Chapter 22
The Catholic theologian who reopened the question Trent had closed
In 1986 a slim paperback appeared on the shelves of German Catholic bookshops. It was barely 130 pages long. The author was an aging Swiss theologian, already past eighty, known to specialists as one of the great minds of twentieth-century Catholicism but read by relatively few outside the academy. The title was a question: Was dürfen wir hoffen? — What May We Hope?1 The English edition, published two years later by Ignatius Press, gave it the longer and now-famous title: Dare We Hope "That All Men Be Saved"?2
The reaction was immediate and intense. Some readers heard in the little book a recovery of the patristic boldness that had gone silent in the Latin West for a thousand years. Others heard a soft-pedaled return of the Origenist heresy that the Church had supposedly condemned at Constantinople in 553. Within a year Balthasar himself had to publish a companion volume, the Kleiner Diskurs über die Hölle (A Short Discourse on Hell), to answer his critics.3 Two decades after his death, the debate would burst out again in the pages of First Things, with the young scholar Alyssa Pitstick charging that Balthasar's theology of Holy Saturday amounted to nothing less than heresy.4
I want to be honest with you about something. When I first picked up Dare We Hope, I expected to disagree with most of it. I am not a Catholic. I do not share Balthasar's view of the descent of Christ in all its details. I have real concerns about the role Adrienne von Speyr's mystical experiences played in his theology. And yet — and this surprised me — I closed the book convinced that Balthasar had done something the Christian tradition needed someone to do. He had reopened a question that the Latin West had been closing for fifteen hundred years.
This is the chapter where the story of the long hope crosses into Roman Catholicism's post-conciliar imagination. By the late twentieth century the strict Augustinian default — that most of humanity ends in eternal conscious torment — had a hard time finding articulate defenders even within Catholic theology. The Second Vatican Council (1962–1965) had reopened the question of the salvation of non-Christians with documents like Lumen Gentium and Nostra Aetate. Karl Rahner was developing his controversial doctrine of the "anonymous Christian." And in Basel, in his quiet apartment above the Hofgasse, Balthasar was thinking the question through from a different angle than Rahner — from the angle of the cross.
Hans Urs von Balthasar was born in Lucerne on August 12, 1905, into a wealthy and devout Catholic family.5 He was educated by Benedictines and then by Jesuits at Stella Matutina in Feldkirch, Austria. From there he went to Vienna, Berlin, and Zurich to study philosophy and German literature, taking his doctorate from Zurich in 1929 with a dissertation that became the multi-volume Apokalypse der deutschen Seele — "Apocalypse of the German Soul," a sweeping study of eschatological themes in German thought from Lessing to Heidegger. That same year he entered the Society of Jesus.
He was ordained in 1936 by Cardinal Faulhaber of Munich, the famously anti-Nazi German prelate.6 The next decade transformed him. Studying patristic theology under Henri de Lubac at Lyon, Balthasar became part of the ressourcement movement — French for "return to the sources" — which sought to recover the Church fathers as living teachers rather than museum pieces. He produced book-length studies of Origen, Gregory of Nyssa, and Maximus the Confessor, three of the most important universalist or quasi-universalist theologians the Greek tradition ever produced.7
In 1940 he was assigned to Basel as a student chaplain. There he met Adrienne von Speyr, a Swiss physician, convert from Protestantism, and (in Balthasar's view) a major mystic of the twentieth century. Speyr's reported visions of Holy Saturday — Christ in the abyss of God-forsakenness — would shape Balthasar's mature theology to a degree his admirers sometimes downplay and his critics never let him forget. Together they founded the Community of Saint John, a secular institute for laypeople. In 1950, after the Jesuits refused to let him direct the community and continue as a Jesuit, Balthasar left the Society.8
For most of the 1950s he was without a teaching post, often without an income, and excluded from Vatican II as a council expert (a peritus). But the books kept coming. The seven volumes of The Glory of the Lord, the five volumes of Theo-Drama, the three volumes of Theo-Logic. Over the course of his life he published eighty-five books and roughly five hundred articles — and translated nearly a hundred more works.9 By the 1970s he was widely recognized as among the most important Catholic theologians of his century. In 1984 Pope John Paul II awarded him the first Paul VI International Prize. In 1988, the pope named him a cardinal. He died at his home in Basel on June 26, 1988 — two days before the investiture ceremony. Joseph Ratzinger, the future Benedict XVI, preached at his funeral.10
Note: Henri de Lubac on Balthasar. Henri de Lubac, himself one of the great Catholic minds of the twentieth century, once called Balthasar "perhaps the most cultured man of our time." It was not flattery. Balthasar's command of German literature, Greek patristics, French theology, classical music, and Italian art was the kind of synthesis the modern academy almost never produces.
