then no one has given it anything. The cross becomes a footnote to a process that would have worked just as well without it.

His charge lands. And any universalism that lets it land has lost the right to call itself Christian.

B. Why It Has Force

McClymond did not invent a problem. He documented one. Consider what he found. William Law, George MacDonald, and Sergius Bulgakov all rejected the idea that Christ bore the penalty for human sin.⁵ They called substitutionary atonement “utterly unworthy of the character of a good and loving God.”⁶ Yet each of them then insisted that sinners must pay for their own sins in postmortem suffering. The cross was dismissed, but the payment was kept. It was simply moved from Christ to the sinner.

Bulgakov makes the problem painfully clear. He rejected any notion of “simple forgiveness” as sentimental. He wrote that sin “cannot be remitted for free, without suffering.”⁷ But if Christ’s suffering on the cross does not count as the payment, and the sinner’s own suffering does, then the sinner has become his own savior. McClymond puts it bluntly: “If I am saved because I suffer, then, in all consistency, it is not clear how or why Christ needed to suffer for me.”⁸

That sentence should stop every universalist in their tracks. I know it stopped me.

And the problem is not limited to the historical figures McClymond catalogs. It is a live temptation for every universalist today. The moment you begin to think that the scope of salvation is so wide that Christ’s atoning death is merely one way God might save, you have stepped onto the ground McClymond is warning about. I feel the pull of that temptation. I refuse it.

De Young presses the same point from a different angle. He insists that the New Testament never confuses the cause of salvation with its means. The cause is the death of Christ on the cross. The means of receiving it is faith. Love is the motivation that moved God to provide the cross, but love is not the ground of salvation.¹⁰ Universalists who elevate God’s love into the foundation and then quietly retire the cross have gotten the architecture of salvation exactly backward.

So I grant McClymond his point. Against the gnostic, the Böhmist, the Sophiological, and the ultra-universalist traditions, his charge is fatal. They have indeed let the cross recede.

The pattern repeats across the centuries McClymond surveys. In the earliest gnostic systems, the soul was a divine spark that had fallen into matter. Salvation was the spark rising back to its source. No cross needed. No forgiveness needed. The soul was never truly lost, only misplaced. The whole drama of incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection was at best a teaching tool.³⁹

In the Sophiological tradition of Russian theology, the problem took a different shape. If humanity and divinity have been united from eternity, then the Incarnation becomes less an event and more a revelation of what was always true. And if the union is eternal and necessary, then the cross is not the moment when something decisive was accomplished for sinners. It is a display of something that was already settled.⁴⁰

Even the ultra-universalists, who seem closest to a doctrine of grace, do not truly preserve it. If God simply overrides all consequences at death, then the cross might as well not have happened. You end up with a theology McClymond calls “fiat forgiveness.” No blood. No sacrifice. No cost. Just a divine decree that erases everything.⁴¹

C. The Response

This section does something different from every other chapter in this book. It does not refute McClymond. It concedes and distinguishes. The concession is real. The distinction is everything.

1. The Book Agrees, Plainly

Let me say it without qualification. Any universalism in which the cross is dispensable has abandoned the gospel.

I do not say this as a tactical retreat. I say it as a confession of faith. The cross of Jesus Christ is the ground of every person’s salvation. There is no plan B. There is no cosmic recycling program that brings souls home apart from Calvary. There is no law of spiritual return that operates whether or not Jesus died and rose. If the Son of God did not bear sin on that cross, no one is saved. Not the best person who ever lived. Not the worst.

Paul did not write that sentence as a slogan. He wrote it as a boundary. Everything the apostle preached flowed from one event: the death and resurrection of the Son of God for sinners. If that event is not at the center, nothing else holds.¹¹

McClymond is right to draw this line. I draw it with him. And I mean it. A universalism where people are “saved because they are divine,” or “saved because they suffer,” or “saved because God simply overrides everything at the end” is a universalism without the gospel. I reject every one of those versions as firmly as McClymond does.¹²

2. Biblical Universalism Is Cross-Centered

The universalism this book defends is the opposite of the cross-less versions McClymond catalogs. It does not reach its conclusion by stepping around Calvary. It reaches its conclusion through Calvary.

Here is the claim in its simplest form. Every person who will ever be saved is saved through the atoning death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. The blood of the cross purchases forgiveness. The Spirit applies that forgiveness to each heart. Faith receives it. This is true for the person who believes in a church pew at age twelve. It is true for the person who believes after death, standing in the unveiled presence of God (see Chapter 27). The timing differs. The ground never does.¹³

Notice what Paul says. Redemption is through his blood. Forgiveness is according to the riches of his grace. Not according to the riches of human nature. Not according to the sufferings of the sinner. Through the blood. That is the mechanism, and it does not change when the scope of salvation widens to include all people.¹⁴

The universality in this hope is not the universality of some impersonal spiritual law. It is the universal reach of the cross. Calvary was sufficient for the sins of the whole world (1 John 2:2). This book simply takes that sufficiency at its word. The cross reached far enough for everyone. God’s saving pursuit is patient enough to apply it to everyone. That is the claim. It starts and ends at the cross.¹⁵

George Sidney Hurd makes the same point in his response to De Young. God took the initiative, Hurd writes, sending His Son as a propitiatory sacrifice that satisfied the justice of God for the sins of the whole world. But Hurd is careful to add what many universalism-critics assume he would drop: no one experiences salvation, reconciliation, or justification apart from repentance and faith in the finished work of the cross.⁵¹ That is not the language of someone who has retired Calvary. It is the language of someone who believes the cross reached further than the tradition admits.

