Chapter 22

Can the Devil Be Redeemed? The Fate of Satan and the Fallen Angels

The Hardest Edge of the Larger Hope

Here is the objection that names the biggest book ever written against us.

Michael McClymond spent more than a decade writing The Devil’s Redemption, a two-volume, twelve-hundred-page critical history of Christian universalism.¹ The title is the argument. If you follow universalism far enough, McClymond says, you end up with the devil saved. And that is the point where the whole thing collapses. Grant that every human being is finally reconciled to God. What about Satan? What about the fallen angels? Scripture seems to send the devil to the lake of fire “forever and ever.” The church’s gravest charge against Origen was that he hoped for the devil’s salvation. The Fifth Ecumenical Council in 553 condemned that hope by name. McClymond has built the strongest modern case for the claim that universalism, taken to its end, must swallow the devil’s redemption or choke on its own logic.²

I want to take that charge seriously. Of all the objections I have met in Part VII of this book, this is the one I have been most careful about. It touches the deepest nerve. Not because the devil’s fate keeps me up at night, but because the charge itself tests whether my hope is an honest reading of Scripture or a philosophical system dressed in biblical clothes.

I will not soften the force of the objection. I will state McClymond’s case fairly, lay out the texts, name the historical danger, and then stake out my position. This book’s hope is for human persons, made in the image of God, redeemed by the incarnate Christ. On the fate of the non-human fallen powers, I am honest about what we do not know. I refuse to assert what Scripture does not.

That honesty is not a weakness. It is what saves the hope from the overreach McClymond rightly targets. And it is what separates this book from the Origenist system the church condemned.

The Objection at Its Strongest

McClymond’s argument runs like this. The logic of universal restoration cannot stop at humanity. If all rational creatures are finally healed, then Satan and the demons must be healed too. But Scripture and the church treat the devil’s doom as fixed and final. So universalism either swallows a monstrous conclusion, or it stops short of its own logic. Either way, the system fails.³

This is not a minor point. McClymond traces the thread across nearly two thousand years of history. The Origenist strand of universalism really did claim the restoration of all rational natures. Origen taught that every soul, angel, and demon belongs to one community of spiritual beings. All fell from an original unity with God. All must return. The devil himself, on this view, will one day cease to be an enemy. Origen wrote that “the destruction of the last enemy” means “not that its substance which was made by God shall perish, but that the hostile purpose and will which proceeded not from God but from itself will come to an end.”⁴ Evil is destroyed by being healed, not by being forever preserved in misery. Even the arch-enemy is included.

McClymond presses the point further. He argues that this same impulse runs through the Gnostic-Kabbalistic-esoteric tradition he traces in his opening chapters. Wherever universalism builds a system, it tends to absorb the devil. The logic of the system demands it. If there is a spark of divinity in every rational nature, then the devil has that spark too. If every act of rebellion is really a form of ignorance that will be healed, then the devil’s rebellion is no different in kind. McClymond calls this the pattern of “divine self-alienation and self-return”: God pours himself out into creation, creatures fall away, and all must return to the primal unity. Even Satan is just an alienated aspect of God’s own existence, on this telling.⁵

The supporting texts are blunt.

“Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.’” (Matthew 25:41, ESV)

“And the angels who did not stay within their own position of authority, but left their proper dwelling, he has kept in eternal chains under gloomy darkness until the judgment of the great day.” (Jude 6, ESV)

“And the devil who had deceived them was thrown into the lake of fire and sulfur where the beast and the false prophet were, and they will be tormented day and night forever and ever.” (Revelation 20:10, ESV)

“For if God did not spare angels when they sinned, but cast them into hell and committed them to chains of gloomy darkness to be kept until the judgment…” (2 Peter 2:4, ESV)

The language is severe. The fire is “prepared for” the devil. The chains are “eternal.” The torment lasts “forever and ever.” For McClymond, these texts close the door on the devil’s redemption, and they should close the door on any system that requires it.

But McClymond does more than cite verses. His argument is structural. He traces the universalist impulse across its many historical forms and shows that the grand systems always tend in the same direction. The second-century Gnostics imagined a divine spark in every soul that must return to the divine light. The medieval Cathars taught that all spirits, demons included, would be purified and restored. The sixteenth-century theosopher Jakob Böhme envisioned a cosmic drama in which everything that fell from God must return to God.⁵⁶ In every case, McClymond argues, the system cannot stop at humanity. Its logic carries it all the way to the devil. And when it gets there, it has gone too far.

