William Law was well-known in the eighteenth century, but perhaps his biggest impact in the story of universal salvation came through the influence his work exerted in the nineteenth century on the thought of Thomas Erskine, who in turn mediated some of Law’s key ideas to many others.
Pietist Universalism in Britain: George Stonehouse (1714–93)
The story
Before looking at the impact of Pietistic universalism in America we need to consider one more influential Pietistic Restorationist, George Stonehouse.187 While a student at the University of Oxford, Stonehouse was possibly one of the members of the Holy Club at Christ Church College, set up by John and Charles Wesley and also attended by George Whitefield.188 According to one source:
Universal Restitution, considered as a Scripture doctrine, was first debated between the years 1729 and 1735, by a society of twelve young collegians of Oxford, emphatically called the Holy Club. John Wesley was tutor, and, of course, president of this society; and he, with his brother Charles, a Mr. Morgan, and one or two others, supported the merit of works. George Whitefield and James Hervey, (author of the Meditations,) adopted the Calvinistic side of the question; Messrs. Delamotte, Hall, Hutchins, and Ingram trimmed and became Moravians. The Rev. George Stonehouse of Hungerford Park (afterward Sir George Stonehouse, of East Brent, in the county of Somerset, Baronet,) had been labouring to reconcile the different opinions of his fellow-collegiaus, till he stood alone in support of his favourite tenet, viz. that Universal Restitution was a Scripture doctrine; and as the arguments he used with his different opponents had ever prevailed, they promised, that if he would collect his thoughts together in a discourse upon the subject, it should receive a candid answer.189
After Oxford, Rev. Stonehouse went to serve as priest at St. Mary’s Church in Islington, London (1738–40). In 1738, he invited Charles Wesley to be his curate, though he had no license from the bishop to do this. Wesley and Whitefield preached there regularly, but their preaching proved unpopular with some of the congregation and the churchwardens had them banned. They and Stonehouse were told: “You have all the spirit of the devil.”190
In June 1739, he had married Mary Crispe, a member of the gentry.191 The disruption in Islington led to Stonehouse leaving the church in 1740 and associating with the Moravians. He moved to his wife’s ancestral home in Darnford, near Woodstock in Oxfordshire, apparently turning away from the Church of England. This he used as his base for his own scholarly research, funded by his personal wealth. Stonehouse was an excellent linguist, fluent in several different languages, and much of his research was spent in the study of Syriac, culminating in the publication of a Syriac grammar. One source reports that he travelled Europe for twenty years in his academic researches, twelve of which he spent in Germany, especially with Count Zinzendorf.
It was not until 1761 that the first volume of Stonehouse’s long-promised universalist work was published, entitled Universal Restitution, a Scripture Doctrine. The second part appeared in 1768 and was called Universal Restitution Farther Defended (URFD from hereon). One often-quoted source describes a later encounter with John Wesley:
On a visit from Mr. Wesley, Mr. Stonehouse said, “Ah, John, there are only you and I living out of us all.”
W. “Better you had died too, George, before you had written your book.”
S. “I expected you had eaten up my book at a mouthful, John; but neither you nor any of the rest, though you all engaged to do it, have answered a single paragraph of it.”
W. “You must not think your book unanswerable on that account. I am able to answer it, but it would take up so much of my time, that I could not answer it to God.”
This declaration so stung the author, as to put him upon writing Universal Restitution Vindicated.192
The book referred to at the end was Stonehouse’s third and final book on universalism, published in Bristol in 1773. However, the suggestion that this final book was inspired by the alleged conversation with Wesley, the arch-Arminian, is questionable because it is in fact five letters written in response to Calvinist critiques of Universal Restitution.
Stonehouse purchased an estate in East Brent in Somerset and lived there until his death in December 1793.