Hurd states this plainly in The Triumph of Mercy: the universalism he defends does not minimize the cross. On the contrary, it magnifies the centrality and the results of Christ’s work on the cross in a way that is not possible if most of those for whom Christ died are eternally lost.⁵² A wider scope does not make the cross smaller. It makes the cross bigger. Walls makes the same point from the direction of sanctification: the grace by which we are saved includes God’s work to restore us to His likeness, and sanctification is just as much the work of Christ as justification is.⁵⁸ If the fire is sanctification by grace, it is the cross doing its full work.

McClymond’s charge that universalism replaces the cross with nature, necessity, or self-expiation is answered at length in Chapter 4, Chapter 5, and Chapter 6. Each of those chapters shows that the biblical version holds none of the premises McClymond targets. Here I simply restate the conclusion: the cross is not replaced. It is central. It does the saving work.

Paul could not have been more direct about what was at stake. He told the Galatians that the cross was the only thing worth boasting about:

A universalism that tries to keep the conclusion (all are saved) while dropping the mechanism (the cross) has not extended Paul’s gospel. It has replaced it with something else. I refuse that replacement.⁴²

3. “Saved Though Never Forgiven” Is Refused

One phrase in McClymond’s argument cuts deepest: the idea that in much universalism people end up saved though never forgiven.¹⁶ Forgiveness through the blood of Christ is no longer doing the work. Something else has taken over.

I refuse that idea absolutely. There is no salvation apart from forgiveness purchased at Calvary.

The author of Hebrews was not speaking only of the Old Testament sacrificial system. He was laying down a principle about how God deals with sin. Sin is forgiven through sacrifice. The sacrifice that counts, once and for all, is the sacrifice of Christ.¹⁷

What, then, about the postmortem fire this book describes? Is it not doing the saving work that McClymond warns about? No. And this is where the distinction matters most. The fire this book affirms is not the fire of self-payment. It is the fire of God’s holy, loving presence (see Chapter 6 and Chapter 24). That fire applies the already-purchased forgiveness to the resistant heart. It does not substitute for the purchase. It delivers what the cross has already won.¹⁸ Baker captures this in her picture of final judgment: the sinner stands before God, expects wrath, and instead encounters love so searing that it burns away wickedness and purifies what remains. At the end of that encounter, the person is, in Baker’s words, “tested by fire, forgiven by grace.”⁵⁷ The fire tested. Grace forgave. The cross made the forgiving possible.

Think of it this way. A doctor purchases medicine for a patient. The patient refuses to take it. The doctor’s persistent, patient work of persuasion is not a second purchase. It is the delivery of the first one. The cross bought the cure. The fire delivers it to those who resist. The saving work is still the cross. It was always the cross.¹⁹

Bulgakov got this wrong. He rejected substitutionary atonement, then replaced it with self-expiation. The result, as McClymond shows, was a theology that could function “almost like a law of karma” apart from Christ.²⁰ This book holds the opposite. No one earns their way through the fire. No one suffers enough to pay for their own sins. The fire is painful because meeting holy love while clinging to sin is painful. But the fire does not buy pardon. Christ already did.

Gerry Beauchemin puts this with striking clarity in Hope Beyond Hell. The ransom, he writes, was paid in full for every person on earth. No one will ever have to pay again for what Christ has already paid for. The sufferings that both believers and unbelievers experience under God’s righteous judgments are remedial and retributive, not redemptive. Only Christ redeems.⁵³ That sentence captures the distinction this chapter hangs on. Remedial, not redemptive. The fire heals. The cross redeems. The first depends entirely on the second.

I want to be specific about why this matters. If the fire pays for sin, then Christ’s death was unnecessary. If Christ’s death was unnecessary, then the incarnation was a meaningless detour. And if the incarnation was a meaningless detour, the entire Christian story unravels. We are no longer talking about the gospel. We are talking about a self-help program that dresses itself in religious language.

The biblical fire works differently. It is God’s unveiled love, pressing against everything in the sinner that resists love. The pain is real. But the pain is the pain of transformation, not of payment. Like a surgeon’s knife, it cuts to heal, not to punish. And the healing it brings was paid for, in full, on a hill outside Jerusalem two thousand years ago.⁴³

4. This Is Why the Boundary Matters Most Here

Throughout this book I have used one strategy over and over. I have drawn a boundary between the universalism McClymond critiques and the universalism I defend. On some chapters that boundary has been easy to draw. The gnostic spark has nothing to do with the biblical hope. Böhme’s dark principle is its opposite. But here the boundary does its hardest work.

