Chapter 25

Modern Universalists

MacDonald, Bell, Hart, Talbott, Parry — the long hope finds a contemporary voice

A. The Tweet That Changed the Conversation

On the afternoon of February 26, 2011, a Reformed pastor in Minneapolis sat down at his computer and typed three words. He pressed send. The tweet read, in full: “Farewell Rob Bell.”¹

John Piper’s message was a response to a promotional video Bell had released a few days earlier for his forthcoming book, Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived. The book was not yet in print. Almost nobody outside the publisher had read it. But the video had hinted that Bell, a megachurch pastor from Grand Rapids, might be flirting with universalism — the ancient and disreputable idea that, in the end, all will be saved. Within twenty-four hours “Rob Bell” was trending worldwide on Twitter. Within a few weeks, Love Wins was on the cover of Time. Within a few months, Bell had left his church, his movement, and most of the institutions that had made him famous.²

I begin here, not in a dusty library, because what happened in 2011 was a snapshot of something larger. For most of the twentieth century, the question of whether anyone might still be saved after death was treated, in American evangelical circles, as a dead question — settled by the Reformation, sealed by the revivalists, defended by every faithful pastor. But by the time Piper sent his tweet, something had shifted. Books were being written. Arguments were being made. Serious evangelical scholars, working in serious presses, were arguing for a serious version of universal restoration. Bell was not the first. He would not be the last. He was simply the one whose name went viral.

This chapter tells the story of that shift. It is the story of how a handful of writers — a Scottish novelist who died in 1905, an American analytic philosopher, a British biblical theologian, an Eastern Orthodox polemicist, a Michigan pastor, a Canadian charismatic, a Roman Catholic patristics scholar — recovered an old Christian hope and made it a live option once again. None of them invented the long hope. All of them inherited it. What they did was give it a voice the contemporary church could finally hear.

Let me name them upfront, in roughly the order of their importance for the contemporary scene. George MacDonald (1824–1905), the nineteenth-century Scottish minister and novelist who taught C. S. Lewis to read with hope. Thomas Talbott (b. 1941), the analytic philosopher whose 1999 book The Inescapable Love of God gave the contemporary movement its philosophical spine. Robin Parry (b. 1969), the British biblical theologian whose Evangelical Universalist (2006, revised 2012) showed that universalism could be argued on evangelical premises. David Bentley Hart (b. 1965), the Eastern Orthodox theologian whose 2019 That All Shall Be Saved gave the movement its sharpest tongue. Rob Bell (b. 1970), the megachurch pastor who took the conversation popular. Brad Jersak (b. 1964), the Canadian writer who made the same case pastorally and quietly. And Ilaria Ramelli (b. 1973), the Italian patristics scholar whose massive 2013 monograph supplied the historical evidence the others needed.

Notice that none of these figures fits the old caricature of a “universalist.” They are not liberal Protestants who lost their faith and decided that everyone goes to heaven. They are biblically serious, often patristically grounded, doctrinally orthodox in most respects, and confessionally located across the Christian spectrum. This matters, because the standard line against them — that universalism is a modern liberal innovation — cannot survive an honest look at who they actually are and what they actually argue. We have spent twenty-four chapters showing that the long hope of postmortem opportunity has roots running back to the second century. This chapter shows that the long hope has bloomed again in our own time, and on evangelical soil.

B. A Movement With Roots

Before we meet the figures one at a time, let me sketch the shape of the movement they form. Three things distinguish the contemporary universalist conversation from the older liberal Protestant universalism that this book treats in Chapter 19.

The first is biblical seriousness. Hosea Ballou and his nineteenth-century American Universalist successors largely operated within an Enlightenment frame: God’s benevolence required universal salvation, the cross was a moral example rather than an atonement, and the harder bits of Scripture could be reinterpreted as figurative. By the time the Universalist denomination merged with the Unitarians in 1961, that older Universalism had melted into a generic religious liberalism with little distinctively Christian content. The contemporary movement is different. Parry argues from the canon. Talbott argues from Paul. Hart argues from the Greek New Testament he himself translated. Jersak argues from Revelation. None of them treats Scripture as a museum piece. Each is committed to the inspiration and authority of the biblical text and to working out the universalist reading within orthodox dogmatic categories.³

The second is patristic recovery. The contemporary universalists know — in a way the nineteenth-century American Universalists rarely did — that they are the heirs of a long Eastern Christian tradition. Origen, Gregory of Nyssa, Diodore of Tarsus, Theodore of Mopsuestia, Isaac of Nineveh, the broader stream of patristic apokatastasis (Greek apokatástasis, pronounced “ah-poh-kah-TAH-stah-sis,” meaning “restoration of all things,” from Acts 3:21): all of this is now their conscious inheritance. When Robin Parry first published The Evangelical Universalist in 2006, he did so under a pseudonym — “Gregory MacDonald” — a deliberate fusion of Gregory of Nyssa and George MacDonald. He was telling the reader, before they had even cracked the spine, where the argument was coming from.⁴

The third is Christological grounding. The contemporary universalists do not hold that everyone goes to heaven on the basis of generic divine benevolence. They hold that the cross of Christ is sufficient and effective for the salvation of all whom Christ died to save — and that, on their reading, Christ died for everyone. Hart, an Eastern Orthodox theologian, frames it in the categories of the great Greek Fathers. Parry, a British evangelical, frames it in the categories of penal substitution interpreted within a wider covenantal scheme. Talbott, raised in conservative American evangelicalism, frames it in terms of the love of God revealed in the cross. The cross, for all of them, is the place where the universal scope of redemption is grounded.

What the movement also shares is a refusal of cheap grace. None of these figures imagines that everyone slips into heaven without judgment. All of them affirm a purifying postmortem reality — what the patristics called the cleansing fire, what Parry calls hell, what Hart calls (with his Eastern Orthodox forebears) the river of fire that is the love of God experienced by those still resisting it. The fires are real. The judgment is real. The pain is real. What is denied is that the fires are endless or that the judgment is the last word.

Now to the figures. I will give MacDonald his due first, because he is the seedbed for almost everything that follows. Then Talbott, who built the philosophical case. Then Parry, who built the biblical-theological case. Then Hart, who brought the polemic. Then Bell and Jersak more briefly, and Ramelli briefly at the close.

