Chapter 30

The Long Hope Continues

Conclusion — From Historical Map to Pastoral Ministry

A Pastor on a Tuesday Morning

A pastor I know — I will call him Daniel, because that is not his name — sat at his kitchen table one Tuesday morning with a yellow legal pad and a cup of coffee that had gone cold an hour earlier. He had a funeral to preach on Friday. The deceased was a sixty-eight-year-old man named Roy, the brother of one of Daniel's most faithful members. Roy had not gone to church since 1971. He had been kind to his nieces and nephews. He had drunk too much. He had been divorced twice and remembered fondly by both ex-wives. He had once, at a hospital bedside, told his Christian sister that he “just couldn't believe in all that.” And then a heart attack at his kitchen sink, and now Daniel had to stand in front of Roy's family on Friday and say something true.

What Daniel had been taught to say — what he had been taught for thirty years was the only thing a faithful pastor could say — was that Roy was now suffering, consciously and forever, under the wrath of a holy God. Daniel did not believe that anymore. He had not believed it for several years. He had read Edward Fudge,¹ and he had read Clark Pinnock,² and he had read Origen and Gregory of Nyssa with growing astonishment, and somewhere along the way the strict version of the doctrine had quietly fallen off. But Daniel had not figured out yet what to put in its place. He did not want to lie to Roy's family, and he did not want to lie to himself. He also did not want to preach a sermon that would get him called into the elders' office on Monday.

So he sat there with his legal pad, and at the top he had written one word: Hope. And under it, in much smaller letters, he had written: How much?

This book has not been written to tell Daniel exactly what to say on Friday. That is not a task historical theology can perform. But this book has been written, in part, for Daniel — and for every Christian who has stood in his position and felt the strict default crack under the weight of an actual human life. The map this book has tried to draw is a map for Daniel. It is a map of every pastor who has ever sat at a kitchen table on Tuesday morning trying to figure out what the gospel actually says about the man in the casket. And it is a map of a Christian tradition that has had more to say to Daniel than the popular handbooks have let on.³

We have walked together through twenty-nine chapters. Apostolic Fathers, apologists, Origen at length, Gregory of Nyssa, Isaac of Nineveh, Augustine handled fairly and at his strongest. The 553 controversy. Aquinas. Eckhart on trial in Cologne. Julian of Norwich and her shewings of love. Luther and Calvin. The Anabaptists falling asleep in Christ. Cudworth and More in their Cambridge studies. Petersen smuggling Origen back into the Pietist conversation. Wesley refusing the wider hope and yet (the historians keep noticing) bumping up against it. Murray and Ballou on the American frontier. Edward White writing in London in 1846, asking a question nobody had been allowed to ask. Barth in Basel. Balthasar daring to hope. Moltmann at the cross. Pinnock, Sanders, Walls, Beilby, Talbott, Parry, Hart, Fudge, Stackhouse, Date — the noise of the present moment. And then, in Chapter 29, the synthetic map that tries to put the whole thing on a single canvas.

This chapter is shorter and quieter than the rest. It is the chapter where we step away from the historical sources and ask the question every honest reader has been carrying since around Chapter 8: What now? If the historical record is what this book has shown it to be, what changes? What stays the same? What does any of this mean for Daniel on Friday morning?

What This Book Has Done — And What It Has Not Done

Before we go further, a brief word on what has been accomplished and what has not.

This book has done one thing: it has drawn the map. From the apostolic period to last year's publications, Christians have held a far wider range of views on the fate of the dead than the popular evangelical handbooks allow. Universal restoration was a respectable patristic option, taught by men the Church would later canonize. Conditional immortality has roots in the late third century and was reasserted in nearly every century afterward by serious Christians. Postmortem opportunity, in some form, is implicit in the Apostolic Fathers, explicit in Clement of Alexandria, central to the patristic reading of 1 Peter 3, alive in the medieval mystics, defended by the seventeenth-century English universalists, recovered by the Pietists, broadened by Wesley, and made systematic by the twentieth-century Catholic recovery and the contemporary evangelical PO movement.⁴ The Augustinian turn shaped the Latin West powerfully, but it never silenced the alternative voices, and from the seventeenth century onward those voices grew steadily louder. The strict-ECT default that many American evangelicals were taught is “the Christian view” is one view among many. A serious view, with serious advocates, but one view among many.

That is what this book has shown. It is also what this book has not done.

This book has not told the reader what to believe about the fate of the dead. That is the task of biblical theology, systematic theology, and pastoral theology — three disciplines distinct from historical theology, and three disciplines this book has deliberately set aside. The reader who has finished this volume holds the map, and holding the map is not the same as deciding where to walk. CI, PO, UR, hopeful universalism, the various inclusivist alternatives — the map shows that all of these have ancient and modern Christian witnesses. Choosing among them is a different task.⁵

This book has also not relieved the reader of the responsibility to take the gospel seriously. Whatever the reader concludes about the duration and possibility of saving encounter after death, the deaths of those one loves are still real, the gospel call is still urgent, and the seriousness of human moral choice has not been waved away by a softer view of judgment. The long hope tradition has never been a sleeping pill. From Origen to Wesley to Balthasar to Beilby, the figures we have met have taken sin seriously, taken judgment seriously, and taken the necessity of repentance seriously. What they have refused is the additional claim that God's pursuit of His creatures must end at the moment their hearts stop. That refusal does not soften the gospel. It widens the field on which the gospel is preached.