Because here the counterfeit looks closest to the real thing. The purgatorial universalist and the biblical universalist both believe in postmortem transformation. Both believe that God pursues the lost beyond the grave. Both believe that the fire purifies. The difference is where the saving power comes from. If it comes from the sinner’s own suffering, the cross has receded. If it comes from the cross of Christ, applied by the Spirit to each resistant heart, the cross is at the center.²¹

This is exactly where confusion enters, and I want to be honest about why. The language of “purifying fire” can sound identical in both versions. Someone hearing that God’s fire burns away sin after death might assume that the burning is the payment. But that is the Bulgakov move, and it leads straight to the problem McClymond identified. The fire this book affirms is different. It is not the sinner paying a debt. It is the already-paid debt being delivered to a heart that has been refusing the receipt.⁴⁷

The distinction is subtle in language but enormous in theology. In one version, the cross is a nice thought but unnecessary. In the other, the cross is the only reason the fire heals instead of destroys. Take away the cross from the biblical version and the whole thing collapses. Take away the cross from the Bulgakov version and nothing changes. That is how you tell them apart.

McClymond’s charge is, in a real sense, the book’s own quality test. If the hope defended in these pages can survive the removal of the cross, it was never the right hope. It cannot survive that removal. That is the proof of its orthodoxy.²²

5. The Concession Earns the Defense

I am aware that this chapter concedes more than any other chapter in the book. That is intentional. Some readers will wonder whether so much concession leaves any universalism standing. Let me explain why it does.

By standing with McClymond against the cross-less universalisms, this book earns the right to defend the cross-centered one. The concession is not a retreat. It is the whole thesis. The universalism McClymond defeats is real. I agree that it deserves defeat. The question has always been whether every universalism falls with it. And the answer is no, because the version this book defends was never built on the premises McClymond targets.²³

McClymond surveyed nineteen centuries of universalist thought and found the cross receding again and again. That is a sobering catalog, and I do not dismiss it. But Gregory of Nyssa held universal restoration and the full creed, including the real and costly atonement of Christ.²⁴ The Cappadocian hope was not gnostic. It was not necessitarian. It was not self-expiating. It was a hope grounded in the character of a God who saves through the cross and does not stop saving until every last creature has been reached.²⁵

That is the strand this book has been defending from the beginning. And it survives McClymond’s charge precisely because it passes his test. The cross does not recede. It stands at the center. It always has.

Let me put it in personal terms. I did not come to universalism by letting go of the cross. I came to universalism because of the cross. It was the sufficiency and the scope of Christ’s atoning work that first made me wonder whether God’s salvation might reach further than I had been taught. The cross was not an obstacle to my hope. It was the foundation of it. And if McClymond’s critique ever forced me to choose between universal salvation and the centrality of the cross, I would choose the cross without a second’s hesitation. The good news is that I do not have to choose.⁴⁸

D. Engagement with Specific Scholars

McClymond’s treatment of the receding cross is his most powerful chapter, and it deserves engagement with the specific thinkers he names.

On Bulgakov, McClymond is devastating. By rejecting Christ’s substitutionary atonement, Bulgakov had no choice but to place the entire burden of expiation on sinners themselves. McClymond notes that Bulgakov spoke of “the entire mercilessness of God’s justice” while simultaneously claiming to preserve grace. But there is no grace in a system where the sinner pays his own debt.²⁶ I agree with McClymond entirely on Bulgakov. The theology is internally contradictory, and the cross has been functionally eliminated.

On MacDonald, the picture is more complex. MacDonald wrote, “Jesus did not die to save us from punishment; He was called Jesus because He should save His people from their sins.”²⁷ McClymond reads this as a rejection of penal substitution, and in isolation it is. But MacDonald also wrote powerfully about the love that flows from the cross and transforms the sinner. His theology is inconsistent on this point, and I wish he had held the atonement more firmly. But his inconsistency is different from Bulgakov’s wholesale rejection.²⁸

McClymond puts the problem well when he observes that MacDonald seemed to set forensic justification and loving fellowship against each other, as if they were enemies rather than partners.⁴⁴ But the Protestant tradition has always held them together. Justification is the declaration. Sanctification is the transformation. The cross grounds the first. The Spirit accomplishes the second. They are not rivals. They are stages of the same rescue.

Sharon Baker’s work on restorative justice offers a more promising model. In Razing Hell, Baker argues that divine judgment takes the form of love itself, love so fierce that it brings the sinner to repentance. Standing in the presence of God is standing in the fire. That fire burns away wickedness and purifies what remains. But Baker grounds the entire process in the reconciling work of Christ. She insists that a restorative view of the fire does not compromise the cross. On the contrary, she writes, it enhances it.²⁹

Jerry Walls, writing from a Methodist perspective, makes a complementary move. His defense of purgatory as sanctification by grace keeps the cross as the ground and the postmortem process as the application. Walls is careful to distinguish his model from any satisfaction account. On sanctification models, he writes, the process has nothing to do with paying a debt of punishment. It is entirely about completing the work of making the person holy. Unless we limit grace to forgiveness alone, he adds, purgatory understood this way is no insult to the atonement.³⁰ That is exactly the move this book makes. The fire finishes what grace began.

