A Larger Hope 2

by Robin A Parry

  Lady Conway explicitly rejected the eternity of hell, which would be an unlimited punishment for a limited sin, and therefore incompatible not only with God’s mercy, but also with God’s justice. “The common idea about God’s justice—namely that every sin is punishable by endless hellfire—has given men a horrible idea of God, depicting him as a cruel tyrant rather than a benign father towards all his creatures.”62 Hell, she said, is reserved for the worst sins, and even then, like all punishment, it is aimed at the eventual healing of the sinner and is thus not everlasting.

  Anne Finch’s universalism saw Christ’s incarnation, death, and resurrection as central to our return to God.63 The patristic flavor of what follows should be clear:

  In taking on flesh and blood, Christ sanctified nature so that he could sanctify everything, analogous to fermenting a whole mass of stuff by fermenting one part of it. Then he descended into time and for a certain period voluntarily subjected himself to its laws, to such an extent that he suffered great torment and death itself. But death didn’t hold him for long: on the third day he rose again, and the purpose of all his suffering, right up to his death and burial, was to heal, preserve, and restore creatures from the decay and death that had come upon them through the Fall. By doing this he brought time to an end, and raised creatures above time, raising them to the level where he dwells—he who is the same yesterday, today, and forever, without loss, decay, or death.64

  Van Helmont too embraced universalism, seeing it as the climax of “a complex chronology of human existences leading to the final restoration of all at the millennium.”65 And he too considered punishment to be healing: “Is not the nature of all punishment Medicinal? And ought not every Judge among Men sincerely to love those whom he condemns to punishment, and aim at their good thereby?”66

  In November 1675, various Quakers, including George Fox himself, had visited Anne and van Helmont, and they began attending Quaker meetings. (Quakers were a Christian sect widely considered at the time to be seditious.) In 1677, both of them converted to Quakerism, and made her house a center for Quaker activity. She died two years later, aged forty-seven.

  The universalism of those within the orbit of Cambridge Platonism was, as we have seen, somewhat heady, drawing on a curious and creative blend of patristic, biblical, and esoteric sources, and would have appeared rather suspicious from the standpoint of mainstream Protestant theological discourse. That was much less the case with the Puritan universalism of Peter Sterry and Jeremiah White, even though Sterry was much influenced by Cambridge Platonism.

  Puritan Universalism

  Peter Sterry (1613–72), Puritan Universalist

  Peter Sterry was born and raised in Southwark and went to study at Emmanuel College in Cambridge, aged sixteen. Emmanuel was a Puritan college, but at the time was also becoming a center of Cambridge Platonism. Here Sterry studied under Benjamin Whichcote, one of the key players in that movement. Sterry was a good student and became a very learned man with a wide range of influences—Scripture, of course, but also Plato, Plotinus, Proclus, the church fathers (Origen among them), John Scotus Eriugena, the scholastics (including Aquinas), Renaissance thinkers (such as Nicholas of Cusa), the mystics of the church (including Jakob Böhme), as well as rabbininc writings. It is little surprise that he was a Christian Platonist throughout his life as well as a devout Puritan.

  In 1637, Sterry was elected to a fellowship at Emmanuel college, which still commemorates him in a stained glass window (seen above),67 but as the political tide turned at the university, he left Cambridge in 1640 and became a chaplain to Robert Grenville (Lord Brooke). After Grenville was killed in 1643, leading the fight against the Royalists in the Civil War, Sterry was nominated as one of the fourteen divines chosen by the House of Lords for the Westminster Assembly, with the commission to reorganize the church on a Puritan basis. It was this Assembly that drew up the famous Westminster Confession of Faith in 1646, which remains a Calvinistic doctrinal standard of faith among many Reformed churches to this day.

