After decades believing that the fate of most humans was eternal torment in hell, as the only just end for people who live unrighteous lives, and after months of studying the Bible with fresh eyes and new doctrinal humility, I recently changed my mind. I now hold to the idea of “universal reconciliation,” or “universal Christian salvation.” There are other various names for it, but all hold to one general idea: God will not destroy or eternally punish any human soul after death.
Since I made that change, I’ve realized that most of the time that conservative Christians encounter universal reconciliation, they usually describe it with a bunch of caricatures, and I thought it would be useful to discuss those for a few minutes.
I really do think that most evangelicals really don’t understand the doctrine of Universal Reconciliation (which I’ll abbreviate UR). And that’s probably because they’ve been taught to avoid deeply studying ideas that conflict with more traditional evangelical doctrines. More than misunderstanding it, they have a very negative view of it.
I grew up thinking that UR was heretical, but as I said, I changed my mind recently. And it was a very determined process. I spent quite a bit of time and a lot of words detailing my reasons for this shift in theology at https://crucibleofthought.com/a-discussion-of-individual-eschatology/
which also links to a series of YouTube videos with the same content, if you’d like to review them.
One question which I see quite often, and which many people who comment on my blog or videos ask, is this: what about the truly evil and truly unrepentant people, who seem to live their lives and die without paying any price for their evil? If UR is true, why do they simply get to end up in heaven too? Don’t they have to pay for their sin? Surely a just and righteous God would not let that evil go unpunished.
That’s an excellent question, and it deserves a careful answer.
But first I’ll point out that many who ask that question don’t really want an answer. In fact, they actually see that very question as the final nail in the coffin of the case against “universal reconciliation” or “universal Christian salvation.”.
By the way, I don’t prefer the term “universal salvation,” mainly because I don’t think that the word “saved” means what most evangelicals think, and I think God is more interested in reconciliation than what I see as a somewhat silly focus on going to heaven when we die. But we’ll talk more about salvation later.
At any rate, let’s talk about punishment. After pointing to a lot of verses which do describe what looks like punishment, using words that are often translated “eternal,” most evangelicals think that this question of “is God really just?” seems like the final proof that hell is absolutely needed, to account for the problem of unmitigated human evil. So that question acts as a form of prophylaxis against really thinking through the topic, and simply asserting that hell is necessary and ending the conversation.
I get it; I lived there for literally decades of my early Christian life.
But if you’re one of those few who really wants to know how someone who holds to UR thinks about that important question, let’s dig in.
I think it helps to look carefully at the caricature of UR among conservative Christians. By “caricature” I mean the poorly-informed, and often disparaging, conceptual framework that conservative Christians use to describe UR to each other. Why do I say “each other?” Because caricatures like this are often used not in thoughtful dialog, but instead to ridicule outsiders and perform a kind of boundary maintenance, building up emotional walls around the dogma and doctrine that keep people from transgressing outside that doctrinal boundary. When you ridicule someone who thinks differently, you create a social friction against going that way, among those inside your own tribe. It doesn’t make much sense to use this caricature outside your own tribe; you won’t convince anyone to change their mind with a caricature. And any person with sufficient education – especially those who knowledgeably hold to a different doctrine – will be easily able to refute the caricature. So it’s not helpful for anything other that keeping one’s own tribe in line.
So with that definition of caricature, let’s consider the caricature of UR among conservative Christians, which I find typically includes these ideas:
1) There is no punishment for evil
2) Any “God” that would let everyone into heaven doesn’t care about justice
And anyone who believes in UR
3) thinks that all religions are equal
4) is just looking for an excuse to act however they wish without consequence
5) doesn’t care about Biblical truth
6) is too stupid or deceived to see the clear meaning of the Bible
7) doesn’t care about evangelism, because without hell, there’s no reason to be saved
I will start by saying that I have never heard a proponent of UR make such claims. They’re excessive, and not really designed for careful discussion.
But a caricature doesn’t care about the truth. It is self-supporting, and serves to distract from the truth for rhetorical purposes. Just as nobody believes that a “wascally wabbit” and a lisping duck can speak, cartoons don’t need to be true to be useful. And so it is with the caricature of UR: it serves the purpose of tribal boundary maintenance.
