278. McClymond, Devil’s Redemption, 595–98.
279. Richard Wright was the minister of the General Baptist Church in Wisbech, East Anglia.
280. Quoted in Brown, English Baptists, 108.
281. The drift toward heterodoxy among the General Baptists led Dan Taylor to break away and set up the New Connexion of General Baptists. This orthodox strand of Arminian Baptists later merged with the Calvinistic Baptists to form the Baptist Union.
282. See, for instance, Elhanan Winchester’s Defence of Revelation (1796), a published response to Thomas Paine’s infamous Age of Reason (1794).
283. Sources on Ballou include Ballou, Biography of Rev. Hosea Ballou (though this was written from the perspective of a devoted son immediately upon the death of his father); Whittemore, Life of Rev. Hosea Ballou (which is tedious and suffers from not knowing what to leave out); Safford, Hosea Ballou; Cassara, Hosea Ballou (far and away the best biography); Miller, Larger Hope, vol. 1, ch. 6 (with a focus on theology).
284. Ballou always prepared his sermons, but delivered them extempore, without any notes.
285. There were always somewhat awkward relations with Paul Dean, John Murray’s successor at the First Society of Universalists.
286. Formal creeds were regarded with great suspicion by the universalists, but the pragmatic situation made it prudent. The Winchester Profession, accepted at Winchester, New Hampshire, was a modification of the 1790 Philadelphia Articles. It was the “profession” of the denomination throughout the nineteenth century.
287. A complete flop.
288. The Universalist Expositor (1830–31) and Expositor and Universalist Review (1833–40).
289. In, for instance, his unitarianism, his Arian Christology, his focus on God’s commitment to “happify” human beings, his notion that sin causes misery to the sinner.
290. Cassara, Hosea Ballou, ch. 5.
291. The page numbers in this section come from the 1812 reprint edition of the Treatise on the Atonement.
292. One theme that remained constant throughout his life was the conviction inherited from his Calvinist roots and reinforced by Ferdinand Olivier Petitpierre’s book Thoughts on the Divine Goodness (Amsterdam, 1786) that God was completely sovereign over every single event in the history of creation. Nothing happens that has not been ordained by God. In this he found common ground with Relly and Murray, and disagreed with Stonehouse, Chauncy, and Winchester, among others. To his mind, theological determinism was the guarantee that God would achieve his purpose to save all people.
293. Cassara, Hosea Ballou, 134–35.
294. Ballou, Examination of the Doctrine of Future Retribution, 24.
295. Cassara, Hosea Ballou, 151.
296. Far and away the most thorough study is Miller, Larger Hope; but see also Cassara, Universalism in America; Williams, American Universalism; Eddy, Universalism in America; Bressler, Universalist Movement in America, 1770–1880 and the numerous helpful articles on the Online Dictionary of Unitarian and Universalist Biography.
297. Miller, Larger Hope, 1.132.
298. Quoted in Williams, American Universalism, 45.
299. On all these issues, see especially Miller, Larger Hope, which explores them all in great detail.
300. Quoted in Williams, American Universalism, 77.
301. Cassara, Universalism in America, 39.
10
Romantic Universalism in the Continental Mainstream
Schleiermacher and Blumhardt
It is time to consider the continuing story of universalism outside of the Universalist denomination. It would be true to say that there was no such thing as Christian universalism as a distinct movement within the mainstream churches. In contrast to the eighteenth century, what we find is individuals within various denominations reaching universalist conclusions and making them public in some way or other, but not seeking to set up some distinctively universalist church outside the established churches. Rather, they were content to remain where they were, even if they sought in various ways to broaden the traditions within which they resided by arguing for the permissibility of belief in—or at least the tentative hope for—the salvation of all people.
There is a very distinctive “feel” to the versions of universalism espoused in the nineteenth century that sets them apart somewhat from their predecessors, especially in their British manifestations (as we shall see in subsequent chapters). This change seems to reflect wider cultural shifts, and a more “liberal” approach to religion. Its contours should become clear by the end of the section.
To begin, we shall move back from America to Continental Europe, and consider the significant theological work of Friedrich Schleiermacher.
Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834)
Friedrich Schleiermacher was a hugely important Christian theologian, albeit a controversial one, and is generally regarded as the father of modern liberal theology.302 For the purposes of our story, he is perhaps the first significantly influential scholarly theologian to embrace universalism since the time of the church fathers.
Schleiermacher was born and raised in Prussia, the son of a Reformed pastor, and was educated at a Moravian Pietistic school, and then at the more liberal University of Halle. While he moved away from the conservative Calvinism of his upbringing, he always remained deeply influenced by the Augustinian and Reformed traditions within which he continued to locate himself.