  Sterry became a regular and well-known Independent preacher to the House of Commons at Westminster. In 1649, he became a chaplain and preacher to the Council of State, and in 1650 he became a chaplain and friend to Oliver Cromwell. “He belonged, in fact, to the group of Independent divines who really became the leaders of the Church under the Protectorate.”68

  Sterry was a great defender of toleration—his opposition, as an Independent Minister, to Catholicism and Presbyterianism was chiefly based on what he saw as their intolerant streak. His deep regard for tolerance and his respect for Jewish thought also made him a defender of Cromwell’s 1655 proposal to allow the Jews to return to England. (The Jews were expelled from England in 1290.) Indeed, Sterry was one of those Cromwell brought into the consultations on the matter in order to break the deadlock. The Jews were allowed to return in 1657.

  After Cromwell’s death in 1658, the cause of the Independents collapsed and the monarchy was restored. Sterry was lucky to get away, not only with his life, but also with his freedom. He received a pardon from the King in 1660 and became a chaplain to Philip Sidney, Viscount Lisle, in London. In May 1672, Sterry became ill, and he died aged fifty-nine in November.69

  In many ways, Sterry is an anomaly—a Puritan who was a lover of the arts and poetry, a Platonist who was a theological determinist, a deeply rational mystic, and, most interesting from our perspective, a Calvinist universalist.

  The heart of his theology was his doctrine of God. The only true Being is God—creation has no subsistence of itself but derives its being from God, who is utterly transcendent, yet profoundly immanent in all things—“in All, thro’ All, on every side, beneath, above, beyond All, ever, every where the same, equally entire, equally undivided, . . . that Sacred Circle of All Being, . . . whose Center is every where, . . . whose Circumference is no where Bounded.”70 God is the artist, creation the artwork; God is the poet; creation the poem; God is the composer and musician, creation the music; God is the author, creation the story. (Interestingly, given the fashions of the time, Sterry does not compare God to a mathematician or an artificer, nor creation to a mechanical artifact.) So God alone is real; creation’s being/becoming is only a shadow, but a shadow that points beyond itself to its cause.

  This cause, the triune God, is unity-in-diversity and the origin and ground of all unity and diversity in creation. And he is Love. This comes out very clearly at the start of the preface to A Discourse on the Freedom of the Will. The first piece of advice to his readers is:

  1. Study the Love of God, the Nature of God, as he is Love, the Work of God, as it is a Work of Love. . . . That Love is the band of Perfection. It is Love then, which runneth through the whole Work of God, which frameth, informeth, uniteth it all into one Master-piece of Divine Love.

  If God be Love, the Attributes of God are the attributes of this Love; the Purity, Simplicity, the Sovereignty, the Wisdom, the Almightiness, the Unchangeableness, the Infiniteness, the eternity of Divine Love. If God be Love, his Work is the Work of Love, of a Love unmixt, unconfined, supream, infinite in Wisdom and Power, not limited in its workings by any pre-existent matter, but bringing forth freely and entirely from it self its whole work both matter and form, according to its own inclination and complacency in it self.

  And: “Our God, the God and Father of our Lord Jesus, is the God of Love in the truest, the sweetest and best sense. He alone is Love it self . . . an infinite Love, a sweet and clear Sea, which swalloweth up all bounds, all shore and bottoms, into it self.”71 It is easy to see how such a theology of omnipotent divine love would lead one toward universalism. All creation is birthed in divine love and determined in love toward its beautiful destination. The God of love is the source and telos of creation, its alpha and omega. And, unlike most of the Cambridge Platonists, Sterry the Puritan believer in predestination maintained that God determined absolutely everything that happened, including human fre
e choices.72 “The will of man then in every motion, act, and determination of it, is from eternity predetermined in the Divine Understanding, as in its first cause and Original form.”73 So not even creaturely freewill could derail God’s loving purposes for creation.

  Of course, the story of creation is not monochrome, but has its disturbing and painful plot-twists, the fall into sin unleashing a world of sorrow. It may be very hard to discern divine love if we focus only on the present fallen world. However, we need to see the whole story to discern the pattern of love, and to see that even the fall and consequent human suffering—of which Sterry does not flinch from recognizing God as the ultimate cause—play a role in bringing about the ultimate good of all. God will make everything beautiful in his time.

  Sterry’s doctrine of atonement was more or less a standard Reformed one, save that he believed that it would extend to all.