C. The Figures and Their Arguments

George MacDonald: The Consuming Fire

George MacDonald was born in 1824 in Huntly, a market town in Aberdeenshire, in the Scottish northeast. His family was Congregational, his upbringing was Calvinist, and the version of God he met in childhood was the God of the Westminster Confession: holy, sovereign, just — and, in the popular preaching of the day, terrifying. The hellfire sermons of nineteenth-century Scotland left an impression on the boy that he would spend his adult life trying to undo. When MacDonald grew up, he could not believe that the God who was love had selected a vast portion of His creatures for endless, conscious torment from before the foundation of the world. To believe such a thing about God, he came to think, was a form of blasphemy.⁵

MacDonald earned a degree at King’s College, Aberdeen, in 1845. After a few years of tutoring in London, he studied at Highbury College for the Congregational ministry. In 1850 he was appointed pastor of Trinity Congregational Church in Arundel, Sussex. He was twenty-five years old. He was a poet, a dreamer, and (it must be said) not a natural fit for a Calvinist congregation that had been used to harder sermons. The deacons were unhappy. MacDonald’s teaching insisted on the universal Fatherhood of God, the inclusive scope of Christ’s atonement, and the necessity of love as the heart of obedience. The deacons cut his salary in half, hoping to drive him out. By May 1853 he had resigned. He never held another regular pastorate.⁶

What MacDonald did instead was write. He wrote novels — Phantastes (1858), David Elginbrod (1863), Lilith (1895) — that pioneered the modern fantasy tradition. He wrote children’s books: At the Back of the North Wind, The Princess and the Goblin, The Princess and Curdie. And from 1867 to 1889, he wrote and published the three series of Unspoken Sermons, thirty-six sermons that he could no longer preach from a pulpit because no Calvinist pulpit would have him. They are, taken together, one of the most important theological texts in nineteenth-century English.

The second sermon of the first series, “The Consuming Fire,” is the heart of MacDonald’s theology of hell. The text is Hebrews 12:29: “Our God is a consuming fire.” MacDonald opens with an arresting line: “Nothing is inexorable but love.”⁷ Pause on that for a moment. The hellfire preachers of his Calvinist youth had imagined God’s justice as the inexorable thing, the immovable thing — the law that would not bend, the wrath that would not relent. MacDonald says: no. The thing that will not bend, the thing that will not relent, is not God’s wrath but God’s love. The fire of God is not the fire of vengeance. It is the fire of a love that will not be content until everything in the beloved that is unworthy of being loved has been burned away.

The argument is theologically simple and emotionally complex. God’s love is unitary: there is no schism in God between mercy and justice, between affection and wrath. What we call wrath is what love feels like when love meets resistance. The fire purifies; it does not annihilate. What is burned away is not the sinner but the sin, until the sinner finally stands in the divine presence with nothing left between himself and God.

In the sermon “The Last Farthing,” MacDonald presses the same logic on Matthew 5:26 (“You will not get out until you have paid the last penny”). He takes the saying literally. The sinner must indeed pay every farthing — not in money, but in the harder coin of repentance and contrition and turning. The fire will not let him out until he has paid. But the fire will, in the end, get him out. MacDonald cannot bring himself to believe that the consuming love of God will lose a single soul forever, even if the working of that love through ages of strife should look, to human eyes, very much like hell.⁸

In the sermon “Justice,” MacDonald takes on the substitutionary atonement theory in its harder forms. He cannot accept that God demanded the suffering of His Son before He could forgive His other children. Forgiveness, MacDonald argues, is the spontaneous overflow of love; it does not need to be earned by a transaction. He is not, in modern terms, an opponent of the atonement; he is an opponent of any account of the atonement that makes God’s forgiveness contingent on Christ’s sufferings having satisfied a prior divine demand for retribution. For MacDonald, the cross does not change God; the cross reveals God.⁹

MacDonald’s universalism was not, in his own lifetime, very influential as a formal theological position. He was a marginal figure in nineteenth-century British religion. The mainline of British evangelicalism ignored him. The Scottish Free Church regarded him with suspicion. What MacDonald did do, though, was plant his theological vision deep in the imagination of a generation of writers and readers who would go on to shape twentieth-century Christianity.

C. S. Lewis is the most important of these. Lewis read MacDonald’s Phantastes at sixteen and later wrote that it had “baptized” his imagination. He called MacDonald “my master” and devoted an entire book, George MacDonald: An Anthology (1946), to selections from MacDonald’s writings.¹⁰ Lewis did not become a universalist — The Problem of Pain and The Great Divorce show him working out his own version of the “choice model” account of hell. But Lewis carried MacDonald’s key intuitions forward into the broadest evangelical and Anglican readership the twentieth century would see. G. K. Chesterton read MacDonald with sympathy. W. H. Auden was an admirer. By the second half of the twentieth century, MacDonald had become the conduit through which long-hope theology entered the imagination of Anglo-American Christianity, even where it was not consciously identified.

That is why, when Robin Parry needed a pseudonym for his 2006 book, he reached for “Gregory MacDonald.” Gregory of Nyssa for the patristic root. George MacDonald for the modern conduit. The two names together announce the genealogy.

Thomas Talbott: The Analytic Case

If MacDonald is the imaginative root of the contemporary movement, Thomas Talbott is its philosophical spine. Born in 1941 and educated as an analytic philosopher of religion at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Talbott spent most of his teaching career at Willamette University in Oregon. He retired in 2008. He is the figure who took the long hope into the seminar rooms of contemporary philosophy of religion and argued for it in the same idiom — logical, precise, unsentimental — that William Lane Craig and Alvin Plantinga and Jerry Walls had been using to defend traditional positions.¹¹

Talbott’s major work is The Inescapable Love of God, first published in 1999 and substantially revised for the second edition issued by Cascade in 2014. The book has thirteen chapters arranged in three parts. Part I is autobiographical and conceptual; Part II is exegetical; Part III is the logical and theological argument.

The book opens not with an argument but with a story. Talbott describes a conservative Christian high school of his youth where “a good Christian was identified as someone who does not smoke, drink, dance …, play cards, or attend Hollywood movies.”¹² He describes his college encounter with an atheistic professor, his crisis of faith, and his gradual working out of a vision of God in which God’s love and God’s justice are not in tension but are one thing seen from two angles. This autobiographical opening is more than table-setting. It frames the philosophical argument that follows as a personal quest. Talbott did not arrive at universalism because he wanted to deny the harder bits of Scripture. He arrived at it because he could not see how the picture of God he had inherited could be both internally consistent and morally tolerable.