But if you’re interested in truth, it makes a lot of sense to consider each of these ideas – because although they’re caricature, they do speak to a real concern by those who choose to believe in eternal conscious torment. And I do respect those concerns, even though I don’t find them to be “showstoppers.”
So here we go.
Caricature 1) There is no punishment for evil.
First, we have to discuss the idea of “punishment.” At some level, the charge that there is no punishment may be true of some who believe in UR, but we have to be very careful to define the terms. Because not believing in punishment does NOT mean disbelief in consequences.
Punishment is a very human thing, that is fundamentally rooted in the need for revenge. And revenge is rooted in self-protection, so it’s understandable, even if it’s harmful. But, asserting that punishment is necessary means that one cannot conceptualize of a way that God could make things right that doesn’t involve talionic justice, eye-for-an-eye, tooth-for-a-tooth, where the scales are balanced by the equal and opposite application of pain or consequence that the sin or evil caused. And it also means that one cannot conceive of a way for God to deter evildoers without the threat of pain.
Certainly this talionic justice concept existed in the Hebrew Bible. It was very obvious, and affirmed many times.
But Jesus flipped that idea on its head, insisting on forgiveness and unmerited grace. Furthermore, even in the Hebrew Bible, the conceptual waters are muddied by the deeply-rooted idea of substitutionary atonement, that the relationship between God and human could be restored by some means other than applying pain or death to the sinner.
And the very concept in Leviticus 16 by which Christians believe that Jesus was prefigured, the ceremony of the scapegoat taking upon itself the sins of the people, does not in any way imply that the scapegoat is PUNISHED for the sins of Israel. Instead, the scapegoat carries them away, but is never slaughtered for that sin. The scapegoat lives!
And also importantly, Jesus doesn’t try to win fights; His ethos involves self-sacrifice, turning the other cheek rather than attacking one’s enemy, even letting Himself be killed on the cross.
Most of the verses in the Hebrew Bible that deal with sacrifice for sin or the justice of God do not speak of punishment, but of discipline.
The Hebrew word translated as punishment, עֹנֶשׁ “onesh,” only is used twice, and only once in a moral situation, in Proverbs 19:19. The other time in 2 Kings 23:33 is describing a monetary tribute imposed on Jerusalem by a Pharaoh.
Another word often found in the Hebrew Bible, and commonly quoted to justify God’s judgement, is vengeance, נְקָמָה “neqamah” in Hebrew. To an English speaker, this word brings a sense of angry violence. But a careful study of Jewish interpretations of the theme of retribution and vengeance in the Hebrew Bible would lead one to a different conclusion: it’s not angry, it’s not violent for the sake of violence. It’s restoring balance, and purging evil.
Those words purging and restoring are important. Most of the Hebrew judicial system is designed to restore relationship, to bring justice (instead of executing justice) by fixing the situation that was caused, by removing evil and its effects. This was supposed to reflect, among God’s people, the very nature of God. And accordingly, the word we translate “discipline,” the Hebrew word מוּסָר “musar,” occurs hundreds of times. The English word, just as the Hebrew word, bears concepts of being instructed, trained, improved, chastised. It’s a much different concept than punishment.
And so, to throw a wrench in this entire concept of God as a vengeful wrathful punisher, Jesus flipped that entire understanding on its head, and refocused His followers on God’s desire for restoration and relationship.
So a better way to think of this first idea, of UR as somehow avoiding punishment for evil, is instead to discuss CONSEQUENCES for evil.
If God is interested in restoration, rather than simply dealing pain-for-pain, then punishment would not be God’s choice. Punishment itself does not bring restoration. Instead, the ideals of instructing, training, improving, and yes, chastising, would be appropriate. God’s goal, stated many times in the Bible, is healing and fixing, not destruction. Even in passages commanding human destruction, God never applied that consequence when it was not necessary to save others, to prevent continued harm. There are instances when the Hebrew Bible describes God commanding destruction to send a message, to show the world God’s superiority, but those are certainly in the minority, and might be argued as a very human wish for retribution that is incorrectly ascribed to God by an angry author.
Put more simply, the Bible doesn’t describe God as interested in causing pain for pain’s sake, and punishment was not a methodology that we see as God’s primary focus.
So what about the consequences?
