Chapter 27
“I dare not say I know. But I dare to hope.”
A pastor I know once told me about a funeral he dreaded for weeks. The deceased was the father of a faithful church member. The father had been a kind man. Generous. Funny at family dinners. He had also, by every external measure, refused the gospel his whole life. The daughter wanted her pastor to say something true at the service. She did not want fiction. She did not want easy comfort. She wanted to know whether her dad was lost forever.1
The pastor stood up that morning and did something he had never planned. He did not pronounce the man saved. He could not. But he did not pronounce him damned either. Instead, he said this: “The God who loved your father in life loves him still. We do not know all that God will do. We can trust Him.” The daughter cried. The pastor sat down. And later he said to me, almost apologetically, “I think I just preached hopeful universalism. I am not sure I even know what that means.”
He knew exactly what it meant. He had stepped into a position that has become widespread in contemporary evangelical thought — a position that refuses both the cold certainty of strict eternal conscious torment and the confident certainty of full-blown universalism. The position is sometimes called “hopeful universalism.” Sometimes “the larger hope.” Sometimes nothing at all — just the quiet way a pastor speaks at a graveside when he no longer has the heart to consign the dead to flame.
This chapter is the story of how that pastor's quiet caution became a recognizable theological category. It is the story of how, in the decades after 2000, a soft but real majority of younger American and British evangelicals stopped affirming the strict deadline doctrine of their grandparents — without converting all the way to confident universalism. Hopeful universalism is now the most pervasive form of long-hope theology in contemporary evangelicalism. Not the loudest. Not the most institutionally defended. But the most common.
The shape of evangelical publishing tells the story plainly. Before 2000, an evangelical book that questioned eternal conscious torment was a curiosity. After 2000, it became a category. Wipf and Stock and its Cascade imprint built a small library of long-hope titles. Eerdmans and Baker Academic each published universalist and postmortem-opportunity works alongside their traditional offerings. Westminster John Knox Press put out Sharon Baker's Razing Hell in 2010.2 Thomas Nelson — a mainstream evangelical publisher — released Steve Gregg's All You Want to Know About Hell in 2013, which treats universalism as one of three respectable Christian views.3 IVP Academic published James Beilby's Postmortem Opportunity in 2021 (treated at length in Chapter 26).23
The pastoral pressure pushed the same direction. American culture is less Christian than it was a generation ago. Pastors bury unbelievers more often. Funeral after funeral, the strict-ECT default felt thinner. Then came the near-death-experience publishing wave — Eben Alexander, Don Piper, the various “heaven is for real” books. Most evangelical institutions responded with hostility. But the conversation kept happening. Younger evangelicals consistently report softer views on hell than their elders.4
Behind the publishing shift was a deeper change. The strict ECT default had been held together for centuries by the assumption that the Christian tradition was solidly behind it. By the early 2000s, that assumption had cracked. The patristic universalist tradition (Origen, Gregory of Nyssa) had been recovered by scholarship.27 Karl Barth (Chapter 21) had reframed the question of election for a whole generation. Hans Urs von Balthasar's Dare We Hope That All Men Be Saved? (Chapter 22) had given the Catholic version of hopeful universalism a name and a phrase. By 2010, the phrase had crossed denominational lines.
Greg Boyd is, by training, a serious philosophical theologian. He earned his Ph.D. from Princeton Theological Seminary in 1987, taught at Bethel University for sixteen years, and in 1992 co-founded Woodland Hills Church in St. Paul, Minnesota, where he still serves as senior pastor.5 He is associated with the Neo-Anabaptist movement — not, as is sometimes assumed, with the Pentecostal-charismatic stream. His most influential books develop a “warfare worldview” framework: God at War (1997), Satan and the Problem of Evil (2001), and the massive Crucifixion of the Warrior God (2017). His pastoral classic Letters from a Skeptic (1994) introduced thousands of readers to a humane defense of the faith.
