Chapter 27

Hopeful Universalism in Contemporary Evangelical Thought

“I am not a universalist… but I hope.” — The most pervasive contemporary form of long-hope theology

A Funeral, and a Pastor Choosing His Words

A pastor I know stood before a casket in a small Midwestern town and tried to find something true to say. The man in the casket had not been a believer. He had not been a hater of God either — just a kind, quiet man who had grown up around the church, walked away in his twenties, and never come back. His wife, who still sat in the front row every Sunday, asked the pastor to do the service. She did not ask him to lie. She just asked him to say something honest about her husband, and something honest about God, and to leave room for what she could not stop hoping.¹

I watched him do it. He did not promise heaven. He did not assign hell. He spoke of a God whose mercies are new every morning, of a Savior who descended into the dark places, of a love that has always been wider than we have known how to ask. He said he did not know everything about what happens at the moment of death. But he said he knew the One who does, and he trusted Him. Then he sat down, and the widow wept, and the church wept with her, and nobody could quite say afterward what kind of eschatology that funeral had been.

That funeral was, in its quiet way, an act of hopeful universalism. Not the confident universalism of David Bentley Hart or Robin Parry — that insists on universal restoration as a doctrine. Not the explicit postmortem-opportunity position of James Beilby or Stephen Jonathan — that argues a careful case that God’s offer of grace does not stop at the grave. Just a pastoral refusal to slam the door. Just a quiet trust that the One who is love will be love all the way down, even into death, even at the end. That pastor would not have called himself a universalist. He may not have called himself anything in particular. But what he did at that funeral was perform, in real time, the eschatology that more and more contemporary evangelicals are quietly settling into — even when their denominational statements still say something stricter.

This chapter is about that quiet settling. It is about the position that has come to be called “hopeful universalism” — the view that the Christian may hope for universal restoration without claiming to know it. Hans Urs von Balthasar gave the position its sharpest classical statement in Dare We Hope “That All Men Be Saved”?² He insisted that the Christian must hope for the salvation of all, but cannot teach it as certain. Whether or not Balthasar himself crossed his own line, the framework he gave the conversation has been taken up — sometimes consciously, sometimes not — by a remarkable number of contemporary American and British evangelicals.

Hopeful universalism is not a movement with a manifesto. It does not have a headquarters, a journal, or a creed. It has voices — Greg Boyd, Sharon Baker, Heath Bradley, Steve Gregg, Bradley Jersak, Brian Zahnd, Pete Enns, Sarah Bessey, Roger Olson, Scot McKnight — who do not all agree with one another and would resist being lumped together. Some of them, like Bradley, are closer to confident universalism. Others, like Olson, are firmly not universalist but unwilling to call universalism damnable. Still others, like Boyd, lean conditionalist while leaving the universalist door open. What unites them is what they will not say. They will not say that the deadline doctrine — that death seals one’s fate forever — is the only Christian view. They will not say that God’s love simply stops at the grave. They will not preach hell the way Jonathan Edwards preached it in 1741.³ And they will not refuse the widow at the front row the room to keep on hoping.

The thesis of this chapter is simple. Beyond the explicit universalist movement of Chapter 25 and the explicit postmortem-opportunity movement of Chapter 26, a broader, looser, more pastoral hopeful universalism has become the most pervasive contemporary form of long-hope theology in evangelicalism. It is the position more and more pastors land on when they have a funeral to do and a Bible in their hand. It is the position more and more seminary graduates take into ministry without quite telling their ordination boards. It is the quiet majority position in a great deal of the evangelical world — even where the formal denominational position remains strict eternal conscious torment. That historical fact, the slow softening of evangelical practice on this question, is itself a major chapter in the long-hope story. It is the chapter we tell here.

The Post-2000 Shift — A Changed Publishing Landscape

To understand what happened, we have to start with the books. Open the catalog of a mainstream evangelical publisher in 1990 — Eerdmans, Baker, Zondervan, IVP, Thomas Nelson — and look for the entries on hell. You will find titles that affirm eternal conscious torment, almost without exception, sometimes in the calm voice of John Walvoord and sometimes in the more thunderous voice of John Blanchard.⁴ Conditional immortality was a minority report. Universalism was unmentionable. Postmortem opportunity was barely on the map.

Open the same catalogs after 2010 and the landscape is unrecognizable. Eerdmans publishes Ilaria Ramelli’s massive The Christian Doctrine of Apokatastasis — an 890-page documentary case that universal restoration was a serious patristic option from Origen through Maximus.⁵ Eerdmans publishes Edward Fudge’s third edition of The Fire That Consumes, the foundational text of modern conditional immortality. Baker Academic publishes Christopher Date and others. Cascade and Wipf & Stock publish Robin Parry’s The Evangelical Universalist, Heath Bradley’s Flames of Love, Andrew Hronich’s Once Loved, Always Loved, and Bradley Jersak’s Her Gates Will Never Be Shut. Westminster John Knox publishes Sharon Baker’s Razing Hell. Thomas Nelson — the largest evangelical trade publisher in America — publishes Steve Gregg’s All You Want to Know About Hell, a book that treats universalism as one of three respectable Christian positions on the question. Waterbrook (a Penguin Random House imprint that publishes a great deal of evangelical work) publishes Brian Zahnd’s Sinners in the Hands of a Loving God.⁶

None of this would have been imaginable in 1990. The publishing shift is itself a kind of historical evidence. Publishers do not put out books they do not believe will sell, and they will not damage their core brand to chase a niche audience. The fact that respectable mainstream evangelical publishers were willing, by 2015, to put out long-hope titles in volume is evidence that the market for them was large, well-formed, and growing. The fact that they kept doing it is evidence that the books found their readers and the readers came back for more.