Again, be careful: this question echoes a deep human need for revenge. We naturally want to see someone pay for what they did. That desire rarely involves wanting to see the evildoer restored. But that’s exactly what Jesus brought to the equation: forgiveness, even when it caused loss to the one who was harmed. Turn the other cheek when one is struck. Walk an extra mile for the oppressor. Give food and drink to one’s enemy. Lay down one’s life rather than demand talionic justice. It was an earth-shattering shift in religious thinking.
However, forgiveness isn’t the entire story.
If God is truly interested in restoring us, both to God and to each other, there are going to be a lot of things that cannot remain accreted to the human soul. And so we will need to be purified of all that cruft somehow.
I actually do believe that the concept of post-death pain is quite real; I just don’t believe it’s necessarily eternal nor punitive. Instead, I find that many descriptions of God’s justice in the Bible call it purifying or cleansing or restorative.
The thing about being in a purifying fire, though, is that it’s necessarily going to be painful. We cannot have things burned off our soul without it being quite unpleasant. The more that needs to be burned away, the worse the pain will be.
But that pain will feel different depending on how we feel about God.
Those who die in a place of antagonism towards God will likely experience it as punitive and retributive based on their soul’s rejection of Love, at least until some of the sinful residue has been burned away. Those who enter that cleansing – for, certainly, every human dies imperfect – with a heart turned towards God and Love will not experience it the same, even though it IS ontologically the same exact cleansing fire in both cases; they’ll experience it as God’s goodness and merciful justice, removing that which still separates them from what they see as a desirable perfect union with God.
So for those who reject universal reconciliation because they feel it lets people off the hook, I say that’s based on a lack of trust in the totality of God’s justice. Scripture is clear that God will not let any sin go unresolved, even if it’s not until they enter eternity. But that doesn’t mean they will experience the fire forever; it will only be exactly as long as needed to purge the sin. Otherwise it would not be just.
Along those lines, note that a careful reading of verses about the fires of Hades show that the Bible speaks of the FIRE as eternal, not the discipline or punishment as eternal. And if we see that it’s God’s supreme holiness and perfection that is what burns away the sin, well, naturally it’s eternal, because it’s God that is both the eternal one and the purifying agent. I’ve written in other posts about the word “eternal,” which is better translated “long-lasting,” so I won’t go into detail on that concept here.
So to summarize the answer to the first caricature, people who hold to UR typically don’t believe that God will simply overlook sin. We just don’t believe that God will use meaningless retributive punishment to do it; we believe that God’s purifying presence will absolutely purge each human of whatever sin they carry, and it will likely be quite painful. But it will be only exactly as much pain is necessary to restore relationship to God and fellow humans – because when the sin is finally gone, so will be the pain of it being purged and burned away.
So in some sense, it IS talionic justice: exactly what needs to be purged, will be. But not a bit more.
Caricature 2) Any “God” that would let everyone into heaven doesn’t care about justice.
This second caricature is closely aligned with the first. It asserts that a God letting an unrepentant sinner into heaven is unjust, and therefore unworthy of being worshiped.
Again, however, we need to consider definitions.
“Heaven” is a very loaded term in evangelical thought, as well as in other segments of Christianity, although to a lesser extent.
Most evangelicals have a really unbiblical idea about heaven, often involving walking down streets of gold and being pampered forever, as a reward for good behavior or for saying an appropriate prayer of belief in Jesus. Those ideas are not very accurate to the Bible, but they’ve coalesced over the years, pulling together a lot of unrelated biblical concepts.
Jesus focused on bringing the Kingdom of Heaven into human time and space on the earth, not on taking us to a destination above the clouds someday. His prayer was “on earth as it is in heaven.” Concepts of heavenly bliss are perhaps most accurately linked to the cessation of human struggle and pain, and the removal of evil from the earth, far more than being pampered forever as a reward for earthly good behavior or even correct beliefs.
One of the most commonly quoted verses that are understood to describe an eternal human residence in heaven is that Jesus said He was going away to prepare a place for us. It’s an interpretive choice, however, to understand this to mean that the place being prepared was itself eternally in heaven. Imagine a businessman telling his client, “I’m going back to my office to prepare your new home.” Nobody would interpret that to mean that the home was in the businessman’s skyscraper; rather, they would correctly interpret that to mean that much of the work to build the home would be managed out of that office. As Hebrews 11:10 says, “For he (Abraham) was looking forward to the city with foundations, whose architect and builder is God.” An architect and builder manages the construction – the laborers do the work of bringing the architect’s plans into existence.