On hell, Boyd has moved publicly toward annihilationism while leaving open the door to a hopeful universalist outcome. In a widely circulated 2008 sermon on Gehenna, he laid out the three views — eternal conscious torment, annihilationism, and universalism — and confessed he could not finally make eternal conscious suffering square with the cross. The natural consequence of sin, he argued, is death — the ending of existence and the forfeiture of the right to eternal life. For those hopelessly set against God, continued existence would itself be hell.6
Boyd has also said in print and from the pulpit that he hopes universalism turns out to be true. He cannot endorse it as doctrine. He thinks the texts forbid that certainty. But he refuses to close the door God has not closed. This is hopeful universalism in its purest evangelical form — a pastor with Ph.D. credentials, an Anabaptist pacifist commitment, and a strong cross-centered theology, holding open both annihilationist and restorationist possibilities while refusing to crush congregants under the certainty of eternal torment.
Heath Bradley is an ordained elder in the United Methodist Church. He holds a master's degree in philosophy from the University of Arkansas, and at the time he wrote Flames of Love: Hell and Universal Salvation (Wipf & Stock, 2012), he was serving as a pastor in Little Rock.7 The book is more explicit than Boyd's preaching. Bradley argues for a distinctively Christian universalism that takes divine judgment seriously, affirms the centrality of Christ, and aligns — he argues — with both Scripture and early-church tradition.
What makes the book a hopeful-universalism artifact rather than a confident-universalism one is its pastoral register. Bradley does not write as a system-builder. He writes as a pastor who has spent years answering parishioners' anxious questions about a friend, a parent, a child. He engages common objections to universalism — that it kills evangelism, that it cheapens grace, that it ignores the texts — one at a time, and uses each objection to clarify what universalism does and does not entail. The book is short. It is accessible. It moves quickly. It belongs to the long tradition of pastoral universalist writing that the present chapter is mapping.
Steve Gregg's All You Want to Know About Hell (Thomas Nelson, 2013) is, in some ways, the single most significant evangelical publication of the decade for the conversation we are tracing. Not because the book itself is a masterwork of original scholarship — it is rather a careful, irenic, three-views survey. The significance is that Thomas Nelson published it.
Gregg, a longtime evangelical Bible teacher and host of the daily radio show The Narrow Path, presents three Christian views on hell: traditionalism (eternal conscious torment), conditionalism (annihilation), and restorationism (universal salvation).8 Each view gets a chapter making its case and a chapter cross-examining it. Gregg does not declare a winner. He insists that none of the three views “necessarily denies any major affirmation” of the historic gospel. The implicit message — coming from a mainstream evangelical publisher, written by a respected Bible teacher — is that all three are inside the conversation. That is itself a major shift from where evangelical publishing stood in 1995.
Brad Jersak's confident-universalism work (Her Gates Will Never Be Shut, 2010) is treated in Chapter 25. Here it is worth noting only his distinct pastoral contribution. Jersak writes warmly, drawing on Eastern Orthodox spirituality, the patristic universalist stream, and a peace-church refusal of violent atonement theology. His broader influence on evangelical readers has tended toward the hopeful end rather than the dogmatic. Pastors who would never endorse Hart's polemical universalism find themselves at home with Jersak's gentler invitation.
Sharon L. Baker (now Sharon L. Baker Putt) is Professor of Theology and Religion at Messiah University in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania — a school with deep Anabaptist roots. Her theological method draws heavily on John D. Caputo's deconstructive theology and on the Mennonite peace-church tradition. Her 2010 book Razing Hell: Rethinking Everything You've Been Taught about God's Wrath and Judgment, published by Westminster John Knox Press, has become one of the most widely read popular-level academic critiques of the strict ECT position published by a mainstream Protestant press.9
The book is structured in three parts. Part 1 (chapters 1–4) lays out the traditional view of hell that Baker is responding to, along with the images of God, divine justice, and divine forgiveness that the traditional view requires. Part 2 (chapters 5–8) rethinks each of those four pillars. Part 3 (chapters 9–12) lays out Baker's constructive proposal — what she calls “a new view of hell.” The whole book proceeds through a conversational frame featuring her students Brooke, Lisa, and Eric, whose real questions Baker uses to drive each chapter.