Schleiermacher was a New Testament exegete, a translator, a philosopher (doing groundbreaking work in hermeneutical theory), and a theologian at the Universities of Halle (1804–7) and then Berlin (1808–34), as well as being a full-time pastor for nearly forty years and a leading player in attempts to unify Lutheran and Reformed churches in Prussia. He published many works, but the most important was his systematic theology, The Christian Faith (1820–21). It is here, and in his essay On the Doctrine of Election, published in 1819, that he develops his thoughts on universal salvation.303
It is interesting to observe that Schleiermacher seems to have come to universalist conclusions through his own reflections on the mainstream Reformed tradition, rather than through having read or conversed with other universalist theologians. Thus, we shall see that Schleiermacher’s universalism has its own distinctive shape—with certain features that are possibly unprecedented in universalist history.304
The feeling of absolute dependence
The striking innovation of Schleiermacher’s approach to theology is that he grounded human piety and theology not in reason, as some of his contemporaries were trying to do, but in “feeling,” in self-consciousness. Simply by virtue of being human, we find themselves with an innate sense of the divine, what Schleiermacher refers to as a feeling of “absolute dependence” on a transcendent Other: “The common element in all howsoever diverse expressions of piety . . . is this: the consciousness of being absolutely dependent, or, which is the same thing, of being in relation with God.”305 This is the seed from which all human rational reflection on God grows. It is also the seed from which religious community grows, for such a “God-consciousness” inevitably tends toward community-formation as people recognize in others that same sense of the divine that they themselves have. This is the basis for the formation of the church. It is also, as we shall see, one of the bases of his universalism. All human beings are created with a sense of absolute dependence on the divine Other—created, as Augustine may say, with a heart that is restless until it finds rest in God. Even those blinded to this by sin are not beyond the divine enlightenment that reawakens the heart to God.
Sin, understood in these generic terms, is that which stops or diverts the healthy development of our God-consciousness. Sin is, in effect, a “God-forgetfulness.”306 Accord
ing to Schleiermacher, redemption is then to be understood in terms of the divine rekindling in darkened humans of this inner awareness of God. God does this through Christ, whose own perfect God-consciousness becomes the means by which we recover our own sensus divinitatis through fellowship with him.
Church and world
This divine enlightenment, however, does not occur instantaneously (for any individual) nor simultaneously (for humanity as a whole). Schleiermacher makes a sharp distinction between the church and the world, between those who are redeemed and those who are perishing. The church, a subset of humanity, is the community of the redeemed, those who have been regenerated through Christ. But the church is located in the context of a wider world that does not participate in salvation in Christ.
He speaks of the world/church relationship as that of two circles: the world is the outer circle—the set of all human beings—while the church is the inner circle, the set of regenerated human beings. The inner circle enjoys sanctification and salvation, while the outer circle enjoys preparatory grace as God works within it, bringing people to the point of embracing the gospel. Unbelievers are “called,” when they hear the gospel preached, but not thereby “chosen” (in one sense at least). The chosen, or elect, are those that God enables to believe the gospel. (We shall return to this notion soon in order to qualify it.)
The relationship between the two circles, the inner and the outer, is thus dynamic. The inner circle of the church grows as people enter it from the outer circle.307 Schleiermacher’s eschatological hope, as we shall see, was that it would one day expand to the size of the outer circle—at that point, all humans would be part of the church, the redeemed.
Providence and election
In accordance with his tradition, Schleiermacher is committed to a very strong view of divine providence, the notion that everything that happens in history happens as a result of God’s sovereign will. (This even includes the fall of Adam and Eve into sin and death.)308 Unlike some universalists, Schleiermacher had no time for views in which humans could mess up God’s plans, even slightly. God’s will is done—always.
This view of sovereignty has implications for redemption. Schleiermacher is a fierce opponent of the idea that we can do anything to merit our salvation; indeed, because of our sin, we cannot even generate faith in our hearts. In other words, apart from God’s action in us we cannot even believe the gospel and we cannot be saved. The flip-side of that is that God’s saving grace in us is irresistible—if God enables faith in us then we will believe. This means that for Schleiermacher, as for the mainstream Reformed tradition, those currently outside the church and salvation are there because God has not yet enabled them to believe. Those in the church are those that God has chosen to believe the gospel now.
Why does God discriminate between people in this way? We do not (and cannot) know, he says, and it is not our place to question it. It is simply part of the wisdom of God’s governance of the world.309 But one thing that we can know is that this division between people has no basis in the persons themselves, as if some have more merit or are worthier than others. All humans are equally powerless in sin and equally lost, apart from divine grace.
Where Schleiermacher departs from the mainstream Reformed tradition is that he does not see this division between lost and saved as permanent. It is one thing to recognize that God does not save everyone all at once—this seems an undeniable state of affairs; but it is quite another to propose that God plans to leave things that way for eternity.