And if we insist on tying the various biblical concepts together, note that in Revelation 21 the New Jerusalem, the eternal heavenly city that will be the home of believers, that is also referred to by Hebrews 11:10, will come “down OUT OF HEAVEN from God” (the emphasis is mine). THAT is the home that Jesus went to prepare – it won’t be staying in heaven. Our destiny is to rule and reign ON THE EARTH with Christ, not live in heaven. There may be streets of gold, but they’ll be here on the new earth in the new holy city.
“Justice,” too, is a loaded term. As with the ideas about punishment, the true concept of justice in the Bible is much different than the popular Christian imagination. It’s far more closely linked to a restoration to the way that things should be, and has little to do with talionic eye-for-an-eye retribution as a consequence for committing evil or sin.
I’ve found that people who hold to UR are actually far more interested in earthly justice than most people who hold to eternal conscious torment. And they trust that God will, in fact, ensure complete and total justice at the end of the ages. They don’t believe God will let anything go, and blindly welcome evil people into heaven. There are simply too many verses that insist on the righteous justice of God.
Perhaps the most compelling verse about this is in Revelation 21:22-27, which ends with this description of the new Jerusalem, which comes down TO EARTH out of heaven from God: “Nothing impure will ever enter it, nor will anyone who does what is shameful or deceitful, but only those whose names are written in the Lamb’s book of life.” And in the next chapter, Rev 22:14-15 says “Blessed are those who wash their robes, that they may have the right to the tree of life and may go through the gates into the city. Outside are the dogs, those who practice magic arts, the sexually immoral, the murderers, the idolaters and everyone who loves and practices falsehood.” There’s no sense in which God will allow unrighteousness into the holy city – but at the same time, from Rev 21:25, “on no day will its gates ever be shut.” There will be no eternal rejection of those who choose to enter the city, having had their robes washed white, purified by God and by the blood of the Lamb.
So this caricature is a fundamental misunderstanding of the real ideas behind UR: God will be just. And God will ALSO welcome all into the heavenly city, come down to earth. Those two things are not in conflict in any way.
Caricature 3) Anyone who believes in UR thinks that all religions are equal.
Once again, definitions are important. “Equal” is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence.
One reason I briefly introduced the term “Universal Christian Salvation” above is because I actually do believe that there’s something unique about Christianity, about the eternal spiritual work that a man named Jesus of Nazareth did a couple thousand years ago.
Now, I will readily admit that most who hold to UR do, in fact, believe that all religions have Truth, with a capital “T”. Most do, in fact, believe that there are many ways to encounter God, that don’t all look like Christianity. We do, in fact, believe that even Muslims encounter the same God as Christians or Buddhists or Hindus, just using very different language and concepts.
This does not, however, mean that we fundamentally reject the uniqueness of Jesus.
What we DO believe is the Bible’s very simply-stated assertion that Jesus’ work on the cross was sufficient for all, for all time. Period.
Now, I fully understand the immediate rebuttal, that John 3:16 and other verses say “those who believe,” as a fundamental limitation that says only those who explicitly put their trust and faith in Jesus of Nazareth to save them from their sins will enter heaven.
However, those verses conflict with plenty of other verses that place no such restrictions on Jesus’ work. For example, 1 Timothy 2:4-6 is pretty clear that Jesus gave Himself as a ransom for ALL people. Those who hold to UR chose to interpret the totality of scripture as teaching that Jesus’ ransom was sufficient for all, without limitation, without any requirement of some earthly choice or prayer. It’s a doctrinal choice, just as insisting on a prayer or surrender to make that gift effective is a doctrinal choice to override the verses that don’t have a restriction.
What, then, do we do with other religions, which often contain ideas that oppose this idea that Jesus is somehow unique?
Simple answer: we are humble.