With those reminders in place, we can ask the question that brought us here. If the long hope tradition is as I have described it — continuous, diverse, resilient, and very much alive — what should that mean for the contemporary church?

For Preaching

It must mean, first, a change in how we preach.

I am not asking the strict-ECT pastor to abandon his convictions on the basis of this book. The book is not designed to do that. I am asking something narrower and, I hope, more obvious. A pastor who preaches the strict-ECT view as the only view the Christian tradition has ever held, or as the position the Church has unanimously taught for two thousand years, is now standing on ground the historical record will not bear. The position can be defended; it cannot be defended that way. The phrase “the Church has always taught” is the rhetorical move that has shouldered most of the popular evangelical case, and that move is, simply as a matter of historical fact, untrue.⁶ Origen, Gregory of Nyssa, Isaac of Nineveh, the *Macrina who taught the Cappadocians, the medieval mystics, Julian, Eckhart, More, Cudworth, Sterry, the Petersens, Bengel, Oetinger, Wesley (at least in some places), Maurice, Farrar, Erskine of Linlathen, MacDonald, White, Barth, Balthasar, Bulgakov, Rahner, Moltmann, Boros, Ware — these are not fringe figures. They are the load-bearing names of multiple Christian traditions.

What I am asking the preacher to do is not to lie about what he believes. I am asking him to tell the truth about what the Church has held. The preacher who has read this book and continues to preach the strict-ECT default does so now with the knowledge that he is choosing one tradition over others. He is choosing the Augustinian turn over the patristic East, the Reformation hardening over the Pietist softening, the nineteenth-century retrenchment over the seventeenth-century English recovery. That choice can be defended. But it has to be made as a choice, not as an inheritance from a unanimous past that does not exist.

And there is a second, more positive thing this changes. The preacher who has read this book is now free to preach Scripture without the editorial overlay of two centuries of Anglo-American hellfire homiletics. He is free to read Jonah hearing God say, “Should I not pity Nineveh?” without flinching. He is free to preach Romans 11 — “that He may have mercy on all” — without immediately running to the qualifications. He is free to preach 1 Timothy 2 — “God our Savior, who desires all people to be saved” — without retreating to the “two wills” distinction in the next breath. He is free to preach 1 Peter 3 — Christ preaching to the spirits in prison — without the centuries of nervous reinterpretation that the Reformed tradition built around that text.⁷ He is free, in short, to preach the Bible.

That freedom is not nothing. It is, in fact, a great deal. American evangelical preaching for most of the last century has been shaped by an unspoken doctrinal grid — a grid that the long hope tradition was excluded from, and that bent every text accordingly. The preacher who has stepped outside that grid will find that the text is bigger than he was told. He will preach the warnings of Scripture with the same seriousness Scripture itself uses. He will preach the promises of Scripture with the same scope Scripture itself uses. He will not have to pick one over the other. He will not have to bend either of them to fit a tradition that, as it turns out, was not the whole tradition.

Consider what this means for the texts the preacher had been taught to bracket. Take Colossians 1:20 — “through Him to reconcile to Himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of His cross.” The strict-ECT preacher has, for two centuries, been taught to read “all things” as something like “the things that get saved among all categories of things,” or to limit the reconciliation to a forced pacification, or otherwise to shrink the scope of Paul's claim. The reader of this book knows that Origen, Gregory of Nyssa, Maximus the Confessor, and a substantial slice of the patristic Greek tradition read the verse at face value — and that they did not thereby cease to be Christians. The contemporary preacher is now free to preach the verse as Paul wrote it. He may still believe that some persons resist that reconciliation finally and irreversibly. But he need no longer pre-shrink Paul's wording out of theological anxiety. He can preach the text, and let the doctrinal questions be settled by the broader theological work that lies beyond any single verse.

Or consider Philippians 2:9–11. “Every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.” Robin Parry has noted that the verse will not fit comfortably inside the strict-ECT default, where the confession of Christ's Lordship by the damned has to be interpreted as a forced confession by those still in revolt — a confession somehow giving glory to the Father while being torn from the lips of those eternally hating Him.^7a The patristic reading is different: the confession is genuine, glorifying the Father, drawn from every creature whose knee bows. The text bears that reading better than the forced-confession alternative. The preacher freed from the strict-ECT grid can preach the verse as it sits. He may believe with the conditionalist tradition that some finally cease to exist before the confession; he may believe with the universalist tradition that the confession will be drawn from all; he may believe with the PO tradition that some will confess after death who did not confess before. But he no longer has to read the confession of Lordship as gritted-teeth submission. The text does not require that, and the long hope tradition has never read it that way.

The same exegetical relief applies down a long list of texts. 1 Corinthians 15:22–28 and the subjection of all things. Romans 5:18–19 and the parallel structure of Adam and Christ. Romans 11:32 and God's mercy on all. 1 Timothy 2:4–6 and 4:10 on the Savior of all people. Ephesians 1:9–10 and the summing up of all things in Christ. The consuming-fire imagery of Hebrews 12. The refining-fire imagery of 1 Corinthians 3. The descent imagery of 1 Peter 3 and 4 and Ephesians 4. Each of these has been read multiple ways across the tradition. The strict-ECT default has tended to read them all in a single direction; the long hope tradition has read them in another. The preacher who has now seen the full range of the readings is no longer doing private exegesis in defiance of two thousand years of consensus. He is doing what Christians have done in every century since the second.