McClymond’s concluding chapter drives this home. He titles it “The Eclipse of Grace.” His claim is not just that universalism has sometimes gone wrong. His claim is that universalism, in its very nature, tends to replace grace with something else: nature, necessity, metaphysics. If everyone is saved because all rational creatures share a divine nature, then salvation is not a free gift. If everyone is saved because God’s nature requires it, then grace is not free either. The devil’s redemption, on McClymond’s reading, is the place where this eclipse becomes most visible. It is the test case.⁵⁷

I take this seriously. McClymond has put his finger on a real danger, and I am glad he has named it. But naming the danger is not the same as proving that every universalism falls into it. The question is whether the bounded, Christ-centered, human-focused hope this book defends is the same system McClymond describes. I do not think it is. And the rest of this chapter will show why.

The Origen Question, Handled Honestly

I dealt at length with the patristic witness to the hope of universal restoration in Chapter 15. There I argued that the universalist tradition in the early church was more orthodox, more careful, and more widespread than its standard caricature suggests. Gregory of Nyssa held the hope without ever being condemned. Clement of Alexandria inclined toward it. The universalist stream was a real strand of the early church, not a later novelty.⁷

But here I must be candid about the genuinely vulnerable point. The inclusion of the devil in the restoration is the place where the ancient universalists drew the most fire. It is the place where the church most plainly said no.

The historical record is clear. In 543, Emperor Justinian circulated a set of ten anathemas against Origenist teachings. The ninth reads: “Whoever maintains that the punishments of the demons and godless human beings are temporally limited, and that after a specified time they will have an end, that is to say there will be a restoration [apokatastasis] of demons or godless human beings—let him be anathema!”⁸ Ten years later, the Fifth Ecumenical Council in 553 issued its own fifteen anathemas. The first condemned “the mythical preexistence of souls and the monstrous apokatastasis that follows from it.”⁹

Notice what was condemned. Not the bare hope that God saves widely. Not the universalism of Gregory of Nyssa, who was never named. What was condemned was the Origenist system: pre-existent souls that fell from a primordial unity, cosmic cycles of fall and return, a destiny shared by all rational natures including the devil, and the spherical resurrection body.¹⁰ The anathemas targeted a theological package, not simply the word apokatastasis. Still, the connection between universal restoration and the devil’s salvation was front and center. The seventh anathema of 543 explicitly condemned anyone who taught that Christ would be crucified in the world to come “also for the demons.”¹¹

I will not pretend this history away. The church fathers who hoped for the devil’s restoration really were condemned. The charge was specific. And the condemnation stuck for fourteen centuries.¹² McClymond is right that modern defenders of universalism sometimes gloss over this, treating the condemnation as a political accident that can be safely ignored. I do not want to make that mistake.

The Greek Orthodox theologian Chrestos Androutsos, in his 1907 Dogmatics, wrote plainly that the theory of Origen and Gregory of Nyssa about the restoration of all, “and concerning the repentance of the demons and the ungodly,” has been condemned by the church.⁵⁸ The Syriac writer Jacob of Sarug responded to the universalist teachings of Stephen bar Sudaili with a stern letter: “Life everlasting, and hell everlasting: there is no end to life, and no termination to hell.”⁶⁴ Even within the Eastern tradition, which has always been more open to the hope than the West, the salvation of the devil has been treated as a bridge too far.

But the ancient voices that hoped for the devil’s restoration were not limited to Origen and Gregory of Nyssa. Jerome, writing in the fourth century, declared that “the fallen angels will become as they were created, and humanity which has been expelled from paradise, will be once again restored to the place of caring for paradise. These things, then, will take place on a universal level.” Jerome also observed that “most persons regard the story of Jonah as teaching the ultimate forgiveness of all rational creatures, even the devil.”^7b Ambrose of Milan, commenting on 1 Corinthians 15:28, wrote that “when every creature learns that Christ is his head, and that the head of Christ is the Father, then God will be all in all; that is to say that every creature will believe in the same way, and that of one voice every tongue of the things in heaven, on the earth and beneath the earth will confess that there is one God of whom are all things.”^7c I name these voices not to claim them for my own position, but to show the scope of the tradition McClymond has cataloged. The hope for the devil’s restoration was not a fringe opinion in the early centuries. It was a real stream. And its presence makes the church’s eventual condemnation all the more telling.

I say all this because it would be dishonest not to. The inclusion of the devil in the restoration is the hinge of this chapter because it was the hinge of the ancient controversy. The church said no to the devil’s redemption with more force and more specificity than it said no to anything else in the universalist tradition.

But notice what the church did not do. It did not condemn Gregory of Nyssa. It did not condemn the hope that God would save all human beings. It did not condemn the prayer for the dead or the hope of purification. The condemnation fell on a specific system, the Origenist package, and on a specific claim: that the devil must be restored. That leaves room for a more modest hope. And that more modest hope is the one I hold.

The question is what follows from that.

The Hope Is for Human Persons, Made in the Image of God

Here is where I stake out my own position. I want to be plain about it, and I want to leave no room for confusion.