The conceptual center of the book is Chapter 4, “Three Pictures of God in Western Theology.” Here Talbott lays out what has come to be known as the “inconsistent triad.” Consider three propositions, he says:

The Augustinians, Talbott argues, finally deny proposition (1): God does not in fact will the salvation of all. The Arminians deny proposition (2): God wills the salvation of all, but His will is thwarted by human freedom. The universalists deny proposition (3): God’s will to save all is unthwarted in the end.¹³

The brilliance of the argument is that it forces the reader to see something often hidden. Every Christian who takes a position on the fate of the dead is denying at least one biblical proposition for which there is some prima facie support. The universalist is not the only one with hard texts to handle. The Augustinian must explain 1 Timothy 2:4 and 2 Peter 3:9. The Arminian must explain Ephesians 1:11 and Isaiah 46:10. The universalist must explain Matthew 25:46 and 2 Thessalonians 1:9. There is no costless position. The question is which denial costs the least and which honors the central biblical witness most. Talbott’s contention is that the third proposition costs the least, because giving it up costs us nothing about the character of God Himself.¹⁴

Part II of the book engages the New Testament directly. Chapter 5 (“Saint Paul’s Universalism”) walks through Romans 5:18, Romans 11:32, 1 Corinthians 15:22, Colossians 1:20, Philippians 2:9–11, and a half dozen other passages where Paul speaks of the universal scope of Christ’s saving work. Talbott’s exegetical argument is that the universal-language passages in Paul are not stray rhetorical flourishes; they sit at the structural heart of his account of redemption. Romans 5:18, for example, places the universal scope of Adam’s fall and the universal scope of Christ’s reconciliation in deliberate parallel. To make the second “all” smaller than the first is, on Talbott’s reading, to undo Paul’s own logic.

Chapter 6 (“Eschatological Punishment”) takes on the most contested word in the discussion: the Greek aiōnios (pronounced “ai-OH-nee-oss”), usually translated “eternal.” Talbott argues that aiōnios in the New Testament does not carry the technical meaning of “unending temporal duration.” It is, instead, an adjective whose meaning depends on what it modifies. When applied to God or to God’s actions, it carries something like the sense “of the age to come” or “belonging to the divine order.” Quoting William Barclay, Talbott summarizes: “The essence of the word aiōnios is that it is the word of the eternal order as contrasted with the order of this world; … essentially it is the word which can be properly applied to no one other than God.”¹⁵ The aionios fire of Matthew 25:46 is, on this reading, the divine fire — the fire that belongs to the age to come — without entailing that it burns endlessly. The lexical question is too thick to settle here; Chapter 8 handles the patristic Greek usage more fully. What matters for our purposes is that Talbott is the figure who put the question of aiōnios back on the table of contemporary analytic philosophy of religion.

Part III is the heart of Talbott’s positive case. Chapter 7 (“God Is Love”) develops the divine-attribute argument. If “God is love” (1 John 4:8) is taken with full ontological seriousness — if love is not one attribute among many but is the very essence of the divine nature — then any account of God that excludes some persons from the scope of divine love is theologically defective at the root. The doctrine of divine simplicity, on Talbott’s reading, will not allow us to play God’s mercy off against God’s justice. Stephen Jonathan, writing from a Pentecostal-pastoral location, notes that Talbott’s “thesis is built upon love being God’s essential nature insisting that the Scriptures do not even hint at God’s mercy allowing something that his justice would not.”¹⁶

Chapter 8 (“The Paradox of Exclusivism”) presses the inclusive-nature-of-love argument. Talbott writes that “if two persons are bound together in love, their purposes and interests, even the conditions of their happiness, are so logically intertwined as to be inseparable.”¹⁷ If I love my daughter, then her permanent loss is my permanent loss. If God loves the saints, and the saints love every neighbor, then God’s love must extend through the saints to every neighbor. Limited atonement, on this view, turns out to be logically incoherent given any plausible Christian account of love.

Chapter 9 (“Punishment, Forgiveness, and Divine Justice”) is where Talbott most directly answers the retributivist objection. The objection is the familiar one: if God forgives without exacting punishment, He is unjust; mercy without justice is moral chaos. Talbott’s response is that the Bible never sets mercy and justice in opposition. Divine retribution, on his reading, is a means by which God furthers His redemptive ends, not a separate divine demand that must be satisfied before mercy can operate. “We should, I believe, interpret all of the biblical ideas associated with divine judgment as redemptive ideas.”¹⁸ Hell, on this reading, is not the absence of mercy. Hell is mercy operating in its severe mode — God’s love refusing to let the sinner remain in his sin.

Chapter 11 (“God, Freedom, and Human Destiny”) takes on the free-will defense of hell. This is the most philosophically demanding chapter and the place where Talbott engages most directly with William Lane Craig, Jerry Walls, and Jonathan Kvanvig. The standard free-will defense holds that hell is what happens when a creature, in full knowledge of God, freely and finally chooses to reject Him. Talbott’s response, refined over decades of exchange, is that the notion of a creature freely choosing eternal misery in full knowledge of God is not actually intelligible. A genuinely free choice has reasons. To choose against one’s own deepest good, in full knowledge that it is one’s deepest good and that the alternative is sheer misery, is not free choice but a kind of derangement. The freedom of the damned, on the standard free-will model, turns out on closer inspection to be no freedom at all.¹⁹

In a section new to the second edition — “Two Very Different Images: The Lake of Fire and the Outer Darkness” — Talbott offers his own constructive picture. The lake of fire is not God’s absence; it is God’s purifying presence experienced by those still resisting it. The outer darkness is the sinner’s self-imposed isolation in his own selfishness. Both are real. Both are painful. Neither is final. The fire purifies until there is nothing left in the sinner to resist the love of God, at which point what was experienced as fire becomes experienced as light. The same divine presence is both. The change is in the sinner, not in God.²⁰

R. Zachary Manis, in his analytic-philosophical engagement with Talbott in Sinners in the Presence of a Loving God (Oxford, 2019), observes that this section of Talbott’s book — new in the second edition — “outlines what is, to my knowledge, the clearest and most detailed example of a hybrid version of the divine presence model to be found anywhere in the contemporary philosophical literature.”²¹ Manis is not a universalist. He develops his own constructive “Divine Presence Model” in Part III of his book as a non-universalist alternative. But his acknowledgment that Talbott’s account of hell-as-divine-presence is philosophically powerful, and that it intersects with his own constructive proposal, is itself a marker of how seriously the contemporary philosophical literature has come to take Talbott’s case.