We recognize that, for millennia before Jesus died, people were born and died without Jesus, and yet on the days between the crucifixion and the resurrection, and in the centuries before the Bible came together, and the millennia between the composition of those scripts and the formation of our modern evangelical doctrines, somehow Jesus rescued those who had already died without saying the “right” kind of prayer, or believing the “right” kind of doctrine. God was not limited by death then, and we don’t believe God will be limited by death in the future either.
We also know the Bible passage that even nature itself speaks of the truth of God, in Romans 1:19-32. Humans are without excuse – but this does not mean that humans must speak a specific prayer to be reclaimed by God. Instead, this speaks to us of God’s determination to bring all back into relationship, even if it is by methods that seem ludicrous to us.
What about those religions that are antagonistic to Christianity?
Most of the time this question is asked by Christians, they are implicitly – or often explicitly – talking about Islam.
The simple fact is that most Muslims are not antagonistic towards Christians. Every faith group has its radicals, its hardliners, just as does Christianity. In general, the vast majority of the adherents to other religions are gentle and humble people, and while they believe that their own faith is the best explanation of the divine, of the infinite Good, they are not antagonistic towards other religions. I’ve found that most other religions are far more humble than Christians.
To get right down to the root of things, our American fixation with Islam is largely a result of the actions of a small handful of terrorists on 9/11/2001, and more than that, the demonization of the entire religion because of the political response to the actions of those fanatics. The reality, however, is much different, and I will testify that as I walked away from right-wing politics and conservative Christian thinking, I’ve found that the situation was much different than I was led to believe.
As a personal example, I had an interesting moment while talking to an elderly Hindu believer – a specialist doctor of mine. I noted that he was looking much older that the last time I’d seen him, and I wondered to him about his thoughts on the aging process. He gently replied that he had no worries for his future, and had no fear of death; he believed he would have plenty of chances to become holy, and he trusted the process to refine him. I’d never studied Hinduism before, and when I looked into their specific beliefs, I realized that from a macro perspective, his expectations of eternity were quite similar to mine: the goal of mankind is to become godlike, in the best possible sense: gentle, kind, loving towards others, doing good deeds to all around us, bringing righteousness into view on earth. He believed in multiple resurrections; I believe in one. He believes that Love is the highest calling of life, as I do. He uses a different name for God, but if God is Love, and we both deeply seek to become infinitely loving, and we both believe that the goal of the highest spiritual force in the universe is to bring every human to that state, I find that we agree on far more than we disagree. And so, as a Hindu, he held no animosity towards Christians, despite the extremists among us. He sees God in us; I see God in him.
As a final thought on this topic of equal religions, the great Christian author C.S. Lewis provides a wonderful picture of this in his book “The Last Battle,” when the Jesus-like lion Aslan welcomes into his kingdom as a son the recently-dead Calormene soldier Emeth, who had lived his life in the service of a different god named Tash who violently opposed Aslan. But Emeth had lived in a good and holy way, so that his life actually honored the true god Aslan. And as a result, in this afterlife scene, Aslan says to Emeth “I take to me the services which thou hast done to Tash. For I and he are of such different kinds that no service which is vile can be done to me, and none which is not vile can be done to him.”
So, according to UR, no, the religions are not “equal.” But I, as many who hold to UR, don’t need to see Christianity as morally superior to any other religion. We wish to see all, no matter what tradition they inherit, becoming like Jesus: loving, kind, forgiving, seeking holiness and the good of others. And we’ll let them call that “God” in whatever language they wish. Because we’re quite convinced that God is well able to sort it all out in eternity, looking at the deeds and the heart more than the beliefs or the specific prayers.
Caricature 4) Anyone who believes in UR is just looking for an excuse to act however they wish without consequence.
This is silly, but it comes up again and again. And it’s the same accusation for any belief different than the conservative Christian accepts; I see it connected with several other theological positions, such as LGBTQ matters, or other sexual sin or abortion. I think the reason it is used so widely is because it’s basically virtue-signaling: asserting that one is better because they care about sin, while the other gets to be hedonistic without any restraint. It’s a way of deflecting from discussing the issues in detail, by ridiculing and denigrating those who believe differently.