The hope this book defends is a hope for human persons. Every passage I have built this case on is a passage about the redemption of the human race. The second Adam undoes what the first Adam did (Chapter 5). The cross reconciles the world of human sinners (Chapter 4). God so loved the world that he gave his Son (Chapter 8). The “all” who are made alive in Christ are the “all” who died in Adam (Chapter 5). The nations stream through the open gates of the New Jerusalem (Chapter 9). The leaves of the tree of life are for the healing of the nations.¹⁴

These texts, this logic, and this Savior are addressed to human persons. The biblical story of redemption is a story about a God who made human beings in his image, who pursued them when they fell, who became one of them in the incarnation, who died for them on the cross, and who will bring every last one of them home. That is the story this book tells, and that story is complete without the devil.

This means I treat the fate of the non-human fallen powers as a distinct and far more open question. It is a question on which Scripture says less, says it in more severe terms, and gives the hoper far less to stand on. I do not claim to know what happens to Satan in the end. What I claim is this: whatever happens to the devil, the case for the final reconciliation of every human person stands on its own.

I should be clear about why this matters. Some readers may feel I am dodging the question. They may think that if I really believed in God’s love for all his creatures, I would extend the hope to the devil too. But that would be sloppy thinking. Good theology does not argue from sentiment to conclusion. It argues from revelation to conclusion. And the revelation I have is about human beings. I would rather be honest about what I do not know than impressive about what I cannot prove.

There is also a pastoral dimension here. Many readers have come to this book carrying a heavy question: will God save my father, my friend, my child who died without faith? That question deserves a real answer, not a theological shrug. This chapter says: the question of the devil’s fate is not your question. Your question is about a human person made in God’s image, loved by God, died for by Christ. And on that question, the answer this book gives is yes. The devil’s destiny does not change your loved one’s. The human case stands on its own.

Thomas Talbott, whose philosophical work on universal reconciliation has been among the most careful in the field, draws a similar line. He argues that the logic of the gospel is a logic about the redemption of human sinners, and that extending it by force to all rational creatures is a move the argument does not require.¹⁶ Andrew Hronich, in his recent defense of universal restoration, likewise focuses on the human race and the incarnation as the grounds of the hope, without insisting that the devil must be included.¹⁷ Robin Parry, writing as an evangelical universalist, acknowledges the difficulty candidly. He notes that universalists “often play it safe and limit universal salvation to humans whilst denying, or remaining agnostic about, the salvation of the devil.” Parry himself explores ways to reconcile Colossians 1:15–22 with Revelation 20:10, but he does so tentatively, and he grants that the agnostic position on the devil’s fate may be enough for the universalist case.^17b

I find that approach right. The hope is bounded by its own foundation: the incarnation, the cross, and the scriptural promise of a world set right. It does not need to become a metaphysical system that must, on principle, absorb every rational being in the cosmos. It is a gospel promise, not a philosophical theorem.

I should note, though, that some careful universalists make the case more strongly than I do. One line of argument points to Colossians 1:16–20, where Paul says that “all things” were created “in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or powers,” and that this same “all” was reconciled through the blood of the cross. Since thrones, dominions, principalities, and powers are terms Paul uses for the fallen spiritual forces (Ephesians 6:12), the argument holds that the reconciliation of Colossians 1:20 must include them.^17c Gerry Beauchemin, in Hope Beyond Hell, argues that “Satan is ultimately a tool of God” and “will one day cease to be,” grounding this in God’s total sovereignty over all his creatures.^17d I respect these arguments. I have not built my case on them, because I think the scope of “all things” in Colossians 1:20 is best handled in Chapter 6, and because the question of what “reconciling all things” means for the non-human powers is far less clear than what it means for human beings. But I name these voices because the reader should know that the bounded position I hold is not the only one available to a biblical universalist. It is simply the one I find most faithful to what the text actually says and does not say.

Why the Human Case Does Not Carry to the Angelic

McClymond’s reductio (his argument that universalism must either redeem the devil or give up its own logic) depends on a premise I do not accept. The premise is that the human case must extend to all rational creatures. If rational creatures share one nature and one destiny, then the devil is included. But do they share one nature and one destiny? I do not think so. The Bible draws sharp lines between human beings and the angelic powers, and those lines matter.

The Incarnation United God to Human Nature, Not Angelic

The clearest line is the incarnation itself. The author of Hebrews says it plainly:

“For surely it is not angels that he helps, but he helps the offspring of Abraham.” (Hebrews 2:16, ESV)

The Greek verb here (Greek epilambanetai, “to take hold of, to lay hold of”) carries the sense of reaching out to grasp someone.¹⁸ God reached out and took hold of human nature. He became one of us. He did not become an angel. He did not take on the nature of fallen spirits. He became a human being, born of a woman, to save human beings born of Adam.