Stonehouse’s theology
Universal Restitution, a Scripture Doctrine, is divided into two parts: an exploration of the kingdom of God and a study of the universal restoration of creatures.193 Prior to that, he opens with a study of the Hebrew word ‘olām and the Greek aiōn and aiōnios (Letter I). These words, usually translated as eternal or everlasting, play a pivotal role in the case for an unending hell. Stonehouse argues that, for a host of reasons, they demonstrably mean no such thing.194 Rather, they mean “a long tho’ undetermined portion or period of time” (6). In the grand divine plan, there are many aeōns (ages) through which God works out his sovereign purposes.
This leads into his discussion of Christ’s kingdom. This aiōnial kingdom of Jesus began with his earthly ministry and will endure for ages of ages. It contains many stages—his ministry, death, descent to Hades to liberate its captives,195 resurrection, ascension, the conversion and return of Israel to the land, the millennium, the resurrection of the dead, final judgment, new creation and the lake of fire, and God’s being all in all (Letter IV).
However, while the messianic kingdom is aiōnial, lasting “to the æons of the æons,” it is not everlasting (Letter II)! His core text here is 1 Corinthians 15:24–28, in which Christ—once all creation has been subjected to him and his kingdom extends over the whole world—hands the kingdom over to the Father, so that God will be all in all. Christ’s role as Mediator is no longer required from that point on. This, Stonehouse argues, clearly teaches an end to Christ’s age-long (aiōnios) kingdom; albeit an end far in the future:
after Christ’s kingdom shall have lasted thro’ several generations and æons, even to the utmost æon very far beyond the end of the world, and probably long after the new heavens and the new earth. . . . [W]hen Christ shall have effected the general Restitution, by the reconciling of all things to God, and by the making of all things new . . . [t]hen shall . . . even the son himself . . . deliver up his vicarial and æonian, or temporary power, together with all the subjects of it, to GOD, even the father. (30)
Some qualification is in order here. The kingdom itself has no end (Luke 1:33), but it will now be reigned over, not by the Messiah as Messiah—that messianic reign was aiōnial, not everlasting—but by God (including God the Son). From this point onward “Christ will no longer reign as mediator, but as God, and one with his father” (28). This is because Christ’s kingdom is his, both in his capacity as man and in his capacity as the divine Logos (58–61).196 The first reign will one day cease; the second will not. So we might say that, to Stonehouse, the mediatorial phase of the everlasting kingdom is of temporal, albeit incredibly long, duration.197 This sets the theological background for Stonehouse’s defense of universal restitution, which occupies the rest of this book (Letters VIII–XXIII) and URFD.
Stonehouse speaks of universal restoration or healing, but not of universal salvation, arguing that the Greek word sōzō in the relevant contexts is a metaphor not of being delivered/saved from danger, but of being restored to health. Many, in fact, are not delivered/saved from the threat of hell, but they will still be restored in the end. This notion is captured in Stonehouse’s translation of 1 Timothy 4:10: “Christ is the restorer of all people, especially of those who believe.” He takes this to mean that believers (the elect), through union with Christ, are regenerated and spared damnation, while the rest (the non-elect) are not—the former are saved; the latter are not. Their restoration follows end-time condemnation (Letter X). So all people are Christ’s possession by purchase of his blood, and as such will be restored, but that does not require that they will all be saved from going to hell (Letters XI, XII). Thus, “it is the absolute purpose of God ultimately to r
estore the world from its present wretchedness, altho’ he has no such purpose to save and preserve it from the wrath to come” (URFD, 87). This use of the words “saved” and “salvation” was not picked up by other universalists.