Talbott’s major debate partner has been William Lane Craig, who responded to Talbott in two extended articles in Religious Studies in 1991 and 1993 (“Talbott’s Universalism” and “Talbott’s Universalism Once More”). The Craig–Talbott exchange has been one of the most productive in recent analytic philosophy of religion. Craig is a Molinist, holding that God uses His middle knowledge of all possible worlds to actualize the world in which the optimal balance of saved and lost obtains. Talbott’s reply has been that Molinism, taken seriously, points toward universalism rather than away from it: if God can use middle knowledge to actualize a world with at least some saved, why not a world with all saved? Manis — who is not himself a universalist — has argued that the Molinist case for universalism is in fact substantially stronger than the Molinist case against, and that “Molinism is deeply problematic for anti-universalists” in ways that have not been adequately appreciated.²²

Talbott’s significance is hard to overstate. He is the figure who gave the contemporary universalist movement its philosophical backbone. He is taken seriously by his critics — Craig praised the rigor of his arguments even while rejecting his conclusions, and Kvanvig and Walls and Manis have all engaged him at length. He has made universalism a respectable position in contemporary analytic philosophy of religion, in a way it had not been since the early modern period.

Robin Parry: The Evangelical Universalist

Robin Parry is a different kind of figure. Where Talbott is an analytic philosopher writing for philosophers, Parry is a biblical theologian writing for evangelicals. Born in 1969, Parry took his Ph.D. at the University of Gloucestershire on Old Testament ethics and worked for many years as an editor at Wipf and Stock and then Eerdmans publishing — two of the leading academic religious publishers in the English-speaking world. He is, in shorthand, a card-carrying evangelical: he affirms the inspiration and authority of Scripture, the deity of Christ, the necessity of conversion, the substitutionary work of the cross. What distinguishes him from his evangelical peers is that he came, through careful biblical study, to a universalist conclusion.²³

Parry tells the story of his conversion to universalism in the preface to the second edition of The Evangelical Universalist. He had been a settled evangelical Arminian when, in 2001, his faith faltered. He could no longer reconcile the picture of God he had been taught with what he found in Scripture: a God who loved the world enough to send His Son, but who would consign the majority of His creatures to endless conscious torment. “I no longer loved God, because he seemed diminished,” he writes. “I cannot express how deeply distressing this was for me — perhaps the most anguishing period of reflection on my faith I have ever experienced.”²⁴ A student showed him an article by the Yale evangelical philosopher Keith DeRose on universalism and the Bible. Then he encountered Thomas Talbott’s The Inescapable Love of God. Over the next year and a half, Parry worked through the biblical material himself, asking whether a universalist reading could actually be sustained on evangelical premises. He concluded that it could.

The result was The Evangelical Universalist, first published in 2006 under the pseudonym “Gregory MacDonald.” The pseudonym was necessary at the time: Parry was an editor at Paternoster Press, and an evangelical editor publishing a universalist book under his own name would have been awkward at best. The second edition (Cascade, 2012) was published under his own name. By then the conversation had shifted enough that he could.

The book has seven chapters and seven appendices. Chapter 1 (“A Hell of a Problem”) sets up the pastoral and theological problem. Chapter 2 (“Universalism and Biblical Theology”) is the methodological core. Parry insists that universalism cannot be argued from proof-texts alone. It must be argued as a biblical theology — a reading of the canonical story of Scripture as a whole, in which the universal scope of God’s saving purpose is the thread that runs from Abraham to the New Jerusalem. Chapters 3 and 4 trace that thread through the Old Testament (Israel and the nations, especially Isaiah) and the New Testament (Christ and the cosmos, especially Paul).

Chapter 5 (“A Universalist Interpretation of the Book of Revelation”) is where Parry’s case is at its most exegetically detailed. The conventional reading of Revelation treats the book as the strongest possible biblical witness against universalism: the lake of fire, the second death, the wicked outside the gates. Parry argues, against the conventional reading, that Revelation actually closes with one of the most striking universalist images in Scripture. The wicked are thrown into the lake of fire in chapter 20. The gates of the New Jerusalem in chapter 21 are described as never being shut: “On no day will its gates ever be shut” (Revelation 21:25). The kings of the earth — whose hostility to Christ Revelation has documented throughout — are pictured bringing their splendor into the city (21:24). The nations, which have been thrown into the lake of fire in chapter 20, are pictured walking by the light of the Lamb (21:24). There is a continuous flow, Parry argues, from outside the city (the lake of fire) into the city (the New Jerusalem). Following the German exegete Mathias Rissi, he reads the lake of fire not as the final destination of the lost but as the purifying station from which the nations eventually pass through the open gates.²⁵

Chapter 6 (“To Hell and Back”) takes on the aiōnios question, the meaning of kólasis (“correction” or “punishment”), Matthew 25:46, 2 Thessalonians 1:9, and the broader judgment-language texts. Parry’s treatment is more biblically grounded and less philosophically intricate than Talbott’s; his target audience is the evangelical pastor who has been told that the universalist reading is biblically impossible, and he sets out to show that, in fact, the universalist reading is biblically defensible.

Chapter 7 (“The Advantages of Christian Universalism and Replies to Remaining Objections”) is the constructive close. Here Parry makes his “evangelical” case explicit. Christian universalism, on his account, is not a denial of the cross, hell, judgment, repentance, or evangelism. It is an affirmation of all of these placed within a larger frame: the cross is the place where the universal scope of redemption is grounded, hell is the purgative judgment that brings the sinner to repentance, and evangelism is the urgent business of inviting people now into a relationship that everyone will eventually enter.

The seven appendices are not throwaway material. Appendix 1 (the reply to William Lane Craig on Molinism) extends the analytic conversation. Appendix 4 (“Love Wins?”) is a measured and gentle critique of Rob Bell’s book, in which Parry, while broadly sympathetic, notes that Bell does not actually make the case Parry himself wants to make. Appendix 7 (“Hell, Moral Formation, and Calvinism”) takes on the Calvinist moral-formation argument: the argument that the doctrine of eternal conscious torment is necessary for proper moral formation. Parry counters that the doctrine of universalism, properly understood, is at least as morally formative as its alternative and arguably more so — because a God whose love finally triumphs is a God it makes sense to love and emulate in turn.

Parry calls his position “hopeful dogmatic universalism.” He is a dogmatic universalist in the sense that he thinks the biblical case for universal restoration is strong enough to be affirmed rather than merely hoped for. He is “hopeful” in the sense that he holds his own conclusions with appropriate humility, granting that he might be wrong and refusing to make universalism a test of Christian fellowship.²⁷ The combination is characteristic of his temperament: confident enough to argue, humble enough to listen.