De Young presses the same point with force. He argues that Jesus became human to save people, not angelic to save angels. The atonement was made in a human body, for human sin, on behalf of Adam’s race. There is no parallel atonement for fallen angels. De Young writes that “there is no Savior, no redeemer, no reconciler for them,” and he grounds this in the incarnation itself.²⁰

I think De Young overstates the case. The cross is cosmic in its reach, as Paul tells us in Colossians 1:20: God was pleased “through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross.” I have argued in Chapter 6 that this verse means more than De Young allows.²¹ But even on the broadest reading of Colossians 1:20, the incarnation remains human. The entry point of God’s saving work is a human body, a human death, a human resurrection. Whatever “reconciling all things” means for the non-human powers, it does not mean what it means for us. We are saved by a Savior who became one of us. They are not.

The Angelic Fall Is Different from the Human Fall

A second line matters too. The fall of the angels is presented in Scripture as a fall of beings who sinned with full knowledge. Human beings fell through the serpent’s deception. Eve was deceived (1 Timothy 2:14). The human story is a story of weakness, ignorance, and vulnerability.²²

The angelic fall is different. The angels stood in God’s presence. They knew what they were doing. They “did not stay within their own position of authority, but left their proper dwelling” (Jude 6). They abandoned a place they knew. That is why the church fathers, even those sympathetic to universalism, often treated the angelic fall as a harder case.²³ Thomas Aquinas argued that the angelic will, once fixed, is fixed. Humans change their minds because they reason step by step. Angels, Aquinas said, grasp things whole. Their choice, once made, does not waver the way ours does.²⁴

James Beilby has put this difference sharply. He notes that the Christian tradition has been “nearly universal in affirming that Satan and the demons are not candidates for salvation.” The reason, Beilby suggests, lies in the nature of the freedom given to angels and humans. Angelic freedom may consist in a once-for-all choice for or against God. That once-for-all quality makes sense given the fact that angels had face-to-face experience of God in heaven. Human beings walk by faith, not by sight (Hebrews 11:1). The angels walked by sight. They chose rebellion with open eyes. Beilby asks the question that cuts deepest: “What information, experience, or realization could be given to them that they didn’t already have before their rebellion?”^24b That is a question I cannot answer, and its force is one reason I leave the angelic case open while making the human case with confidence.

I am not sure Aquinas is right about how angelic minds work. We know very little about the inner life of angels. But the biblical picture does draw a contrast. Humans fell through temptation and deception. The angels who fell did so with open eyes, from a place of privilege, with knowledge of God that no human sinner has had. That difference makes the cases distinct, even if we cannot draw the line with precision.

De Young raises a related point that deserves attention. He asks whether the demons who “believe and shudder” (James 2:19) have saving faith. The answer is plainly no. But the verse tells us something about what knowledge of God does and does not accomplish. The demons know that God exists. They know who Jesus is. They shudder. But they do not repent.⁶⁰ This is different from the human case. I have argued in this book that the human person who sees God face to face, fully healed and fully freed, will have every reason to say yes and no remaining motive to say no. But the devil already sees God. He has always known who God is. And he chose rebellion anyway. Whether that kind of knowing is the same as the full, healing, unveiled encounter with God that this book envisions for human persons is a question I cannot answer with confidence. It may be. It may not. I leave it open.

No Image of God in the Devil

There is a fourth point worth making, one that runs deeper than the others. Human beings are made in the image of God (Genesis 1:26–27). That is the ground of our dignity, our worth, and our redemption. God made us to reflect him. The fall distorted the image but did not destroy it. The incarnation assumed the image. The cross redeemed the image. The whole story of salvation is a story about restoring what was always there: the likeness of God in human beings.⁶²

Angels are not said to be made in the image of God. They are glorious creatures. They serve God. They worship him. But the imago Dei is a human thing. It is the reason the incarnation took human form. It is the reason the cross saves human beings. And it is the reason this book’s hope is a human hope. The image of God in us is the hook on which the whole gospel hangs. The devil has no such hook.

I do not mean that God cannot do what he wills with his own creatures. I mean that the revealed grounds of redemption are human grounds. The incarnation is the Son of God becoming a human being. The atonement is a human death for human sin. The resurrection is a human body raised. The promise of restoration is a promise to creatures made in God’s image. The devil stands outside all of that, and I do not have the authority to put him back inside it.

The Language for the Devil Is the Language of Defeat and Destruction

A third point is worth noticing. The New Testament talks about the devil in the language of defeat and destruction, not in the language of reconciliation.