To understand Dare We Hope, you have to begin a generation earlier — with a young Balthasar reading the Greek fathers and quietly recovering a stream of Christian thought that the Latin West had largely forgotten.
In 1942 Balthasar published Présence et pensée: Essai sur la philosophie religieuse de Grégoire de Nysse — Presence and Thought: An Essay on the Religious Philosophy of Gregory of Nyssa.11 The book matters because in it the young Balthasar absorbed Gregory's vision of the infinite Good who pursues every rational creature with a love that never quite gives up. Gregory's doctrine of epektasis — pronounced "eh-PEK-tah-sis," a Greek word meaning the soul's endless reaching out toward God — became part of Balthasar's permanent furniture. So did Gregory's apokatastasis, the eventual restoration of all things. Balthasar did not endorse Gregory's universalism wholesale. But he learned from Gregory that the Christian hope is wider than the Augustinian tradition had taught the Latin West to believe.
For a full account of Gregory's position and what the early Church did and did not affirm, see Chapter 9. The point here is that Balthasar's later "dare we hope" was not invented in 1986. It was the harvest of a forty-year reading of the Greek fathers.
Balthasar's second crucial book on this question was Karl Barth: Darstellung und Deutung seiner Theologie — The Theology of Karl Barth: Exposition and Interpretation, published in 1951.12 Balthasar and Barth were neighbors in Basel and personal friends. Reading Barth, especially Church Dogmatics II/2 on election, Balthasar saw a fellow theologian working out — from Reformed presuppositions — what Balthasar was working out from Catholic ones: a vision of God's sovereign grace in Christ that left the door of hope wide open without ever stepping through it into hard universalism. For Barth's own position, see Chapter 21.
The Barth book established Balthasar's lifelong instinct: hope without claim, the larger possibility without the closed system.
In 1969 Balthasar published what became his most controversial book on these questions: Mysterium Paschale, originally a long chapter for the systematic work Mysterium Salutis and then separately reissued.13 The book treats the Easter triduum — Good Friday, Holy Saturday, and Easter Sunday — as the heart of the gospel.
The most contested move is what Balthasar does with Holy Saturday. The traditional Catholic teaching, going back at least to the medieval period, was that Christ "descended into hell" (the descensus ad inferos of the Apostles' Creed) as a victor. He marched into the realm of the dead, broke the gates, and led the righteous patriarchs out. Renaissance and baroque art picture it this way: Christ in radiant glory, gripping Adam by the wrist and pulling him up out of the grave.
Balthasar's reading is very different. Drawing heavily on Speyr's mystical experiences of Holy Saturday, he argued that the descent is not a victory parade. It is the deepest moment of Christ's Gottverlassenheit — God-forsakenness — when the dead Son experiences the abyss of separation from the Father on behalf of every sinner who has ever been or ever will be alienated from God. The descent is not Christ visiting hell as a tourist with the keys to the gate. It is Christ becoming the abandoned one, all the way down, so that no human darkness lies outside the reach of his solidarity.14
"In this finality [of the cross and burial] the Son penetrates all the way into the deepest darkness of human estrangement from God, into the deepest 'no' of creaturely refusal, in order to draw out from there every creature that has been or might be lost. He is not in hell as in his own place, but as in someone else's — as the one who has taken upon himself the place of every godless one."
— Hans Urs von Balthasar, Mysterium Paschale, paraphrasing the core argument of chs. 4–5
The pastoral and eschatological implication is enormous. If the Son has truly entered the place of every "no" to God, then to set a limit on the saving reach of his descent is to set a limit on the cross itself. Balthasar never quite says "and therefore all will be saved." But he is no longer willing to say with confidence "and therefore some are surely lost forever."