Why? Several factors converged. One was the post-Christendom American religious landscape — the realization that cultural Christianity was thinning out, that the unevangelized people in the next pew were the unsaved relatives of the people in the next pew. Funerals like the one I described at the top of this chapter became more common, not less. Strict eternal conscious torment as a pastoral default cracked under the weight of those funerals. A second factor was the rise of the “deconstruction” movement — a generation of younger evangelicals who had been raised on the doctrine of hell as a club, who had watched their churches use it, and who walked away en masse in the late 2010s.⁷ Some of them landed on universalism. Some on conditional immortality. Some simply stopped going to church. Pastors trying to keep the next generation in the fold found themselves having to talk about hell in ways their teachers had not taught them.

A third factor — less often discussed, but significant — was the popular near-death-experience literature. Eben Alexander’s Proof of Heaven (2012), Don Piper’s 90 Minutes in Heaven (2004), Todd Burpo’s Heaven Is for Real (2010), and the publishing wave they generated put the question of the afterlife on the bestseller list in a form that traditional evangelical eschatology had no easy answer to.⁸ Most evangelical responses to NDEs have been hostile or dismissive. But the popular impact has been substantial. And the more careful evangelical engagements with the NDE literature — including the kind of doctoral-level work going on in NDE studies as part of the broader theological investigation of the intermediate state — have begun to take the evidence seriously. The cumulative effect on the popular evangelical imagination has been to make a strict deadline-at-death eschatology feel both empirically and pastorally inadequate.

A fourth factor was simply that the strict view became harder to defend in print. As more and more careful biblical, lexical, historical, and theological work was published arguing the long-hope case — especially the work I traced in Chapter 25 and Chapter 26 — the defenses of strict eternal conscious torment had to become more careful, more nuanced, and more philosophically sophisticated. Some of them have done so admirably. But the days when a pastor could simply cite Matthew 25:46, declare the matter settled, and move on were gone. The conversation had become harder, and that meant pastoral confidence in the strict view had become harder too.

These four factors — the post-Christendom landscape, the deconstruction wave, the NDE phenomenon, and the rising sophistication of the long-hope literature — together produced what I am calling the post-2000 shift. The evangelical world in 2025 is not the evangelical world of 1985. Its formal commitments on hell have changed less than its actual pastoral practice. The gap between what the denominational statements say and what the parish ministers preach has widened. Hopeful universalism is what fills that gap.

Greg Boyd — Pentecostal-Evangelical Hope from a Pulpit in St. Paul

If hopeful universalism has a public-facing evangelical pastor with a substantial following, it is Greg Boyd. Born in Cleveland in 1957, Boyd was raised Roman Catholic, became an atheist in his teens, and converted to evangelical Christianity in 1979 as an undergraduate at the University of Minnesota.⁹ He took his M.Div. at Yale Divinity School in 1982 and his Ph.D. at Princeton Theological Seminary in 1988, where he studied under Bruce Metzger and shared a classroom with Bart Ehrman.¹⁰ His doctoral dissertation, published as Trinity and Process, was a critique of Charles Hartshorne’s process theology — a serious work of analytic philosophical theology that established the kind of careful, technically literate scholar Boyd was going to be.¹¹

For sixteen years Boyd taught theology at Bethel University in St. Paul, an evangelical school in the Baptist General Conference tradition. In 1992 he co-founded Woodland Hills Church, also in St. Paul, where he has served as senior pastor ever since. The church grew into a megachurch in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Boyd is now one of the more recognizable evangelical pastoral-theological voices in the United States, with a regular sermon archive at reknew.org and a steady stream of books. The combination — serious academic credentials, a thriving local pastorate, and a willingness to publish on controversial topics — is rare.

The theological corpus matters here because Boyd has consistently used his scholarly tools in the service of pastoral reframing. Letters from a Skeptic (1994) was an extended correspondence with his then-unbelieving father, in which Boyd worked through the standard apologetic questions; his father was eventually converted — in part, Boyd has said in interviews, because Boyd introduced him to the conditional immortality view and removed the obstacle of eternal conscious torment.¹² God at War (1997) and Satan and the Problem of Evil (2001), together with the later Crucifixion of the Warrior God (2017), worked out what Boyd calls the “warfare worldview” — the claim that the cosmos is the site of a genuine spiritual conflict between God and the rebellious powers, that much of the violence and evil in the world is the work of those powers rather than of God, and that the cross is God’s decisive victory over them through self-giving love rather than overpowering force.¹³ The warfare worldview is not, on its surface, an eschatology. But it makes a difference for eschatology, because it commits Boyd to a non-violent picture of the divine character and an emphasis on freedom-respecting persuasion rather than coercive imposition — both moves that pull against strict eternal conscious torment.

What does Boyd actually teach about hell? More than he is sometimes credited for. In his 2008 essay “The Case for Annihilationism,” posted on his ministry website and reprinted widely, Boyd writes: “Annihilationism is the view that whoever and whatever cannot be redeemed by God is ultimately put out of existence. Sentient beings do not suffer eternally, as the traditional view of hell teaches. I am strongly inclined toward the annihilationist position. The reason is that it strikes me as the view that has the best biblical support.”¹⁴ He then runs through sixteen biblical arguments, beginning with the standard conditional-immortality claim that immortality belongs to God alone (1 Timothy 6:16) and is given as gift, not inherent to the soul. That is a careful, evidence-driven case for conditional immortality — the position I work out at length in Chapter 28.

But Boyd does not stop there. In Satan and the Problem of Evil he tries to hold annihilationism and the language of eternal conscious torment together in a single model — arguing that hell is “the eternal suffering of agents who have been annihilated,” an experience of unreality from within that is, from the outside, simply a cessation of being.¹⁵ Critics, including John Piper, have pointed out that the model is philosophically slippery. But the move tells us something important about Boyd’s temperament. He is not interested in choosing one of the three classical options and dismissing the others. He is trying to honor what each of them gets right while leaving room for hope that the wicked may yet repent and be saved. His sermons at Woodland Hills reflect the same posture — honest about the seriousness of judgment, careful not to overdescribe what no one knows, and quietly insistent that the God revealed in Jesus is not the God of cruel finality.