David Bentley Hart insists on the centrality of Christ with a force that few theologians can match. Whatever one makes of Hart’s philosophy of freedom (and this book parts from his necessitarianism; see Chapter 5), no one can accuse Hart of marginalizing the Incarnation or the cross. His universalism is emphatically Christ-centered.³¹ Robin Parry, whose Evangelical Universalist laid down the modern evangelical case for the larger hope, makes the same commitment. Parry writes that his universalism does not sidestep the centrality of God’s work in Christ: the cross and resurrection remain at the heart of the gospel. He affirms that Christ is the only means by which God reconciles the world to Himself.⁵⁶

Hunter Coates presses this from another angle in Grace Abounds. The number of people being saved, he argues, does not diminish the saving work itself. If anything, a wider reach magnifies the cross rather than shrinking it.⁵⁴ A surgeon who heals a hundred patients has not cheapened surgery. A ransom that frees a thousand hostages has not cheapened the price. The cross does more, not less, when its reach extends to every last sinner.

De Young, for his part, presses the atonement from the exegetical side. He is right that the New Testament consistently grounds forgiveness in the cross. He is right that love is the motivation for the cross, not a replacement for it.³² His error, in my judgment, is assuming that a universal scope for the cross’s work automatically diminishes its necessity. It does not. A wider reach requires a stronger arm, not a weaker one.

De Young cites the grammar of Ephesians 2:8–9 to show that faith is the means of receiving salvation, not its cause. The cause is the cross. I agree with that entirely. What I add is that faith will, in the end, be exercised by everyone. Not because the requirement of faith has been lowered. Because the God who gave His Son will not stop offering that gift until every heart has received it.⁴⁹

E. Counter-Objections

The concession in this chapter is large enough that it invites sharp pushback from several directions. Let me state the strongest objections and answer them.

Objection 1: “If the Cross Saves All Regardless of Any Response, It Is Still Automatic”

A traditionalist might press: your cross-centered universalism still ends with everyone saved, so the cross functions like an automatic machine that processes everyone through, willing or not. That is still “cheap grace,” as Bonhoeffer would say.

Objection 2: “Universal Scope Makes the Cross’s Work Impersonal”

Some will argue that if the cross saves all seven billion living today (and all who have ever lived), its work becomes so broad that it loses its personal character. Salvation becomes a blanket rather than a hand reaching for yours.

But this confuses scope with mechanism. A universal scope does not make the cross impersonal any more than a doctor who heals every patient in the hospital is less personal than one who heals only a few. Each patient is still seen, still examined, still treated as an individual. The cross reaches each person specifically. The Spirit convicts each heart individually. Faith is exercised by each soul on its own.³⁵ The wider reach of the cross does not flatten it. It magnifies it.

In fact, if anything, the universalist vision of the cross is more personal, not less. Think about what it requires. It requires God to pursue each person with patient, tailored, specific love. It requires the Spirit to address each rebel’s specific objections, each sinner’s specific wounds. The cross is applied one soul at a time, never in bulk.⁴⁵

Objection 3: “You Concede So Much That Little Universalism Survives the Cut”

This is the most interesting objection, and it deserves a careful answer. If I reject the gnostic version, the necessitarian version, the self-expiating version, and the ultra-universalist version, what is left?

What is left is what has always been left: the creedal, Christ-centered, cross-grounded hope of the apokatastasis (the restoration of all things, Acts 3:21). Gregory of Nyssa held it. A real strand of the early church held it (see Chapter 15). It affirms the Trinity, the full deity of Christ, the authority of Scripture, the real atonement of the cross, the necessity of faith, and the reality of judgment. It reaches its universal conclusion through these doctrines, not in spite of them.³⁶

Hurd models this in his own work. In A Defense of Biblical Universalism he writes that Christ’s propitiatory death accomplished the reconciliation of the whole world, and yet he insists that God can only justly justify those who come to Him through Jesus, whom God has set forth as a propitiation.⁵⁵ That is full evangelical theology with a wider outcome. It keeps the cross, the propitiation, the requirement of faith, and the justice of God. It concedes nothing McClymond warns about.

That is not a thin sliver. It is a strong theological position. And it is the one that survives McClymond’s critique, because it passes every test he sets. The cross is central. Faith is required. Grace is free. Judgment is real. The only thing this version adds to traditional orthodoxy is a wider hope about the outcome. The structure of salvation is identical. The scope is larger. That is all.⁵⁰

F. Conclusion

The cross must never recede. Where it does, McClymond is right and I stand with him.

I have spent thirty-six chapters showing where McClymond’s arguments do not reach the biblical hope. Here I spent a chapter showing where one of his arguments does reach something real, something dangerous, something I refuse. The universalisms that let the cross become dispensable have lost the gospel, and I grieve that they carry the same name as the hope I hold.

Paul wrote that reconciliation comes “by the blood of his cross.” Not by the nature of the soul. Not by the necessity of metaphysics. Not by the fire of self-expiation. By the blood. The scope of that reconciliation is “all things.” The ground of that reconciliation is the cross.³⁷ Those two truths belong together. This book holds them together.