“The reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the works of the devil.” (1 John 3:8, ESV)

“Since therefore the children share in flesh and blood, he himself likewise partook of the same things, that through death he might destroy the one who has the power of death, that is, the devil.” (Hebrews 2:14, ESV)

The verb in 1 John 3:8 (Greek lyse, from lyō, “to loose, to undo, to destroy”) means to dismantle, to break apart.²⁵ The verb in Hebrews 2:14 (Greek katargese, from katargeō, “to render powerless, to bring to nothing”) means to put out of business, to make useless.²⁶ These are not the words the New Testament uses for the reconciliation of sinners. When Paul talks about what God does with human rebels, he uses the language of making alive, of reconciling, of grafting in, of justifying. When the New Testament talks about what God does with the devil, it uses the language of crushing, destroying, and rendering powerless.²⁷

That difference in vocabulary matters. It does not prove that the devil cannot be redeemed. But it does mean the texts themselves are not doing the work that the human-reconciliation texts do. The case for universal human salvation rests on passages that say “all will be made alive,” “every knee will bow,” “God will be all in all.” No comparable passage says “the devil will be reconciled.” The weight of evidence is simply different.

I want to sit with this difference for a moment, because it is easy to gloss over. When I read Romans 5:18, I find Paul saying that “one act of righteousness leads to justification and life for all.” When I read 1 Corinthians 15:22, I find Paul saying that “as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive.” When I read Colossians 1:19–20, I find Paul saying that God was pleased “through him to reconcile to himself all things.” These are texts of astonishing breadth. They say “all.” They mean it. They gave me the foundation for the case I built in Chapters 5 and 6.

But nothing comparable exists for the devil. There is no passage that says, “As in Adam all fell, so in Christ shall all angels be made alive.” There is no text that says, “God was pleased through him to reconcile the devil to himself.” The silence is telling. Paul could have said it. He did not. And I will not build on silence what I refuse to build without Scripture.

Paul does say, in 1 Corinthians 15:24–28, that Christ will destroy “every rule and every authority and power,” and that the last enemy to be destroyed is death. I read this as a promise that every hostile force will be put down. Whether “putting down” the powers means reconciling them or abolishing them is the question Paul does not settle for us.²⁸ I take the text as a promise about the final state of creation, not a blueprint for the devil’s inner journey. In the final state, God is “all in all.” Evil has no final place. How that happens to the non-human powers, Scripture does not say.

What Can and Cannot Be Said about the Powers

I want to be candid here, because this is a place where honesty matters more than tidiness. I see three live possibilities for the non-human fallen powers, and I want to rank my confidence in each.

The first possibility is that the language of destruction means what it sounds like: the fallen powers are finally undone. Evil itself, personified, is abolished. “Death and Hades” are thrown into the lake of fire (Revelation 20:14). The lake of fire is the “second death.” What is thrown in does not come out. Evil is consumed. The devil, as a hostile power, simply ceases. This is not a rescue. It is a removal. And it is the outcome Revelation most naturally describes for the beast, the false prophet, and the great dragon.²⁹

I have argued in Chapter 20 that the lake-of-fire imagery for human beings is best read through the lens of purification, not endless torment. But the imagery for the non-human powers may work differently. The beast and the false prophet are not persons in the ordinary sense. They are symbols of systemic evil: political oppression, false religion, deception on a cosmic scale. When John says they are “tormented day and night forever and ever,” he may be saying that these forces of evil are permanently, totally, and irreversibly put to rest. The language of Revelation 20:10 may describe finality, not consciousness.³⁰

Robin Parry has pressed this point with care. He notes that the beast in Revelation is not an individual person but a personification of a totalitarian political kingdom. This is clear from its background in Daniel 7:17 and from Revelation 17:7–12, where the beast includes a range of kings but is itself larger than any one of them. The false prophet is likewise not an individual but a false religious system. Parry observes that we can imagine speaking of the “eternal destruction” of a regime while still imagining that the persons who served in that regime may repent and be restored. The defeat of the system is permanent. The persons are a separate question.^30b

This reading gains support from a detail that is easy to overlook. Death and Hades are also thrown into the lake of fire (Revelation 20:14). No one thinks Death and Hades are conscious beings who can be tortured. They are realities that are abolished. The fact that John uses the same language for the beast, the false prophet, and Death and Hades should make us slow to treat the lake-of-fire imagery as a literal account of the inner experience of persons. David Powys, whose work on Revelation Parry draws upon, concludes that “if the lake of fire will constitute literal torment for any, it will be so only for the Beast, the false prophet and Satan”—not for the human dead.^30c

If this is right, then the devil is not “saved.” But neither is the devil in eternal torment. The devil is gone. Evil is ended. The hostile power that deceived the nations and led the cosmic rebellion is no more. This reading fits the broader biblical arc. Paul says the last enemy to be destroyed is death (1 Corinthians 15:26). The destruction of evil, including personified evil, is part of the final putting-right of all things. That creation can be set right by the removal of evil rather than by its endless preservation is a possibility the text allows.