Parry’s influence on the contemporary movement is hard to measure but easy to feel. As an editor at Wipf and Stock and then Eerdmans, he was in a position to shepherd through the press much of the contemporary universalist and inclusivist literature — Jersak’s Her Gates Will Never Be Shut, the various follow-up volumes from the Christian Universalist Association, and a long list of patristic recovery projects. His blog, Theological Scribbles, has been a clearing house for the contemporary conversation. And in 2019 he co-published, with Ramelli, the two-volume A Larger Hope? (Cascade), which is now a standard reference work on the history of Christian universalism.²⁸

David Bentley Hart: The Polemic

If Talbott gave the movement its philosophy and Parry gave it its biblical theology, David Bentley Hart gave it its rhetoric. Born in 1965 and educated at the University of Maryland and the University of Virginia (Ph.D. 2001), Hart is an Eastern Orthodox theologian, philosopher, and cultural critic. His major systematic work, The Beauty of the Infinite (Eerdmans, 2003), is an extended Trinitarian engagement with postmodern philosophy. In 2017 he published a fresh translation of the New Testament with Yale University Press, a project that was both an exercise in self-conscious literalness (deliberately preserving the rough edges of the Greek) and a setup for the theological book that would follow.²⁹

That book is That All Shall Be Saved: Heaven, Hell, and Universal Salvation (Yale, 2019). It is a 232-page polemic, structured in three parts. Part I introduces the question. Part II is the heart of the book: four extended meditations on (1) who God is, (2) what judgment is, (3) what a person is, and (4) what freedom is. Part III, “What May Be Believed,” closes the argument. Hart writes with deliberate force. The book’s prose is some of the sharpest in twenty-first-century theological writing, and the rhetoric is not for the faint of heart.³⁰

Hart’s central argument is that what he calls “infernalism” — the doctrine of eternal conscious torment — is morally monstrous and theologically incoherent. The first meditation (“Who Is God? The Moral Meaning of Creatio ex Nihilo”) presses an old patristic point. If God creates from nothing, with no rival reality forcing His hand, then God Himself is the sole and final cause of every creature’s existence. To create a creature in full knowledge that it will spend eternity in conscious torment is, on Hart’s reading, to be morally responsible for that torment in a way the infernalist scheme cannot honestly own. The only morally coherent account of a creating God who is also good is an account in which every creature is eventually restored. Anything less makes God either incompetent or cruel.³¹

The second meditation (“What Is Judgment?”) walks through the biblical material on judgment, with sustained attention to the Greek terms — aiōnios, kólasis, apokatástasis — that Hart has handled in his own New Testament translation. His exegetical case is broadly continuous with Talbott’s and Parry’s but presses harder on the claim that the standard English translations have systematically loaded the biblical vocabulary in an infernalist direction. The aiōnios punishment of Matthew 25:46, on Hart’s rendering, is the punishment of the age to come, not unending temporal punishment — and the kólasis of that verse is corrective, not retributive. The Greek New Testament, read on its own terms, will not deliver the doctrine of eternal conscious torment without some help from the translators.

The third meditation (“What Is a Person?”) advances what Hart calls a “relational” anthropology. Drawing on Gregory of Nyssa, he argues that a person is not an isolated atom but a node in a web of relations. To be human is to be constituted in part by one’s love for others. If even one person is finally lost, then the salvation of the rest is incomplete — because each of the saved is constituted in part by relations of love to the lost. To say “the saints will rejoice in heaven while their loved ones suffer in hell” is, on Hart’s reading, to misunderstand what a saint is. The saints are perfected in love, and love makes the lost neighbor’s torment one’s own.³²

The fourth meditation (“What Is Freedom?”) is the philosophical heart of the book. Hart argues that the free-will defense of hell rests on an incoherent account of freedom. True freedom, on the classical account he inherits from Gregory and Maximus the Confessor, is not the bare power to choose between alternatives but the rational orientation of the will toward its proper good. A genuinely free being is one who, in full knowledge of the truth, chooses the truth. To “freely” choose eternal misery in full knowledge of God is, on this account, a contradiction in terms. The infernalist’s appeal to free will to justify hell turns out, on closer inspection, to rest on a Voluntaristic account of freedom that the Christian tradition has historically rejected.

Hart’s tone throughout is unsparing. He describes the infernalist position as “morally insane.” He calls some of its defenders “impressively limited.” The polemic has been variously received. Some readers — especially those who have already moved toward universalism — have found the book bracing, even cathartic. Others have judged the rhetoric self-defeating: the sharp tone closes the ears of the very readers who most need to hear the argument. Roger Olson, an Arminian who is broadly sympathetic to the long hope, has criticized the book’s tone while crediting its central arguments. Edward Oakes, a Catholic Balthasarian, wrote a respectful but skeptical review in First Things. Michael McClymond, in The Devil’s Redemption, sees Hart’s book as the most aggressive iteration of a broader trajectory he wants to resist.³³

Hart’s ecclesial location matters. He is not an evangelical. He is an Eastern Orthodox theologian, working within a tradition that — from Gregory of Nyssa through Isaac of Nineveh through the modern Russian school of Bulgakov and Berdyaev through Met. Hilarion Alfeyev and the Anglo-Orthodox Kallistos Ware — has had a steady (if often quiet) openness to apokatastasis. His engagement with the long hope is not the recovery of an exotic option but the foregrounding of a strand that has been continuous in his tradition all along. This makes him an unusual interlocutor for evangelical readers: he can claim a deep ecclesial pedigree the evangelical universalist often cannot.³⁴ See Chapter 24 for the broader Orthodox context.

Rob Bell: The Pastor

Rob Bell is the figure who took the long-hope conversation popular. Born in 1970, Bell was educated at Wheaton College and Fuller Theological Seminary. In 1999 he founded Mars Hill Bible Church in Grandville, Michigan; by the late 2000s it had grown to over ten thousand attendees and Bell had become one of the most-watched figures in American evangelicalism. His teaching style was conversational, story-driven, and accessible — closer to a TED talk than to a traditional sermon.³⁵

Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived was published in March 2011 by HarperOne. It is a short book — under 200 pages — written in Bell’s characteristic short-line, single-paragraph-per-sentence style. It is not a work of academic theology. It is a pastoral book that takes the form of a long question. What kind of God is the God of Christian preaching? Does the God who loves the world finally accept the eternal loss of most of His creatures? Bell’s answer, while never fully committed to universalism in dogmatic form, leans heavily in that direction.