I’ve never met someone who holds to UR who believes that UR is permission to be hedonistic. And I’ve never met someone who is serious about progressive faith who isn’t just as deeply concerned with righteous living as any conservative. It’s just that some specifics of the moral framework that defines “righteous living” differs. But at the core, both sides deeply believe that upright living is important, that there are social standards that are important, that helping others thrive and grow are critical, that treating others with love and forgiveness is the second-most important commandment after loving God.
One might make this claim about those who reject all faith – that they want to live as they wish. Well, true hedonism usually leads to harming others in the end, and that is agreed upon as evil by both sides of this debate about UR. But with that said, I have atheist friends who act just as morally and righteously as any Christian I know – and lately, more so than a lot of people who claim to be Christian yet don’t act much like Jesus. Faith, in itself, is not a defense against hedonism, and the lack of faith is not evidence of hedonism.
So as pure virtue signaling, I don’t think this caricature is worth any further discussion.
Caricature 5) Anyone who believes in UR doesn’t care about Biblical truth.
As with most of these caricatures, this is about definitions.
What is “truth?” Pilate famously asked that question of Jesus at His trial. And it’s still a valid question today.
I grew up in a deeply conservative Christian household and church. For over 45 years I was raised on a very particular set of evangelical theologies. I knew little to nothing of the multitude of alternative ways of reading the Bible. My theology was the only valid one, in my eyes.
But in the last five or so years, I’ve been exposed to a great many other ways of reading the exact same scriptures. Decent, trustworthy, diligent, careful students of the Bible have reached quite different conclusions about many things that I insisted my dogma had the only answer. And so I had to learn to be humble. This very discussion here is a good example: I concluded, as have many others, that there are no less than three ways of interpreting the Bible’s statements on the fate of a human soul after death. And each has explicit support in the scriptures. And so, humility about the Truth is really important.
What I’ve found is that most people who believe in UR arrived at that conclusion after being raised, as was I, on eternal conscious torment. Only after deep and extensive Bible study did they change their minds. In fact, those who reach this conclusion often were driven to spend excessive amounts of time studying the topic, exactly because they’d been raised to believe that disbelieving in an eternal hell was itself grounds for being sent to hell for unbelief. We had no choice but to study even deeper than ever before, because we had been explicitly taught for decades that the consequences of getting the answer wrong were likely eternally and infinitely painful.
So this caricature doesn’t hold up under the simplest scrutiny. Those who believe in UR typically do so from a very well-studied position, with a deep and abiding concern for accurate reading of the scriptures.
But interestingly, those people are also the most humble about their beliefs – because one nearly universal consequence of this study is to realize that it’s impossible to state an absolute position on this topic with any credibility. The Bible is simply NOT entirely clear on this matter, and we who hold to UR are willing to admit that fact, and live with the tension that it introduces.
Caricature 6) Anyone who believes in UR is too stupid or deceived to see the clear meaning of the Bible.
This caricature is in some ways a subset of the previous one, but it has this nuance: the word “clear” is doing all the heavy lifting.
I’ve found that many people who use a phrase like “clear reading of the Bible” come from a specific subset of Christians: those who insist that the Bible is literally true from cover to cover.
What such people are usually unaware of, however, is that their own dogma is interfering with their view of the Bible. They have a specific lens through which they were taught to read the Bible, and anything that doesn’t agree with the lens will be reinterpreted, or called merely metaphorical, or otherwise dismissed or ignored.
This entire topic is a good example. To read the Bible as “clearly” proclaiming that humans who don’t say the sinner’s prayer will go to hell for eternity, one must ignore obvious verses with clear meanings that say differently.
Or as another example, those who say the Bible clearly teaches that God doesn’t lie, must explain away numerous passages where God explicitly lies, and even explicitly states that they are lying.
Those who insist that the Bible clearly teaches that no man has seen God must explain away passages where God is clearly described as being seen, as having a corporeal form, where main characters in the Bible express surprise that they saw God and yet live.
The list of such conflicts is extensive. But those who hold to a “clear reading” have little choice but to ignore or explain away such challenges.
And they’re apparently unable to see that what seems clear to them is only clear because they insist that this is what the Bible must be saying.
In other words, it’s self-fulfilling. It’s begging the question. It says “The Bible clearly says this is truth, and because it is true, that’s the only way to read the Bible.”