This is the book’s most important concession, and I make it freely. Because the hope I hold was never built on the sand McClymond rightly washes away. It was built on the rock of Christ crucified, and it stands there still.

The entire boundary this book has been drawing, chapter by chapter, comes down to this single question: is the cross at the center, or is it not? Where it is not, McClymond wins, and he should. Where it is, the hope survives. And it does more than survive. It is the hope that, in the end, the blood shed at Calvary was sufficient for the sins of the whole world, and that a God who loves like that will not rest until every last one of His children has come home through that blood.

I think of the reader who picked up this book worried. Maybe you heard McClymond’s charge and felt it in your chest. Maybe you wondered: Is my hope built on sand? Has the cross really receded in the universalism I hold?

Test it. Ask yourself: Can I remove the cross from what I believe, and does the system still work? If it does, you are holding the wrong version. Find the one that breaks without Calvary. That is the one this book defends.

And if you hold that version already, take heart. McClymond’s charge, fierce as it is, does not touch you. It touches the counterfeits. The real hope stands. It stands on the blood of Christ, which is the only ground any sinner has ever had.

That is not the eclipse of grace. That is grace at its fullest, its costliest, its most relentless. The cross has not receded. It towers over everything. And if the love that hung there is strong enough to save the worst rebel who ever lived, then I believe it will. Not because I must, but because I trust the One who bled.⁴⁶

Notes

↑ 1. McClymond, The Devil’s Redemption, 2:1025–1032 (§12.3, “The Problem of Grace in Christian Universalism”). This section is the capstone of McClymond’s twelve-chapter theological analysis and the most concentrated expression of the “eclipse of grace” thesis.

↑ 2. McClymond frames the four universalist positions as four substitutes for grace. See The Devil’s Redemption, 2:1025–1032, where each claim is developed at length.

↑ 3. McClymond, The Devil’s Redemption, 2:1025. The four formulae are introduced here as an organizing framework for the entire section. Each receives its own treatment: the spark-of-the-divine (pp. 1025–1027), eternal Godmanhood (pp. 1027–1029), purgationism (pp. 1029–1031), and ultra-universalism (pp. 1031–1032).

↑ 4. McClymond, The Devil’s Redemption, 2:1025. This sentence opens the section and encapsulates the thesis that the entire book has been building toward. The same point appears in compressed form in McClymond’s introduction, 1:24 (§0.10, “A Theological Irony: Universalism’s Eclipse of Grace”).

↑ 5. McClymond, The Devil’s Redemption, 2:1030. McClymond identifies this pattern across the Böhmist lineage specifically.

↑ 6. McClymond, The Devil’s Redemption, 2:1030. The characterization applies to Law, MacDonald, and Bulgakov collectively.

↑ 7. Bulgakov, as quoted in McClymond, The Devil’s Redemption, 2:1030. Bulgakov’s original formulation is from The Bride of the Lamb. McClymond also cites Bulgakov’s declaration that “God does not tolerate sin, and its simple forgiveness is ontologically impossible.”

↑ 8. McClymond, The Devil’s Redemption, 2:1030. McClymond concludes this analysis by calling Bulgakov’s theology “a stark reminder of how purgationist universalism contrasts with the message of salvation by grace.”

↑ 9. McClymond, The Devil’s Redemption, 2:1025–1032. See also the compressed version in 1:23–24 (§0.10).

↑ 10. De Young, Exposing Universalism, ch. 15. De Young carefully distinguishes the cause of salvation (the cross), the means (faith), and the motivation (God’s love), drawing on the Greek grammar of Ephesians 2:8–9 and Galatians 2:16 to reinforce the distinctions.

↑ 11. On 1 Corinthians 2:2 as a programmatic declaration, see Gordon Fee, The First Epistle to the Corinthians, rev. ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2014), ch. 2. Fee reads this as Paul’s deliberate refusal of the “wisdom” paradigm in favor of a cross-centered epistemology.

↑ 12. The four versions are treated individually in this book: salvation by nature in Chapter 4; salvation by necessity in Chapter 5; salvation by self-expiation in Chapter 6; and ultra-universalism’s “fiat forgiveness” in Chapter 12.

↑ 13. On the postmortem offer, see Chapter 27 of this book. The claim is not that a second ground of salvation opens after death, but that the same ground (the cross) is applied to those who did not receive it in this life.

↑ 14. Ephesians 1:7. The prepositional phrase “through his blood” (Greek dia tou haimatos autou) is instrumental, specifying the means by which redemption is accomplished. See Peter O’Brien, The Letter to the Ephesians, Pillar New Testament Commentary (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999), 101–102.

↑ 15. 1 John 2:2: “He is the propitiation for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the sins of the whole world” (ESV). The scope of the atonement in this verse has been contested since the Reformation. For the universalist reading, see George Sidney Hurd, A Defense of Biblical Universalism, ch. 2, where Hurd argues that the “whole world” means what it says. See also Hurd, The Universal Solution, ch. 3, where he develops the case for a “limitless atonement” (fn. 51 below), and Gerry Beauchemin, Hope Beyond Hell, ch. 2, who insists that the sins of the whole world have been “paid in full” (fn. 53 below).

