Ballou tries to show that many of the biblical texts about the fires of hell are aimed at salvation. His hermeneutical key for understanding all texts about the fire that causes suffering to the wicked is 1 Corinthians 3:15: “If any man’s works shall be burnt, he shall suffer loss, but he himself shall be saved, yet so as by fire.” This fire has the power of salvation, and it is this fire that Ballou sees whenever Scripture speaks of the fire of divine judgment (154). Ballou’s biblical exegesis, while clearly very much his own, bears similarities to the allegorical exegesis of John Murray. Ultimately, what is destroyed is the sinful Adamic nature (the hay, wood, and stubble), not the sinner.
Hell is the state in which the human sinful condition meets the fire of divine revelation. He likens it to a traveler who rests in a dark cave for the night, unaware that it is filled with poisonous snakes. He is unperturbed by the snakes until the sun rises in the morning, and by its light he sees the serpents and is deeply distressed. But it is not the light of heaven that torments him; it is the snakes. The light simply enables him to see them as they are. So too, God’s divine fire reveals to us the nature of our sin and fills us with torment (161). This is hell.
He seeks to build a positive biblical case for universalism from the by-now familiar proof texts. Some of his key texts, however, are a little more unusual. For instance, Psalm 72:11, which says “Yea, all kings shall fall down before him; all nations shall serve him.” Such submission and service, he argues, cannot take place if most kings and nations exist in endless rebellion in hell. On the contrary, Scripture teaches that all people come from God, that God wills all to be saved, that Christ died to save everyone, and that God “works all things after the council of his own will” (Eph 1:11). So we know God has revealed his will on this matter—that all should be “holy and happy” in the end—and we know that he will accomplish all of his purposes. QED.
If the servants of Christ here on earth desire the increase in holiness, and the decrease of sin, which would be most agreeable to such a desire, the belief, that the greatest part of mankind will grow more and more sinful to all eternity; or, to believe, that sin will continually decrease, and righteousness increase, until the former is wholly destroyed, and the latter becomes universal? (218)
In 1832, Ballou published a revision of the Treatise. By this time his thinking had moved on, so he cut various passages and rewrote others in some significant ways. Ernest Cassara identifies the following changes:293
1.Ballou moves away from the somewhat fanciful claim that God first created humans in Christ (spirit) and then formed them in Adam (flesh), though he still affirms that humans are both of heaven and of the dust, and he still sees the cause of sin as linked with the conditions of embodiment.
2.He now denies Christ’s preexistence, perhaps under the influence of the writings of Joseph Priestly, though he still believes that God invested Christ with the power necessary to make atonement.
3.On the issue of hell texts, he now interprets them as references to the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD, rather than to the destruction of the Adamic nature.
So even though Ballou’s major theological reconfiguration was complete by 1805, he continued to develop his thought, sometimes in significant ways.
The Restorationist controversy (1817–31)
One of the issues that had divided the movement from the start was the matter of punishment in the afterlife. This issue was to raise its head again and became a significant controversy within the young denomination.
Ballou was somewhat undecided on the issue for some years. In some correspondence from 1797 he denied future punishment, then later changed his mind and affirmed it. Very unusually for a universalist book, his Atonement volume in 1805 did not even raise, let alone seek to answer, the question, reflecting his ambivalence. A key turning point came with a series of letters between Ballou and his friend Edward Turner, published in The Gospel Visitant from 1817–18. The aim of the letters was to show both sides of the question so readers could better appreciate the issues. Ballou let Turner pick which side to defend. Turner picked the view that the wicked would be punished in the afterlife and Ballou therefore argued against it. This exercise forced Hosea to think through his own position more carefully, and as a result he became forever convinced that there would indeed be no suffering for anyone after death.
The traditional universalist view, defended by Turner, became known as restorationism, while Ballou’s view became known as ultra-universalism. Ballou had stumbled his way toward ultra-universalism over a period of years, but it was really the logical outworking of the perspectives he defended in his Treatise in 1805, as we shall see.
After the published debate, Ballou then started preaching ultra-universalism at his Boston church, though he was much more restrained in The Universalist Magazine. However, when he stepped down from editing the magazine in 1820, his successor encouraged regular discussion on the restorationist issue, first in the main articles and then in the letters pages. Thus, the temperate debate sparked by Ballou and Turner’s original correspondence was fanned into flame and then a forest fire within the denomination, with key pastors lining up on both sides. The whole discussion became very hot-tempered, with personalities playing as strong a role as theology in the disputes. In the end, after several twists and turns, a small group of eight restorationist pastors left and set up their own short-lived society in 1831. Most of the restorationists chose to stay, wounds were healed, and things settled down.
There is some irony in the fact that, while Ballou’s ultra-universalism had come to dominate within the denomination in the 1830s, its triumph was short-lived, and even before he died in 1852 restorationism had become the dominant view again; by the end of the century, ultra-universalism was virtually extinct among the Universalists. But Ballou never gave up his ultra-universalism and published his mature thoughts on the matter in An Examination of the Doctrine of Future Retribution in 1834.