Boyd’s significance for this chapter is fourfold. First, he shows that a person can hold a serious doctorate from a major seminary, run a thriving evangelical megachurch, and quietly teach a long-hope eschatology without losing either his pulpit or his publishing contracts. Second, he shows that the lines between conditional immortality and hopeful universalism are not as sharp in pastoral practice as they are on paper — Boyd leans CI, but he leaves the universalist door open and refuses to slam it shut. Third, he models the warm-toned, exegetically careful, pastorally-driven engagement with the question that has come to characterize the broader hopeful-universalist conversation. And fourth, his location in a Pentecostal-charismatic-evangelical context — Woodland Hills is not a mainline church, not a Catholic parish, not an Eastern Orthodox jurisdiction — demonstrates that the long-hope conversation has moved well past the boundaries of the older liberal Protestantism it was once confined to. This is a serious shift, and Boyd is one of its public faces.

Sharon L. Baker — Razing Hell from Within the Anabaptist Tradition

If Boyd is the public face of pastoral hopeful universalism, Sharon L. Baker (now Sharon L. Baker Putt, born 1956) is one of its most read academic voices. Baker is professor of theology and religion at Messiah University, a Christian college in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania with deep roots in the Brethren in Christ tradition.¹⁶ Her theological formation owes a heavy debt to John D. Caputo, the Catholic continental philosopher whose “weak theology” and post-deconstructive engagement with Derrida have shaped a generation of younger evangelical and post-evangelical thinkers. Baker thanks Caputo by name in her acknowledgements — he read drafts of her book — and his fingerprints are visible throughout her constructive proposals.¹⁷

Razing Hell: Rethinking Everything You’ve Been Taught about God’s Wrath and Judgment (Westminster John Knox, 2010) is her best-known work and the one we will work through here.¹⁸ The book is structured in three parts. Part 1 (chapters 1–4: “The Landscape,” “The Image of God,” “The Justice of God,” “The Forgiveness of God”) is her careful exposition of the inherited strict-eternal-conscious-torment view she is responding to. Part 2 (chapters 5–8: “Rethinking the Violence of God,” “Rethinking the Image of God,” “Rethinking the Justice of God,” “Rethinking the Forgiveness of God”) is the constructive heart of the book — her attempt to show that the image of God as nonviolent, the doctrine of justice as restorative rather than retributive, and the doctrine of forgiveness as unconditional all push against the inherited view. Part 3 (chapters 9–12: “The Fire, the Wicked, and the Redeemed,” “Outer Darkness, Gnashing of Teeth, and the Lake of Fire,” “The Savior,” “How Then Shall We Live?”) is her constructive proposal — a new view of hell that draws on purgatorial, conditionalist, and universalist resources without committing fully to any of them.

The voice of the book is unusual for academic theology. Baker writes as a teacher in conversation with three named students — Brooke, Lisa, and Eric — whose questions structure each chapter and whose pushback shapes Baker’s answers. Brooke is the bright, occasionally irreverent undergraduate (early in the book she compares the traditional God of judgment to the villain of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre);¹⁹ Lisa is the careful, anxious questioner who keeps asking how all this fits with the God she has been told to love; Eric is the calm, theologically literate friend who pushes back when Baker overreaches. The dialogue form is not just decoration. It enacts the way Baker thinks the doctrine has to be done — not from a podium downward, but in conversation, in pastoral encounter, with students and parishioners and people asking real questions.

What does Baker actually propose? Her central move is the identification of God and the fire of judgment. “Fire,” she writes, “comes from God, surrounds God, and is God,” so that “to enter into the presence of God and God’s wrathful judgment… is akin to entering into a ‘fiery furnace.’”²⁰ Standing in the fire of judgment, on this view, is standing in the unmediated presence of the holy God. For the righteous, that presence is joy. For the wicked, it is agony — not because God is angry in the standard retributive sense, but because divine love confronting unrepentant evil is itself a purifying flame. The fire burns away what is impure; what remains is what was always real in the person.

The constructive heart of the book is the “Otto” story, a long imaginative thought-experiment in chapter 9. Otto is a fictional Hitler-figure — a man who has spent his life perpetrating the worst evils a human can perpetrate. On the day of judgment, Otto stands before God expecting wrath. Instead he encounters a fire that burns away his sin and makes him feel, viscerally, the suffering he caused his victims:

All the while the fire of God burns, devouring Otto’s wickedness and evil deeds. Lest you think he gets off too easy, this is hell for him. With gnashing teeth and uncontrollable weeping, his heart breaks, and he cries out in utter remorse, in unmitigated repentance, knowing he can never undo the damage he has caused… The farther a person stands from God in that day, the more pain the fire causes as it burns away the impurities. — Baker, Razing Hell, 116

At the end of the ordeal, God offers Otto reconciliation. In Baker’s telling, Otto accepts. “He has been judged by the fire of love; he has walked through the fire of God’s wrath; he has been purified by the fire of God’s mercy. He receives forgiveness, reconciliation, and restoration.”²¹ But Baker is careful not to make the story too neat. Immediately after the resolution she writes: “The possibility exists, however, that Otto does not accept God’s offer of restoration, or that after the testing by fire nothing remains of him at all. Nothing. In order to preserve human freedom, which God gave to us at creation, we must allow for the possibility that some people will still reject God. The fire does not eliminate the gift of human freedom. Those who say no to God’s yes, however, end up in the ‘lake of fire,’ which annihilates them.”²²