↑ 16. The phrase “saved though never forgiven” captures the logic of McClymond’s analysis across §12.3 and §0.10. If the mechanism of salvation is not the forgiveness purchased by Christ’s blood but some other principle (nature, necessity, self-suffering, or divine fiat), then the person is “saved” in the system’s terms but has never been forgiven in the biblical sense.

↑ 17. On Hebrews 9:22, see William Lane, Hebrews 9–13, Word Biblical Commentary (Dallas: Word, 1991), 244–245. Lane notes that the principle of blood-mediated forgiveness undergirds the entire Levitical system and finds its definitive fulfillment in Christ’s self-offering.

↑ 18. The distinction between the fire as payment and the fire as application is developed fully in Chapter 6 of this book. The same distinction is central to the divine-presence model of hell defended in Chapter 24.

↑ 19. The medical analogy is imperfect (all analogies are), but it captures the essential structure: the cure has been purchased by someone else, and the ongoing process is the delivery of that cure, not the creation of a new one.

↑ 20. McClymond, The Devil’s Redemption, 2:740. McClymond describes Bulgakov’s system as one that “might function efficiently apart from Jesus Christ—almost like a law of karma.” The comparison is severe but, given the textual evidence McClymond marshals, warranted.

↑ 21. This is the essential distinction the boundary callout in this chapter makes. See also Appendix B for the full statement of the boundary.

↑ 22. The claim that McClymond’s own test vindicates the biblical version is developed throughout this book but stated most sharply in Chapter 40.

↑ 23. This is the thesis of the book in a single sentence. See Chapter 1 for its first statement and Chapter 40 for its final form.

↑ 24. Gregory of Nyssa, De anima et resurrectione and Catechetical Oration. On Nyssa’s universalism alongside his full creedal orthodoxy, see Ilaria Ramelli, The Christian Doctrine of Apokatastasis (Leiden: Brill, 2013), ch. 10. Nyssa was never condemned, and his orthodoxy on the Trinity and the Incarnation is beyond dispute. See Chapter 15 and Chapter 16 of this book.

↑ 25. On the Cappadocian hope as distinctly different from the Origenist system condemned in 553, see David Burnfield, Patristic Universalism, ch. 4. Burnfield distinguishes the speculative cosmological apparatus that drew condemnation from the simpler restorative hope that Nyssa held alongside the Nicene faith.

↑ 26. McClymond, The Devil’s Redemption, 2:1030. McClymond writes: “By rejecting Christ’s vicarious or substitutionary self-offering for sinners, Bulgakov placed the entire burden of ‘expiation’ on the backs of sinners themselves. Astonishingly, he spoke of ‘the entire mercilessness of God’s justice.’”

↑ 27. George MacDonald, as quoted in McClymond, The Devil’s Redemption, 1:532. See also MacDonald’s Unspoken Sermons, Series I, “The Consuming Fire.”

↑ 28. MacDonald’s theology of the cross is more complex than either his critics or his admirers sometimes allow. He clearly rejected a forensic model, but he affirmed that Christ’s suffering reveals and accomplishes something real about God’s dealings with sin. For a sympathetic reading, see Kerry Dearborn, Baptized Imagination: The Theology of George MacDonald (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), ch. 5.

↑ 29. Sharon Baker, Razing Hell: Rethinking Everything You’ve Been Taught About God’s Wrath and Judgment (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2010), chs. 7–9. Baker argues that fire “comes from God, surrounds God, and is God,” so that standing in the presence of God at judgment is standing in the fire (pp. 112–113). This fire purifies and cleanses, burning away what is evil in the sinner while leaving what is righteous intact (pp. 113–114). Her vision of divine justice is restorative rather than retributive: “our alternative view of hell speaks of God’s love as the most grueling judgment—judgment that brings repentance and reconciliation” (p. 120). Crucially, Baker keeps the cross central, grounding the entire process in the reconciling work of Christ. She writes that a more hospitable view of hell “in no way compromises or diminishes the reconciling work of the cross of Christ. In fact, it enhances it!” (p. 164). See also R. Zachary Manis, Sinners in the Presence of a Loving God (Eugene: Cascade, 2024), 309–311, for a careful analysis of Baker’s model as a hybrid of the divine presence model and universalism. Manis notes that on Baker’s account the sinner is “tested by fire, forgiven by grace” (quoting Baker, p. 117). See also Chapter 24 of this book.

↑ 30. Jerry Walls, Purgatory: The Logic of Total Transformation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), ch. 3 (“Models of Purgatory”) and ch. 2. Walls carefully distinguishes satisfaction models of purgatory (where sinners pay a debt of punishment) from sanctification models (where the process completes the moral and spiritual transformation begun in this life). He writes that on sanctification models, “Purgatory on this account is not in any way about satisfying divine justice or paying a debt of punishment. It is entirely a matter of continuing and completing the process of sanctification, of making us truly holy so that we can be fully at home in the presence of God.” He adds that “unless grace is limited to forgiveness and justification, the claim that the doctrine of purgatory represents a version of salvation by works is simply misguided.” His key insight for this chapter: “it is simply beside the point to appeal to the blood of Christ and the atonement as grounds for rejecting purgatory, unless one assumes the whole point of purgatory is punishment to satisfy the justice of God.” If the fire is sanctification rather than satisfaction, the cross is not undermined. See also Walls’s treatment of Wesley’s doctrine that sanctification, like justification, is received by faith (ch. 2, “Wesleyan Perspectives on Purgatory”).