For Teaching

What is true of preaching is more sharply true of teaching.

A Sunday school curriculum that presents the strict-ECT view as “what Christians have always believed,” a youth ministry that hands out hell tracts as evangelistic standard-issue, a confirmation class that treats the Westminster Confession as if it were the seventh ecumenical council — all of these are doing something the catechist owes a duty to undo. The duty is not to abandon teaching about judgment. It is to teach accurately. To teach that there have been multiple Christian positions on these questions since the second century. To teach that the strict-ECT view has been a major and serious option, with serious advocates, in the Latin West and especially in the Reformation and post-Reformation traditions. To teach that the patristic East was more pluralistic. To teach that Origen and Gregory of Nyssa taught what they taught. To teach that the conditionalist tradition is older than people think. To teach that the contemporary debate is a real debate, with serious Christians on each side, and that the student who has questions is not in danger of apostasy for asking them.

I think a great many Christian young people have left their childhood faith over precisely this point, and over the way it was handled.⁸ The young person asks the obvious question — what about Grandma? what about the kind atheist down the street? what about everyone who lived before Christ? — and is told either to silence the question or that her grandmother is in hell. Some young people accept the answer and lose something irreplaceable in the accepting. Others reject the answer and reject the faith that gave it. Still others go silent and carry the question for the rest of their lives, like a stone in the shoe of their devotion.

The long hope tradition gives the catechist a third option. It allows him to say: the Christian tradition has wrestled with this question for two thousand years and has not always given the answer you have been given. Here are the answers it has actually given. Here are the resources you have for thinking about your grandmother. Here are the figures — Gregory of Nyssa, Wesley, Barth, Balthasar, Beilby — who have thought about this and have not given up the gospel. The young person who is given that answer is not lost. The young person who is denied that answer often is.

For Evangelism

For evangelism, the picture is more complicated, and it is worth dwelling on with care.

The standard objection — the one Michael Griffiths put memorably, that wider-hope theology is “a Trojan horse” that “threatens to destroy missionary motives”⁹ — has been made and re-made for two centuries. Charles Van Engen put it more recently: “The universalist perspective threatens missionary motivation, reduces missional urgency, and emasculates the biblical message.”¹⁰ The argument is intuitive. If salvation is possible after death, why bother with the difficult work of evangelism now?

The intuitive argument has two empirical problems and one theological problem.

The first empirical problem is that the long-hope traditions have, throughout their history, produced missionaries. Wesley sent his preachers to coal miners and slaves. The Pietists invented modern Protestant missions. The English Restorationists were vigorously evangelistic. American Universalists planted churches across the frontier. Wesley taught a doctrine that had at least gestured toward postmortem hope, and Methodism nevertheless became the largest revivalist movement in American religious history.¹¹ The historical claim that wider-hope theology gut-checks missions is empirically false. It does not match the record.

The second empirical problem is the inverse. Strict ECT, in its popular evangelical form, has been one of the major causes of de-conversion in the last two generations. Pastors in evangelical churches have been saying so for twenty years now, and the social-science data backs them up.¹² The young person who concludes that the God described by the strict-ECT preacher is a moral monster does not become a more committed evangelist. He becomes a former evangelical. Stephen Jonathan, writing as a Pentecostal pastor with over twenty-five years of evangelistic conversations, puts it bluntly: “I would suggest that it is restrictivist theology that acts as a greater hindrance to the gospel message than any disincentive apparently caused through wider hope theologians diminishing the urgency for mission.”¹³ The claim that strict ECT is the great driver of missionary urgency, and that softening it gut-checks the gospel, is contradicted by the experience of pastors actually doing the evangelism.

The theological problem is the deepest. The argument that wider hope undercuts evangelism assumes that the principal motive for evangelism is fear of hell. That assumption has shaped a great deal of American evangelical practice — the altar call as fire insurance, the gospel as escape route, the tract as warning label. But it is not the motive Scripture gives for evangelism. The motive Scripture gives is the love of Christ constraining us, the desire that the lost should know the One who made them, the urgency of present reconciliation to God, the call to make disciples and teach them all that Christ has commanded. None of that is touched by the long hope tradition. The PO advocate is not less motivated to share Christ with his neighbor; he is motivated by Christ rather than by fear. The universalist who hopes God will at last save all does not therefore stop preaching the gospel; he preaches the gospel because the gospel is what God uses to save people, both in this life and (if the long hope is correct) afterward.¹⁴

And Beilby's careful observation on 2 Corinthians 6:2 is worth keeping in mind. Paul's “now is the day of salvation” is addressed to people who have already heard the message of reconciliation. The urgency is real, but it is urgency to respond to a gospel one has heard — not a denial that those who have not heard will receive an opportunity.¹⁵ The objection collapses the two situations together, and they are not the same.

Evangelism in the long hope tradition does not become less urgent. It becomes differently urgent. The urgency is the urgency of love, the urgency of the present reconciliation that frees the believer for life and witness now, the urgency of standing alongside a neighbor who needs to know now that he is loved by the God who made him. None of this is weakened by the recognition that God's saving love is not confined to the seventy or eighty years of a human life. If anything, it is strengthened. The evangelist who knows that God will not give up on his lost friend either before or after death is the evangelist most likely to keep showing up.

