Chapter 39

Antinomian and Esoteric Universalism

When Grace Becomes a License

A. The Argument on the Table

If everyone is saved no matter what, why be good? It is the oldest objection to grace itself. Paul heard it about his gospel. Someone in the Roman house churches raised a hand and asked, "Shall we go on sinning so that grace may increase?" Paul's answer was sharp: "By no means!" (Romans 6:1–2).¹ Twenty centuries later, the question still has teeth. And McClymond sharpens those teeth by pointing to real people who answered it the wrong way.

In the final sections of The Devil's Redemption, McClymond turns to what he calls the newer and stranger fruit of the universalist impulse. Two strands trouble him especially. The first is the liberal and esoteric universalism of Carlton Pearson's "gospel of inclusion." The second is the antinomian "grace message" of charismatic preachers like John Crowder, Benjamin Dunn, and Francois du Toit.²

The names are different, but the charge is the same: universalism produces bad moral fruit. If grace covers everyone, then sin stops mattering.

McClymond's argument is not merely theoretical. He names names and traces trajectories. Pearson abandoned the atonement, declared that humans are "innately, internally, and eternally divine," and ended in New Thought pantheism.³ Crowder declared that "sanctification is not a process" and that Christians have no obligation to the moral law.⁴ Du Toit produced a "Bible" that left out Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John entirely, keeping only a heavily paraphrased Paul.⁵ McClymond's conclusion is pointed: the bad fruit reveals the bad root. If universalism keeps producing antinomianism and esoteric excess, then the doctrine itself is suspect.

I want to say something clearly before we go further: the antinomian and esoteric strands McClymond catalogs here are real. They are unbiblical. They deserve the criticism they receive. If this were all universalism had to offer, the doctrine would deserve to be buried. The question is whether it is all universalism has to offer. It is not. And in the remainder of this chapter I want to show why.

B. Why the Charge Has Force

Every teacher I just named claims the word "universalism" or something close to it. Pearson calls his position the "gospel of inclusion." Crowder writes that "all are included in Christ" and that "it is now impossible to see insiders or outsiders."⁷ Dunn proclaims a gospel of "instantaneous righteousness" that requires no striving.⁸ Du Toit declares that "every human life is equally included in God's economy of grace."⁹ These voices are real. They all fly the banner of universal grace. And they all end in places no serious Christian should go.

Pearson's trajectory is the starkest. He began as a respected bishop in the Church of God in Christ. He lost ninety percent of his congregation, was disciplined by his denomination, and eventually landed in a New Thought congregation in Chicago.¹⁰ Along the way he rejected the atonement and declared himself "pantheistic." He dismissed the Bible as "not the definitive source of wisdom and command concerning God." He wrote a chapter titled "The Gospel of Evil" in which he taught that good and evil "complement each other."¹¹ That is not a caricature. That is what the man wrote.

The charismatic grace teachers are different in kind but equally troubling. They began as Christocentric rather than pantheistic. But their Christ does all the work in a way that makes human response meaningless. Crowder wrote that the entire Christian life is "an effortless state of being" and compared it to being a natural-born citizen of a country.¹² Dunn wrote that "not only are our efforts unnecessary, they are not allowed."¹³ Du Toit's Mirror Bible replaced "faith" with "realization" and turned Jesus into a mirror of humanity's own divine nature.¹⁴

The problem goes deeper than sloppy theology. These teachers work with what scholars call a "canon within a canon." Crowder says that Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are "not the gospel." Only Paul's letters carry the message of grace. Du Toit's Mirror Bible leaves out the Old Testament entirely. It also omits all four Gospels except a few lines from John's prologue. Even the book of Revelation is absent.³⁹ When you strip away Jesus' Sermon on the Mount, his calls to repentance, and his parables about judgment, what remains is not a purified gospel. It is a gutted one. McClymond is right to ask whether Jesus himself would pass Crowder's test for grace, or whether Jesus' own moral teaching would count as "legalism" in this system.⁴⁰

A universalism that makes sin costless, replaces Scripture with private revelation, or trades the cross for self-discovery deserves every word of criticism McClymond gives it. The bad fruit is genuinely there. The question is whether it grows from the root of universal hope itself, or from something else entirely.