  All men are redeemed by the same blood of the Lord Jesus, who hath given himself as a Ransom for all, to be testified, ἐν <και>ροῖς ἰδίοις, in the proper times. Each person which hath his part in this Ransom, hath its proper time for its discovery to him. Thine may be now sooner. This person also now most of all lost in the depth of all evils, may have his proper time yet to come, for the taking off the disguise of these filthy Rags from him, for the discovery of the Glory, as a Son of God in him. . . . So look thou on every man as a brother to thee.74

  Sterry affirmed a doctrine of hell—it was, after all, the teaching of inspired Scripture. His fullest account is given in an unpublished manuscript entitled “That the State of Wicked Men After This Life Is Mixt of Evill, and Good Things.” And he could make good sense of hell as one of the painful parts of the story of the world as it moved toward its final state, but a doctrine of eternal damnation for some creatures made no sense to him, being incompatible with divine goodness and the omnipotent love of God.

  On Sterry’s account, all the divine attributes “are the attributes of this Love,” which means that divine justice, divine wrath, and divine punishment must be understood to be modes of God’s love for sinners. “Love is the end [i.e., goal] of wrath.”75 If God “meets with opposition he rageth. He burns upon dark, unclear, intractable Hearts, as Fire in the Ironworks; till he hath poured them forth into the Temper, and Mold of his Spirit and Image.”76 As such, hell should be understood as reformative, aimed at the ultimate good of those condemned to it. So “no Individual Soul can be forever abandoned.”77 This includes fallen angels as well as humans. What God hates is sin, not sinners. Those in hell would look up and see heaven and be full of remorse, recognizing the incompatibility of their sinful lives with the glory of heaven. This realization is a fundamental step toward their restoration.78 “Wrath is but for a moment; at longest the moment of this Life, this Shadow, this short Dream of Lifes. The Truth of Life, the Perpetuity of Life, Eternity is for Love.”79

  Jeremiah White (1629–1707)

  White’s life

  Jeremiah White, like Sterry, was also a Puritan with Independent convictions, a student at Cambridge University (Trinity College, 1646–53), then a preacher to the Council of State at Whitehall, and also a chaplain to Oliver Cromwell.80 Sterry and White were colleagues and White edited and wrote the preface to Peter Sterry’s book The Rise, Race, and Royalty of the Kingdom of God in the Soul in which we are left in no doubt that White was a great admirer of Sterry.

  After Cromwell’s death and the Restoration of the Monarchy, White was without a regular income.

  He lived privately . . . , preaching only occasionally. . . . He had, with great pains and charge, made a collection of the sufferings of the Dissenters by the penal laws after the Restoration [of the Monarchy in 1660], which contained an account of the ruin of many thousand families in the several parts of the kingdom. When James II came to the crown, and gave the Dissenters liberty, he was much importuned to print it. Some agents of the king were with him, and made him very considerable offers, if he would comply: but as circumstances then stood, he was not to be prevailed with, for fear of serving and strengthening the Popish interest.81

  Jeremiah White’s posthumous publication The Restoration of All Things is, in my opinion, the most interesting statement of universal salvation to come out of the seventeenth century.82 It was published anonymously in the first edition (1712) to protect White’s reputation, but his name was added in a subsequent edition. Richard Roach, an Anglican priest and a member of Jane Lead’s Philadelphians (see later discussion), edited and wrote the preface to the book’s first edition,83 and there he explains how White came to embrace the larger hope while at university:

  When he was at the University, and had studied all the schemes of Divinity, he could not find any, or from all of them together, that God was Good, that God was Love, as the Scriptures declared him. This put him into a great Dissatisfaction and Perplexity of Mind, from which he could no way extricate himself; but it grew upon him more and more, till it threw him into a Fit of Sickness, and that so dangerous [th]at there was no Hopes of his Recovery; but in it, at the worst, he had a Beam of Divine Grace darted upon his Intellect, with a sudden, warm, and lively Impression; which gave him immediately a New Set of Thoughts concerning God and his Works, and the Way of his dealing with his Offending creatures, which, as they became the Rule and Standard of all his Thoughts and Measures of Things afterwards, as I have heard him declare, so they gave in particular, the Ground and Occasion of this present Design. And upon this he presently Recovered.84

  White’s thought

  The book itself was written over a number of years, indeed he must have been thinking the issues through since his student days, but it was only completed soon before his death, aged seventy-eight in 1707. It offers a sustained set of competent expositions of various biblical texts, which allows White to set out a whole biblical theology that is at once both Calvinist and universalist.