What does Baker actually say? Three commitments anchor her position. First, she refuses to do away with hell. “I have no intention of doing away with hell. I can't,” she writes early in the book; “I have too high a respect for the authority of the Bible as God's Word.”10 Second, she insists that the image of God which sustains strict ECT — God as gleefully wrathful and vindictive — contradicts the cross. Third, she develops a constructive account of fire as God's purifying presence rather than a separate created torment.
“Just as the fire of the goldsmith burns off impurities in the precious metal, so the painful treatment that purifying entails burns off the dross in the fiery presence of God at the last judgment. At the same time that we encounter the wrath and judgment of God, we also encounter God's love. Far from being vindictive, divine wrath is part of the reconciling activity of God as the fire of God burns away unrighteousness and leaves only the righteous parts of us behind.”
— Sharon Baker, Razing Hell, 122Baker's central image is the story of Otto — a fictional figure she uses to test her constructive proposal. Otto is a hardened, unrepentant sinner. At the last judgment, Otto stands before God. The fire of God is not separate from God; the fire is God's presence. Otto experiences that presence as agony, because his evil cannot bear it. The fire burns away his wickedness. He sees what he has done. He gnashes his teeth. He may, in this purifying encounter, repent and be reconciled. Or, if anything of him remains after the burning that still rejects God, what remains is annihilated.11
This is the heart of her “new view.” It blends a strong divine-presence model with a postmortem-opportunity moment and a conditional-immortality outcome. Baker insists she is not a universalist; she preserves human freedom and the genuine possibility that some will say no even in the fiery presence of love.12 But she expects, hopes, and writes as though the love of God will, in most cases, finally win.
The philosopher R. Zachary Manis — whose Sinners in the Presence of a Loving God (Oxford, 2019) is treated in Chapter 28 — classifies Baker's account as “a hybrid of the divine presence model and annihilationism,” with universalist resonances throughout.13 Manis notes, fairly, that Baker's view is imaginative and provocative but “lacking in precision” for the kind of analytic work he is doing. The criticism is just. But it is also the wrong frame. Baker is not writing a systematic theology of hell. She is writing for the classroom and the lay reader who cannot reconcile the God of the cross with the God of Edwards's sermons. Her parallel with Stephen Jonathan's restorative-justice framework (treated in Chapter 26) is striking: two pastoral theologians, working independently, both landing on a vision of judgment as God's loving purification rather than retributive punishment.14
The key move. Baker (like Jersak, like Talbott in Chapter 25, like much of the long-hope tradition) identifies the fire with God's own presence. Hell is not a place God consigns the wicked to. Hell is the experience of the wicked in the presence of God's perfect love. This single move — fire as presence rather than as instrument — opens space for purgation, for postmortem opportunity, for conditional immortality, and for restoration, all without surrendering the biblical fire imagery. It is the central conceptual gift of the hopeful-universalist literature to contemporary evangelical thought.
Beyond the writers who land closest to explicit universalism, a broader band of respected evangelical voices have positioned themselves in what Roger Olson likes to call “hopeful, but not committed.”
Roger Olson himself — longtime Baylor theology professor and the most influential popular Arminian voice in American evangelicalism — has repeatedly written that he is not a universalist but is a hopeful universalist, and that universalism is “the least heretical of all heresies,” if it is a heresy at all.15 His extended treatment of Karl Barth as a “hopeful universalist in the second sense” gave many evangelical readers the vocabulary to hold the position with a clean conscience.16
Scot McKnight has written extensively on the kingdom and on a more pastoral, kingdom-oriented eschatology that does not require strict ECT as a load-bearing wall. N. T. Wright's Surprised by Hope (HarperOne, 2008) firmly rejects purgatory and confident universalism, but advances an idiosyncratic view of the unredeemed as gradually losing humanity — a position closer to a soft conditionalism than to strict ECT.17 John Stackhouse holds a conditional-immortality position with openness to postmortem opportunity (his work belongs primarily to Chapter 28).24 Gerald McDermott's careful “respect both options” framing keeps the conversation hospitable across positions.25
And on the popular front: Brian Zahnd's Sinners in the Hands of a Loving God (WaterBrook, 2017) reframes Jonathan Edwards's famous sermon for a generation that no longer finds spider-over-flame imagery edifying.18 The late Rachel Held Evans, Sarah Bessey, Pete Enns, and Bruxy Cavey — each writing in the broader “deconstructing evangelical” conversation — have pulled their substantial readerships toward hopeful or explicit universalism. Some of those readers have left evangelicalism entirely; others have stayed, holding the long hope quietly inside formally conservative congregations.