Now, I understand – from long personal experience as a former evangelical, that believing otherwise is hard. It requires us to accept that the Bible is far more complex than we would like. It requires us to accept that some issues simply cannot be settled simply by pointing to a prooftext Bible verse and walking away from the discussion. In short, it requires us to be humble, and to admit that some things are, in fact, unknowable.
In short, there is an awful lot of the Bible that is NOT clear, and the doctrine of what happens to a human soul after death is one of the most muddy topics of all, because the Bible is multivocal about it.
Caricature 7) Anyone who believes in UR doesn’t care about evangelism, because without hell, there’s no reason to be saved.
This caricature is attractive at some level, because in our lived experience as humans, if there’s no threat of consequence, then in many cases people will live as they wish.
But once again, the definitions matter.
In this case, in particular, we should address “saved” and “evangelism” in that order.
First, “saved.” In modern evangelical parlance, “saved” is a very critical word, and it usually refers to keeping people from going to hell for eternity.
But Jesus didn’t use that word “saved” in that way. It’s a relatively recent theology, on the 2,000-year scale of Christian thinking. When Jesus talked about salvation, He almost always was addressing people’s immediate needs: food, shelter, healing, deliverance, or freedom from oppression. One might even conclude, at some level, that Jesus was relatively uninterested in eternity. If He had any interest, it was in seeing the Kingdom of Heaven manifest on earth, in time and space, by the timely actions of His followers, who He sent out to do good works and share the good news of those good works: in Luke 9:1-2 “He gave them power and authority to drive out all demons and to cure diseases, and he sent them out to proclaim the kingdom of God and to heal the sick.” This whole modern evangelical focus on belief as the catalyst for eternal destiny would have been quite alien to Jesus, if we take the words of the Gospels at face value.
Second, “evangelism.” Of course it’s a simple concept: spreading the good news. Now, for the average evangelical, whose Christian identity is explicitly named for a focus on expanding the church by spreading the good news, that usually means getting more people saved – which to them means keeping more people from going to hell.
But for those of us who hold to UR, it means something quite different: bringing the good news of God’s love and infinite grace and acceptance and salvation to as many as possible, and manifesting the works of Jesus on earth, in such a way that the Kingdom comes “on earth as it is in heaven.” It’s not about keeping people from going to hell; it’s about bringing as many into the Kingdom on earth as possible.
If anything, from my 45 years of experience in evangelicalism, there’s actually a nasty little conflict inherent in the doctrines: the true goal is to ensure that the conditions are met for Jesus to come back and rapture His church, so that the believers all can go to heaven and escape from a rapidly deteriorating world, so that Jesus can wipe the slate clean, kill all the unbelievers (and send them all to hell), and set up a shiny new Kingdom on earth for a thousand years (a blip of time in eternity), before the believers escape again to Heaven. While the stated evangelical goal is to expand the Kingdom to every single human, in reality they believe that the vast majority will reject God, and so it’s really a waste of time to hope for that end result.
By contrast, we who hold to UR believe that God’s word is pretty clear: that ALL SHALL be saved. There’s no Rapture escape. There’s no Armageddon where everything is destroyed and billions are judged to hell for eternity. There’s no final plan to spend eternity lounging in luxury in heaven. Instead, we have to do the hard work, here and now, to spread the Gospel, the good news that ALL have been saved, already, and God welcomes them into righteous relationship with God and with fellow man. Rather than minimizing evangelism, it maximizes its importance. The Kingdom of God will not increase unless we spread the Good News.
And to touch back on the first couple of caricatures, I’ll point out that this idea that being saved is a way to escape the threat of eternal punishment depends on the idea of an angry and retributive and threatening God, instead of a God of holy purifying and cleansing fire that seeks and finds and restores and rebuilds. This idea of UR doesn’t depend on a , it holds out a hand of love and restoration. It trusts that people who encounter the love and mercy of God will willingly turn, without any threat needed. It believes that humans are inherently biased towards God and goodness, even if there is brokenness corrupting that goodness. It believes that more than being given a prayer to say, that when spiritually-dead-and-dying people encounter a human actually living and loving like Jesus, their hearts will be changed, and lives turned around, and they will be saved in the practical sense of here-and-now resurrection into life, and freedom from bondage.
