If we said or thought that what concerns Gehenna is not in fact full of love and mixed with compassion, this would be an opinion full of blasphemy and abuse against God our Lord. If we even say that God will hand us to fire in order to make us suffer, to torment us, and for every kind of evil, we attribute to the divine nature hostility toward the rational creatures that God has created by grace, and the same is the case if we affirm that God acts or thinks out of spite, as though he sought vengeance. Among all of his deeds, there is none that is not entirely dictated by mercy, love, and compassion. This is the beginning and end of God’s attitude toward us. (Isaac of Nineveh, Second Part 39.22)
Consummation (apokatastasis)
The telos will come after the many aeons have reached their end: “Every knee will be restored to be one [John 17:21], and God will be ‘all in all’ [1 Cor 15:28]. However, this will not happen in a moment, but slowly and gradually, though innumerable aeons of indefinite duration” (Origen, Princ. 3.6.6). At that point, Christ will have subjected all creatures beneath his feet (1 Cor 15:24–28). This subjection, however, is not a defeat: “He will subject all beings to himself, and this must be understood as a salvific submission” (Eusebius, Eccl. theol. 3.15–16). The submission of creatures to Christ—their union with him in his body—must occur before Christ can submit to the Father on behalf of all creation. Christ’s submission to the Father is the submission of his body, which at that point amounts to all creation. Then God will be “all in all” (1 Cor 15:28).
For God to be “all in all” requires that no evil be found in any creature:
God will be “all” for this intelligence . . . because evil will exist no more for this intelligence, everything is God, who is untouched by evil. Therefore, if at the end of the world, which will be similar to the beginning, there will be restored that condition which the rational nature had . . . then for the creature, who has returned pure and unsullied, the One who is the only good God will become all. . . . [And] “in all” God will be all. (Origen, Princ. 3.6.2–3).
“It will be the case that God is ‘in all’ only when in the beings it will be impossible to detect any trace of evil” (Gregory of Nyssa, In Illud 17). “Evil must necessarily be eliminated, absolutely, and in every respect, once and for all, from all that is. . . . For, as evil does not exist in nature outside will, once each will has come to be in God, evil will be reduced to complete nothingness, because no receptacle will be left for it” (Gregory of Nyssa, De anima 101). Here we see the importance of the notion that evil has no substance: when God’s good creatures are restored there is literally nothing left of evil. The annihilation of evil is thus inseparable from the salvation of creation.
In the end then, sin, death, and evil—not sinners—are forever destroyed. “There was a time when evil did not exist, and there will be a time when it is no more” (Evagrius, Kephalaria Gnostika 1.40, Syriac non-expurgated version 52). “We must understand the destruction of the last enemy as the destruction, not of the substance that was created by God, but of the inclination and the hostile will that stemmed not from God but from the enemy [Satan] himself. Therefore, he will be destroyed, not in order for him to exist no more, but in such a way as to no longer be ‘enemy’ and ‘death’” (Origen, Dial. 26).
The apokatastasis also marks a return to the unity of creation: “Making us all one thing, so that we are no longer many, but all of us are one, made one with his divinity, . . . made perfect, not in a confusion of substances, reduced to one, but in the perfection of virtue brought to its apex” (Eusebius, Eccl. theol. 3.18). Note that the final unity is explicitly stated in non-pantheistic manner (“not in a confusion of substances”). It will also be marked as a resurrection of both body and soul, which is theosis.4
All will be saved
The universalism of this vision is already clear, but it is worth driving it home. No sin is too big to thwart God’s purposes: “in souls there is no illness caused by evilness that is impossible to cure for God the Logos, who is superior to us” (Origen, Cels. 8.72). And all will be healed: “Every being that has its origin from God will return such as it was from the beginning, when it had not yet received evil” (Gregory of Nyssa, In Illud 14). Consequently, “no being will remain outside the number of the saved” (Gregory of Nyssa, In Illud 21). “The end will be the so-called apokatastasis, in that no one, then, will be left an enemy” (Origen, Comm. Jo. 1.16.91).
Origen and others who embraced apokatastasis were, however, very cautious about preaching it openly lest unspiritual and immature people use it as a license to sin (Origen, Cels 5.16; 6.26; Comm. Rom. 5.1.7; Hom. Ezech. 1.3.5). They would preach coming judgment and the fires of gehenna to the masses, often failing to mention that such fire was temporary, because they believed that fear was a factor that could help in restraining sin in some people.
This then is the basic shape of historic Christian universalism. As Ilaria Ramelli demonstrated in the first volume in this series, Origen’s theology of apokatastasis was once widespread in the church, both among the laity and clergy, but under the influence of the Emperor Justinian in the East and Bishop Augustine in the West it fell out of favor, becoming a mere trickle in the mainstream Christian tradition. By the time of the Reformation it had been almost forgotten in the West. But, as we shall see, it is a hard idea to keep down.
1. Brumbaugh, History of the German Baptist Brethren, xi.
2. The summary that follows is my attempt at drawing together threads from across Ilaria Ramelli’s Christian Doctrine of Apokatastasis.