C. The Response

1. Universal Scope Does Not Entail Antinomianism

The logical move McClymond makes here is simple: if everyone ends up saved, then sin has no final cost, and moral effort becomes pointless. But this reasoning confuses the end of the story with the middle. Consider a simple parallel. A doctor tells you that a painful surgery will succeed. The cancer will be removed. You will live. Does that mean the cancer does not matter? Does it mean you should skip the surgery?

Of course not. The cancer is real. The surgery is agonizing. The recovery is long. The good ending does not erase the pain. It gives the pain a purpose. That is how the universalist reads judgment. God's purifying fire is severe, real, and painful (see Chapter 24). Sin brings genuine consequences: broken lives, damaged souls, and the terrible experience of standing before the holy God with all your rebellion exposed.¹⁵ That everyone is finally healed does not mean nobody gets burned.

Think of it this way. A parent who says "I will never give up on my child" is not saying "my child can do anything without consequences." The opposite is true. That parent will confront, discipline, and correct. The child who lies will be caught. The child who steals will face the shame. The promise of unfailing love does not cancel the demand for right behavior. It grounds it. The universalist claim about God works the same way. God's refusal to lose anyone is not permission to sin. It is a promise that sin will be dealt with, fully and severely, until it is gone.

Paul understood this perfectly. He preached a gospel of total, free, unconditional grace. And the very first objection people raised was the antinomian one: "Shall we go on sinning so that grace may increase?" (Romans 6:1). Paul did not respond by limiting grace. He responded by explaining what grace does. Grace kills the old self and raises a new one. Grace buries you with Christ in baptism and raises you to walk in a new way of life (Romans 6:3–4).¹⁶ The universalist says exactly the same thing. Grace does not leave people in their sin. It comes after them, pursues them, and burns the sin out. That process is not optional, and it is not painless (see Chapter 14).

2. Grace Produces Obedience; It Does Not Abolish It

The clearest answer to the antinomian charge comes from one of the most beautiful passages in the New Testament:

For the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation for all people, training us to renounce ungodliness and worldly passions, and to live self-controlled, upright, and godly lives in the present age. (Titus 2:11–12, ESV)

Read that sentence slowly. Grace brings salvation "for all people." That is the universalist note. But the same grace trains us. It teaches renunciation of evil. It produces self-control, uprightness, and godliness. The scope of grace and the moral demand of grace are not at war. They are the same sentence.¹⁷

This is the hinge of the chapter. The antinomian reads "grace for all" and drops the second half. The legalist reads "training us to renounce ungodliness" and drops the first half. Paul holds them together. So does this book.

Notice what Paul says next. He writes of "waiting for our blessed hope, the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior Jesus Christ, who gave himself for us to redeem us from all lawlessness and to purify for himself a people for his own possession who are zealous for good works" (Titus 2:13–14). Three things stand out. The hope is eschatological; it looks forward to Christ's return. Christ "gave himself for us"; the cross is the foundation. And the purpose of the cross is to "redeem us from all lawlessness" and create a people "zealous for good works." The grace that saves is the grace that produces zealous obedience. Any reading that separates these is reading Paul against Paul.⁴¹

George Sidney Hurd makes the same point from the universalist side. In A Defense of Biblical Universalism, he argues that "true holiness is inseparable from love." For Hurd, "holiness is love and love is holiness." Love, he insists, "is not indifferent and therefore gets angry when there is sin and rebellion, just as any loving parent is angered by the rebellion of his children." And love "is not negligent and therefore disciplines and scourges when necessary."¹⁸ The God who saves all is the God who commands holiness from all. The scope of salvation does not cancel the demand of obedience; it grounds it. In The Universal Solution, Hurd adds that willing obedience has a real role to play in sanctification. God "deliberately made us with a will, capable of interacting with Him, and He desires our participation."⁴⁴ A father who will never stop loving his children does not therefore let them run wild. He disciplines them because he loves them (Hebrews 12:6). The love is the reason for the discipline, not the excuse to skip it.

John's first letter is even more direct. "And by this we know that we have come to know him, if we keep his commandments. Whoever says 'I know him' but does not keep his commandments is a liar, and the truth is not in him" (1 John 2:3–4).¹⁹ Notice what John does not say. He does not say that obedience earns salvation. He says that obedience is the evidence that salvation has actually reached a person. If someone claims to know God and lives without moral concern, the claim is empty. That test applies to every universalist as firmly as to anyone else.