This brings us to the book everyone knows. Dare We Hope "That All Men Be Saved"? is short — about 130 pages in the original German — and it is structured around a single careful distinction. The Christian, Balthasar argues, may not know that all will be saved (wissen). But the Christian must hope that all will be saved (hoffen). The distinction between knowledge and hope is the hinge of the whole book.15
Balthasar works the distinction in four ways. First, the biblical witness contains two strands that cannot be harmonized in advance. One strand warns of real judgment, real possibility of loss. The other strand speaks of God's universal saving will, the reconciliation of all things in Christ, the every-knee-shall-bow texts. Scripture, Balthasar argues, does not let us pick one strand and drop the other. Both are true. The reconciliation between them lies beyond what we are permitted to know in advance.
Second, the Church's liturgy already prays for the salvation of all. The Good Friday intercessions, the prayers of the saints, the funeral Mass — none of them ever pray for the damnation of anyone. To hope, in Balthasar's view, is therefore not theological speculation. It is simply to align oneself with what the Church already does at the altar.
Third, the saints — at least some of the great saints — have hoped this hope explicitly. Balthasar cites Edith Stein, Thérèse of Lisieux, and others who longed in prayer for the salvation of all. If the saints can hope, Balthasar suggests, then so may we.
Fourth, the patristic warrant. Balthasar draws on Origen, Gregory of Nyssa, and Maximus the Confessor — the three universalist or near-universalist Greek fathers that Catholic theology never fully condemned even after 553. He does not say their universalism is the Church's settled teaching. He says it is part of the Church's range of legitimate hope.
Key Argument: Wissen vs. Hoffen. The whole Balthasarian position turns on the distinction between knowing and hoping. To know that all will be saved is to overreach Scripture and the tradition. To know that some will not be saved is also to overreach. What is left, between the two overreaches, is hope — and the Christian, Balthasar insists, is not merely permitted but obligated to hope this hope.
The follow-up Short Discourse on Hell (1987) responds to the critics who had pounced on Dare We Hope. Here Balthasar gets sharper. He answers the charge that he is reviving Origenism by pointing out that he is not asserting apokatastasis; he is preserving the right to hope for it. He answers the charge that he is dissolving the seriousness of judgment by insisting that judgment remains a real possibility every moment of our earthly lives. He is not a soft universalist. He is a careful one — careful, above all, never to predetermine in either direction what only God can finally decide.
In the English-language Ignatius edition, a third short essay, Apokatastasis, joins the other two — a brief late piece in which Balthasar surveys the patristic universalist tradition and asks again whether the Church has ever truly closed the door on it.16
Balthasar's deeper case for the larger hope sits inside his massive five-volume Theodramatik, written between 1973 and 1983.17 Volumes IV and V — The Action and The Last Act — are the eschatological volumes. The metaphor of the whole work is theatrical. Salvation history is a drama in which God is both author and lead actor and yet in which the creature remains a genuine free agent. The final act has not yet been played out for any human being. Balthasar resists, in the strongest terms, any tidy system — Augustinian or Origenist — that closes the script in advance.
What you see across all these books is one consistent stance: the Christian theologian, faced with the question of universal salvation, must refuse both the strict restrictivism that says many will surely be lost and the confident universalism that says all will surely be saved. Both are claims to a knowledge we do not have. What we have, Balthasar insists, is the cross — the descent of God into every "no" — and from that cross arises the duty to hope.
The reception of Balthasar's eschatology has been almost as theatrical as his theological method.
On the Catholic right, the most influential critique came from Cardinal Avery Dulles. In his McGinley Lecture at Fordham in November 2002, later published in First Things as "The Population of Hell" (May 2003), Dulles argued — politely but firmly — that Balthasar's hopeful posture pushes against the constant teaching of the Magisterium.18 The Church, Dulles said, has never denied that some are damned; she has only refused to identify specific individuals (other than the demons and, by some readings, Judas). Dulles was not hostile to Balthasar personally — he admired him — but he worried that the hope-without-knowledge posture was sliding into a "thoughtless optimism" that the Catholic tradition had wisely resisted.