3. The preexistence of disembodied souls was condemned at Constantinople II in 553. Whether Origen’s view was condemned depends on how one construes it. We maintain that it was not, for we would argue that, in his view, the logikoi were not disembodied, but had spiritual bodies. See Ramelli, Preexistence of Souls?
4. Resurrection of the body is the destruction of sin and death and the door to “deification” (theosis): “Resurrection is a restoration to our original condition” (Eusebius, Comm. Ps. PG 23.1285.56). “After human beings have become pure of heart . . . restoration (apokatastasis) awaits them, in eternal contemplation. And they shall be gods” (Clement, Strom. 7.10.56.6).
Origen distinguished the metaphysical principle of identity of the body (eidos) and the material substratum of the body (hupokeimenon). In the resurrection, we will have a body, the same body, but it will be a spiritual body (sōma pneumatikon; 1 Cor 15:44), an ethereal body suitable to the heavens.
Part I
The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries
Reformation and Beyond
1
At the Radical Fringe of Reformation and Counter-Reformation
The Protestant Reformation was a time of massive religious, social, and political upheaval in Europe. Until that point, the church had kept a tight control over acceptable doctrine and the correct interpretation of Scripture, lest individuals get it into their heads that they were able to rightly interpret the Bible on their own and thus unleash upon the world a plethora of potentially heretical teachings, wrapped in the clothing of biblical authority. The Protestant demotion of the authority of church tradition and elevation of the Bible and its many individual interpreters changed all that. The Protestant cry was that “Scripture alone” was the authoritative source for Christian belief and life. Furthermore, discerning the meaning of Scripture, said the Reformers, was not the preserve of the church authorities, but of all true believers, for the Bible is clear when it read canonically and according to sensible grammatical-historical standards. Any Christian, they said, has the right to interpret the text and appeal to its authority, and if the Bible turns out to run counter to traditional Catholic teaching, then so much the worse for traditional Catholic teaching.
The Protestant Reformation very quickly generated not a single version of true biblical faith, but a wide range of different, not-fully-compatible versions
of Christian religion all claiming to be the genuine manifestation of biblical teaching. The diversity was reflected even among the Magisterial Reformers like Luther, Calvin, and Zwingli, but was most clear around the margins of Protestantism, where individuals who considered themselves Spirit-led interpreters of the Bible were empowered to declare their new “discoveries” with confidence.
In this context, it is no surprise that the idea of universal salvation, which had for a long time been suppressed as “heretical” by the authority of the church, now began to re-enter through the crack in the door opened up by the Reformation. Its reappearance is hard to chart with any certainty. The Magisterial Reformers themselves never really questioned the traditional Western teachings on hell and heaven, taking them as given,5 for their theological focus was elsewhere. Nevertheless, the idea of universal restoration did reappear quickly in some quarters. Thus Luther, in a letter to Hans von Rechenberg in 1522, wrote:
For the opinion that God could not have created man to be rejected and cast away into eternal torment is held among us also, as it was at all times by some of the most renowned people, such as Origen and his kind. They regard it as too harsh and cruel and inconsistent with God’s goodness. They based their opinion on Psalm 77[:7–9], where the Psalmist says, “Will God cast off forever, and never again be gracious? Has his steadfast love forever ceased? And his promises at an end for all time? Had God’s forgotten to be gracious? Has he in anger shut up his compassion?” [They also cite] Paul, 1 Timothy 2[:4], “God desires all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of all truth.” Proceeding from this premise they argue that in the end even the devils will be saved and will not be eternally damned, etc., etc., one step following from the other.6
We are not certain who Luther has in mind here, but what is clear is that within five years of Luther nailing his ninety-five theses to the door of All Saints’ Church in Wittenberg (1517), a trigger-event for the start of the Reformation, universalism was already poking its head around the doors of some Protestants.
Accusations of teaching the universalist heresy are especially common against Anabaptists—the radical wing of the Protestant Reformation. For instance, the Lutheran Augsburg Confession says that their churches “condemn the Anabaptists, who think that there will be an end to the punishments of condemned men and devils” (Article 17). In 1552/53 the Reformed English Church also intended to ratify one of its Articles of Religion against universalism, and it is generally thought that the article was directed against what was considered an Anabaptist belief: “All men shall not be saved at the last. They also are worthy of condemnation, who endeavor at this time to restore the dangerous opinion, that all men be they never so ungodly, shall at length be saved, when they have suffered pains for their sins a certain time appointed by God’s justice” (Article 42). The ascent of the Catholic Queen Mary to the throne stopped the Articles making it to the statute books, and after Mary’s death the Forty-Two Articles were reduced to the Thirty-Nine Articles, with the anti-universalism being dropped (presumably because the threat from universalism seemed to have diminished by 1571).
Accusations of universalism were repeated against one Anabaptist in particular—Hans Denck, an Anabaptist leader and humanist from Southern Germany. It is worth our while considering him in some more detail.