For Pastoral Care of the Dying and the Bereaved

It is here, in pastoral care, that the difference the long hope makes is most concretely felt.

Stephen Jonathan tells the story of a member of his church — a woman who had just lost her brother and her teenage nephew within a few days of each other. The brother had been dying. The wider family had asked her, sharply, not to talk about God to him. She had obeyed. Now she sat with her pastor, devastated, holding the conviction (it had been taught to her her whole life) that her brother and nephew were now in hell because she had run out of time to lead them to Christ. Jonathan, sensing that the moment was not for a theological treatise, asked her two simple questions: Do you believe God loved your brother? Do you believe God loves your brother eternally and unconditionally? She answered yes to both. He then said: God did not love your brother any less one minute after his heart stopped than one minute before.¹⁶

She did not require a complete doctrine of postmortem opportunity. She did not require an exegesis of 1 Peter 3. She required only the recognition that her brother had not slipped past the love of God when his heart stopped beating. Within minutes, Jonathan reports, her face changed. The peace came. She did not ask any of the systematic questions, and Jonathan, wisely, did not push the systematic answers. He gave her what the historical record gives all of us: the recognition that God's love does not switch off at death.

This is the pastoral situation evangelical theology has, until very recently, refused to address with serious resources. Stoddart — quoted at length by Jonathan — observed years ago that the question of the death of a non-Christian family member is “largely unaddressed by the evangelical community,” with the result that many evangelicals carry the question silently, “in the silence of their own heart,” unwilling to voice it to their pastors and unable to bear the answer they fear they would hear.¹⁷ The strict-ECT default has produced what Stoddart calls a “conspiracy of silence” — Christians grieving the deaths of beloved unbelievers, unable to talk about it, sometimes for decades. The grief becomes a shame.

The long hope tradition gives the pastor honest words for that grief. Not lies. Not a sentimental certainty that everyone goes to heaven. Not a theology that pretends the gospel call is optional. But genuine words. Words drawn from Scripture and from the Christian tradition that say: God loved your brother. God loves your brother. God's love did not stop. God is just, and God is merciful, and God's pursuit of His creatures does not end where ours does. That is what hope looks like in pastoral care of the bereaved. Not certainty, but real Christian hope, of the same texture Balthasar described and the patristic East lived inside.¹⁸

The same applies to the dying. A pastor sitting beside a parishioner whose father is unsaved and unconscious in the next room has, on the strict-ECT view, almost nothing to say. He can urge prayer. He can pray for a deathbed conversion. He can, in some traditions, anoint and absolve. But the moment the heart stops, his theology runs out of pastoral material. The long hope tradition does not run out. It can say to that parishioner: pray, yes; pray hard, yes; and remember that the God who loves your father is not bound by the clock on the wall. The God whose love is from everlasting to everlasting does not contract that love into the next ten minutes of physical heartbeat. The pastor's prayer can extend, in honest hope, beyond the moment of death itself.

This is not a small thing. It is, for many of the families I have known, a very large thing. It is what the Christian gospel has to say, at its widest and oldest, to people in the moment of greatest need. And it is what an unfortunate slice of the modern evangelical tradition has, until recently, refused to let pastors say.

For Engagement with Non-Christians

For engagement with non-Christians in ordinary life, the long hope tradition shifts the texture of conversation more than it shifts the content.

The Christian who is convinced that his Buddhist coworker, his agnostic mother-in-law, and the kind atheist next door will all be in hell forever has, whether he means to or not, a hard time having ordinary conversations with them. He may suppress the conviction in order to be polite. He may bracket it in order to keep the relationships. He may carry it like a wound. But he cannot relax around them, because in his theology the people he is laughing with at dinner are people he has been told to imagine in the lake of fire. Most evangelicals manage this by simply not thinking about it. The unthought theology becomes a kind of pastoral repression, with all the ordinary consequences of repression.¹⁹

The Christian who has thought through the long hope tradition does not have to manage that repression. He believes the gospel matters. He believes his coworker needs Christ. He believes the present moment is the right moment for his coworker to come to faith. None of that has changed. What has changed is the catastrophic background image — the lake-of-fire stage set behind every conversation. The God who is with him at dinner is also the God his coworker has not yet met, and that God's love does not have an expiration date. He can be a friend without being a fearmonger. He can talk about Christ honestly when the moment comes, and he can drop the subject honestly when it does not. He is freed from the strange double life that strict-ECT theology forces on its honest practitioners.

This is, again, the experience pastors actually describe when they speak of the shift. Their relationships with non-Christians become more honest, not less evangelistic. The witness becomes louder, not quieter. The gospel becomes good news again, in the sense the word originally had — news that one would want to share with a friend, not news that one shares the way one warns about a coming storm.

I have a friend — a thoughtful Christian, evangelical in conviction — who described to me, several years into his reading on these questions, the relief he felt when he finally allowed himself to stop sorting the people in his life into the saved and the doomed. He had been doing it automatically for decades, since he was a teenager. Every coworker, every cousin, every barista, every elderly neighbor — sorted. The sorting was exhausting, and it shaped every interaction without his awareness. When he allowed the long hope tradition to release him from the sorting, what he discovered was not that he stopped caring about his coworkers' salvation. He discovered that he could finally see his coworkers as people. He could love them in the ordinary way the New Testament asks Christians to love their neighbors, without the catastrophic background image distorting the love.