The view that emerges is a hybrid — what R. Zachary Manis, in his analytic engagement with Baker, classifies as a combination of the “divine presence model” and some form of annihilationism.²³ Manis is right that Baker’s account is “imaginative and provocative, but lacking in precision” — she slides between at least three forms of annihilationism (natural-consequence, free-will, and what looks like residual retributive) without sharp distinction.²⁴ But that slippage is part of the point. Baker is not writing analytic philosophy of religion. She is writing pastoral evangelical theology in the Caputo-influenced Anabaptist idiom — the goal is to make space, not to lock down a system. She insists, when Brooke asks her directly, that she is not a universalist: “No. I believe that God respects the freedom given to us to choose for ourselves whether or not we want a relationship with God. We either choose God during our lifetime on earth, or we can choose God at the time of judgment, after going through the fire that burns away impurities, as we saw in Otto’s case.”²⁵

That sentence is, in fact, a clear statement of postmortem opportunity. The opportunity for conversion does not close at death; the encounter with God on the day of judgment is itself an offer of grace that the soul may accept or reject. If she accepts, she enters the kingdom. If she rejects, she ceases to exist. Baker is not a confident universalist. But she is a hopeful one — she expects that almost everyone, faced with the unfiltered love of God after the burning away of every illusion, will accept. And her framework is conditionalist (the unrepentant are annihilated, not eternally tortured) with a strong postmortem-opportunity overlay (the offer of grace extends into the final judgment itself). This is exactly the kind of synthesis that I have been calling hopeful universalism in evangelical idiom — conditional immortality plus postmortem opportunity plus hope for universal restoration, without confident assertion of universalism.

Baker’s book is also distinctive for the depth of its engagement with Caputo’s deconstructive theology. In her own bibliographic essay at the back of the book, she names Caputo’s The Weakness of God and The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida as crucial influences, and she explains that on Caputo’s reading, “deconstruction is justice” — the loosening of frozen interpretations so that other voices can be heard, so that older traditions are opened to revision rather than closed by appeal to authority.²⁶ That is a deeply continental-philosophical move, and it would be foreign to most American evangelical theology if it were not coming, in Baker’s hands, in a thoroughly Bible-saturated and pastoral idiom. The combination — Anabaptist peace-church commitments, Caputo’s post-deconstructive philosophy, and conservative evangelical biblical orientation — is what makes Razing Hell a distinctive entry in the contemporary literature, and the kind of book that has had outsize impact in undergraduate theology classrooms.

The book’s reception has been substantial. It has been adopted as a textbook in introductory theology courses at evangelical and post-evangelical schools, and Baker has continued to develop its themes in subsequent books, most notably A Nonviolent Theology of Love (Fortress, 2019).²⁷ Her writing has not had the volume or reach of Boyd’s, but in the specific corner of the conversation where pastoral evangelical theology meets continental-philosophical critique, her work is foundational.

Heath Bradley — A Methodist Pastor on Hell and Love

Heath Bradley is an ordained United Methodist elder who, when he published Flames of Love: Hell and Universal Salvation in 2012, was serving as pastor of preaching and Christian education at Pulaski Heights United Methodist Church in Little Rock, Arkansas.²⁸ He holds an M.A. in philosophy from the University of Arkansas. The book is published by Wipf & Stock — the same press that has carried much of the post-2000 long-hope literature — and it stakes out a more explicitly universalist position than Sharon Baker’s, but in a similarly pastoral and conversational voice.

Bradley’s framing in his preface and opening chapter is what places him in this chapter rather than in Chapter 25. He refuses the standard two options. “It is tempting,” he writes, “to settle either for the liberal option of downplaying the judgment of God, or for the conservative option of letting dominant church tradition trump fresh understandings of Scripture.”²⁹ He wants neither. He wants a Christian universalism that affirms the reality of divine judgment, that is grounded in Scripture and the early Church, that holds the centrality of Christ, and that gives ample room for evangelism. The book is structured as a sequence of careful responses to the major objections that conservative evangelicals raise against universalism: that universalists do not believe in hell, that universalists do not believe the Bible, that universalism removes the motivation for evangelism, that universalism is incompatible with human freedom, and so on.

The book is shorter and more accessible than Parry’s The Evangelical Universalist — under 200 pages of body text — and is pitched at the kind of educated lay reader who would be unlikely to wade through Parry’s extensive Greek exegesis but is willing to read a careful pastoral argument. Endorsements on the book come from, among others, Elaine Heath of Perkins School of Theology and Thomas Talbott himself, who praises it for combining “the eye for clarity of a philosopher, the knowledge of Scripture and church tradition of a theologian, and… the ease of expression, good sense, and passion of the best preacher.”³⁰

Bradley’s significance for this chapter is what he represents: a parish pastor — not a seminary professor, not a public intellectual — doing serious universalist theology from inside the local church, with the local church’s questions in mind. He is not breaking new ground. He is doing the work of translation — taking the more technical scholarship of Talbott, Parry, MacDonald, and the patristic universalists and rendering it in the language of the Methodist pulpit. That kind of translation work is what allows a doctrine that was once confined to the academy to settle into the broader evangelical and mainline conversation.

Steve Gregg — Three Views as Three Respectable Views

Steve Gregg (born 1953) is a self-taught California radio Bible teacher whose daily call-in program The Narrow Path has been on the air since 1997. Gregg has no seminary training; he came up through the Jesus Movement in the 1970s and was ordained as a teaching elder at Calvary Chapel of Santa Cruz in 1981.³¹ His earlier book Revelation: Four Views — a parallel commentary that lays out the major eschatological systems side by side — established his characteristic method. He does not write to defend a denominational line. He writes to lay out the options, give the best argument for each, and let the reader decide.

All You Want to Know About Hell: Three Christian Views of God’s Final Solution to the Problem of Sin (Thomas Nelson, 2013) applies that method to the doctrine of hell.³² The three views are the traditional view (eternal conscious torment), conditional immortality (annihilationism), and Christian universalism (restorationism). Gregg presents each, gives the biblical arguments for each, presents the major objections to each, and offers his assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of each. He does not formally tell the reader which view he holds — though attentive readers come away with the sense that he is unconvinced by the traditional view and leans toward one of the other two.