In understanding Ballou’s view, we need to make clear that while it may seem superficially similar to Relly’s and Murray’s, it was, in fact, very different. First of all, it was different in that Rellyans were prepared to see some suffering for people after death—albeit self-inflicted mental wounds resulting from their ignorance of the fact that God has redeemed them, rather than punishments from God. Ballou saw no suffering of any kind after death, which earned his position the name “death and glory.” Second of all, it was different because the rationale behind the view was completely unlike that of the Rellyans. They denied punishment after death because of their view of the atonement as a universal penal substitution. We have seen, however, that Ballou vigorously rejected this model of atonement. His reason for denying postmortem pains was very different.
Ballou argued that teaching about future rewards and punishments is actually ineffective as a motivation for good living. Time and time again people show that they will act in a way that they believe will bring them pleasure in this life, even if it is something that they are told will bring them misery in the next. So threatening hell is morally ineffective. Threats of hell also fail to generate love for the good, creating, at best, fear. They are also are pernicious, for they present us a view of God that is “unlovely and unworthy of being loved.”294
Ballou believed that sin generates misery here and now and that righteousness brings joy here and now. If people are to be motivated to live well, they need to learn to appreciate that sin only falsely promises a joy that it cannot really deliver, that sin is in fact inherently horrible. When people grasp this, they will be sufficiently motivated to live godly lives.
Ballou sought to show that the Bible only speaks of suffering for sin in this life. Beginning in Eden, he argues that Adam was not threatened with afterlife punishment. Continuing through the Old Testament, he seeks to show that it cannot be found there either. Jesus is then interpreted against the background of OT prophetic discourse, speaking symbolica
lly of punishment in this world, with gehenna referring not to hell, but to the destruction of Jerusalem. The warnings of coming judgment in the Epistles are also seen in this way.
The reason why suffering ends at death is fundamentally tied up with Ballou’s anthropology and his understanding of sin. Suffering for sin only exists for as long as one is sinning. Once one ceases to sin and asks for forgiveness, suffering vanishes too. Now sin arises from the human condition of embodiment. But once the body is dissolved in death, then all carnal desire ceases and all sin ceases. Consequently, all suffering for sin is banished. Ballou’s theological system cannot find a place for suffering in the afterlife. For it to continue would require sin to continue, which would create all sorts of theological problems for him.
Ballou’s end
Ballou was a revered and loved patriarch within the denomination by the time he died in 1852. When he began his ministry, the Universalists were a small and despised group, but that changed dramatically.
By 1840 the faith was prospering in all the states and territories of the young nation. There were almost seven hundred societies, with 311 preachers—and these figures were to almost double in the remaining dozen years of Ballou’s life. At his death there would be more than 800,000 adherents to the faith. How things had changed since his young manhood, when a handful of preachers served the faithful.295
One of the changes within the movement was already beginning to make itself felt before Ballou’s death: from the late 1840s, the impact of German higher critical approaches to the Bible was seen among the younger preachers. Ballou and many in the older generation were unhappy about such skepticism toward Gospel miracles and undermining of biblical authority. He felt that the faith would be damaged by such views, and for a while the new thinking was held at bay.
The Universalist Denomination in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century
The history of the Universalist denomination is recounted in numerous studies, and there is a lot that could be said.296 Our focus in this book, however, is on the theology of key individuals, with a particular focus on mainstream Christian orthodoxy. Thus, having considered the transitional figure of Ballou, we shall take our leave of the denomination, given that it placed itself outside Christian orthodoxy and that its history is already easily available. Nevertheless, it would be negligent not to gesture at some of the significant themes and trends among the Universalists over the rest of the nineteenth century and on into the twentieth.
Universalists were very active in various social and political causes. “The emphasis in the 1840s and 1850s and for many decades to follow was placed not so much on theological speculation as on the practical and moral side of Universalism, and the translation of its principles into social action.”297 Their belief in the radical equality of all people before God had implications beyond the doctrine of hell. For instance, they were strongly democratic and Republican in their politics and saw Universalism as the version of Christianity that most naturally resonated with the ethos of the newly formed United States of America. Their radical egalitarian theology also served to motivate advocacy for further social change. One such cause from the start was that of the abolition of slavery. Elhanan Winchester and Benjamin Rush had been outspoken opponents of slavery, and in 1790 the Philadelphia convention issued a statement that:
We believe it to be inconsistent with the union of the human race in a common Savior, and the obligations to mutual and universal love, which flow from that union, to hold any part of our fellow creatures in bondage. We therefore recommend a total refraining from the African trade and the adoption of prudent measures for the gradual abolition of slavery of the negroes in our country, and for the education of their children in English literature, and the principles of the Gospel.298
Their ethical and political stance here arose from the theological, and Universalists remained consistently abolitionist throughout the nineteenth century.