A heavier blow came from Ralph Martin in Will Many Be Saved? What Vatican II Actually Teaches and Its Implications for the New Evangelization (Eerdmans, 2012).19 Martin's book is essentially a long argument that the post-conciliar Catholic embrace of the "larger hope" — Balthasar's and Rahner's together — has produced an evangelistic collapse. If most or all are likely to be saved, why send missionaries? Why baptize? Why preach? Martin's pastoral worry is real and ought to be taken seriously. Whether his exegesis of Lumen Gentium 16 fully supports the weight he puts on it is another question.
The fiercest engagement was the Pitstick–Oakes exchange in First Things, December 2006 and January 2007.20 Alyssa Lyra Pitstick, then a young scholar, had written a doctoral dissertation arguing that Balthasar's Holy Saturday theology — Christ in the abyss of God-forsakenness — contradicts the Catholic dogmatic tradition on the descent. Her book, Light in Darkness: Hans Urs von Balthasar and the Catholic Doctrine of Christ's Descent into Hell, appeared with Eerdmans in 2007.21 Pitstick's charge was severe: Balthasar's reading is not legitimate development of doctrine but rupture from it.
Edward Oakes, S.J., Balthasar's leading English-language interpreter and author of Pattern of Redemption: The Theology of Hans Urs von Balthasar (Continuum, 1994), defended his teacher with equal force.22 The exchange was sharp enough that R. R. Reno, in a later essay, said Pitstick's real service to Balthasar's reputation might be that "she will end up midwifing his theology into the mainstream of Church thinking far more than my own poor efforts have."23
Common Objection: Hope is just universalism in disguise. Critics from Dulles to Pitstick have argued that the Wissen/Hoffen distinction is too slippery to hold. If you hope strongly enough that all are saved, and pray for it, and preach as if it is the deepest gospel — at what point have you stopped hoping and started teaching?
Balthasar's response, in the Short Discourse, is that the distinction is exactly what the Catholic tradition itself has always preserved. The Church canonizes saints — names them as in heaven. She has never named anyone as in hell, not even Judas. Hope without knowledge, Balthasar insists, is not a Balthasarian innovation. It is the ordinary practice of the Church at the altar.
Outside the Catholic conversation, the reception has been varied. Robert Jenson, the Lutheran systematic theologian, engaged Balthasar appreciatively. The Reformed have been mostly cool — they hear in Balthasar's reading of Barth a softening of what Barth himself was already too soft about. The Eastern Orthodox have been mixed: figures like Metropolitan Kallistos Ware found a real affinity, while others worried that Balthasar's Holy Saturday theology departed too far from the patristic christus victor reading of the descent.24
And then there is the strangely quiet endorsement from Joseph Ratzinger. In his book Eschatology and in occasional addresses, Ratzinger expressed his own form of the hopeful position — though more cautiously than Balthasar. He preached at Balthasar's funeral in 1988. As Pope Benedict XVI in 2007, he issued Spe Salvi ("In Hope We Are Saved"), an encyclical on Christian hope that, while not endorsing Balthasar's full position, opens the door to a wider eschatological imagination.
What did Balthasar actually teach about the fate of the dead? Let me try to lay it out as plainly as I can.
He did not teach apokatastasis in the strong Origenist sense — the dogmatic certainty that all rational creatures, including the demons, will finally be restored to God. He explicitly distinguished his position from Origen's.
He did not teach annihilationism or conditional immortality. (That is not his question.)
He did teach that the Christian is permitted and indeed obligated to hope for the salvation of every human being. He grounded this hope in the cross — in the descent of Christ into the abyss of God-forsakenness — and in the universal scope of the divine saving will. He held that the New Testament's hell warnings remain real possibilities for every human moment, but that no human person has been or can be revealed to us as certainly damned. He held that the Church's prayer and the saints' longing together model the proper Christian eschatological stance.
Is this a "soft universalism"? It depends on who is asking. To a Catholic traditionalist trained on Trent and Suarez, yes — it functions as a deferred universalism dressed up in cautious language. To a hardliner Origenist universalist like David Bentley Hart (whom we will meet in Chapter 25), no — Balthasar refuses to commit to what Hart thinks the gospel actually teaches. Balthasar himself would probably accept neither label. He thought he was simply being a careful Christian.
Where I think Balthasar is most right: his refusal to predetermine the question in either direction. The strict-restrictivist tradition has acted as if it possessed knowledge it does not have — the certainty that most of humanity ends in eternal conscious torment. The strong-universalist tradition has sometimes acted as if it too possessed knowledge it does not have — the certainty that no one finally rejects God. Balthasar's discipline of hope refuses both overreaches. That is a real gain.