The second possibility is that even the fallen powers are, in some way Scripture does not reveal, finally healed. I do not rule this out. God is able to do more than we can ask or imagine (Ephesians 3:20). If God chose to redeem even the devil, who am I to say he could not? Gregory of Nyssa inclined this direction, and he remains a saint of the church.³¹ In his Catechetical Oration, Gregory spoke of a cleansing fire that would extend even to “the author of evil,” removing “that unnatural accretion” of sin. He wrote that the process of purification would reach “every creature that has gone astray from God, including even ‘the introducer of evil himself.’” McClymond himself quotes this passage, and it is one of the most striking texts in the patristic tradition.^31c Parry has even sketched how this might look: the “devil,” as the identity of rebellion, is destroyed forever, but the fallen angel beneath that identity—Lucifer, if you will—might be reborn as a redeemed creature, much as the “old person” in the human believer is put to death so that there is a new creation (2 Corinthians 5:17). Parry himself calls this proposal tentative, and I treat it the same way.^31b But I refuse to assert it. The texts that support this reading are thin. The weight of the biblical language leans against it. And the church’s most specific rejection of universalism fell on exactly this claim. I hold this as a bare logical possibility, no more.

The third possibility is the one I reject: the confident, systematic insistence that the devil must be saved because the logic of universal restoration demands it. This is the Origenist overreach that McClymond rightly targets. It is the view that treats all rational beings as sharing one nature and one destiny, so that the devil’s redemption is not a hope but a requirement. I reject this because it goes beyond what Scripture says. It imports a philosophical premise (all rational creatures share one ultimate fate) that the Bible does not teach. And it is the version of universalism that the church condemned with the most specificity.³²

But I also reject the mirror-image claim: the confident insistence that humans share the devil’s doom. De Young argues that if the lake of fire is permanent for the devil and his angels, “it must be permanent for human beings who choose their side.”³³ That inference is the one I refuse. The fire was “prepared for the devil and his angels” (Matthew 25:41). It was prepared for them, not for human beings. Human beings fall under it by association, not by original design. And the case I have made across this book is that the God who made humanity in his image, who died for them, and who pursues them with infinite patience and perfect knowledge, does not leave them there. The human case and the angelic case are different cases, and I insist on keeping them that way.³⁴

Why the Book Does Not Need the Devil’s Salvation

I want to make the structural point plainly: McClymond’s reductio only works if universalism is committed to the salvation of all rational beings without exception. The conservative, creedal, human-focused universalism this book defends carries no such commitment.

The thesis of this book is the final reconciliation of every human person in Christ. That hope stands whole whether or not the non-human powers are included. I have argued for it on grounds that are entirely about human beings: the character of the God who made us (Chapter 3), the cross that atoned for human sin (Chapter 4), the Pauline texts that speak of “all” being made alive in Christ (Chapter 5), the Johannine witness to a God who loves the world (Chapter 8), the open gates through which the nations stream (Chapter 9), the fire that purifies human hearts (Chapter 12), the offer that reaches every person God has made (Chapter 14). None of these arguments require the devil’s salvation. All of them work on their own terms.³⁶

This is the key difference between the universalism McClymond critiques and the universalism I defend. McClymond’s target is the grand systematic universalism that traces from Origen through Eriugena, through Böhme, through the Gnostic-Kabbalistic-esoteric tradition. That universalism really does tend to absorb the devil. It does so because it rests on a metaphysical premise about the unity of all rational natures. Strip out that premise and the devil’s redemption is no longer required. What remains is the gospel promise about human beings, and that promise is the one I have been defending all along.³⁷

So the reductio fails. Not because I have answered it with a clever move, but because its premise does not apply to my position. McClymond says: “If universalism, then the devil is saved.” I say: “Not this universalism.” This one is bounded by the incarnation. It is bounded by the scope of the atonement. It is bounded by what Scripture actually says. And within those bounds, it holds.

I want to press this point a bit further, because it matters for how we think about systems and arguments in general. A good argument does not claim more than its premises support. My premises are about human beings: God loves them, Christ died for them, the universal-scope texts promise their reconciliation. Those premises support a conclusion about human beings. They do not support a conclusion about the devil. To claim that they do would be to import an extra premise: “whatever is true of the human case must be true of all rational creatures.” That is the premise I reject. And rejecting it is not a compromise. It is intellectual honesty.

Think of it this way. A doctor might say, with confidence, that a given treatment will work for every human patient in a trial. That does not commit the doctor to saying the treatment will work on horses. The treatment was designed for human physiology. It was tested on human subjects. Its success depends on human biology. Someone who says, “Ah, but if it works for all humans, it must work for all mammals,” is making a logical leap the evidence does not support. The universalism I defend is tailored to the human case. It does not promise what it cannot deliver.⁶³

Engaging McClymond and De Young Directly

Let me bring the critics back, because they deserve a fair hearing and a full answer.