The change he described is, I think, what Sharon Baker is describing when she writes about the way her own teaching shifted when she came out the far side of the strict-ECT default. The Christian who has stepped outside that default is not less serious about Christ. He is more able to be Christlike toward his neighbors. The two things are not in tension. They are the same thing.^19a

This is not a small claim. It is, in fact, a significant pastoral claim. Christians who have lived under the strict-ECT default for a long time often do not recognize how much of their ordinary social anxiety, their politeness-and-fear, their inability to relax around non-Christian friends, comes from a theology they have not consciously examined. The long hope tradition, simply by giving them a different theological background, gives them a different social posture. Not a posture of indifference. A posture of love.

For the Question of the Unevangelized

The long hope tradition's most direct contribution is to the question that, more than any other, has driven post-Reformation Christian thought to consider the wider hope: the question of the unevangelized.

The numbers, however one calculates them, are very large. James Beilby — who writes from a careful, restrained evangelical scholarly position — notes that even by conservative estimates, the population of those who lived before the time of Christ, plus those who have lived since but have never had the gospel meaningfully presented to them, runs to tens of billions of human beings.²⁰ Stephen Jonathan cites the more recent figures: 5.2 billion alive in 1989, with 1.7 billion Christians and 12,000 unreached groups, in addition to “incalculable numbers” who lived prior to the Incarnation.²¹ Whatever the exact figure, the question is not abstract. The question is whether the God who is love has, by some means, provided for the salvation of those who through no fault of their own never heard the message.

Strict restrictivism — the view that those who never hear and respond to the gospel in this life are necessarily lost — has tried to answer this question in several ways. It has appealed to general revelation as condemning but not saving (Packer's formulation).²² It has appealed to the doctrine of original sin and the universal guilt of fallen humanity. It has appealed to God's sovereign right to do as He wills. Each of these answers is theologically intelligible. None of them, in my judgment, has proved pastorally or theologically satisfying to most Christians who have looked at the question hard.

The long hope tradition offers three substantive alternatives, each with its own ancient and modern witnesses. Inclusivism (Justin, Aquinas's possibility for the virtuous pagan, Pinnock, Sanders) holds that God may save those who have not heard the gospel through a faithful response to the grace they have been given, with Christ as the universal but sometimes unrecognized ground of that salvation. Postmortem opportunity (Clement of Alexandria, the patristic reading of 1 Peter 3, Wesley in some moods, Pinnock, Walls, Beilby) holds that God meets those who did not have a genuine opportunity in this life after death. Universal restoration (Origen, Gregory of Nyssa, Isaac, MacDonald, Talbott, Parry, Hart, Hronich) holds that God's love will at last prove irresistible to all.²³ Each of these is, in the historical record, an option that serious Christians have held.

One does not have to embrace any single one of these to recognize the force of the long hope tradition's contribution. The contribution is this: the strict-restrictivist answer is not the only Christian answer. The strict restrictivist who wants to maintain his position must do so as a chosen position, not as a default — and he owes the unevangelized millions a more careful theological defense than “the Church has always taught it.” The Church has not always taught it. Significant streams of the Church have rejected it at every century since the second. The strict restrictivist may still be right. But he must argue, not assert.²⁴

For Christological and Theological Coherence

The largest contribution of the long hope tradition is theological, and at its largest it is Christological.

The God revealed in Jesus Christ is the God whose love seeks the lost sheep, who runs to meet the prodigal, who weeps over Jerusalem, who prays for the forgiveness of His executioners, who descends into the abyss of God-forsakenness for the sake of those who put Him there. Talbott has argued that this God cannot coherently be the same God who consigns the majority of His creatures to endless conscious torment for finite sin, and Talbott's argument is more than a moral protest — it is a Christological observation.²⁵ The image of God in the New Testament is the image of relentless love. The doctrine that says this love stops at the moment of death — and that having stopped, gives way to endless torment — is in obvious tension with the image. The tension can be managed, and the strict-ECT tradition has expended great theological energy managing it. But the tension is real, and the long hope tradition has named it from the earliest centuries.

Ladislaus Boros put the same observation in his own idiom. The death of Christ, for Boros, is the moment in which Christ in His humanity passes through the same passage every human person will pass through — and in passing through it as God Incarnate, He transforms it. Death becomes “the place of our fully Personal Encounter with Christ.”²⁶ The Christological logic here is striking. If Christ has truly entered death, then death is no longer the place where God's saving presence cannot reach. It is the place where God's saving presence is most fully shown. The descent passages, the patristic Holy Saturday tradition, Balthasar's Mysterium Paschale, the long Christological meditation of Catholic and Orthodox theology — all converge on this point. Wherever Christ has gone, there God is. And Christ has gone into death.²⁷

This is not a sentimental claim. It is a dogmatic one. It is the dogmatic claim the patristic descent tradition made for two millennia before the Reformation, often awkwardly, sometimes clumsily, but consistently. The reach of Christ's saving work is not limited to the territory the church has so far reached. The reach of Christ's saving work is co-extensive with the descent of Christ himself.