↑ 31. David Bentley Hart, That All Shall Be Saved: Heaven, Hell, and Universal Salvation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019). Hart’s Christology is robustly Chalcedonian, and his insistence that salvation is through Christ is explicit throughout the book. On the book’s treatment of Hart as a source rather than a counterfeit, see Chapter 5 and Appendix B.

↑ 32. De Young, Exposing Universalism, ch. 15. De Young’s grammatical argument from Ephesians 2:8–9 is technically sound and pastorally important.

↑ 33. Oswald Chambers, My Utmost for His Highest, November 20 entry (“The Forgiveness of God”), as cited in De Young, Exposing Universalism, ch. 15. Chambers adds: “Never accept a view of the Fatherhood of God if it blots out the Atonement.”

↑ 34. On the non-coercive character of the universalist hope, see Chapter 26 of this book. Middle knowledge (God’s knowledge of what each person would freely choose in any situation) provides the framework: God arranges the most persuasive possible appeal for each soul without overriding freedom. See also Timothy Stratton, Mere Molinism: A Defense of Two Essential Truths (Eugene: Wipf and Stock, 2022).

↑ 35. The personal character of salvation is preserved precisely because faith is exercised individually. Even in a universalist framework, no one is saved en masse. Each person encounters Christ, each is convicted by the Spirit, and each freely responds. The scope is universal; the mechanism is personal.

↑ 36. On the early church’s universalist stream, see Chapter 15. On the creedal shape of this hope, see Appendix B. On the marks of biblical universalism as distinct from the counterfeits, see Chapter 2.

↑ 37. Colossians 1:20. The phrase “making peace by the blood of his cross” (Greek eirēnopoiēsas dia tou haimatos tou staurou autou) joins universal scope (“all things”) to a particular, historical, bloody means (the cross). On this verse as the strongest single text for cosmic reconciliation, see N. T. Wright, The Epistles of Paul to the Colossians and to Philemon, Tyndale New Testament Commentary (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1986), 75–77.

↑ 38. McClymond, The Devil’s Redemption, 2:1032. His summary statement reads: “The general conclusion is that Christian universalism has notably failed to preserve the principle of salvation by grace and to express the basic biblical insight that ‘I am saved because of God’s free, unconditional, unmerited love.’”

↑ 39. McClymond traces the gnostic-esoteric strand through The Devil’s Redemption, chs. 2–4. The spark-of-the-divine teaching is treated as the earliest and most persistent form of the eclipse of grace. See also Chapter 4 of this book.

↑ 40. On the eternal Godmanhood tradition and its implications for grace, see McClymond, The Devil’s Redemption, 2:1027–1029. See also Chapter 5 of this book, which treats Barth and the Sophiologists at length.

↑ 41. McClymond, The Devil’s Redemption, 2:1031–1032. McClymond notes that ultra-universalism “seems to trivialize sin, to minimize the moral and spiritual life, and to evacuate salvation itself of its meaning.” Even within the nineteenth-century Universalist Church, rank-and-file members viewed it as antinomian.

↑ 42. On the relationship between the universal scope of salvation and the necessity of the cross, see the treatment in Chapter 25, where the “all” texts (Romans 5:18; 1 Corinthians 15:22; Colossians 1:20) are shown to extend the reach of the cross rather than replacing it.

↑ 43. On the divine-presence model of the fire, see Chapter 24 and the discussion of R. Zachary Manis’s work. The Eastern Orthodox tradition has long held that the “fire” is God’s unveiled love, experienced differently by the reconciled and the resistant.

↑ 44. McClymond, The Devil’s Redemption, 1:532. McClymond observes that MacDonald’s rejection of forensic justification is theologically one-sided, since justification and transformative fellowship are not as opposed as MacDonald imagined.

↑ 45. On the personal, non-coercive character of God’s saving pursuit, see Chapter 26 and Chapter 28. Middle knowledge allows God to tailor the appeal to each heart without violating freedom.

↑ 46. The cumulative case for this conclusion is gathered in Chapter 40. There the full defense is assembled: the boundary held, grace was not eclipsed but fulfilled, and the strand that survives is the creedal, Christ-centered, cross-grounded hope of the apokatastasis.

↑ 47. The analogy of the “receipt” is imperfect but captures the point: forgiveness has been purchased and offered; the postmortem fire is the process by which the still-refusing heart is finally brought to accept what has already been given. The purchase happened at Calvary. The delivery continues as long as resistance does.

↑ 48. The personal testimony here reflects the author’s own journey from conditional immortality to universalism, described in the introduction to this book. The cross was not abandoned in that journey but rather seen as reaching further than previously believed. See also the full discussion of the cross and the atonement in Chapter 4.