The book does not, technically, claim that all will be saved. It claims that the God revealed in Jesus Christ is committed to the salvation of everyone, that the divine love is restless until it has reached every last person, and that the question of whether everyone will, finally and freely, accept that love is one we cannot answer with certainty this side of glory. In structure, this is closer to Balthasar’s “hopeful universalism” (see Chapter 22) than to Parry’s “dogmatic universalism” or Hart’s confident assertion. But the book’s reception treated it, almost without exception, as a universalist book.

The fallout from Love Wins reshaped American evangelicalism’s public conversation about hell. Within months, several response books appeared: Francis Chan’s Erasing Hell, Mark Galli’s God Wins, an edited volume from Albert Mohler, J. I. Packer, and others titled Is Hell for Real or Does Everyone Go to Heaven? The Gospel Coalition convened a panel on universalism at its 2011 national conference. Don Carson devoted significant lecture time to the question. The doctrine of eternal conscious torment, which had not been seriously contested in mainstream American evangelical discourse in decades, was suddenly being argued for from the pulpit and the podium and the blog.

Bell himself stepped down from Mars Hill in late 2011 and moved to California, where he pursued various media projects, did a stint with Oprah Winfrey’s OWN network, and worked on books and podcasts that drifted further from recognizably evangelical commitments. The trajectory of his career after Love Wins seemed to confirm, for many evangelicals, that the book had been the moment when Bell left the evangelical movement — or, depending on your view, when the evangelical movement disowned him.

What Love Wins accomplished, theologically, was modest. The arguments were not new. Bell drew heavily on the patristic tradition (especially Origen and Gregory of Nyssa) and on earlier modern figures (especially MacDonald and C. S. Lewis). What the book did do, and what no academic monograph could have done, was bring the question of postmortem opportunity and universal restoration to the dinner table of evangelical America. After 2011, ordinary evangelicals knew that the question was open, that serious Christians took different positions, and that the answer was not as obvious as it had looked the year before.

Brad Jersak: The Quiet Voice

Brad Jersak is the most pastorally framed of the contemporary universalists. Born in 1964 in Canada, Jersak emerged from a charismatic-evangelical background (he was associated for years with the Vineyard movement and with Peter Fitch’s Streams Ministries) before moving, in his middle career, into Eastern Orthodoxy. As of 2019 he serves as Dean of Ministry Studies at St. Stephen’s University in New Brunswick, Canada, and as a reader at All Saints of North America Orthodox Monastery in Dewdney, British Columbia.³⁷

Her Gates Will Never Be Shut: Hope, Hell, and the New Jerusalem (Wipf & Stock, 2009) is Jersak’s major contribution to the contemporary conversation. The title is a phrase from Isaiah 60:11 and Revelation 21:25 — the same image Parry built his Revelation chapter around. Jersak’s book covers similar ground to Parry’s but in a different register. Where Parry is a biblical theologian making a sustained academic argument, Jersak is a pastor making a careful case for evangelical readers who have been frightened away from the conversation by the polemics on both sides.

Jersak calls his position “the humility of hope” or “hopeful universalism.” He does not claim certainty that all will be saved. He claims that Scripture gives sufficient warrant for the hope that all might be saved, and that the love of God obliges and inspires the Christian to live, pray, and proclaim with that hope as a real possibility.³⁸ The book’s tone is the opposite of Hart’s: gentle, irenic, slow, listening. Jersak speaks in the voice of a fellow evangelical pulling up a chair and saying, “What if we looked at this together?”

The argumentative shape is recognizable. Jersak handles the Hebrew Sheol and Greek Hades distinctions. He walks carefully through Gehenna. He spends most of his time on Revelation, especially Revelation 21–22, where the universalist case is at its most visually striking. Like Parry, he reads the open gates and the entry of the nations as evidence that the lake of fire is not the final word. Unlike Parry, he does not press toward dogmatic universalism. The careful pastoral framing is everything.

Jersak’s later trajectory is worth noting briefly. By the 2020s he had moved fully into Eastern Orthodoxy and into a deeper engagement with the patristic tradition. His more recent writing on the “River of Fire” tradition (the idea that the same divine fire is bliss to the saints and torment to the resistant) and on the Eastern doctrine of theosis has continued the same project from a different ecclesial vantage. His current position is sometimes called “ultimate redemption” or “beyond hopeful universalism,” with greater confidence that the love of God will, in fact, prevail.³⁹

Ilaria Ramelli: The Historian as Advocate

Ilaria L. E. Ramelli is the contemporary scholar of the historical universalist tradition. Born in 1973 in Italy and trained in Catholic patristic scholarship, she is currently Full Professor of Theology at the Angelicum (Pontifical University of Saint Thomas Aquinas) in Rome, with research appointments at Oxford and Durham. Her 890-page monograph The Christian Doctrine of Apokatastasis: A Critical Assessment from the New Testament to Eriugena (Brill, 2013) is the most extensive recent study of the patristic and medieval universalist tradition. The book’s claims are sweeping: that universalism has roots in the New Testament itself, that it flourished in the early Church as a respectable theological option, and that the Eastern tradition has carried the doctrine forward in a continuous line from Origen through Gregory of Nyssa and Isaac of Nineveh into modern Orthodox theology.⁴⁰ See Chapter 8, Chapter 9, and Chapter 10 for the historical engagement with Ramelli’s major monograph.

For the present chapter, what matters is that Ramelli is not merely a historian. She is also a contemporary advocate for apokatastasis as a live theological option. The two-volume A Larger Hope? (Cascade, 2019) — Ramelli wrote Volume 1 (covering Christian beginnings to Julian of Norwich) and co-wrote Volume 2 (the Reformation to the nineteenth century) with Robin Parry — is a more accessible presentation of the historical case for a general readership. In her contributions to the contemporary conversation, Ramelli moves freely between the historian’s and the theologian’s voice. The historical scholarship lends weight to the contemporary advocacy, and the contemporary advocacy gives a sharper edge to the historical scholarship. Ramelli has been criticized for moving too quickly between the two roles — McClymond, in particular, has argued that Ramelli’s historical readings sometimes lean further toward the universalist conclusion than the sources warrant. The dispute is now part of the contemporary patristic landscape.⁴¹

D. Reception: The Critics and the Conversation

The contemporary universalist movement has not gone unanswered. The most thorough critique is Michael J. McClymond’s two-volume The Devil’s Redemption: A New History and Interpretation of Christian Universalism (Baker Academic, 2018), winner of The Gospel Coalition’s 2018 academic theology book of the year and a Choice Outstanding Academic Title for 2019. The book runs to 1,362 pages. It is the largest single-volume critique of Christian universalism ever published.⁴²