Stonehouse believed that God directly created souls and gave them an existence before they were embodied as humans. These preexistent souls became sinners through the misuse of their freewill before they were embodied, an idea he possibly inherited from seventeenth-century interpreters of Origen like the Cambridge Platonists.198 Because they sinned, God appointed them to be born as the sons of fallen Adam. This sending into embodiment was actually for our good. The plan was that the Logos would then be born as a man so that, through the humanity of the Logos and his work in atoning for their guilt, they might be restored. Souls are ransomed by Christ as his own possession. So God assigned all humanity to share in the fate of Adam—enslavement to Satan, sin, and death—so that they might then also share in the fate of Christ—resurrection and union with God. And Christ performed this restorative work on behalf of all humanity, “For Christ has indeed exhausted the whole venom of sin in his own body, and is in himself singly both the cause and power of our recovery” (185). In Christ our debts are discharged and we stand innocent before God.199 Thus, hell has no grip on those who are united to Christ.
[A]ll creatures have a joint interest in Christ; and the life of all was offered up in Christ’s sacrifice (Luke xix.10. I John iv.14. Rom. v.6. Acts iii.21. Eph. i.10. Col. i.20) from hence also is the apostle’s reasoning (ii Cor. v.14) If one (that is Christ) died for all, then all were dead, i.e. dead virtually in Christ so dying for them. But Christ died for all men, (see i John ii.2. i Tim. ii.6. i Cor. xv.22, 49. Rom. v.6. John i.29) therefore are all men dead virtually in Christ. (316)
As Christ died for all, so too he rose for all. The resurrected Christ, says Paul, is the firstfruits of the resurrection of all the dead (1 Cor 15:23). This is a reference to the Israelite practice of offering the first part of the gathered harvest to God as a symbol that all of the harvest comes from him and belongs to him. “And as all the fruits of Canaan belonged to Jehovah in the first fruits, so Christ being the first fruits unto God of all the sons of Adam, all the sons of Adam are claim’d of God in his Christ as property” (294).
Now the effects of Christ’s sacrifice “do not immediately display themselves universally” (193). Humans can, within limits, freely resist God. But God can work with our human freedom to lead us to regeneration in Christ:
For why may not the operations of the Holy Ghost upon the human soul, tho’ resisted by that soul, be notwithstanding finally effectual towards his restitution? Surely they may be partly resistable, and gradually effectual; the sacred influences gaining as it were in all their operations within us . . . giving us mediately . . . now a little light, now a devout desire, now a degree of liberty, now a dread of divine justice and a trembling like Felix, now a penitential sentiment, and so in other effects.
For thus the Holy Ghost, accumulating his gracious largesses by subsequent accessions thereof, abates our weaknesses, strengthens our native powers, and causes us to thrive by a kind of natural progress into a ripeness for, and condition adapted to receive, agreeably to the order and regulation of divine things, that last victorious regenerating gift. (URFD, 73)
The compatibility of human freewill and divine sovereignty only seems a paradox to us because of our blindness (URFD, 105–6). In the permissive will of Christ the principles of fallen nature are not as yet abolished, but they cannot fail to be so in the end: “that as Christ is the restorer of the world; the world must finally be restored; that as he draws all men unto him, all men must finally come unto him” (200). Before that day, many shall drink of the wine of the wrath of God to an age of ages (Rev 14:10–11). However, some care must be taken when understanding this language of divine wrath:
Since mankind cannot judge of those things but by the sensations which those things excite in us; and since these excited sensations bare no real resemblance with the objects that excite them; Our conceptions of GOD, founded upon those sensations which we call the perceptions of his wrath or anger, may also have nothing in them resembling any reality in the divine: In likeness of those sensations which we call pain, sickness, pleasure, smells, colours, tastes, sounds, have nothing resembling them in the objects themselves that raise them in us, have no correspondent reality existing in the bodies felt, heard, or seen.