The author of this book holds CI with PO. I am open to UR. I am not open to ECT — not because I find it uncharitable, though I do, but because I cannot reconcile it with the Christ I find in the New Testament. That conviction was not given me by the long hope tradition; it grew under the pressure of reading the New Testament and the Fathers without the editorial overlay I had inherited. But the long hope tradition gave me the language for the conviction, the company for it, and the historical assurance that I was not the first Christian to notice that the strict default and the Christ of the Gospels were sitting uneasily together.

For Ecumenical Conversation

One of the more striking features of late-twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century Christian thought is the cross-tradition convergence on long-hope theology, and the implications of that convergence for ecumenical conversation deserve a word here.

Consider what has happened since roughly 1940. Karl Barth, in the most influential dogmatic project of the twentieth-century Reformed tradition, reworked the doctrine of election in a direction that has been called — by friend and critic alike — “objective universalism,” even if Barth himself refused the universalist label.^27a Hans Urs von Balthasar, the most prolific Catholic theologian of the second half of the century, wrote Dare We Hope “That All Men Be Saved”? and trained a generation of Catholic theologians in his careful distinction between hope and knowledge. Karl Rahner's transcendental theology and his concept of the “anonymous Christian” reopened the question of the salvation of the unevangelized for the entire post-Vatican II Catholic conversation. Ladislaus Boros's Mysterium Mortis proposed the moment of death itself as the locus of the saving encounter. Sergei Bulgakov, in the Russian Orthodox tradition, defended apokatastasis in The Bride of the Lamb. Kallistos Ware, the major modern English-language Orthodox theologian, devoted careful attention to the patristic universalist tradition in his book The Inner Kingdom. Jürgen Moltmann's The Coming of God proposed a relentlessly universalist eschatology grounded in the Trinitarian theology of the cross. In Anglican and Methodist circles, the wider-hope tradition that runs through Maurice, Farrar, Erskine of Linlathen, and the Cambridge Platonists was being recovered alongside MacDonald and Lewis. In American evangelical circles, Clark Pinnock, John Sanders, Jerry Walls, and James Beilby were developing rigorous PO scholarship. In the Eastern Orthodox diaspora, Bishop Hilarion Alfeyev's work on the descent of Christ was being widely read.^27b

The convergence is not on a single position. There is genuine and important disagreement among these traditions. The Eastern Orthodox case for apokatastasis (in Bulgakov, in Ware to a more cautious degree) is not the same as the Catholic Wissen/Hoffen distinction (in Balthasar) or the Catholic moment-of-death encounter (in Boros) or the Reformed objective-universalism (in Barth) or the Methodist-Wesleyan wider hope or the contemporary evangelical PO scholarship. These are distinct positions with different doctrinal centers. They share a refusal — the refusal of the strict-ECT default as the only Christian option — and they share a set of patristic and Christological resources. But each tradition has reached the long hope by its own route, and each holds it with its own qualifications.

The ecumenical implication is striking. The strict-ECT default, which often functions in American evangelical apologetics as a marker of Christian orthodoxy itself, is the position that the major theological developments in Catholic, Orthodox, Reformed, and Methodist traditions in the twentieth century have all, in their distinctive ways, called into question. This is not an obscure development. It is one of the most significant theological developments of the last hundred years. The fact that much of American evangelical theological education has continued operating as if it had not occurred is itself a striking historical phenomenon, and one worth noting.

For the contemporary Christian who is interested in talking across tradition lines — with Catholic friends about Balthasar, with Orthodox friends about the descent, with mainline Protestant friends about Barth or Moltmann — the long hope tradition opens conversations that the strict-ECT default closes. It turns out that one's Catholic neighbor reading Balthasar, one's Orthodox neighbor reading Ware, and one's Methodist neighbor reading Charles Wesley's hymns are all reading inside a long-hope conversation that has its own coherence across the traditions. The American evangelical who steps into that conversation steps into a much larger Christian world than the popular handbooks have allowed him to see.

The Author's Hope

Let me say plainly what I hope for in writing this book.

I hope, first, that the reader who holds strict ECT will hold it with greater historical humility. The position is defensible. The position has had great minds in it. I have spent two long chapters (Chapter 12 on Augustine and Chapter 13 on Aquinas) doing my best to present those great minds at their strongest. I am asking nothing of the strict-ECT reader except that he hold his position knowing that it is one option among the several the Christian tradition has produced — not the only one, not the unanimous one, not the obvious one. If he continues to hold it after reading this book, I have no quarrel with him. I have a quarrel only with the assertion that the Church has always taught the position. That assertion is not true, and the case for ECT does not depend on it.

I hope, second, that the reader who already holds a long-hope position will hold it with greater theological seriousness. The long hope tradition is not the inheritance of the careless or the sentimental. It is the inheritance of Origen, Gregory of Nyssa, Isaac, Julian of Norwich, the Cambridge Platonists, Wesley, Barth, Balthasar, Talbott, Parry, Hart. These are not lightweights. They worked hard, read deeply, prayed long. The reader who has finished this book and now identifies as a hopeful universalist, a postmortem-opportunity advocate, or a confident universalist owes the position the same care. There is no excuse, in this tradition, for sloppy exegesis. There is no excuse for replacing “the church has always taught ECT” with “all the real Christians have always known better.” That is the same rhetorical move, in reverse. It is as untrue from one side as from the other.