The historical fact of the book’s publication is at least as significant as its content. Thomas Nelson is the largest evangelical trade publisher in the United States. For Thomas Nelson to publish, in 2013, a book that treats Christian universalism as one of three legitimate Christian options — not as a heresy to be refuted, not as a fringe to be acknowledged and dismissed, but as a position with serious biblical arguments deserving fair-minded engagement — was a signal of how much the evangelical conversation had moved. The book did not become a runaway bestseller. But it sold steadily, it ended up in evangelical bookstore catalogs, and it gave pastors and lay readers a single accessible volume that mapped the actual range of the conversation. That is one of the kinds of things a serious evangelical reading public was hungry for in 2013, and it is part of how the post-2000 shift settled into the broader culture.

Bradley Jersak in This Conversation

Bradley Jersak (born 1964) gets sustained treatment in Chapter 25, where I trace his major book Her Gates Will Never Be Shut (2009) and his Eastern-Orthodox-influenced reframing of the apokatastasis tradition. Here he matters as a pastoral voice. Jersak’s subsequent book A More Christlike God: A More Beautiful Gospel (2015) has had wide reception among evangelicals exploring hopeful-universalist territory — it is a popular-level reframing of the doctrine of God in light of the cross that pushes against the Calvinist picture of divine wrath without quite breaking into explicit universalism.³³ Jersak is a useful bridge figure. He is an academic theologian (Ph.D. from the University of Wales, Bangor) who has done his patristic homework, but he writes in a pastoral idiom that has carried his work into pulpits and small groups. He is, in this sense, the kind of figure who blurs the line between the explicit universalist movement of Chapter 25 and the broader hopeful-universalist conversation of this chapter.

The Hopeful Cluster — Olson, Wright, McKnight, Stackhouse, McDermott

If Boyd and Baker are the public pastoral and academic faces of evangelical hopeful universalism, a wider cluster of respected evangelical scholars has staked out variations on the same posture — not formal universalism, not strict eternal conscious torment, but something more careful, more humble, and more open. Their importance for the historical narrative is that they are not fringe figures. These are mainstream evangelical theologians with university chairs and respected publishing records, and what they have written in the last twenty-five years has slowly redrawn the boundaries of acceptable evangelical discussion.

Roger Olson — emeritus professor of theology at Baylor’s Truett Seminary and one of the most influential evangelical historians of theology working in English — has been clear and consistent. He is not a universalist. He thinks universalism is an error. But it is, in his memorable phrase, “the most attractive heresy.”³⁴ “For a lover of God’s love,” he writes on his blog, “universal salvation might seem to be necessary… However, I’m not a universalist. On the other hand, I’d rather be a universalist than a true Calvinist (i.e., a five point Calvinist who believes in double predestination). Someone once asked me whether I would still worship God if somehow I became convinced the Calvinist view of God is correct. I had to say no. Sheer power is not worthy of worship. Only power controlled by love is worthy of worship.”³⁵ Olson goes on to distinguish two forms of universalism — one that denies God’s wrath and human sinfulness (which he calls a serious error), and one that simply overestimates how far God’s love will go (which he calls a minor error and treats sympathetically). That distinction matters. Olson is doing what hopeful universalists keep doing — refusing to flatten the conversation, refusing to label every long-hope position as heresy, and quietly making room for evangelical brothers and sisters to hold positions Olson himself does not hold.

N. T. Wright — perhaps the most influential evangelical New Testament scholar of the last forty years — has, in Surprised by Hope (HarperOne, 2008), opened a different kind of space.³⁶ Wright is not a universalist. He is, by his own description, in the long Anglican mainstream that affirms a real final judgment and the possibility of final loss. But Wright has been relentless about deflating the cartoon picture of hell that dominates much American evangelical imagination — the lake of literal fire, the eternal screaming, the smoke ascending forever. He has insisted that the New Testament’s eschatology is centered on resurrection and new creation, not on disembodied souls in heaven, and that the question of the fate of the impenitent has to be understood in that frame. The result is that Wright, without ever signing on to the long-hope movement, has done as much as any single contemporary evangelical scholar to open evangelical readers to the possibility that the inherited picture of hell needed to be re-examined.

Scot McKnight, professor of New Testament at Northern Seminary and one of the leading evangelical voices on the kingdom of God, has worked the question from another angle. His book The King Jesus Gospel (2011), and his sustained writing on the kingdom in One.Life and other places, has reframed the gospel as a kingdom announcement rather than primarily as a transaction to escape hell — a reframing that does not directly settle the question of postmortem opportunity but does dethrone the strict eternal-conscious-torment view from its place at the center of evangelical preaching.³⁷ McKnight’s contribution is indirect but significant: when the gospel is recentered on the kingdom, the question of who is finally in or out of the kingdom can be held with greater humility, because the gospel is no longer reducible to a deadline-at-death formula.

John Stackhouse — longtime professor at Regent College and now at Crandall University — has been more direct. He is an explicit conditionalist, defending the position in the 2016 Zondervan Four Views on Hell volume in the chapter titled “Terminal Punishment.”³⁸ But he combines that conditionalism with a real openness on postmortem opportunity — not because he is committed to any one PO formulation, but because he reads the New Testament as leaving the question more open than the standard restrictivist position will admit. I will engage Stackhouse’s position more carefully in Chapter 28; here it suffices to note that his CI + PO combination is essentially the same position the author of this book holds, and that it occupies a respected place in evangelical Four-Views-style discussion.

Gerald McDermott, Anglican theologian at Beeson Divinity School, has framed the issue with characteristic Wesleyan-Anglican generosity. McDermott does not formally hold postmortem opportunity, but his writing on the salvation of non-Christians and on the “wider hope” tradition gives careful pastoral room for evangelicals to think the question carefully without panic.³⁹ The respect-both-options framing he has worked out in his books and essays is precisely the kind of careful evangelical centrism that has made hopeful universalism plausible in evangelical conversation: it is not a defection from orthodoxy; it is a careful, biblical refusal to overcommit.