The institutional response from the evangelical establishment has been hostile, but the cultural drift has not been reversed. A pattern of formal opposition combined with informal accommodation has set in.
The Gospel Coalition and its allies have been the most visible polemical voice. Through its archives one can trace a steady stream of articles warning against universalism, hopeful universalism, postmortem opportunity, and any softening of the deadline doctrine. Major evangelical seminaries — Southern, Southeastern, Westminster, Dallas, The Master's — have remained firmly committed to strict ECT, and most evangelical denominational statements (the Southern Baptist Convention, the Presbyterian Church in America, the Evangelical Free Church of America) have not been revised. The “Together for the Gospel” movement, before its dissolution, made strict ECT a confessional marker.
But behind the official statements, the pastoral conversation has shifted. Survey after survey of evangelical laity since 2010 has reported softer positions on hell among younger evangelicals. Pew Research, LifeWay, the Cooperative Election Study, and the Public Religion Research Institute have all shown the same drift: younger evangelicals are less likely to affirm strict ECT, more likely to affirm a wider hope, and more likely to say they simply do not know what will happen at the final judgment.19 The shift is not a wholesale abandonment of evangelical convictions. It is a quiet refusal to extend confident certainty beyond what the biblical witness, in their judgment, supports.
A note on the surveys. The data are not uniform, and survey design matters. When asked “Do you believe in hell?” most American evangelicals still say yes. When asked “Will most people who never heard of Christ be eternally tormented?” the numbers drop sharply. When asked about specific cases — a kind neighbor who died without faith, a Muslim grandmother, a friend who left the church — the numbers drop further still. The strict deadline doctrine survives in the abstract; it falters in the concrete. That is the pastoral fact this chapter is mapping.
One striking feature of the institutional landscape is the asymmetry of risk. Pastors who quietly hold hopeful-universalist views can usually stay in their pulpits, provided they do not publish books announcing the position. Pastors who publish such books often face institutional consequences. Rob Bell's Love Wins (HarperOne, 2011) is the paradigmatic case (treated in Chapter 25): the book did not commit to confident universalism, but the reception treated it as if it had, and Bell's subsequent departure from his Michigan megachurch and from broader evangelical institutional life confirmed for many onlookers the costs of saying out loud what many were thinking quietly.20
The Wesleyan and Pentecostal-charismatic traditions, by contrast, have shown a softer institutional landscape. Wesleyan eschatology has always had a stronger sense of God's universal salvific will (see Chapter 18), and Pentecostal pastoral practice has often been more flexible than its confessions suggest.22 Boyd's location in the Anabaptist tradition is also significant: peace-church theology has long been hospitable to a non-violent eschatology that resists eternal torture as a category.
Michael McClymond's two-volume The Devil's Redemption (Baker Academic, 2018) is the most significant scholarly opposition to the broader long-hope movement.21 McClymond traces what he calls a coherent intellectual tradition of Christian universalism from Origen through Bulgakov to the contemporary movement, and argues that the tradition is internally problematic at several points. His work is treated more fully in Chapter 25. For our purposes here, what matters is that McClymond aims his polemic at confident universalism — not at the diffuse hopeful universalism we are mapping. The hopeful position is harder to refute precisely because it does not claim certainty.
Let me speak plainly about strengths and weaknesses.
The strengths first. Hopeful universalism takes seriously the biblical texts that universalists usually point to (1 Tim 2:4; 2 Pet 3:9; Col 1:20; 1 Cor 15:22, 28) without overreading them as proofs of certain salvation for all. It takes seriously the texts traditionalists point to (Matt 25:46; Rev 20:10–15) without resolving them in advance toward the most maximal reading. It preserves the seriousness of the gospel call. It preserves the genuine possibility of final loss, in some form. And it refuses to pronounce confident damnation over individuals whose eternal fate is not ours to know.