3. Esotericism Is the Opposite of the Book's Method

McClymond is right that some forms of universalism have drifted into esotericism. He traces a line from ancient gnosis through Kabbalah to modern teachers who ground salvation in the soul's discovery of its own divine nature (see Chapter 3).²⁰ Du Toit's Mirror Bible is a vivid example. In his rendering, salvation comes not through faith in Christ but through "realization" of one's own eternal origin in God. McClymond notes that du Toit's themes are "paralleled in the literature of ancient gnosis, wherein theophany or christophany gives way to egophany, the manifestation of the self."²¹

That is damning, and I agree with the judgment. But notice what it proves. It proves that du Toit's version is esoteric. It does not prove that every universalism is.

The conservative biblical universalism this book defends is anti-gnostic by construction. Its method is public, not secret. It argues from the canonical Scriptures, not from private revelations. It holds the historic creeds without revision. It keeps every book of the Bible, including the Gospels and Revelation that du Toit's Mirror Bible omits. It grounds salvation in the finished work of Christ on the cross, not in the soul's awakening to its own divinity (see Chapter 20).²²

Consider the contrast point by point. The esoteric teaches that the soul is a fragment of God, divine by nature. This book teaches that humans are creatures, made in God's image but not made of God's substance. The esoteric teaches that evil is an illusion, a misunderstanding to be outgrown. This book teaches that evil is real rebellion against a holy God, requiring real atonement. The esoteric teaches that salvation is remembering who you already are. This book teaches that salvation is a gift you could never earn and do not deserve.⁴² At every decisive point, the biblical universalism of this book stands on the opposite side of the line from the esoteric version McClymond rightly condemns.

The esoteric universalist says: you are already divine; you only need to remember it. The biblical universalist says: you are a sinner; you need Christ's blood and the Spirit's power; and God will not stop until that blood and that power reach you. These are opposite claims wearing the same label.

4. Disowning Pearson and the Spirit-Preachers

I want to be direct here, because directness matters when the counterfeits are this visible.

Carlton Pearson's "gospel of inclusion" is not a version of the hope this book holds. Pearson rejected the atonement. He called himself pantheistic. He said that evil and good "complement each other" and should coexist in "balance."²³ He cited Ralph Waldo Trine's In Tune with the Infinite and the anonymous A Course in Miracles as formative texts, both of which belong to the New Thought tradition, not to historic Christianity.²⁴ His trajectory took him from orthodox Pentecostalism to a position that has more in common with metaphysical religion than with the gospel of Jesus Christ. I tell this story with sorrow, not with contempt. A gifted pastor lost his bearings. But the universalism he arrived at is precisely the counterfeit this book has been guarding against since Chapter 2.

The charismatic grace teachers present a different problem. McClymond rightly notes that Crowder in his later writings "shifts away from Barth's and Kruger's views and moves in the direction of du Toit's and Rabe's esotericism."²⁵ Crowder's Cosmos Reborn declares that human beings are "a divine race" with "a very real eternal aspect" that "goes eternally forward and backward."²⁶ McClymond rightly calls the result "an assertive universalism of the gnostic-esoteric variety."²⁷

This book refuses both strands. It refuses the pantheism that says we are already God. It refuses the antinomianism that says the moral law no longer applies. It refuses the esotericism that replaces Scripture with self-discovery. And it refuses these things not reluctantly, as if they were embarrassing cousins, but firmly, as a matter of doctrinal conviction (see Appendix B).

That is precisely the opposite of what this book teaches. The conservative hope does not say you are already divine. It says you are a creature, made in God's image but fallen, in desperate need of a Savior. And that Savior will find you.

5. The Fruit Argument Cuts Both Ways

McClymond's argument from bad fruit is powerful. If universalism keeps producing antinomians and esotericists, does that not say something about the doctrine itself? Perhaps. But the same argument can be turned around.

The doctrine of eternal conscious torment has produced its own bad fruit. It has been used to terrorize children into faith through fear. It has driven sensitive souls into scrupulosity, anxiety, and despair. It has been wielded as a weapon of political control, from medieval indulgences to modern manipulation (see Chapter 35).²⁹ Thomas Talbott has documented this at length, arguing that fear-based doctrines of hell have caused genuine pastoral harm.³⁰

Does this bad fruit prove that the doctrine of eternal torment is false? Not by itself. Bad fruit tells you that a doctrine can be misused. It warns you to guard against the distortion. But it does not settle the question of truth. The same rule applies to universalism. The fact that Pearson and Crowder misused the idea of universal grace does not prove that the idea is wrong. It proves that the idea can be corrupted. And that is exactly what this book has been saying for thirty-eight chapters.