Hans Denck (ca. 1495–1527)—Anabaptist
Hans Denck was a pious, intelligent, and often irenic man. Born in Bavaria, he studied at the University of Ingolstadt, where he seems to have been well regarded by his teachers, and on leaving edited a three-volume Greek dictionary before settling down to a quiet and respectable family life working as a headmaster in Nuremberg. However, his soul was restless, and he struggled with his inner sense of spiritual poverty despite his outward respectability. This led him to make contact with the Anabaptist Thomas Müntzer, who provoked Denck to significantly rethink his theology and practice. For this he was expelled from Nuremberg in 1525, when the city accepted the Reformation.
Denck was (re)baptized by Balthasar Hubmeier, an Anabaptist leader, in 1526, though he always maintained that it was the inner spiritual reality, not outward rituals like Baptism and Eucharist, that really counted. He was certainly harsh concerning what he regarded as legalistic religion based on the outward “dead letter,” rather than the Spirit within. Denck then began preaching and publishing his ideas and became prominent within Anabaptist groups (and strongly disliked in Magisterial Reformation circles).
After his expulsion from Nuremberg, he remained “homeless” for the rest of his short life, moving to Augsburg, Strasbourg, Southern Germany, and then on to Basel in Switzerland, where he died of the Black Death in 1527, aged only thirty-two.
Was Hans Denck a universalist? Possibly, though scholars continue to debate the issue and certainty eludes us. In 1525 Denck was imprisoned in Schwyz with the charge of teaching the salvation of sinners, and even the devil, from hell. In the same year, he was accused of disturbing the Anabaptists of St. Gall with similar doctrines.7 Caution is always required when treating the accusations of opponents, and universalism was one of those “off-the-peg heresies” that was often used to dress one’s enemies in this period. Charges of universalism were thus often leveled without accuracy—for instance, by some Catholics against all the opponents of the doctrine of purgatory—so that accusations alone are not enough to establish whether someone actually upheld a theory of universal salvation. Nevertheless, there is no smoke without fire, and the accusation seems to have had some basis in Denck’s actual teachings.
Morwenna Ludlow notes Denck’s stress, against the teaching of the Magisterial Reformers, on God’s universal saving will grounded in his nature as Love. Denck writes, “He . . . offers his mercy to everyone with wholehearted earnestness and desires truly to accomplish all he promised.”8 Furthermore, Christ died for everyone in accordance with this desire of the Father to save all. This is suggestive, though it is not enough in itself to show that he was a universalist.
Another relevant element in Denck’s theology is his belief that a “divine spark” from God resides in all people, even if they are not aware of it. This “spark” is God-within and offers a divine inner witness to God’s truth: “This attestation is in all people and proclaims to each one in particular, according to how one hears him.”9 So none are completely without God’s inner work, even if many are largely deaf to it. This provides a basis for God to draw even the most hardened of sinners to salvation, and he can do it even if those sinners have no access to Scripture. Denck appears to be what we would refer to as an inclusivist. But while such a theological idea could certainly fund universalism, it does not require it.
Does he go further than this? Yes. He rejects a retributive understanding of divine punishment and sees the suffering that results from sin to be a natural, self-inflicted consequence of such actions; consequences designed by God for the purposes of reforming sinners. For Denck, Romans 11:32—“For God has bound everyone over to disobedience so that he may have mercy on them all”—was interpreted as applicable to individuals and their inner spiritual experiences. Johannes Steenbuch comments, “Human beings need to go through an existential experience of being lost and damned in order to come to faith and thus salvation.”10 So “hell” can be seen as an experience of divine abandonment followed by mercy. As Denck says, quoting 1 Samuel 2, “The Lord leads down into hell and up again.”11 However, it seems that the “hell” of which he speaks here is a “hell” experienced prior to death; he never clearly refer to postmortem punishments, so caution is needed in assessing the implications of these ideas.
Sin itself is in fact part of the very purpose of God, part of the plan of salvation. God may use evil, but it will be more than compensated for in the end: “He who ordains evil [i.e., God] and yet can compensate with greater gains than the loss he cannot prevent is not to be blamed for evil.”12 God can and will overcome evil in creation: “For sin against God is to be reckone
d as nothing; and however great it might be, God can, will, and indeed already has, overcome it for himself to his own eternal praise without harm for any creatures.”13 This flies close to the wind on the question of universal salvation, but remains frustratingly ambiguous.
In the treatise on Divine Order (1526), Denck writes, “God desires everyone to be saved, but knows full well that many condemn themselves. If then his will were to force anyone through a mere order, he could say the word this instant and it would happen. But this would diminish his righteousness.” Here Denck sounds like what would today be called a freewill theist. He goes on to say that when a sinner rejects God, he “has come to the place for which he was predestined, which is hell.” Again, thus far he seems not unlike Erasmus in his defense of human freedom (directed against Luther). The surprise comes in what follows. According to Denck, the sinner in hell “does not necessarily want to nor need he remain there, of course, for ‘even hell is exposed before the Lord and damnation has no cover’ (Job xxvi).”14 The possibility of salvation from “hell” is very clearly proclaimed. However, a few lines later Denck can speak of people continuing to resist and thus submerging themselves in death, so yet again we must stop short of confident declarations on Denck’s universalism.
A Larger Hope 2 Page 2