The pastoral strengths are even clearer. Hopeful universalism gives a pastor something honest to say at a funeral for an unbeliever — not a false comfort, but a real one. It allows the church to grieve without despair and to hope without presumption. It puts the question of eternal destiny back in God's hands, where the New Testament repeatedly locates it (Acts 1:7; Matt 24:36; Rom 14:10–12). It builds a bridge between the long Augustinian tradition and the long universalist tradition without forcing the church to choose one and condemn the other.
The evangelism question, turned inside-out. Critics of hopeful universalism often charge that it kills evangelism — if everyone (or maybe everyone) will eventually be saved, why bother sharing the gospel now? But the hopeful-universalist pastors I know say the opposite: that the doctrine of eternal conscious torment for the unevangelized actually paralyzes evangelism, because it makes evangelism a desperate rescue mission carried out under unbearable pressure. When evangelism is reframed as inviting people to know the God who already loves them — the God who will not stop pursuing them — it becomes joyful rather than frantic. The gospel is, after all, called “good news.”
The Balthasarian critique — carefully heard. Hope without grounding can degenerate into wishful thinking. If hopeful universalism becomes simply “we do not really know and so we should not really worry,” it has lost the seriousness of the gospel call. Balthasar himself (see Chapter 22) anchored his “dare we hope” in the descent of Christ into the dead and the cross's universal scope. Hopeful universalism without that grounding is structurally unstable.26
The weaknesses are real. The first is the risk of theological vagueness. “We don't really know” can be honest humility, or it can be a way of avoiding the harder exegetical work. If the hopeful universalist cannot say why she hopes — if she cannot anchor the hope in the cross, the descent, the character of God, the trajectory of Scripture — then her hope is not actually a Christian hope but a sentimental one.
The second weakness is the risk of pastoral irresponsibility. If hearers leave the sermon thinking “well, in the end everyone will be fine,” the gospel call has been undercut. Boyd's preaching has been very careful on this point. So has Baker's writing. The risk is real, but the better hopeful-universalist writers have worked to avoid it.
The third weakness is the structural ambiguity Manis identifies. Hopeful universalism shifts between several distinct positions — sometimes a divine-presence model, sometimes a postmortem-opportunity model, sometimes a soft conditionalism, sometimes a soft universalism — without always being clear which one is doing the work. The result is a position that is rhetorically powerful but philosophically slippery. The more rigorous defenders (Talbott, Parry, Hart) have therefore tended to move toward confident universalism, while the more pastoral defenders (Baker, Boyd, Bradley, Jersak) have stayed in the hopeful zone. Both moves are intelligible.
My own assessment: hopeful universalism is the most pervasive contemporary form of long-hope theology in evangelicalism, and it is, in the main, doing more good than harm. It holds together the seriousness of the gospel call with the breadth of God's mercy without overcommitting to certainty in either direction. Its weaknesses are real, but they are weaknesses that can be repaired by deeper engagement with the biblical and patristic sources — not by abandonment of the project. The Christian who, like the pastor at the funeral, refuses both confident damnation and confident salvation, and waits in trustful hope, is standing on ground that the tradition has long known.
Several years ago, I sat with a young pastor who was wrestling with all this. He had been trained at a strict-ECT seminary. He had served a strict-ECT congregation. He believed the strict view because his church believed it. But the funerals were starting to wear on him. The doctrine of family members of his parishioners burning eternally in flames had become, for him, an unbearable burden — not because he doubted God's justice, but because he doubted his own ability to preach with conviction what he no longer believed in his bones.
I told him about the long hope. I told him about Origen and Gregory of Nyssa. I told him about Julian of Norwich and the Cambridge Platonists and Wesley's wider hope and Barth's reconsideration. I told him about Boyd and Baker and Bradley and Gregg and Olson. I told him that he was not alone, that the tradition itself contained the resources he needed, and that the long hope was not an innovation but a recovery.