Jude's letter warns about people "who pervert the grace of our God into sensuality" (Jude 4). Jude does not conclude that grace is the problem. He concludes that the perversion is the problem. The answer is not less grace but true grace, the kind that transforms rather than indulges.

Paul said the same thing in Galatians: "For you were called to freedom, brothers. Only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for the flesh, but through love serve one another" (Galatians 5:13).³¹ Freedom is real. Grace is real. And both come with a call to love and service, not to license.

D. Engagement with Specific Scholars

McClymond's treatment of Pearson and the charismatic grace teachers is some of the most valuable material in The Devil's Redemption. His documentation is thorough. He lets each figure speak in his own words. He traces the theological trajectories with care, showing how Pearson moved from orthodoxy to pantheism and how Crowder moved from Christocentrism to esotericism.³² I use his catalog gratefully.

Where I part from McClymond is in the conclusion he draws from the evidence. He treats these cases as representative, as though the antinomian and esoteric strands reveal the true nature of universalism itself. But his own survey shows the opposite. In the same chapter where he documents Pearson's pantheism and Crowder's esotericism, he acknowledges that Robin Parry "remains clearly committed" to the unique divinity of Jesus and that Thomas Talbott "seeks to build his universalist theology from the text of the Bible."³³ Parry's method is sober exegesis. Talbott's method is rigorous philosophical argument from Scripture. Neither man shows the slightest trace of antinomianism or esotericism. McClymond knows this. He documents it. But he allows the worst examples to color the whole family.

Hurd’s response to the antinomian charge is worth hearing at length, because he addresses it from multiple angles. In A Defense of Biblical Universalism, he insists that love and holiness are not opposed in God’s nature. Love “will even reject the object of His love when they do not respond to His discipline.” But love “never rejects forever because His love never ceases.” Against the charge that universalism softens the moral demand, Hurd argues that God’s “wrath, ‘hatred,’ and even His patience, mercy and grace are temporal manifestations of His love in the presence of evil.”³⁴ The God who saves all is the God who commands all to repentance. Universal grace does not soften the command but grounds it in the character of a God whose love is both unconditional and morally serious.

Hurd is also explicit about the boundary this book holds. In The Universal Solution, he writes: “I understand that there is a slippery slope that leads towards a syncretistic, unbiblical form of Universalism which admittedly is the preferred belief of apostates. However, that form of Universalism is in no way comparable to the biblical doctrine of Universalism presented in these pages.”⁴⁵ That is exactly the line this book draws.

Talbott would add a sharper philosophical edge. In The Inescapable Love of God, his central argument is that if God’s love is genuinely inescapable, then God does not leave anyone in the comfortable enjoyment of their sin. The very inescapability of divine love is what makes sin unbearable in the end. A God who will never stop pursuing you is not a God who lets you do whatever you please. He is a God whose love burns until every last rebellion gives way. Talbott’s philosophical case — that genuinely informed freedom under the pressure of inescapable love must eventually yield to that love — is the opposite of the antinomian claim. The antinomian says: grace means freedom from moral effort. Talbott says: grace means the relentless moral pressure of a love that will not let you rest until you are transformed.³⁵ He puts it plainly: there is “nothing sentimental” about such love, because a God who condoned our selfishness and vicious attitudes “would be indifferent, not loving.”⁵⁴

Robin Parry sharpens the point in the Third Edition of The Evangelical Universalist. In Appendix 5, written as a direct response to McClymond’s theological critique, Parry lays down the principle this book shares: if a criticism of universalism applies to some versions of universal salvation but not to others, then it is not a criticism of universal salvation as such.⁴⁸ The antinomian and esoteric examples prove that bad versions exist. They do not prove that the doctrine requires antinomianism or esotericism. On the esoteric charge specifically, Parry observes that the Christian story of creation-fall-redemption shares structural features with the esoteric pattern of unity-diversity-unity, and that such overlap does not prove esoteric origins. McClymond, Parry argues, sometimes sees “monsters under the bed when it is not clear any are present.”⁴⁹ A universalist who speaks of the image of God in every person is not importing gnostic metaphysics. He is making the ordinary Christian claim that God’s image, though marred by sin, cannot be completely erased, and that this is precisely why restoration remains possible.