I hope, third, that readers wrestling with these questions — the seminarian, the pastor, the lay Christian who has watched a parent die unconverted — will find resources here for thinking and for praying. The book is documentary. It cannot tell anyone what to believe. But it can show the reader that he is not alone, that the questions he is asking have been asked, that the answers offered have been multiple, and that the Christian tradition is large enough to hold his honest grief and his honest hope.

I hope, fourth, that the book might contribute, however modestly, to a more honest and more charitable Christian conversation about the fate of the dead. The conversation has been, in much of the popular evangelical world, brittle and uncharitable. ECT advocates have accused long-hope advocates of denying the gospel. Long-hope advocates have accused ECT advocates of worshipping a monster. Neither charge is helpful, and neither is, in the main, accurate. The conversation will go better when both sides treat the other as Christians who have read the same Bible and reached different conclusions for serious reasons. That is the conversation Beilby and Walls and Stackhouse and Date are having among themselves. It is a useful conversation. The popular tone is, I hope, starting to follow.²⁸

I should add a fifth hope, more personal. I hope this book will be useful for those who, like Daniel at the kitchen table, are sitting in the middle of pastoral situations the strict default cannot address. Pastors at funerals. Hospice chaplains. Christian counselors meeting with grieving family members. Sunday school teachers fielding the questions of a thoughtful sixth grader. Missionaries trying to make sense of the millions outside their reach. Parents whose adult children no longer believe. The strict default has had nothing for these people for a very long time, and it has often condemned them, in the silence of their own hearts, to a grief that the gospel was meant to address. I hope the historical record this book has tried to draw will be, for at least some such readers, a quiet kind of permission to receive what the Christian tradition has been offering all along.

And I hope, sixth, that this book will be useful for those readers who are committed strict-ECT believers and have no intention of leaving the position. The book was not written to convert anyone. It was written to inform. The strict-ECT reader who walks away from this book with a deepened sense of his own tradition's actual relationship to the broader Christian conversation has, I think, gained something worth gaining — even if he holds his position more firmly afterward. He at least holds it with full information.

What Strict-ECT Advocates Deserve in This Conversation

It is worth saying plainly that the long hope tradition owes its ECT interlocutors more than the popular tone has often given them.

It owes them, first, recognition of their real concerns. The seriousness of the gospel call, the horror of sin, the character of God's holiness, the dignity of human moral choice — these are the concerns the strict-ECT advocate is, at his best, defending. They are real concerns. They are not phantoms. They are concerns serious Christians should share, and most of the long-hope figures in this book have shared them. Origen took sin seriously. Wesley took the gospel call with terrifying seriousness. Balthasar refused universalist knowledge precisely because he refused to dissolve the seriousness of free human response. The PO advocate who reads Beilby will find a man who refuses easy universalism precisely on the grounds that human moral choice is real and consequential.²⁹ These are the company in which the long hope tradition does its best work.

It owes them, second, argument and not polemic. The cheapest move in this conversation is the moral-shock argument: ECT is the doctrine of a monster, only a sadist could believe it, the people who hold it are spiritually broken, the doctrine itself is evidence of psychological damage. This move is everywhere in the popular literature, and it is, by and large, useless. It does not move anyone. It hardens opponents. It substitutes feeling for argument. And it commits a kind of historical injustice — Augustine was not a sadist, Aquinas was not a monster, Edwards was not a psychopath. They were brilliant Christian theologians whose readings of Scripture and tradition led them to conclusions I think were mistaken, but they were trying to be faithful to the text and to the gospel as they understood it. The long hope tradition does not need the moral-shock argument. The case is biblical, patristic, and theological. It should be made on those grounds.³⁰

It owes them, third, an honest reckoning with the costs of long-hope positions. Each long-hope option carries genuine theological liabilities. UR has to answer the New Testament's apparently irreversible judgment language. PO has to answer the Hebrews 9:27 framing of death and judgment. CI has to answer the Christological objection (raised by Hronich and others) that if death is annihilation, then the death of Christ on the cross must have involved His annihilation, which Chalcedonian Christology will not permit.³¹ These are real objections. They deserve real answers. The reader of this book who has been drawn to one or another of these positions should not pretend the position is free of cost. The cost of the strict-ECT position is high. The cost of every long-hope position is also real. Honest theology weighs the costs.

The Limits of This Book — And the Books Beyond It

One reason this concluding chapter is comparatively brief is that the book it concludes has been deliberately disciplined. The Long Hope is historical theology, not biblical theology, not systematic theology, not pastoral theology. It has tried to show what Christians have believed; it has not tried to settle what Christians today ought to believe.

That settling is the work of other books. The reader who wants the biblical case for postmortem opportunity, with attention to 1 Peter 3, the descent of Christ, the Pauline universalist texts, and the apparent counter-texts in Hebrews and Luke, should turn to the biblical-theological companion volume Beyond the Grave, where I have tried to make that case at length.³² The reader who wants the verse-by-verse rebuttal of restrictivism — the careful exegetical engagement with the standard restrictivist proof-texts — should turn to Death Is Not the Deadline. The reader who wants a near-death-experience-informed theology of dying and the intermediate state, drawing on my dissertation research on the veridical elements of NDEs and the case they make for substance dualism, should turn to When Death Approaches.³³ Each of those volumes does what this volume has not done.