He went back to his pulpit. He did not announce a new doctrinal position from the front. He simply began, slowly, to preach a fuller gospel — a gospel in which God's love for the lost did not end at the grave, a gospel in which the cross's reach was as wide as the world, a gospel in which the church's call to evangelism flowed from love rather than from fear. His people responded. Not all of them; some did not. But the deep, quiet pastoral shift had begun — in his church, in thousands of churches across the English-speaking world, in the pages of evangelical publishers, in the prayers offered at gravesides where strict ECT had become unsayable.
That shift is the central historical fact of contemporary evangelical eschatology. It is not the loudest fact. The loud fact is the institutional defense of the deadline doctrine. The quiet fact is its erosion at the level of pastoral practice and lay belief. The long hope, in its hopeful-universalist form, has become the broadest river in contemporary evangelical eschatological thought — broader than confident universalism (Chapter 25), broader than explicit postmortem opportunity (Chapter 26), broader even than the conditionalist revival (Chapter 28). It is the broad river inside which the other long-hope positions move.28
The historical record this book has traced has already made the central point: the long hope is not a modern innovation. It is a recovery. Hopeful universalism is the form in which that recovery is reaching the broader evangelical church today — pastor by pastor, funeral by funeral, quiet conversation by quiet conversation, until what was once unsayable in evangelical pulpits is now spoken, perhaps gently, perhaps haltingly, but spoken, in pulpits across the English-speaking world.
↑ 1. Details adjusted to protect the privacy of the pastor and the family. The pastoral pattern, however, is common; I have heard versions of this story from a dozen ministers across denominational lines.
↑ 2. Sharon L. Baker, Razing Hell: Rethinking Everything You've Been Taught about God's Wrath and Judgment (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2010). All page references below are to this edition.
↑ 3. Steve Gregg, All You Want to Know About Hell: Three Christian Views of God's Final Solution to the Problem of Sin (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2013).
↑ 4. See Ed Stetzer and the LifeWay Research surveys (2014, 2018, 2022) tracking American evangelical beliefs on the afterlife; the Pew Research Center's Religious Landscape Study (2014, with updates through 2024) shows a similar generational softening on questions of hell and eternal destiny. For broader interpretation, see Christian Smith, American Evangelicalism: Embattled and Thriving (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), and Mark A. Noll, The Rise of Evangelicalism (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2003).
↑ 5. Boyd's Princeton dissertation was published as Trinity and Process: A Critical Evaluation and Reconstruction of Hartshorne's Di-polar Theism Towards a Trinitarian Metaphysics (New York: Peter Lang, 1992). His biographical details are widely available; see his ministry site reknew.org and Woodland Hills Church (whchurch.org).
↑ 6. See the 2008 sermon “Gehenna” in the Woodland Hills sermon archive (whchurch.org/sermon/gehenna). Boyd has spoken in several venues and Q&A responses on Reknew about his openness to hopeful universalism while declining to endorse the position; see the ReKnew “Universalism” tag for assembled posts.
↑ 7. Heath Bradley, Flames of Love: Hell and Universal Salvation (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2012). Bradley holds an M.A. (Philosophy) from the University of Arkansas and an M.Div. from Southern Methodist University; he is an ordained United Methodist elder.
↑ 8. Gregg, All You Want to Know About Hell, see esp. the structural overview in the introduction and the parallel two-chapter treatments of each view.
↑ 9. Baker is widely cited in classroom and pastoral conversations; Razing Hell remains in print and has been adopted in undergraduate theology and religion courses across multiple Christian universities. For Baker's Caputo connection, see her acknowledgments and her later work Executing God: Rethinking Everything You've Been Taught about Salvation and the Cross (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2013), and A Nonviolent Theology of Love (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2021).
↑ 10. Baker, Razing Hell, xiii–xiv (Introduction).
↑ 11. Baker, Razing Hell, 140–147 (the Otto narrative in ch. 10, “Outer Darkness, Gnashing of Teeth, and the Lake of Fire”).
↑ 12. Baker, Razing Hell, 141 (Baker's own demurral from the universalist label): “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. . . . 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.”
↑ 13. R. Zachary Manis, Sinners in the Presence of a Loving God: An Essay on the Problem of Hell (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), 309–312. Manis's full analysis of Baker as a hybrid divine-presence-and-annihilationism model appears in his ch. 7 on the Divine Presence Model.