Parry also addresses McClymond’s slippery-slope claim head-on. McClymond treats the American Universalist denomination as a cautionary tale: it began as evangelical universalism and drifted into unitarianism, exemplarist atonement, and post-Christian moralism. But Parry contends that the drift was not caused by universalism itself. The link was the Enlightenment rationalism that made universalism thinkable in the first place. Hosea Ballou’s theology, Parry notes, “was deeply impacted by deist rationalism,” and that same spirit of the age drove the denomination toward rejecting the Trinity and other doctrines long before universalism could have been the culprit.⁵⁰ Parry makes a pointed observation: the same rationalist drift pulled “numerous Presbyterians and Congregationalists” toward unorthodox Christologies and exemplarist atonement theologies in the eighteenth century. No one concluded that the strict Calvinism of the Westminster Confession was therefore a “game-ending move.” The chess analogy McClymond uses, Parry insists, “is entirely inappropriate unless one can show precisely how that doctrine leads to the abandonment of doctrines x, y, and z.”⁵¹

A historical counter-example is telling. Hannah Whitall Smith, one of the most influential universalists of the nineteenth century, was not an antinomian drifting into license. She was the architect of the holiness movement’s most formative text. Her The Christian’s Secret of a Happy Life (1875), as Robin Parry documents in A Larger Hope?, Volume 2, became one of the most influential texts in the holiness movement and was foundational for the Keswick doctrine of sanctification.⁴⁶ Smith was a universalist whose entire public ministry was about obedience, surrender, and moral transformation. She is the exact opposite of the antinomian caricature. If universalism inevitably dissolved moral seriousness, Smith’s ministry should never have existed. But it did, and it produced the “joy of obedience” that shaped a generation of evangelical holiness teaching.

More recently, Hunter Coates’s Grace Abounds provides a holistic case for universal salvation spanning the biblical, philosophical, and historical grounds while consistently maintaining the moral seriousness of the gospel. Coates, like Parry and Talbott, shows that the universalist hope, carefully stated, fuels rather than undermines the pursuit of holiness.⁴⁷

McClymond himself draws a helpful distinction between “esoteric and Christocentric versions of universalism.” In the esoteric version, "the self's discovery of its own true nature" is what saves. In the Christocentric version, the truth to be understood is "a truth about Christ."³⁶ This is exactly the distinction this book has been making throughout. The esoteric version is a counterfeit. The Christocentric version is the one we hold.

McClymond also documents Andre Rabe, another figure in the charismatic grace network. Rabe teaches that "relationship to Christ is grounded in God's creation of us rather than in Christ's redemptive work. To be human is already to be connected to God."⁴³ I part from Rabe on exactly this point. Being human connects you to God as creature to Creator, yes. But it does not save you. Salvation requires redemption, atonement, the cross. The universalist claim of this book is not that everyone is already saved by virtue of being human. It is that the God who redeemed humanity at the cross will apply that redemption to every person, bringing each one to genuine, free, repentant faith. That is a world away from Rabe's position, and the difference matters.

E. Counter-Objections

"Remove the threat of final loss, and moral motivation collapses."

This is the strongest form of the objection, and it deserves a direct answer. If people know they will be saved in the end, will they not simply stop trying?

The answer depends on what you think motivates holiness. If the only reason to obey God is the fear of eternal loss, then yes, removing the threat would remove the motive. But is that what Scripture teaches? Paul does not ground obedience in fear of hell. He grounds it in gratitude, in love, and in the transforming power of grace. "The love of Christ controls us" (2 Corinthians 5:14).³⁷ Love is a stronger engine than terror. And a salvation grounded in love produces a holiness that fear-based obedience never could (see Chapter 14).

Think about it from the other direction. A child who obeys only because she fears being thrown out of the house is not displaying healthy obedience. She is displaying fear. A child who obeys because she knows her parents love her, because she has learned that the rules are good, because she wants to grow into the kind of person her family has shaped her to be, is displaying something far deeper. Fear-based obedience is brittle. It lasts only as long as the threat is credible. Love-based obedience runs deeper. It lasts because the person has been changed from inside. That is what grace does. It does not merely threaten. It transforms.