  It comes as something of a shock to some people to learn that Calvin himself, in his massive Institutes of the Christian Religion, never makes a single reference to the biblical assertion that “God is love” (1 John 4:8, 16), despite the fact that his work offers a comprehensive and thorough overview of Christian theology, as he saw it, engaging thousands of biblical passages. Clearly the idea was not central to Calvin’s theology. What White offers is a glimpse of what Calvinism might look like if re-formed around the insight that “God is love.” For, like Sterry, White begins with the doctrine of God’s love and allows it to inform his entire theology.

  God is indeed justice itself, wisdom itself, and power itself, but these and all other divine attributes find their unity in the triune love of God, he says. All divine attributes are subservient to and aim at divine love. Indeed, “Love is more than an Attribute, it is the very Name of God, it is God himself; an Attribute is an imperfect and a partial Expression of God to us; But Love is the full Expression of him, so far as God can be expressed and conceived by us. . . . God is Love, and therefore all his Attributes are the Attributes of Love” (178–79).85 This has huge implications for how we think about God’s justice and anger. “What must we conclude then? That his Severity is not without Goodness, nor contrary to it; not incompatible with it; his Goodness can admit Severity and yet remain Goodness notwithstanding” (58). White argues at some length that divine justice needs to be understood as a manifestation of love (186–90), as do holiness (190–92), faithfulness (192–93), wisdom, and power (193–97). So the common attempt to ground eternal punishment in God’s holiness or justice utterly fails to grasp those very attributes, because it detaches them from love. “O then let us fear to set up a Wisdom, a Power, a Justice, a Holiness, a Greatness in God, without Love! Without Love as its Ground, its Root, its Essence, its Design, its Fruit, its Image, its End” (151). Love seeks the good of the other, not its eternal misery, and love never fails. The same critique applies to Calvinist attempts to appeal to the sovereign will of God as the basis for everlasting hell, for
that will is the will of the God who is love (199–210).

  And the wrath of God, real as it is,86 is his fierce opposition to sin and evil, and this too is motivated by his love for us (210–25). For “he can no more cease to be Love when he is angry, than he can cease to be God. . . . [T]he anger of God towards his own is the fruit of his Love” (213–14). Divine anger—which is in fact God’s love actively opposing sin—will burn until it has consumed all that is evil in creation, then it will be gone forever. God’s love is like the sun, permanent and shining, while wrath is akin to a cloud that temporarily passes across the sun, just “a Mist before his Face” (201).

  Our salvation then is established in God’s nature as love, which contains in itself all that is necessary to complete the restoration of the creature:

  God is an Eternal act of Goodness, Love, and Sweetness, that carries his Effect and End Eternally in himself, and tho’ there be a process in the discovery of this Love to us, yet in its first and Eternal emanation and motion, (if we may so speak) he is in the term of his motion. For he hath and possesseth the term Eternally in himself, and whom he Loves, he Loves to the end, Loves fully, perfectly, furnishing and supplying all things to the End of his Love richly, freely, intirely, out of himself. (19)

  The argument on the extent of salvation develops step by step, through the analysis of key texts. It launches with 1 Timothy 2:3, in which Paul exhorts the church to offer prayers for “all Men” on the ground that “this is acceptable in the Sight of God our Saviour, who will have all Men to be Saved and come to a knowledge of the Truth.” God wills that all people (not only the elect) be saved and, argues White, God’s will—which reflects his nature as love—is effective (Eph 1:11). God’s will certainly will be done. God calls his church to pray for the salvation of all, which he would not do if it were not his intention to save all. “God wills that all Men be saved, this Will is the Will of an Omnipotent and Sincere Agent, an immanent and eternal Will, eternally in Act, that hath its end in its own Power, yea in his Arms and Embraces, and neither can, nor could it ever be resisted” (20).