McClymond’s great contribution is his taxonomy. He has shown, with more historical detail than anyone before him, that the universalist impulse has taken many forms, and that most of those forms carry real theological dangers. The Gnostic strand treats salvation as a return to a divine spark. The Böhmist strand builds a myth of divine self-alienation and self-return. The purgationist strand replaces grace with self-expiation. The kenotic strand makes the incarnation a metaphysical fact rather than a contingent act of grace. And the Origenist strand absorbs the devil into a cosmic return of all rational natures to unity.³⁹

I agree with McClymond on all of these. Every form of universalism he names in those categories is a form I have rejected in Chapter 2 of this book. The Gnostic version is not my hope. The Böhmist version is not my hope. The purgationist version that replaces the cross with self-expiation is not my hope. McClymond has catalogued the counterfeits, and I am grateful. I have used his catalog throughout this book to sharpen the line between the biblical hope and its rivals.⁴⁰

Where I part from McClymond is in his conclusion. He believes that the disease he has diagnosed in the counterfeits infects all universalism. He presses the charge specifically against Thomas Talbott and the contemporary evangelical universalists. In his chapter on “The Eclipse of Grace,” McClymond argues that any universalism, even one that claims to rest on grace, will end up reducing grace to nature or necessity. If everyone must be saved, then salvation is not a free gift. It is a metaphysical requirement. And metaphysical requirements are not grace.⁴¹

McClymond identifies four ways the eclipse happens. Grace is lost when people are saved “because I am divine” (the Gnostic spark). Grace is lost when people are saved “because I am human” (eternal Godmanhood). Grace is lost when people are saved “because I suffer” (purgatorial self-expiation). And grace is lost when people are saved “because God so wills it” (universal election that becomes impersonal decree).⁶¹ In each case, McClymond shows, the specific, contingent, personal work of Christ on the cross fades into the background. Salvation becomes automatic. Grace becomes a machine.

This is a serious objection, and I have already answered its deepest form in my chapter on free will (Chapter 23). Here let me say only this: the universalism I defend does not rest on necessity. It rests on the character of God, the God whose love is free, whose grace is real, and whose knowledge of each person’s heart is perfect. Salvation remains a free gift. It remains dependent on the contingent, historical work of Christ on the cross. What I hold is that this free, gracious, cross-shaped love will, in the end, win every human heart. Not because logic requires it, but because God is that good and that wise.⁴²

The difference between my view and McClymond’s targets is the difference between confidence and necessity. I am confident that God will save all. I do not claim it is necessary that he must. Confidence rests on trust in a person. Necessity rests on the structure of a system. McClymond’s eclipse-of-grace argument hits the systems. It does not hit the trust.

McClymond’s “eclipse of grace” argument lands on the Origenist and the Gnostic and the kenotic versions of universalism. I grant every one of those landings. But the creedal, Christ-centered universalism of Gregory of Nyssa, of Talbott, of Robin Parry, and of this book is precisely the strand that survives the critique. We do not reduce grace to nature. We do not replace the cross with self-expiation. We do not demand the devil’s redemption as a requirement of the system. We hold the hope as grace, grounded in the character of the God who is love, offered through the cross, received by faith.⁴³

De Young raises a different set of concerns. He presses sixteen questions against universalism, several of which touch the devil’s fate. He asks: on what basis would Satan and the fallen angels be reconciled to God? The atonement was made in a human body for human sin. If some other basis is found for reconciling the fallen angels, does that not make Christ’s death unnecessary? And if the devil must be reconciled before anyone in hell can repent, what prevents Satan from continuing to deceive the lost?⁴⁴

These are good questions. And my answer to most of them is simple: I agree. The atonement was made for human sin. There is no revealed basis for the reconciliation of the fallen angels. I do not require it. My universalism does not depend on the devil’s salvation. De Young assumes that universalism must claim the devil’s redemption or give up the whole system. He writes that “it has to be the restoration of all creatures or it is the restoration of no creatures.”⁴⁵ I reject that either-or. It can be the restoration of all humans without being the restoration of all creatures. The incarnation gives us the ground for one without the ground for the other.

De Young also argues that if the fallen angels are lost forever, then hell must be forever, because the devil and humans share one place of punishment.⁴⁶ But that inference depends on the assumption that the duration of punishment is the same for all who enter it. I have argued throughout this book that it is not. The fire that is “prepared for the devil and his angels” may well be permanent for them and corrective for us. Matthew 25:41 says the fire was prepared for the devil, not for human beings. We were never its intended inhabitants. And the God who sent his Son to die for us does not leave us in a fire that was never meant for us.⁴⁷

There is a deeper question here that some universalist writers have pressed with force. In The Triumph of Mercy, the author asks whether an eternal dualism—Satan forever in opposition to God, the kingdom of darkness forever against the kingdom of light—would truly count as total victory for Christ. If evil endures forever in any form, does God ever become “all in all”?^47b I feel the weight of that question. It is one reason I do not slam the door shut on the second possibility I described earlier. But I will not let a philosophical question about cosmic completeness drive me to a claim that Scripture does not make. The answer to the dualism problem may not be the devil’s salvation. It may be the devil’s abolition. What matters is that evil has no final place. How God gets there is his business, and I am content to leave it in his hands.