"Pearson began orthodox and slid. That is the doctrine's trajectory."

This is the slippery-slope form of the argument. Pearson started as a Pentecostal bishop and ended in New Thought. Does universalism inevitably lead there?

No. Consider the counter-examples. Gregory of Nyssa held universal restoration in the fourth century and remained one of the most honored theologians in church history.³⁸ Robin Parry has held evangelical universalism for decades and remains a committed, orthodox, Trinitarian Christian. David Bentley Hart affirms universal salvation and holds every article of the Nicene Creed without flinching. The trajectory McClymond traces in Pearson is real, but it is not the only trajectory available. What Pearson abandoned was not just the traditional view of hell; he abandoned the atonement, the authority of Scripture, and the uniqueness of Christ. Those are not entailments of universal hope. They are departures from the faith that happen to have accompanied a particular man’s journey.

Parry’s analysis in The Evangelical Universalist makes the diagnosis precise. The American Universalist denomination’s slide into heterodoxy was driven by the same Enlightenment rationalism that shaped much of American Protestantism in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, not by the doctrine of universal salvation itself. That rationalism drove Presbyterians and Congregationalists toward the same unorthodox conclusions without any universalism in sight.⁵² Pearson’s journey followed a similar pattern. He did not reason from universal hope to the rejection of the atonement. He exchanged the God of the cross for the God of New Thought, and the universalism came along for the ride, transformed beyond recognition.

The slippery slope is only as real as the ground under your feet. If you stand on the creeds, the cross, and the canon, the slope does not exist. Pearson slid because he let go of those anchors, not because universalism forced him to. Sharon Baker, in Razing Hell, puts the positive case well: a more hopeful view of judgment “in no way compromises or diminishes the reconciling work of the cross of Christ. In fact, it enhances it!”⁵³ The question for any universalist is simple: do you hold to the atonement? Do you hold to the authority of Scripture? Do you hold to the necessity of personal faith in Christ? If the answer to all three is yes, then you are standing on solid ground, and Pearson’s trajectory is not yours.

F. Conclusion and the Boundary

Here is what this chapter has argued. McClymond is right that antinomian and esoteric universalism exist. He is right that they produce bad fruit. He is right that Pearson's "gospel of inclusion" abandoned the core doctrines of the Christian faith. He is right that Crowder, Dunn, and du Toit have drifted into an anti-law, anti-effort spirituality that Scripture does not support. I share his concerns about every one of these figures. Their versions of universalism are counterfeits, and this book rejects them firmly.

But the argument does not reach where McClymond wants it to go. The existence of counterfeit grace does not prove that real grace is impossible. The existence of antinomian universalism does not prove that all universalism is antinomian. The existence of esoteric universalism does not prove that all universalism is esoteric. What it proves is exactly what this book has been saying since the opening chapter: you must know which universalism you are looking at.

The universalism this book holds says that grace is universal, not that grace is permissive. It says that God will save all, not that sin does not matter. It says that the fire purifies, not that there is no fire. And it says that the same grace Paul preached, the grace that "trains us to renounce ungodliness" (Titus 2:12), is the grace that will finally reach every heart.

If someone asks me, "If everyone is saved in the end, why should I pursue holiness now?", I have an answer, and it is not complicated. You should pursue holiness because the God who made you designed you for it. You should pursue holiness because sin destroys you, and the fire that burns it away is real. You should pursue holiness because the grace that saves you is not a permission slip but a power that transforms. And you should pursue holiness because obedience born of love is the most joyful life a human being can live. The threat of eternal loss is not the only reason to love God. It is not even the best one.

Paul faced the antinomian objection and answered it without flinching. His answer was not less grace. His answer was more. "Shall we sin that grace may abound? By no means! How can we who died to sin still live in it?" (Romans 6:1–2). That answer is still good. It is still enough. And it is the answer this book gives to McClymond's charge.

The antinomian and the esotericist are not the heirs of Gregory of Nyssa. They are the very counterfeits he would have refused. The real hope, the bounded hope, the creedal and Christ-centered hope of the final restoration of all things, stands where it has always stood: on the cross, on the Scriptures, and on the character of a God whose grace teaches holiness all the way to the end (see Chapter 40).