McClymond’s argument is partly historical and partly theological. The historical claim is that “Christian universalism” is a coherent intellectual tradition with identifiable roots, family resemblances, and recurring problems — not a series of independent recoveries of the obvious meaning of Scripture but a particular theological trajectory that runs from gnostic and Origenist sources through medieval Joachimism and early modern enthusiasm and German idealism and Russian sophiology into the contemporary movement. To accept universalism, McClymond argues, is to enter a tradition with a particular shape, not to read Scripture afresh. The theological claim is that the universalist tradition tends to undermine the gravity of sin, the seriousness of the cross, and the urgency of conversion. “The effort to extend grace to everyone undermines the principle of grace for anyone,” he writes.⁴³

The book has been variously received. Hans Schwarz has called the two volumes “a wealth of insights.” The Gospel Coalition awarded it the academic theology book of the year. Roger Olson found it useful as a history but unpersuasive as a theological critique. Various contemporary universalists — especially the Catholic theologian Taylor Nutter and the Reformed-turned-universalist John Kronen — have written extended replies arguing that McClymond’s theological objections, while serious, do not undermine the central universalist case. The exchange is now part of the standard literature.

McClymond’s most striking historical claim — that contemporary Christian universalism has gnostic roots — has been the most contested. Ramelli has argued, on the contrary, that the early Christian universalist tradition was specifically anti-gnostic, defining itself against the gnostic devaluation of the body and the material order. Hart, characteristically, was less polite. The dispute will not be settled here. What matters for our purposes is that the contemporary critical conversation around universalism is now sufficiently serious that two thousand pages of academic critique and reply have been published in the last decade, with more in production. This is not a fringe debate.

R. Zachary Manis, an analytic philosopher of religion at Missouri Baptist University, has published the most rigorous recent philosophical engagement with Talbott. His book Sinners in the Presence of a Loving God: An Essay on the Problem of Hell (Oxford, 2019) is a major work. Part II of the book runs through the standard options — traditionalism, universalism, annihilationism — before Part III develops Manis’s constructive “Divine Presence Model.”⁴⁴

Chapter 3 of Manis’s book (“Traditionalism and Universalism,” pp. 95–116) treats Talbott directly. Manis sets out the central universalist arguments with the philosophical care they deserve. He outlines the divine-attribute argument: if God is necessarily perfectly loving, and necessarily perfectly sovereign, then the salvation of all is the only conclusion consistent with the divine nature. He outlines Talbott’s “inclusive nature of love” argument. He outlines Marilyn McCord Adams’s related case that God must “defeat” horrendous evil within the life of each person who participates in it. He concludes that “the case for universalism appears to be quite strong even when supported by just these initial points.”⁴⁵

Chapter 4 (“Providence, Freedom, and God’s Creation of the Damned,” pp. 117–158) develops the most thorough analytic case against universalism in the recent literature. Manis argues that the free-will argument against universalism — the standard line that universalism is incompatible with libertarian freedom — fails on its own terms. The Molinist defense of anti-universalism, he argues, is “deeply problematic.” If God can use middle knowledge to actualize a world with some saved, He can use it to actualize a world with all saved — and the failure to do so calls divine goodness into question. The result is a kind of philosophical stalemate that pushes Manis toward his own constructive Divine Presence Model, in which hell is the same divine presence that is heaven, experienced differently depending on the state of the soul.

The most striking thing about Manis’s engagement with Talbott is the convergence. Manis is not a universalist. He develops the Divine Presence Model as a non-universalist alternative. But he acknowledges, with admirable scholarly honesty, that Talbott’s account of hell — especially the new section in the second edition on the lake of fire and the outer darkness — offers “the clearest and most detailed example of a hybrid version of the divine presence model to be found anywhere in the contemporary philosophical literature.”⁴⁶ The convergence between Talbott’s universalist version of the Divine Presence Model and Manis’s non-universalist version is one of the more interesting developments in recent philosophy of religion. It suggests that, on the philosophical merits, the gap between the most sophisticated universalist positions and the most sophisticated non-universalist positions has narrowed considerably. The dispute is increasingly about whether the divine presence will, in fact, succeed in transforming all who experience it — not about whether the divine presence is what hell is.

Other critical engagements are worth brief mention. Edward Oakes, a Jesuit Balthasarian, reviewed both Bell and Hart in First Things, generally sympathetic to the spirit of the hope but skeptical of the dogmatic confidence in Hart and dismissive of the popular shallowness in Bell. Roger Olson, an evangelical Arminian, has written extensively (mostly on his blog) defending the right of evangelical universalists to a hearing within evangelicalism while himself stopping short of universalism. Albert Mohler, John MacArthur, and R. C. Sproul represent the conservative Reformed rejection: Mohler in particular argued in 2011 that Love Wins represented “a denial of the gospel.” Cornelis Venema and Michael Horton have published more measured Reformed engagements. The conversation crosses denominational lines in ways the conversation about universalism has rarely crossed since the patristic period.

E. Assessment: What the Movement Is and Is Not

What can we say, after taking the measure of these figures and their critics?

First, the contemporary universalist movement is not a fringe phenomenon. Talbott’s book has been engaged in Religious Studies, Faith and Philosophy, and the Philosophical Quarterly. Parry’s book has been on the reading list of every serious evangelical seminary course on hell since 2010. Hart’s book was reviewed in The New York Times Book Review and The New York Review of Books. McClymond’s critique won The Gospel Coalition’s academic theology book of the year. The question is being argued at the highest levels of contemporary theology and philosophy of religion, in a way it has not been since the patristic period.

Second, the movement is biblically and patristically serious. The major figures all engage Scripture as Scripture, not as a museum piece. They engage the patristic tradition (especially Origen, Gregory of Nyssa, and Isaac of Nineveh) as their conscious genealogy. The standard rhetorical move against them — that universalism is a modern liberal innovation imported into Christian theology from the Enlightenment — cannot survive a careful look at their actual sources and methods. The contemporary universalist movement is best understood as a recovery of the patristic universalist stream, supplemented by analytic philosophy and modern biblical theology, not as a fresh invention of the Enlightenment imagination.

Third, the movement is internally diverse. Talbott’s analytic Arminian universalism is not Hart’s Orthodox classical-theistic universalism. Parry’s evangelical biblical-theological universalism is not Jersak’s pastoral hopeful universalism. Bell’s popular framing is not Ramelli’s scholarly framing. There is no single “universalist” position in the contemporary movement; there is a family of overlapping positions held together by a common conclusion about the final scope of salvation and a common refusal of eternal conscious torment.