What this volume has done is the historical work. It has drawn the map. It is, I hope, a fair map. I have tried to let Augustine be Augustine and Origen be Origen, to let Aquinas speak with his own voice and Gregory of Nyssa with hers (because Macrina is somewhere in the background of every Cappadocian sentence). I have tried not to retroject modern categories onto premodern figures, not to enlist the early Fathers as proxies for present-day debates, not to make the long hope tradition any larger or smaller than it has been.

The reader who has walked through these chapters will, I hope, finish with a better picture of the Christian tradition than he or she had when beginning. That is the most this book can deliver. It cannot tell anyone what to do with the picture. The picture itself, though, was worth drawing, because the picture has been routinely misdrawn in popular evangelical discourse, and the misdrawing has had pastoral and theological consequences.

The Long Hope Continues

Let me close with the longest single observation this book makes.

The long hope tradition has continued for two thousand years because Christians, in every generation, have continued to read Scripture and to find in it more mercy than the strict tradition allowed. They have continued to read the Fathers and to find in them more diversity than the polemical histories acknowledged. They have continued to wrestle with the deaths of those they loved and to find in the Christian tradition resources that the strict tradition closed off. The Origenist controversy did not silence Origen; the 553 anathemas, contested as they are, did not silence Gregory of Nyssa or Isaac of Nineveh; the Augustinian turn did not silence Eckhart and Julian; the Reformation hardening did not silence Cudworth and Sterry; the nineteenth-century retrenchment did not silence MacDonald and Maurice and Farrar; and the modern evangelical default has not silenced Pinnock and Sanders and Walls and Talbott and Parry and Hart and Beilby and Hronich and Date and Fudge and Stackhouse.

The reader who has walked through this book has walked, in some sense, with all of these. Origen lecturing in Caesarea. Gregory at Macrina's deathbed. Isaac alone in his Syriac cell with the love of God overwhelming him. Eckhart in Cologne. Julian in her anchorhold in Norwich. The Cambridge Platonists in their long evenings of conversation. The Petersens hiding the manuscript of Mysterion Apokatastaseos Pantōn. Wesley on horseback. Murray on the New Jersey shore. White in his London study. Barth in Basel writing the doctrine of election. Balthasar daring to hope. Moltmann at the cross. Pinnock writing A Wideness in God's Mercy and watching his evangelical world shift around him. Beilby in his Bethel office. Hronich, very young, writing the universalist book his mentors did not expect him to write.

The reader stands now in their company. That is no small thing. It is not the company of heretics, no matter what some popular handbooks have implied. It is the company of Christians — across centuries, traditions, languages, and continents — who have refused to accept the smallest possible answer to the largest possible question. They have asked what God's love is wide enough to do, and they have been unwilling to set the limits in advance. They have read the descent of Christ as a saving descent. They have read the love of God as a love that pursues. They have read the gospel as good news that is good in the largest sense the word can bear.³⁴

What the reader does with that company is the next question. The book cannot answer it for anyone. It can only point and say: these are the Christians who have thought about this; here is what they have said; here is what the tradition actually looks like; now you decide. The decision will be different for different readers. Some will move into deeper CI. Some will move into PO. Some will become hopeful universalists. Some will hold what they already held with greater historical understanding. Some will remain strict-ECT advocates and continue to argue the case from new ground. All of these are responses honest readers can make to honest historical material.

What I do not expect any honest reader to do, after walking through this book, is to continue repeating the rhetorical move that the long hope is a modern innovation. That move has not survived the historical record. It will, for popular reasons, continue to be made in some quarters. But it cannot be made by anyone who has read the Fathers, the medievals, the seventeenth-century English, the Pietists, Wesley, the Cambridge Platonists, the American Universalists, the twentieth-century recovery, and the contemporary movement, and continues to claim that none of this exists, or that none of it counts, or that none of it amounts to a genuine Christian conversation. It exists. It counts. It is the conversation. And it is still going on.³⁵

So when Daniel sits down at his kitchen table on Friday morning, with his cup of coffee gone cold and Roy's funeral two hours away, he is not alone. He has Origen and Gregory at his shoulder. He has Julian and Wesley and Balthasar. He has Beilby and Talbott and Parry and Hronich. He has, if he wants it, the company of two thousand years of Christians who have stood at gravesides and refused to write off the dead. He does not have the certainty that the strict-ECT preachers offered him in seminary. He has something different, and something older. He has the hope. He has the long hope.

That is what every reader who has finished this book has — whether they realize it yet or not. They have the long hope. They stand in the company of those who carried it through the centuries. The next chapter of that hope is theirs to write.

We began this book, in Chapter 1, at a graveside. A pastor stood there, asked by a grieving family member whether anything could possibly be done for the unbeliever now in the ground.³⁶ The pastor in that opening did not know what to say. He had been told, all his ministry, that the answer was no. He had been told that nothing could be done, because the Church had always taught that nothing could be done. He had been told a great many things, and at the graveside he stood holding them all, and they were not enough.

The reader who has now walked through thirty chapters knows that the things the pastor had been told are not what the Christian tradition has actually held. The pastor was not given the inheritance he was owed. The hope was older, wider, and far more resilient than he had been allowed to know. The pastor stands now in a different position. He stands in the company of those who have carried the long hope through every century since the apostles. He does not yet know what the next sentence is. But he knows there is one.

The long hope continues. It is now the reader's turn.