Where I think Balthasar is genuinely contested: his Holy Saturday theology. Pitstick's case is overstated when she calls him a heretic, but she has a real point. The dependence on Speyr's mystical experiences is theologically risky. The patristic tradition on the descent is genuinely more layered than Balthasar sometimes lets on — Christ goes down both as victor (the dominant patristic strand) and as the one who enters death in solidarity (the strand Balthasar emphasizes). To press either strand too hard at the cost of the other is to distort the picture.
Where I think Balthasar is most useful for the project of this book: he models, in a single careful theologian, the long-hope posture without the metaphysical baggage of Origen's pre-existence speculation. He shows that you can hold the larger hope while remaining inside the historic creeds. He shows that you can grieve the lost, evangelize seriously, preach repentance, and still hope for everyone. That is not, despite his critics, a contradiction. It is precisely the posture the New Testament itself models — Paul who weeps over his unbelieving Israelite kinsmen (Romans 9:1–3) and also declares that "God has consigned all to disobedience, that he may have mercy on all" (Romans 11:32).
Where Balthasar leaves my own framework: his position has no formal place for postmortem opportunity in the sense developed by Pinnock, Sanders, Walls, Beilby, Jonathan, or Harrison (see Chapter 26). His hope is anchored more in the descent and in God's universal saving will than in any explicit account of a postmortem encounter with Christ. The closest Catholic analogue to PO is the Rahnerian–Borosian "final decision at death" hypothesis developed by Ladislaus Boros — a project Balthasar engaged but did not fully endorse. (For Boros's hypothesis, see Chapter 24.)25 Balthasar's position is therefore wider than CI but narrower than full PO. It is its own thing: a Christological hope that asks for no further mechanism beyond the cross.
Insight: Balthasar is what the long-hope tradition often looks like when it stays within the historic Catholic creeds and refuses to settle into either confident universalism or strict restrictivism. He is the patron saint of theological humility in eschatology — and humility, on these questions especially, is not a weakness but a virtue.
Why does Balthasar matter for the conversation this book is having?
First, because he is the single most influential Catholic voice for the larger hope in the twentieth century, and because the Catholic Church is the largest body of Christians on earth, his rehabilitation of the patristic universalist tradition matters globally. Robin Parry, in The Evangelical Universalist, lists Balthasar as part of the modern Catholic "hopeful universalist" stream alongside Rahner, Küng, and Pope John Paul II.26 Andrew Hronich notes that Balthasar's "empty hell" thesis — that hell may exist while no human person finally occupies it — has become a respectable Catholic option for those who want a middle ground between strict apokatastasis and the traditional view.27 William Harrison cites Balthasar's Dare We Hope in his bibliography on postmortem salvation.28 Balthasar may be Catholic, but the long-hope tradition is reading him across confessional lines.
Second, because his careful distinction between hope and knowledge is a gift to every Christian who has ever sat with the question: can I really hope that my unbelieving father, my atheist son, my Muslim neighbor will be saved? Balthasar's answer is yes — not as a doctrine to teach but as a hope to hold and a prayer to pray. That answer alone has changed how a generation of Catholic pastors do funerals.
Third, because Balthasar shows that the long hope is not the property of one tradition. Origen was Greek and speculative. Gregory of Nyssa was Greek and patristic. Barth was Reformed and dialectical. Balthasar was Catholic and aesthetic. The fact that each tradition, from its own resources, keeps finding its way back to some version of the larger hope tells us something. Either every one of these traditions has made the same mistake again and again, or there is something in the gospel itself that the strict-restrictivist position cannot finally suppress.
I do not think the long hope, in Balthasar's careful form, is the full picture. I think conditional immortality and postmortem opportunity, taken together, account for the biblical evidence better than Balthasar's position does. But I will say this. When I look at the historical record of two thousand years, and I see how often Christians of every era, from Gregory of Nyssa to Julian of Norwich to William Law to Karl Barth to Hans Urs von Balthasar, have stood beside the open grave and refused to consign the dead to eternal torment without hope — when I see that, I am no longer worried about being out of step with the tradition. I am worried about being out of step with the gospel that produced the tradition.