By this way of thinking the sensations of God’s wrath, revenge or anger (excited in the minds of reprobates by the light of their reason and remonstrations of a dissatisfied conscience) are like the yellowness of objects to a jaundiced eye; which exists not in the objects of its vision . . . but is the mere effects of an inward distemper. (201)
We can speak about God’s wrath, but such language expresses how sinners perceive the experience of being handed over by God to their own sin—how it feels to them—rather than telling us about God’s own inner feelings or disposition. (This is very similar to William Law’s view, and indeed the view of many of the church fathers.) He later adds:
Wherefore, althou’ the LORD may seem to them that suffer to be an angry GOD, and a devouring fire; yet the blessed (whose eyes are clear and strong to see through the vail of wrath, into his real character) perceive with all joy and complacency that such anger and such fire are emergent from love only, and that it can only burn up what if heterogenial to true life, can only consume what ought to die; namely, that spirit in us which lives to the ruin of ourselves and others: and this done, all will be well again. (392)
Indeed, the pains of divine wrath experienced by the soul that rejects God’s gift of righteousness are in fact the pains that arise from within a sinful soul when it is left alone to curve in on itself and experience its own endarkened and empty self (410).200
At death, all descend to Hades—but to different zones of it: some to zones of blessing and comfort, others to zones of punishment (including gehenna,201 tartarus, and the abyss). Once the day of judgment arrives, all those not deemed worthy of the paradise of God go away to the lake of fire, the second death. But this is not the end of their story. According to Stonehouse, the promise that “there shall be no more death” (Rev 21:4), includes the lake of fire. This second death is that “which will destroy horribly all the enemies of our LORD, yet as a destroyer it is itself [styled] his enemy. I Cor. xv.26. The last enemy that is to be invalidated is death. And being our LORD’s enemy, that is his last enemy, it must itself likewise lastly cease to be” (280; Letter XIV).
Death is a “strange work of God” that is “far from being agreeable to him” (290), yet in the providence of God it still serves a purpose in bringing about the gathering together in the fullness of time all things in Christ—“our LORD’s severest dispensations of judgment, are only accessories to those of his benevolence and whether he brings evil or good upon us, still it all comes from the bowels of his love, and in his faithful provision for our truest happiness” (292).
The latter part of the first volume (Letters XVII–XXIII) and the beginning of the second volume are given over to a consideration of alleged “problem passages” in the Bible. We shall briefly consider three to give a flavor of his approach.
Regarding the aiōnial life of the sheep and the aiōnail punishment of the goats (in the aiōnial fire) in Matthew 25:46, Stonehouse predictably argues that neither the life nor the punishment and fire are described as eternal but as age-long. He then imagines the obvious response from his critic:
But, you say, how then can you prove the eternal happiness of the saints? This is easy to be done (tho’ not from the passage before us . . .) from the many other scripture passages where the immortality of christians is expressly declared.
The æonian life of christians arises from the principle of immortality in them, which they derive from Christ, and which will also carry them thro’ all the æons into eternity: but the wick
ed, not having this principle in them for the power of their existence in the æonian periods, will be in a state of misery, whence will insue their corruption, and finally death. (359–61)
Regarding Judas, and Jesus’ comment that “it had been good for him, if that man had not been born” (Matt 26:24), Stonehouse argues that it was a proverbial saying, containing allusions to sentiments expressed by Jeremiah (20:11–18) and Job (3:2–9).
But these words of our LORD, thus understood, import no more than that it had been better for that man that he had died in his mother’s womb; that he had proved an abortive birth; that he had been carried from the womb to the grave. . . . If Judas had died in his mother’s womb, he still would have been a man . . . and at the same time he would not have been the betrayer of his LORD and redeemer, and so would have escaped the curse which was the horrible issue of his treachery. (396–97)
On the threat of the fire of gehenna in Mark 9:43–48: the words mean no more (or less) than that fire cannot be quenched nor the worms die, but will most certainly continue their work unhindered until it is completed. The italicized words, argues Stonehouse, are clearly intended by Jesus to be supplied by his audience. He provides numerous biblical parallels in which similar information is implicit but unstated. This is reinforced by the OT texts and phrases alluded to by Jesus in the saying (Jer 7:4; 17:27; Isa 66:24), in which we find “unquenchable fire” that is clearly not fire that burns forever, but fire that burns until its task is complete (URFD, Letter I).
A Larger Hope 2 Page 13