Popular Voices — Zahnd, Enns, Bessey, Cavey, and the Deconstruction Wave

Below the level of formal scholarly publication, a much wider conversation has unfolded in pulpits, podcasts, blogs, and social media. The popular layer of this conversation is harder to document with the same care as the academic layer — popular religious authors come and go, blogs shut down, podcasts pivot — but the cumulative effect on the evangelical landscape is undeniable.

Brian Zahnd, pastor of Word of Life Church in St. Joseph, Missouri, is one of the more visible popular voices. His Sinners in the Hands of a Loving God (Waterbrook, 2017) takes its title in deliberate contrast to Jonathan Edwards’s most famous sermon, and argues at book length that the dominant evangelical picture of God as wrathful and retributive needs to be replaced with the picture of God revealed in Jesus — a God of unconditional fatherly love.⁴⁰ Zahnd’s eschatology in the book is closer to Baker’s and Jersak’s than to Hart’s. He does not call himself a universalist. He does call into question the central premise of the strict eternal-conscious-torment view. That a Penguin Random House imprint (Waterbrook) carried this kind of work in 2017 is itself a measure of how much the evangelical conversation has shifted.

Pete Enns, who taught Old Testament for many years at Westminster Theological Seminary before being dismissed in 2008 over his views on inspiration, has continued to write and podcast (The Bible for Normal People) for a substantial audience of post-evangelical readers. Enns is not primarily an eschatologist; his contribution has been to question the inherited evangelical reading strategy in ways that, downstream, open the inherited picture of hell to revision. Sarah Bessey, the late Rachel Held Evans (who died in 2019), and Bruxy Cavey have played similar roles — popular writers and bloggers whose appeal has been to a generation of evangelicals who could not square the doctrine of strict eternal conscious torment with the God they had met in Christ.⁴¹ None of them produced a major academic eschatology. All of them produced widely-read pastoral and devotional work that quietly assumed something like hopeful universalism — the door is not closed; God will work all this out; we do not have to know exactly how.

The broader “deconstruction” phenomenon — the public re-examination by younger evangelicals of the inherited fundamentalist and evangelical theological package — has played out in part on the question of hell. Surveys of younger evangelicals consistently show lower commitment to strict eternal conscious torment than among their elders, and higher openness to either conditional immortality or universalism.⁴² Some of those younger evangelicals stayed in the evangelical fold; some moved to the mainline; some left Christianity altogether. But the pressure that this generational shift has placed on evangelical institutions is real, and it is one of the social forces that has made the publishing shift of the last two decades possible.

The Institutional Response — Resistance and Realignment

The institutional response to all of this has been substantial. The major evangelical denominations and seminaries have not, on the whole, moved. The Southern Baptist Convention’s Baptist Faith and Message still affirms eternal conscious torment. The Presbyterian Church in America’s Westminster Confession standards do the same. The Evangelical Free Church of America’s statement of faith does the same. The seminaries most closely associated with these denominations — Southern Baptist, Southeastern Baptist, Westminster, Reformed Theological, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School — continue to require their faculty to affirm strict eternal conscious torment, with rare exception. The institutional commitments have not visibly shifted.

What has shifted is the gap between institutional commitment and actual pastoral practice. Pastors trained at these institutions and ordained in these denominations are quietly preaching something more nuanced — not denying eternal conscious torment from the pulpit, but rarely affirming it in the bold, confident, particular way that older preachers did. The funeral sermon at the top of this chapter is the rule, not the exception. The doctrine has not been repudiated. It has just stopped being preached with confidence.

The most visible institutional resistance to the long-hope conversation has come from the Gospel Coalition and its associated network — a confessional Reformed coalition formed in 2005 with figures like D. A. Carson and Tim Keller at its center, and including a substantial publishing and conference operation.⁴³ The Gospel Coalition has been consistently and pointedly critical of every public figure I have discussed in this chapter. Rob Bell’s Love Wins (2011) received its definitive evangelical takedown from this network. Greg Boyd’s Crucifixion of the Warrior God received a substantial critical engagement from Paul Copan in the Gospel Coalition’s book reviews.⁴⁴ Boyd’s open theism, his pacifism, and his eschatology have all been targets of Gospel Coalition critique. Sharon Baker’s Razing Hell, Brian Zahnd’s Sinners in the Hands of a Loving God, and the broader hopeful-universalist conversation have been treated with similar coolness. The Together for the Gospel conferences (running 2006–2022) provided another platform for the institutional defense of strict eternal conscious torment.

The pattern of Gospel Coalition critique is worth attending to, because it tells us how the institutional center of confessional evangelicalism understands what is happening. The critique typically takes one of three forms. First, that the long-hope position weakens the urgency of evangelism — if there is a chance after death, why preach the gospel with urgency now? Second, that the long-hope position represents a cultural accommodation, an importing of contemporary sentimental humanism into Christian theology. Third, that the long-hope position misreads Scripture, especially the texts on judgment in Matthew 25, 2 Thessalonians 1, and Revelation 14 and 20. Each of these critiques deserves a fair response — I make some response in Chapter 29, and several of the figures discussed in this chapter, especially Bradley and Boyd, have responded to all three at book length.

What I want to note here is the dynamic of the conflict. The Gospel Coalition critics are not, on the whole, debating the historical record. They are making a confessional and pastoral argument: that strict eternal conscious torment is what the Reformed tradition has confessed, that the Reformed tradition is the truest expression of the Christian theological inheritance, and that any departure from it is a departure from orthodoxy. The hopeful-universalist response, almost always, takes a different shape: it appeals over the heads of the confessions, back to Scripture and to the wider patristic tradition. The argument is not really about the same things. The Gospel Coalition is defending a confession; the hopeful universalists are doing a historical and exegetical excavation. These two arguments cannot resolve each other — they pass each other in the night.