De Young presses a further point that is worth addressing. He argues that if the devil were restored and entered heaven, nothing would prevent him from leading another rebellion. If fallen angels can change their destiny, then restored angels can change theirs. The future of heaven itself would be insecure.⁵⁹ This is a real concern, but it is a concern about a position I have not taken. I do not assert the devil’s restoration. I do not need to answer a problem that arises from it.

But I will say this: De Young’s question about the security of heaven cuts both ways. If he is right that restored angels could rebel again, then the same logic applies to any creature whose will is genuinely free. The security of heaven does not rest on the impossibility of rebellion. It rests on the character of God. The God who keeps his own is the God who holds heaven together. And that same God is the one who holds the hope for humanity together, not by removing freedom, but by being the kind of God no healed soul would ever wish to leave.

David Bentley Hart, whose exegetical and linguistic work has been among my most valuable resources throughout this book, takes a different view from mine on this point. Hart argues that all rational beings, without exception, will be restored. He grounds this in his view of the rational will: to see the Good clearly is to will it, and no rational creature can finally refuse what reason itself grasps as the highest reality.⁴⁹ On this reading, the devil’s restoration is not optional; it is a requirement of the nature of rationality itself.

I have said in Chapter 23 that I respect Hart’s argument but decline the necessitarian premise. I keep libertarian free will, which means a real “yes” requires a possible “no.” That same commitment shapes my answer here. I will not claim, as Hart does, that the devil must be saved because reason requires it. I leave the devil’s fate in the hands of a God who is both perfectly just and perfectly good. That is honest enough for me.⁵⁰

The Point of the Chapter

I do not want anyone to walk away from this chapter thinking it was about demonology. It was not. It was about keeping the hope honest and bounded.

The honesty matters. If I had claimed the devil’s salvation with the same confidence I claim for humanity, I would be going beyond what Scripture says. I would be building a system rather than following the text. I would be giving McClymond the target he aims at, and he would be right to hit it. A hope that overclaims loses the trust of the very readers it wants to reach. And I have spent twenty-one chapters building trust. I am not going to throw it away by claiming to know what I do not.

The boundedness matters too. The bounded hope is stronger than the unbounded one. That may sound backward. You might think a bigger hope would be a stronger one. But in theology, as in engineering, what is overbuilt tends to break. The Origenist system was grand. It included everything: every soul, every angel, every demon, every cycle of fall and return. But it included too much. It included claims that Scripture did not support and that the church could not accept. The simpler structure, built on what the text actually says, stands where the grand structure fell.⁶⁵

I learned this lesson from McClymond himself, though he would not be pleased to hear me say so. His taxonomy of the counterfeits is one of the most useful tools in this book. He has shown me where the dangers are. He has shown me what the overreach looks like. He has shown me the difference between a hope grounded in Scripture and a system grounded in metaphysics. I have used his work to build a better hope: one that keeps the cross, the creeds, the incarnation, and the authority of Scripture, and that refuses to claim more than these grounds support. McClymond intended his book as a case against universalism. I have received it as a guide to a more careful universalism.

So where does that leave the devil?

In the hands of God. That is the honest answer, and I think it is the right one. I do not know what God will do with the fallen powers. I know that “every rule and every authority and power” will be destroyed (1 Corinthians 15:24). I know that evil, however personified, will have no final place in God’s renewed creation. I know that “the last enemy to be destroyed is death” (1 Corinthians 15:26). Whether the destruction of the devil is an abolition or a healing, I cannot say. What I can say is that it will be just and good, because the God who does it is just and good.⁵²

What I can also say, with confidence, is that we will not share the devil’s fate. We are not angels. We were not made to be thrown into the lake of fire. We were made in the image of God, fallen though we are, and the Son of God became one of us to bring us home. The fire that was “prepared for the devil and his angels” is not our final destination. Our final destination is the arms of the God who made us, the God who loved us enough to die for us, the God who has all of eternity and perfect knowledge with which to win every heart.⁵³

That is the hope. Confident for every human being. Humble about what God has not revealed. Content to leave the devil in the hands of a God who is both perfectly just and perfectly good.

I have spent this chapter on the strangest and hardest edge of the hope. It is a good place to stop and notice what the chapter has not done. It has not weakened the case for human salvation. It has not introduced a new uncertainty about whether God will get every person home. It has not given ground on the universal-scope passages, the character of God, the cross, the fire that purifies, or the offer that reaches every soul. What it has done is draw a line around the hope and say: this far the evidence carries us, and no further. Within that line, the hope is strong. Beyond it, we are honest.

And in the end, God will be all in all.⁵⁴