↑ 14. The parallel with Jonathan is striking precisely because the two writers do not depend on each other. Baker writes from a Mennonite-Anabaptist Caputo-influenced location in Pennsylvania; Stephen Jonathan writes from a British Pentecostal-pastoral location with academic engagement through the University of Wales, Bangor. See Jonathan, Grace beyond the Grave: Is Salvation Possible in the Afterlife? (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2014), 118–166 (the theological case, treated at length in Chapter 26).
↑ 15. Roger E. Olson, “Is Universalism a Heresy?” (blog post, March 5, 2025), and the extensive related discussion across his Patheos blog My Evangelical, Arminian Theological Musings. For Olson's longer-form work, see The Story of Christian Theology: Twenty Centuries of Tradition and Reform (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 1999), and Counterfeit Christianity: The Persistence of Errors in the Church (Nashville: Abingdon, 2015).
↑ 16. Roger E. Olson, “Was Karl Barth a Universalist? A New Look at an Old Question” (essay, Patheos blog, March 10, 2013). On Barth's eschatology more broadly, see Chapter 21 of this book.
↑ 17. N. T. Wright, Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church (New York: HarperOne, 2008), esp. ch. 11 (“Purgatory, Paradise, Hell”), 175–183. Wright's proposal that the unredeemed gradually cease to be fully human is sui generis and resists clean classification.
↑ 18. Brian Zahnd, Sinners in the Hands of a Loving God: The Scandalous Truth of the Very Good News (Colorado Springs: WaterBrook, 2017).
↑ 19. The data are scattered across multiple surveys; see esp. LifeWay Research, “American Views on Hell” (2016, 2022 updates); Pew Research Center, “Most Americans Believe in Heaven . . . and Hell” (November 2015), and the more recent “How Americans Think about the Afterlife” (2023); and the Public Religion Research Institute's biennial American Values Survey.
↑ 20. Rob Bell, Love Wins: A Book about Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived (New York: HarperOne, 2011). For the reception history, see Chapter 25.
↑ 21. Michael J. McClymond, The Devil's Redemption: A New History and Interpretation of Christian Universalism, 2 vols. (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2018). For sustained engagement, see Chapter 25.
↑ 22. The Wesleyan stream's hospitality to a wider hope is a thread running back through the Methodist Restorationists; see Chapter 18. For the Pentecostal-charismatic pastoral landscape, see the broader pastoral literature from Vineyard, Foursquare, and Assemblies of God writers, where conditional immortality and postmortem opportunity have had quieter but real influence at the pastoral level.
↑ 23. James Beilby, Postmortem Opportunity: A Biblical and Theological Assessment of the Idea of a Second Chance to Be Saved after Death (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2021). Beilby's nine-chapter treatment forms the spine of Chapter 26 of this book.
↑ 24. John G. Stackhouse, “Terminal Punishment,” in Four Views on Hell, 2nd ed., ed. Preston Sprinkle (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2016), 61–81. Stackhouse's combination of CI with PO openness is a paradigmatic instance of the hybrid pastoral position discussed in this chapter, though his primary location is Chapter 28.
↑ 25. Gerald R. McDermott, ed., Understanding the Times: New Testament Studies in the 21st Century (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2017), and his broader historical-theological corpus. McDermott has consistently modeled the “respect both options” framing inside conservative evangelical contexts.
↑ 26. 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, 1988). The Balthasarian framing of hope without certainty is the principal Catholic source for the contemporary evangelical hopeful-universalist position; see Chapter 22.
↑ 27. Brian E. Daley, The Hope of the Early Church: A Handbook of Patristic Eschatology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), remains the standard scholarly survey of the patristic landscape on which the contemporary hopeful-universalist recovery is drawing.
↑ 28. The thesis that the broader hopeful-universalist drift is the most pervasive contemporary form of long-hope theology — rather than confident universalism (Ch. 25), explicit postmortem opportunity (Ch. 26), or the conditionalist revival (Ch. 28) — is developed further in the synthetic argument of Chapter 29.