Summary and Conclusion
So I hope I’ve broken through a few of the misbeliefs about UR, and I’m sure that in the process, I’ve touched on some ideas about how those like me who hold UR as the best understanding of how the scriptures address the problem of justice for evil.
I realize that I’m presenting a concept here that may sound contradictory: that talionic eye-for-an-eye punishment is not deserved, but people will be purified exactly as they deserve. That description of deserved purification can sound exactly talionic. However, the difference is important: punishment is based on retribution and repayment, founded upon indignation and wrath. Purification is a simple and natural incompatibility between accreted evil and the holiness of pure Love, and the superiority of Love over evil. When evil enters the presence of Love, it is burned away – not as retribution, but as the natural way of things. Nobody would claim that light illuminating a dark room was retribution for or violence against the darkness; rather, the darkness is utterly unable to exist in the presence of the overwhelming unstoppable light.
I also realize that those who reject UR will assert that it violates free will, and is coercive and abusive: that if God is unwilling to let any be eternally separated, or to die eternally separated from God, then God is dishonoring a human choice against God, and is no different than a rapist. This is a good argument, and while it’s out of the scope of this immediate discussion, I would respond that it misunderstands God’s eternal patience as coercion. God is refusing to “pull the trigger” to execute a human soul, and is willing to wait forever for that human to respond. And the UR position asserts that the infinite Love of God will eventually soften the heart of even the most determined atheist, entirely without coercion or abuse.
Partly as a conclusion I’d like to link you to one of my older blog posts you may find useful, pondering this matter more deeply. In that post, I explicitly consider the fate of one of those “super sinners” we all know from history, and how their future might go. More than that, it ponders God’s response to these matters.
https://crucibleofthought.com/for-two-billion-years/
I also wrote a blog post after the famed fundamentalist pastor John MacArthur recently passed away, considering how these ideas of UR might play out in the afterlife of a human that many people look up to as a paragon of Christian virtue, but who definitely had real flaws.
https://crucibleofthought.com/the-eternal-fate-of-john-macarthur/
To wrap all this up, I will offer one personal, real-life analogy that may be useful.
One of my three children, from his earliest years, never liked physical affection. When we hugged him, even as a toddler, he would pull away, squirm, push off with his hands. He knew what we were doing, but couldn’t abide it nonetheless. At some level, our love for him seemed to repel him, even though we thought it was good for him. He’s grown out of that, I’m happy to report, but I do wonder if that may be the experience of some people in eternity. They reject God’s love here on earth, and so entering God’s presence in eternity will initially be painful. Like my son, they’ll squirm and pull away and resist. Only after some of their sin has been purged, and they have time to encounter the real beauty and love that is God’s real nature, no longer filtered through ugly humanity’s poor portrayal of God, and without the continued presence of earthly lies, will they be able to relax in God’s true presence; what had been painful will finally become welcome. I believe this is one reason that Revelation describes the gates of the heavenly city as never being closed. Some will suffer outside the gates, and take a long time to heal and be purified enough to be able to enter the city, and finally join the rest of humanity in the Kingdom. But that welcome will never cease. And I believe that God will eternally stand at the gate, gazing down the road, waiting until the very last sinner is cleansed and repents and comes home.
And so, I have faith that those who hurt people here on earth will face exactly what they deserve – and what they NEED – once they enter eternity. They will no longer be able to put off dealing with their sin and injustice. But I see hope in their fate – that they’ll finally, eventually, become exactly who they were always meant to be. As Philippians 1:6 says, I am truly “confident of this, that He who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus.”
And in that sense, the glorious statement in the Bible that God is unwilling that ANY should perish gives me great hope. Instead of imagining standing beside the throne watching in vengeful satisfaction as God tortures tens of billions of human souls for eternity, instead I joyfully anticipate that a day will finally come, when every human but one stands together inside the amazing holy city, when we watch as all the sin has finally been purged from that one last most sinful and most hurtful human, and all of humanity together with all the heavenly hosts will rejoice as that last human accepts the infinite love of God and finally enters the gates to join us, and we will be able to say, together with Jesus on the cross, “it is FINISHED.”
I hope you can see that vision, too. I appreciate you spending some time with me today; I know this episode was longer than most, but I thought this topic deserved some extra care today. Be blessed, and we’ll talk again soon.
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