Another common concern among Universalists was the rights of women. They admitted women into their colleges on the same basis as men and were the first denomination to officially ordain women to the ministry (starting with Olympia Brown in 1863). Thereafter they had many female leaders, many of whom were also active in the women’s suffrage movement or other causes (e.g., Clara Barton, who founded the American Red Cross). Further causes championed by Universalists included temperance, penal reform, and abolition of the death penalty (all following directly upon their rethinking the penal theology of hell), fair labor arrangements, humane treatment of animals, dignified treatment of children, and so on.299
Universalists were also very busy in printing and disseminating their newspapers, pamphlets, and books. Indeed, Richard Eddy notes 2,013 universalist publications between 1750 and 1889, with the low point being 1750–59 and 1760–69 (with only four publications in each decade), and the height of activity being 1830–39 (378 publications) and 1840–49 (351 publications). A rapid rise indeed in the number of universalist books! This dropped off during the Civil War (only 159 publications between 1860–69), and only picked up slightly thereafter.
German higher criticism of the Bible and Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection (1859) began to stir discussion within the denomination, as it did in the Christian mainstream. The eventual result of those contentious debates was a general assimilation of and accommodation to the new ideas. While the Universalists had always been a Bible-based denomination, they had also stressed the importance of reason. Now reason was calling for a rethink of the Bible itself, and so the Universalist’s theology of the Bible became increasingly liberal, perceiving God as revealing himself in Scripture through imperfect men and their fallible writings. Similarly, evolutionary theory was not some road to atheism, but pointed to the work of the great Designer. Some of the denomination’s intellectuals who helped midwife the new thinking were Orello Cone (1835–1905), a well-known biblical scholar, and Thomas B. Thayer (1812–86), a leading theologian.
Darwinian thinking, along with the general cultural optimism of the nineteenth century, led Universalist theology—with its stress on rationality—in new directions. For instance, toward the end of the century there was a growing discomfort with the notion of a fall from grace into sin. The Darwinian trajectory was one of gradual ascent to higher forms, not a depressing descent. This transformation of Universalist theology continued on into the twentieth century with a trend away from emphasizing the uniqueness of Jesus and Christianity and a growing inclination toward humanism and religious pluralism. This change, which was gradual and contested, marked a stark departure from the earlier theology of the movement. In 1870 a pluralist understanding of the church and salvation was very much a minority position, but by 1946 it was the dominant view among Universalists. Indeed, some looked for an evolution of religion beyond Christianity. The Humiliati, a fellowship based at Tufts University from 1945 onward, adopted a symbol with the cross demoted from the center. Their rationale was that “Christianity is not central or even necessary to Universalism. . . . The important feature of the symbol is the circle, not the cross.”300
Christianity has been a significant step along the road, but universalism can be found in all religions and it, not Christian faith, is the higher form into which religion is evolving.
The patterns in growth changed significantly. The hostility of the mainstream churches to the idea of universalism subsided and, as a consequence, those who would have otherwise been drawn out of the traditional churches into the Universalist denomination by the idea found that they could embrace it where they were. In addition, the increasing movement of Universalism away from its biblical roots and Christian orthodoxy would not have endeared it to most Christians exploring the wider hope. “Whereas in 1888 Universalism was claimed to be the sixth largest denomination in the United States, by the second quarter of the twentieth century it was on its way to becoming one of the smallest.”301
In the late nineteen
th and twentieth century, there were various discussions of mergers with other likeminded bodies. Eventually, after many decades of on-and-off negotiations, the longstanding love-hate relationship between the Universalists and the Unitarians came to an end and the two bodies merged to form the Unitarian Universalist Association in 1961.
It is time to take our leave of the organized Universalist movement of nineteenth- and twentieth-century America and move on to consider universalists within mainstream Christianity. We shall begin our explorations in Continental Europe with two outstanding men: the celebrated Reformed theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher and the influential Lutheran pastor Johann Christoph Blumhardt.
274. E.g., Murray, Letters and Sketches of Sermons, 1.254.
275. There were few exceptions. “After Murray’s death in 1815 the only clergy known to be preaching trinitarian universalism were Paul Dean in Boston and [Edward] Mitchell in New York—and he was never in formal fellowship” (Miller, Larger Hope, 1.105). In fact, Dean was actually a modalist, like his mentor John Murray. A more unusual exception is First Universalist Church in Providence, Rhode Island (founded in 1821). To this day it is trinitarian and publicly affirms both the Apostles’ Creed and the Nicene Creed.
276. See Miller, Larger Hope, vol. 1, chap. 6.
277. In one awkward incident in 1798, Ballou was filling the pulpit in Boston for John Murray while Murray was away. He preached a subordinationist Christology from 1 Corinthians 15:26–28. Judith Murray was incensed and sent a message to be read out after the closing prayer declaring, “I wish to give notice that the doctrine preached here this afternoon is not the doctrine which is usually preached in this house.” (This was seen as a very rude thing to do and the parish committee later apologized to Ballou.) John Murray was candid in his appreciation of Ballou, but also in his disagreement. Murray did not invite Ballou to the installation of Edward Mitchell as Murray’s (brief) successor in Boston in 1810. He expressed his joy at the absence of “a Socinian, Deistical, Sadducean Universalist”—presumably Ballou! (This is as reported in a letter by George Richards to Edwin Turner of Salem.)
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