Fourth, the movement’s exegetical case is contested and will remain contested. I write this as someone whose own position (conditional immortality with postmortem opportunity, open to conservative biblical universalism) sits adjacent to but not within the movement. Talbott’s reading of aiōnios is debated in the lexical literature. Parry’s reading of Revelation 21–22 is debated by Beilby and others. Hart’s reading of Romans 5 is debated by N. T. Wright and others. None of these debates has been settled by the publication of any of the movement’s books, and none is likely to be settled soon. What the movement has established is that the universalist reading is at least exegetically defensible — that it is not, as it has so often been described, a position requiring the Christian to set aside the plain meaning of the biblical text. It is a position requiring the Christian to engage the biblical text with at least as much care as the alternative positions require.

Fifth, the movement’s philosophical case is strong but contested. Talbott’s inconsistent triad is a powerful argumentative tool, but it is not a knock-down refutation of the alternative positions. The Calvinist can deny proposition (1) by insisting on the doctrine of limited atonement, however unpalatable that may seem. The Arminian can deny proposition (2) by insisting on a robust account of libertarian freedom, however weakened the divine sovereignty thereby becomes. Manis’s constructive Divine Presence Model attempts something different: it accepts the central force of the divine-presence-as-hell intuition but argues, against the universalists, that some creatures may persist in their resistance to the divine presence forever. Whether that is intelligible is itself contested. We are in the middle of the conversation, not at the end of it.

Sixth, the movement’s pastoral case is strong. None of the major contemporary universalists is preaching cheap grace. All affirm the reality and seriousness of judgment. All affirm the necessity of repentance. All affirm the gravity of sin. What they deny is that the judgment is endless and the repentance impossible. The pastoral upshot of the universalist case is not the antinomian one its critics sometimes allege. It is, on the contrary, a renewed seriousness about the love of God: a love that is finally so relentless that it will not give up on its creatures, however long it must wait.

What can the contemporary universalist movement clearly not establish? It cannot establish, by historical argument alone, that universalism is the correct conclusion. The history shows that universalism has been a continuous Christian option from the second century forward. That establishes the legitimacy of the universalist position as a serious Christian option. It does not establish its correctness. The exegetical and philosophical arguments are independent of the historical ones and must stand or fall on their own merits. The movement’s historical recovery has been thorough and convincing. The exegetical and philosophical work remains, in honesty, in progress.

F. Why This Matters

So why does any of this matter for the contemporary church?

It matters because the question of what becomes of the dead is one of the deepest pastoral questions any Christian community faces. Every pastor has stood at the deathbed of a person who never made a clear profession of faith. Every parent has wondered, in the small hours of the morning, whether the prodigal child who died apart from Christ is finally and forever lost. Every Christian who has loved a non-Christian deeply has felt the weight of what the standard evangelical doctrine of hell requires them to believe about the person they love. The contemporary universalist movement does not, by itself, settle these questions. But it does open the conversation in a way that allows the questions to be asked honestly within the church.

It matters, second, because the modern-innovation charge against the long hope can no longer be sustained. When John Piper tweeted “Farewell Rob Bell” in 2011, the implicit theological claim was that Bell was leaving the historic Christian faith for a modern liberal innovation. We have seen across the previous twenty-four chapters of this book that this is not true. The long hope of postmortem opportunity, in some form, has been part of the Christian conversation from the second century forward. What the contemporary universalist movement has done is to give that long hope a contemporary voice that can be argued for in the idiom of contemporary theology, philosophy, and biblical scholarship. The recovery is more rigorous than at any point since the patristic period — more rigorous than Origen could have been (since the analytic tools were not yet available), more rigorous than Gregory of Nyssa could have been (since modern biblical theology was not yet available), more rigorous than the Cambridge Platonists could have been (since the patristic sources were not yet adequately recovered).

It matters, third, because the conversation has shifted what evangelicals can reasonably claim about Christian tradition. By the early 2020s, “hopeful universalism” had become a recognized option in evangelical theology — not the majority position, certainly not the dogmatic position of any major denomination, but a position that could be held by a thoughtful evangelical without forfeiting evangelical identity. The Society of Evangelical Arminians, the Christian Universalist Association, the Rethinking Hell project, and a half dozen smaller scholarly conversations have established that the long hope, in its various forms, is now part of the evangelical landscape. The argument has moved from “are you a heretic for considering this?” to “what is the best exegetical and theological case for or against this?” That is real progress, regardless of where one finally lands.

And it matters, fourth, because the figures we have met in this chapter are not, in the end, scholars first. They are pastors. MacDonald was a pastor. Talbott has written most of his books with the lay reader in view as well as the professional philosopher. Parry has spent most of his career editing books for evangelical laypeople. Hart, for all his polemics, writes out of an Orthodox liturgical formation in which the question of the fate of the dead is asked every time the church gathers. Bell was a megachurch pastor. Jersak is a monastery reader. The contemporary universalist movement is, at its core, a pastoral movement — an attempt to recover for the church a hope big enough to bear the weight of human suffering and human loss.

From MacDonald’s little chapel in Arundel in 1853, where he was driven out for preaching that God is love, to Hart’s lectern at Notre Dame in 2019, where he argued the same thing in the idiom of contemporary philosophy, the long hope has found its contemporary voice. It is more articulate, more biblically grounded, and more philosophically serious than at any point since Gregory of Nyssa. Whether the contemporary reader accepts the universalist position is a separate question — one that the rest of this book will continue to weigh, with attention to the postmortem opportunity scholarship of Chapter 26, the hopeful universalism of Chapter 27, and the conditional immortality of Chapter 28. What is no longer in doubt is that the position has serious contemporary defenders, and that the question deserves to be asked.

I think MacDonald himself would have been astonished by the conversation that now bears, in part, his name. He spent his life as a marginal figure, unable to hold a pulpit, telling stories to children because no congregation would let him preach. He could not have imagined that, a hundred and fifty years after his death, an analytic philosopher in Oregon, a biblical theologian in England, an Eastern Orthodox polemicist at Notre Dame, a Canadian Orthodox reader, a Roman Catholic patristics scholar at the Angelicum, and a pastor turned podcaster in California would be reading him together and finding, in his stubborn refusal to give up on God’s love, the seed of an argument the church needs to hear. The consuming fire is still consuming. The long hope is still long. And the gates, in Jersak’s phrase, will never be shut.