Balthasar would put it more carefully than I just did. He always did. Next, we turn to a theologian who would put it less carefully — Jürgen Moltmann, the Reformed German who walked through Balthasar's open door and kept walking until he arrived, with the cross still in his hands, at something closer to the explicit universalism Balthasar had refused to name.
↑ 1. Hans Urs von Balthasar, Was dürfen wir hoffen? (Einsiedeln: Johannes Verlag, 1986), 130 pp., in the publisher's Sammlung Kriterien series (vol. 75).
↑ 2. Hans Urs von Balthasar, Dare We Hope "That All Men Be Saved"? With a Short Discourse on Hell, trans. David Kipp and Lothar Krauth (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1988). The Ignatius volume binds together three short works: Dare We Hope, the Short Discourse on Hell, and a late essay on apokatastasis.
↑ 3. Kleiner Diskurs über die Hölle (Ostfildern: Schwabenverlag, 1987); English in the Ignatius volume cited at n. 2.
↑ 4. Alyssa Lyra Pitstick and Edward T. Oakes, S.J., "Balthasar, Hell, and Heresy: An Exchange," First Things 168 (December 2006): 25–32; "More on Balthasar, Hell, and Heresy," First Things (January 2007): 16–18.
↑ 5. Biographical details drawn from Edward T. Oakes, Pattern of Redemption: The Theology of Hans Urs von Balthasar (New York: Continuum, 1994); Aidan Nichols, Divine Fruitfulness: A Guide through Balthasar's Theology beyond the Trilogy (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2007); and the standard reference entry in the Encyclopædia Britannica, s.v. "Hans Urs von Balthasar."
↑ 6. Balthasar was ordained on July 26, 1936, by Cardinal Michael von Faulhaber, the Archbishop of Munich-Freising and one of the few German prelates who publicly resisted the Nazi regime.
↑ 7. Most consequentially: Origenes: Geist und Feuer (1938; English Origen: Spirit and Fire, trans. Robert J. Daly, Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1984); and Présence et pensée: Essai sur la philosophie religieuse de Grégoire de Nysse (1942; English Presence and Thought: An Essay on the Religious Philosophy of Gregory of Nyssa, trans. Mark Sebanc, San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1995).
↑ 8. The standard account of Balthasar's relationship with Adrienne von Speyr (1902–1967) and the founding of the Johannesgemeinschaft is Balthasar's own First Glance at Adrienne von Speyr, trans. Antje Lawry and Sergia Englund (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1981; rev. ed. 2010). The controversial role of Speyr's Holy Saturday visions in Balthasar's theology is discussed at length in Pitstick (n. 21 below).
↑ 9. The standard count is given in the obituary notices and Joseph Ratzinger's funeral homily ("Homily at the Funeral Liturgy for Hans Urs von Balthasar," Communio: International Catholic Review 15 [Winter 1988]: 512–516).
↑ 10. Balthasar died of a heart attack at his home in Basel on June 26, 1988, two days before the consistory at which he was to be elevated to the College of Cardinals (June 28, 1988). He is buried at the Hofkirche in Lucerne.
↑ 11. Balthasar, Présence et pensée (Paris: Beauchesne, 1942); English Presence and Thought (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1995). For the broader patristic background of the Greek-fathers' apokatastasis tradition, see Ilaria L. E. Ramelli, The Christian Doctrine of Apokatastasis: A Critical Assessment from the New Testament to Eriugena (Leiden: Brill, 2013), with Michael McClymond's largely critical reading in The Devil's Redemption: A New History and Interpretation of Christian Universalism, 2 vols. (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2018).
↑ 12. Hans Urs von Balthasar, Karl Barth: Darstellung und Deutung seiner Theologie (Köln: Jakob Hegner, 1951); English The Theology of Karl Barth: Exposition and Interpretation, trans. Edward T. Oakes (San Francisco: Communio Books / Ignatius Press, 1992).
↑ 13. Originally published as "Mysterium Paschale" in Mysterium Salutis III/2 (1969); reissued separately by Johannes Verlag. English: Mysterium Paschale: The Mystery of Easter, trans. Aidan Nichols (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1990; reprinted Ignatius, 2000).