While Christian sympathy is not disquieted by the earlier and later adoption of one and another individual into the fellowship of redemption, yet on the other hand there does remain an insoluble discord if, on the assumption of survival after death, we are to think of a part of the human race as entirely excluded from fellowship. . . . [I]f only everyone who has lagged behind us is some time or another taken up into living fellowship with Christ, our sympathetic concern can accept the fact with perfect satisfaction without any contradiction arising between it and our God-consciousness.310
All human beings stand in solidarity in that they are all equally created to be conscious of God, are all are equally lost in sin and undeserving of salvation, and are all redeemed in Christ, for redemption is “universally and completely accomplished by Jesus of Nazareth.”311 There is no basis for an eternal discrimination between the two circles. After all, on what grounds would one postulate such an eternal distinction within the human race? Perhaps something of merit among the elect? But that is Pelagianism! As a Reformed theologian, Schleiermacher insisted that if there is eternal perdition then it must be grounded in God’s decree, but such a decree would be sheer caprice! And, writes Schleiermacher, “I know of no way in which [the doctrine of eternal damnation] can be reconciled with the universal love of God.”312
So what of the doctrine of election? Schleiermacher rejects the idea popular with many Calvinists that God elects some to salvation and elects others to damnation (the so-called double decree). He also argues that the claim popular among Lutherans of his day that God elects some to salvation but simply passes over the rest (rather than electing them for damnation) really amounts to the same thing as the double-decree. After all, on that latter view God is still actively choosing to let someone go to hell forever, rather than redeeming them, so the problem with election remains.
Schleiermacher’s alternative view is that there is a single decree to salvation for all humanity. God foreordains the redemption of humanity: this single decree concerns the human race, rather than individuals as such, but the race cannot be saved without all its component parts (the universal and the particular are, according to Schleiermacher, inseparable in God’s thought).313 “The truth of the matter . . . is that only one divine decree can be assumed, one that embraces all, namely the decree concerning the arrangement within which those of the mass [of humanity] who are capable of individual spiritual life are gradually quickened.”314
Only once we have let go of the particular . . . and have, instead of this, broken into contemplating things as a whole, are we convinced . . . that one cannot speak, in particular, of a divine decree concerning each individual person. Rather, we can say that there is one divine decree by which God determines what will become of each and every human being and thus that this is not at all different from the order according to which the dead mass is quickened by the divine Spirit.315
This single degree covers everything, including the staggered entry of the human race into life.
We can still speak of God rejecting or passing over people, distinguishing between elect and non-elect, but we can only do so in a limited sense, i.e., that at this present moment God is choosing to pass over this person rather than to bring them into the church.316 We need to grasp that for Schleiermacher “election and rejection of any individual are the two contrasting, yet correlated, aspects of the one single divine decree, ‘whereby through divine power, yet in a natural way, the human race is to be transformed into the spiritual body of Christ.’”317 So the reprobate are simply the not-yet-saved, those currently passed-over by grace. But they remain loved by God, who has eternally and unconditionally decreed their redemption, their participation in the fellowship of Christ.
Given that many are clearly unredeemed at the time of their deaths, that their foreordination to salvation has not been fulfilled, one can postulate that death is not the end of the journey: “the state in which he [the unrepentant] dies is only an intermediate state.”318 Death and damnation is a step along the road, not the end of it: “because damnation is taken to be a necessary stage, it must also be a stage of development. . . . [T]he damned likewise cannot be excluded from being objects of the divine love since everything that belongs to the ordered world of human life must be an object of the divine attributes.”319
This view, Schleiermacher thinks, elevates the work of Christ higher than the mainstream tradition is able to. Here Christ work
s for the salvation of all, rather than just some (contra Calvinism), and his work is efficacious for all, rather than just for some (contra Lutheranism).320
Schleiermacher’s view of the final consummation is necessarily corporate—the final perfection of humanity as the church, the body of Christ, in an eternal indissoluble fellowship with Christ and with each other. Here God-consciousness, which is necessarily consciousness of others who share that same consciousness, is complete. “[W]hen human development has reached its telos, and the human race is the body of Christ, these differentiated human levels [i.e., the differences between the world and the church] will have been resolved as the plentitude of humanity existent as the singularity of the body of Christ, joined to the head.”321
Schleiermacher’s understanding of the corporate solidarity of humanity also raised a serious problem for the traditional notion of hell. For Schleiermacher, humans who become more conscious of God are actually recovering something fundamental to their humanity, and as their personal consciousness draws closer to what he calls their “race-consciousness” they become more aware of their solidarity with other humans. So a growing God-consciousness inevitably leads to a growing sense of sympathy and fellow-feeling for other humans, even the reprobate. The consequence of this is that the misery of the damned diminishes the blessedness of the redeemed, and if some people are damned forever then the redeemed can never achieve complete happiness.322 This is perhaps the most influential of Schleiermacher’s arguments for universalism.323
A Larger Hope 2 Page 22