↑ 49. De Young, Exposing Universalism, ch. 15. His grammatical analysis is sound. The dative/instrumental of means construction in Ephesians 2:8 (“by grace … through faith”) keeps faith as the instrument and the cross as the ground. The universalist agrees: faith is the instrument. The universalist adds: God will see that the instrument reaches every hand.

↑ 50. This is the central claim of Appendix B: the biblical version adds a wider scope to the same salvation mechanism. It does not change the mechanism. It does not lower the bar. It extends the reach.

↑ 51. George Sidney Hurd, A Defense of Biblical Universalism: A Biblical Response to James B. De Young’s Book “Exposing Universalism” (Triumph of Mercy, 2019), ch. 2 (“The Reconciliation of All”). Hurd insists that God “took the initiative, sending His Son as a propitiatory sacrifice, thereby satisfying the justice of God for the sins of the whole world.” He adds that no one experiences salvation “apart from repentance and faith in the finished work of the cross.” See also Hurd, The Universal Solution: Presenting Biblical Universalism as the Solution to the Debate between Calvinists and Arminians, ch. 3 (“Limited Atonement or ‘Limitless Atonement’”), where he argues that if Christ is the propitiation not only for the elect but for the whole world (1 John 2:2), then the atonement cannot be limited in scope.

↑ 52. George Sidney Hurd, The Triumph of Mercy: The Reconciliation of All through Jesus Christ, Introduction. Hurd writes: “The Universalism presented in these pages does not minimize the importance of the cross. On the contrary, it magnifies the centrality and efficacy of the work of Christ on the cross in a manner that is not possible with the traditional belief that the majority of those for whom Christ died will be eternally lost without benefitting from His salvation.”

↑ 53. Gerry Beauchemin, Hope Beyond Hell: The Righteous Purpose of God’s Judgment (Olmito: Malista, 2007), ch. 2 (“Paid in Full”). Beauchemin writes: “The ransom was paid in full for every person on earth. There is no way anyone will ever have to pay again for what Christ has paid for.” He adds: “The sufferings both believers and unbelievers experience, as a result of God’s righteous judgments, are remedial and retributive, not redemptive—only Christ redeems.” See also his treatment of Colossians 1:19–20, where he argues that the reconciliation of all things cost Christ “a most horrendous price” through the blood of His cross.

↑ 54. Hunter Coates, Grace Abounds: A Holistic Case for Universal Salvation (Eugene: Resource Publications, 2024), ch. 3. Coates argues that the number of people being saved does not diminish the saving work itself, and that if anything, a wider reach magnifies the cross rather than shrinking it. He further argues that the Incarnation remains fully necessary under universalism because it brought forth forgiveness of sins and a change in the relationship between humanity and God, regardless of how many are ultimately saved.

↑ 55. Hurd, A Defense of Biblical Universalism, ch. 2. Hurd writes: “Although Christ died for all and in time all will be made alive in Him, God can only justly justify and make alive those who come to Him through Jesus whom God has set forth as a propitiation.” He adds that, although reconciliation was obtained for all upon the cross, “one does not experience justification, reconciliation or salvation until they receive Christ, being born-again and thereby becoming a part of the new creation in Him.” This framework preserves both the universal scope of the atonement and the personal requirement of faith.

↑ 56. Gregory MacDonald (Robin A. Parry), The Evangelical Universalist: The Biblical Hope That God’s Love Will Save Us All, 3rd ed. (Eugene: Cascade Books, 2026), pp. 207–208. Parry writes: “I have not sidestepped the centrality of God’s work in Christ, so the cross and resurrection remain at the heart of the gospel. I have not reduced the importance of faith in Christ nor the missionary calling of the church.” Earlier in the same edition, he affirms that he believes “Christ is the only means by which God reconciles the world to himself” (p. xiv). This is the explicit evangelical commitment that distinguishes his universalism from the cross-less varieties McClymond targets.

↑ 57. Baker, Razing Hell, pp. 116–118. In Baker’s account, the sinner encounters the “blazing fire of the divine presence” and, anticipating condemnation, instead encounters divine love and forgiveness. The fire burns away wickedness. The victims are vindicated. And the sinner is offered reconciliation and restoration. Baker’s summary: the person enters the kingdom of God, “tested by fire, forgiven by grace” (p. 117). The phrase captures the book’s own distinction: the fire tests; grace, purchased at the cross, forgives. See also Manis, Sinners in the Presence of a Loving God, 310–311, who discusses how Baker’s account models the divine presence as both purgatorial and restorative.

↑ 58. Walls, Purgatory, ch. 2 (“Is Purgatory Biblical?”), concluding reflections. Walls writes that “sanctification is just as much the work of Christ to save us as justification. The grace by which we are saved is not merely God’s choice to forgive us for the sake of Christ, but also to restore us to his likeness.” He adds that “unless grace is limited to forgiveness and justification, the claim that the doctrine of purgatory represents a version of salvation by works is simply misguided.” This is precisely the point this chapter requires: the postmortem fire, understood as sanctification by grace, does not compete with the cross. It extends the cross’s work into the realm of transformation. See also Walls’s discussion of Wesley’s parallel between justification and sanctification as both received by faith (ch. 2).