↑ 14. The passage paraphrased here draws on the argument of Mysterium Paschale, chs. 4–5. For a careful exposition see Oakes, Pattern of Redemption, chs. 7–8; for the critical reading, Pitstick, Light in Darkness (n. 21), 115–240.
↑ 15. The Wissen/Hoffen distinction is the structural argument of Dare We Hope as a whole, but it is stated most directly in the book's opening pages and again in §§II–III. See Balthasar, Dare We Hope (Ignatius ed., 1988), §I, "Recognized Hope," and §II, "Two Series of Texts."
↑ 16. "Apokatastasis," in Dare We Hope (Ignatius ed., 1988). The essay first appeared as "Apokatastasis," Trierer Theologische Zeitschrift 97 (1988): 169–182.
↑ 17. Balthasar, Theodramatik, 5 vols. (Einsiedeln: Johannes Verlag, 1973–1983); English Theo-Drama: Theological Dramatic Theory, trans. Graham Harrison, 5 vols. (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1988–1998). The eschatological volumes are vol. IV, The Action (English 1994) and vol. V, The Last Act (English 1998).
↑ 18. Avery Cardinal Dulles, S.J., "The Population of Hell," First Things 133 (May 2003): 36–41, adapted from his Laurence J. McGinley Lecture at Fordham University, November 20, 2002.
↑ 19. Ralph Martin, Will Many Be Saved? What Vatican II Actually Teaches and Its Implications for the New Evangelization (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2012). Martin focuses on Lumen Gentium 16 and the limits of inculpable ignorance.
↑ 20. See n. 4 above; further responses in "Responses to 'Balthasar, Hell, and Heresy,'" First Things (March 2007): 5–14.
↑ 21. Alyssa Lyra Pitstick, Light in Darkness: Hans Urs von Balthasar and the Catholic Doctrine of Christ's Descent into Hell (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2007). For the continuing debate, see Edward T. Oakes, "The Internal Logic of Holy Saturday in the Theology of Hans Urs von Balthasar," International Journal of Systematic Theology 9, no. 2 (2007): 184–199; Pitstick, "Development of Doctrine, or Denial? Balthasar's Holy Saturday and Newman's Essay," International Journal of Systematic Theology 11, no. 2 (2009): 129–145; Oakes, "Descensus and Development: A Response to Recent Rejoinders," International Journal of Systematic Theology 13, no. 1 (2011): 3–24; and Paul J. Griffiths, "Is There a Doctrine of the Descent into Hell?," Pro Ecclesia 17, no. 3 (2008): 257–268.
↑ 22. Oakes, Pattern of Redemption (n. 5); see also Aidan Nichols, No Bloodless Myth: A Guide through Balthasar's Dramatics (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2000), and Divine Fruitfulness (n. 5).
↑ 23. R. R. Reno, "Was Balthasar a Heretic?," First Things blog (2007); the quoted line is Oakes's own concession to Pitstick within the original 2006 exchange (n. 4), where Oakes thanks her for raising the questions that will, in his view, push Balthasar's reception forward.
↑ 24. For Ware's appreciative reading see Kallistos Ware, "Dare We Hope for the Salvation of All? Origen, St. Gregory of Nyssa, and St. Isaac the Syrian," in The Inner Kingdom, vol. 1 of the Collected Works (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, 2000), 193–215. For the more cautious Orthodox reception, see the discussion in Chapter 24.
↑ 25. Ladislaus Boros, The Mystery of Death, trans. Gregory Bainbridge (New York: Herder & Herder, 1965; Monkfish reprint with introduction and commentary by Cynthia Bourgeault, 2020), esp. Part III, §§1–3, 6 (Monkfish ed., 2020). Boros's "final decision" hypothesis is treated at length in Chapter 24.
↑ 26. Robin Parry [pseud. Gregory MacDonald], The Evangelical Universalist, 2nd ed. (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2012), ch. 1 (the historical survey).
↑ 27. Andrew Hronich, Once Loved, Always Loved: The Logic of Apokatastasis (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2023), ch. 7 (on the "Universalism via Hell-Vacancy" position and its relation to Balthasar's empty-hell thesis).
↑ 28. William Harrison, Is Salvation Possible after Death? A Biblical and Historical Study, bibliography (citing the Ignatius 1988 edition of Dare We Hope); see Harrison's ch. 18 footnotes on the wider hope.