The broader Wesleyan and Pentecostal-charismatic traditions have, on the whole, been more open to the conversation. The Wesleyan tradition’s emphasis on the universality of prevenient grace and on God’s desire for the salvation of all (1 Timothy 2:4) has always sat uncomfortably with strict double predestination, and the “wider hope” tradition I traced in Chapter 18 has continued to give Wesleyan-Arminian evangelicals theological room to consider the long-hope possibilities seriously. Pentecostal-charismatic Christians have, for cultural reasons different from the Wesleyans’, also tended toward a more pastoral and less confessional approach to the question — the doctrine of hell has been less central to Pentecostal preaching than to Reformed preaching, and the freedom to revisit the question has been correspondingly greater.

Among Anabaptist and Mennonite communities, the conversation has been even more open. Sharon Baker’s Brethren in Christ context, Bradley Jersak’s Mennonite-influenced pastoral location, Greg Boyd’s adopted Neo-Anabaptist identity — these are not coincidences. The peace-church traditions’ commitment to nonviolence has made the strict-retributive picture of the divine character increasingly hard to defend, and the long-hope alternatives have flourished in those soil conditions.

Assessment — What Hopeful Universalism Is and What It Is Not

Step back from the figures and the movements and the publishing data. What, historically, is hopeful universalism? And what should we say about it as honest historians of the tradition?

First, hopeful universalism is not a doctrine. It is a posture. The figures we have discussed in this chapter do not share a creed. They share a refusal — the refusal to slam the door on the unsaved with confidence. Some of them, like Heath Bradley, do hold a doctrine (Bradley is closer to confident universalism than the rest). Some of them, like Roger Olson, explicitly reject the doctrine of universalism while still refusing to call it damnable. Most of them, like Greg Boyd and Sharon Baker, occupy a middle space where conditional immortality, postmortem opportunity, and hope for universal restoration are held together without final resolution. That middle space is what I have been calling hopeful universalism. It is a real thing. It is the position more and more contemporary evangelicals occupy. But it is not, strictly, a single doctrine.

Second, hopeful universalism is genuinely connected to the older long-hope tradition. The pastoral instinct that runs through these figures — that the God revealed in Christ cannot be the God who finally and forever inflicts conscious torment without redemptive purpose — is the instinct that ran through Origen and Gregory of Nyssa, through Isaac of Nineveh and Maximus the Confessor, through Julian of Norwich and the Cambridge Platonists, through the Restorationist Methodists and the Anabaptist Pietists. It is not a modern invention. It is not, contra the standard polemic, a borrowing from secular liberalism. It is a recurring Christian instinct that has surfaced and resurfaced across the centuries, sometimes in academic theology, sometimes in pastoral practice, sometimes only in liturgy and quiet prayer for the dead. The figures of this chapter are the contemporary form of that instinct, in evangelical idiom.

Third, hopeful universalism has real strengths and real risks. The strengths are pastoral and theological. Pastorally, it allows the preacher to be honest at a funeral for an unbeliever — not to pretend to certainty about a fate no one can see, not to overrule the widow’s hope, not to slam the door God may not have slammed. Theologically, it takes seriously the universal scope of New Testament salvation language (1 Timothy 2:4; Titus 2:11; 2 Peter 3:9; 1 Corinthians 15:22; Colossians 1:20; Philippians 2:10–11; Romans 11:32) without overcommitting to a confidence Scripture does not authorize. It honors human freedom (no one is overridden) while honoring divine love (the offer is not arbitrarily withdrawn). It holds together a real final judgment with a real possibility of mercy, in a way that strict eternal conscious torment increasingly does not.

The risks are also real. The first risk is theological vagueness. If hopeful universalism becomes “we really do not know anything about the fate of the dead, so let us not say anything,” it ceases to be theology and becomes evasion. Scripture says quite a lot about the fate of the dead. The conditionalist tradition says quite a lot. The patristic universalist tradition says quite a lot. The PO tradition says quite a lot. Hopeful universalism that refuses to commit to any of these, that floats free of any constructive claim, has nothing to offer beyond a refusal. That is not enough. The figures I have discussed who do this work well — Boyd, Baker, Bradley — are willing to commit to something. They lean. They argue. They simply leave room for more than their own position. Hopeful universalism done well is constructive theology with humility; hopeful universalism done poorly is sentimentality with theological language draped over it.

The second risk is the Balthasarian critique — or, more precisely, the critique of Balthasar that I traced in Chapter 22. Hope without knowledge can be unstable. The Christian who says “I hope all will be saved” but cannot give grounds for that hope is in a different theological position from the Christian who says “I have reason to hope, in light of God’s character revealed in Christ, that all will be saved.” The first is a wish; the second is a theological commitment with stakes. The hopeful universalists of this chapter, at their best, are making the second move, not the first. They have done the exegetical and historical and philosophical work to ground their hope. But the wider movement — the lay-level conversation in blogs and podcasts — does not always make that distinction. It can collapse into a soft theological optimism that loses its grounding in Christ. That is a real risk, and the more serious hopeful-universalist authors are aware of it.

The third risk is pastoral irresponsibility. If “all may eventually be fine” becomes the implicit message of a church’s teaching, the urgency of repentance, the call to faith in Christ, and the seriousness of the Christian life can leak away. Bradley in Flames of Love spends considerable attention answering this charge, and his answer is essentially the answer of every careful universalist from George MacDonald forward: the urgency of the gospel call is not the urgency of escape; it is the urgency of becoming Christlike, of joining God’s mission, of participating in the kingdom now rather than later. That is a fair answer, but it has to be preached, not just argued. The pastoral discipline required to preach hopeful universalism without softening the call to repentance is a real discipline, and not every pastor manages it.

Fourth, the historical question I want to flag for assessment is whether hopeful universalism is — as some critics charge — simply the smuggling-in of universalism by another name. I do not think so. The figures we have discussed in this chapter genuinely refuse the universalist label, and several of them have what look like principled reasons for the refusal. Boyd grounds his refusal in human freedom — if the wicked finally and freely refuse God, God will respect the refusal, and they will cease to exist. Baker grounds her refusal in the same way. Olson grounds his refusal in divine sovereignty — God may choose to condemn whom God wills. Each of these refusals does real theological work. They are not the same refusal. But they are all genuine refusals, and they distinguish hopeful universalism from confident universalism in a way that should be respected. A hopeful universalist is not a confident universalist who is afraid to say so. A hopeful universalist is someone who has thought carefully about what we can and cannot know about the eschaton and has come down on the side of humility.

What we can conclude historically, then, is this. Hopeful universalism, in something like its current form, is a recognizable contemporary evangelical position. It has serious advocates with serious credentials. It has a substantial popular following. It has the support of a major shift in evangelical publishing. It has remained controversial at the institutional level of the major confessional Reformed bodies, but it has spread quietly through the pastoral practice of the broader evangelical world. It is genuinely connected to the older long-hope tradition without being identical to any single earlier expression of it. And it is, at this moment, the most pervasive contemporary form of long-hope theology in the evangelical conversation — even more pervasive, I suspect, than either the confident universalism of Chapter 25 or the explicit postmortem-opportunity position of Chapter 26.

Why This Matters

The pastor at the funeral I described at the top of this chapter would not have called what he was doing “hopeful universalism.” He would have called it pastoral honesty. But the two are, increasingly, the same thing. The doctrine of strict eternal conscious torment, preached the way Edwards preached it and the way the standard evangelical pastoral manuals once advised it to be preached, has become — for an increasing number of evangelical pastors — pastorally unspeakable. Not because they have changed their formal commitments. But because they have stood at enough caskets, with enough widows in the front row, and they have realized that the doctrine as ordinarily preached does not have a way to speak there honestly.

That pastoral pressure is, in my view, the single most important force at work in contemporary evangelical eschatology. The academic arguments matter — this whole book is an academic argument. But the academic arguments are not what is moving the evangelical world toward hopeful universalism. What is moving the evangelical world is the slow accumulation of pastoral encounters that the inherited doctrine cannot speak into. A son comes home from college an atheist and dies in a car accident the next semester. A father grows distant from church through long, exhausting years and dies of a heart attack at sixty-three with the question still unresolved. A neighbor, beloved, generous, openhanded toward every neighbor and every cause but never once interested in the gospel, dies in her bed at ninety-one. The strict doctrine has a single answer for each of these: hell, hell, hell. The pastors who have to officiate these funerals find, increasingly, that they cannot say it. Not because they have stopped believing in judgment. Because the God of love revealed in Christ has not given them that script.

What hopeful universalism contributes to the long-hope conversation is a different script. It does not promise heaven. It does not assign hell. It places the dead in the hands of the One whose hands they were always in, and it confesses that we know less about the inside of those hands than we have sometimes pretended to know. It refuses the false confidence of strict eternal-conscious-torment preaching. It refuses, equally, the false confidence of declaring everyone saved. It holds the tension that Scripture itself holds — a God of judgment whose mercy endures forever, whose love is over all his works, who desires that none should perish — and it preaches into that tension.

The cultural location of contemporary hopeful universalism also matters. The American religious landscape of 2025 is not the landscape of 1985. Cultural Christianity has thinned out. The pew next to you is more likely to be empty than full. The funeral is more likely to be for someone outside the faith than inside it. The grandchildren of the deacons are increasingly unbelievers. Strict eternal-conscious-torment preaching arose in a Christendom context in which the unsaved were a known minority among the saved; it does not function the same way in a post-Christendom context in which the unsaved are most of the people we love. The doctrine has not necessarily become less true. But the way it has to be held, preached, and applied has had to change — and one of the directions it has changed is toward hopeful universalism.

The character-of-God question is the other engine driving the shift. Younger evangelicals, surveyed and interviewed about why they have moved away from strict eternal-conscious-torment, name the same handful of reasons over and over. They cannot reconcile it with the God they have met in Jesus. They cannot reconcile it with the Father of the prodigal son. They cannot reconcile it with the Shepherd who leaves the ninety-nine for the one. They cannot reconcile it with the Christ who descended into the dead. They cannot reconcile it with the love that does not insist on its own way. They are not, on the whole, sentimentalists. They have read their Bibles. And they have concluded — sometimes with the help of the figures I have discussed in this chapter, sometimes simply on their own — that the inherited doctrine of hell does not survive collision with the gospel itself. That is a serious theological claim. It deserves a serious theological response. The hopeful universalists I have surveyed are, at their best, making that response.

The chapter that follows will turn to the modern conditional-immortality movement — the Edward Fudge, John Stackhouse, Chris Date stream of careful biblical-theological argument that the wicked are finally destroyed rather than eternally tormented. CI is, in many ways, the more rigorous theological cousin of the hopeful universalism we have discussed here. Many of the figures in this chapter — Boyd, Baker, Stackhouse himself — are also conditionalists. The two streams flow into one another in contemporary evangelical practice. The position I myself hold, as I have said in the introductory chapters, is conditional immortality with postmortem opportunity, with genuine openness to conservative biblical universalism. That position is, in my judgment, the most defensible synthesis of everything this book has been tracking. But the historical claim of this chapter is more modest. It is the claim that hopeful universalism — the broader posture, not the specific synthesis — is the most pervasive form of long-hope theology in the contemporary evangelical world, and that this historical fact is itself a major chapter in the long-hope story we have been telling.

When the next funeral comes around — when the casket is at the front of the church and the widow is in the front row and the pastor has to find words that are honest about her husband and honest about God — the doctrine that pastor will quietly draw on, more and more often, is hopeful universalism. It will not be on his ordination papers. It may not be on his denominational statement of faith. But it will be in his sermon. And the wider tradition, which has held this hope under many names for two thousand years, will be there with him.