326. Friedrich Schelling (1775–1854) defended a version of universalism. He considered 1 Corinthians 15:28 to contain the “most profound” words in the New Testament. See McClymond, Devil’s Redemption, 657–64.
327. For example, Blanchard argues that Albrecht Ritschl (1822–89) “had universalist leanings,” though he never explicitly endorsed universalism. See Blanchard, Will All Be Saved? 100–101. Another liberal theologian of note who defended universalism was Adolf von Harnack (1851–1930).
328. Winn, Jesus Is Victor, 67–68.
329. Helpful biographies of Blumhardt are Ising, Johann Christoph Blumhardt and Macchia, Spirituality and Social Liberation. On Blumhardt’s sympathy with universalism, see Groth, “Chiliasmus und Apokatastasishoffnung”; Macchia, Spirituality and Social Liberation; and Winn, Jesus Is Victor, 106–8. For Blumhardt’s healing ministry in the wider context of healing movements, see Robinson, Divine Healing, ch. 2.
330. Blumhardt, Täglich Brod (Meditation on 16th July 1879).
331. Johann was a very close friend with the son of the leader of the community.
332. Johann’s son, Christoph Blumhardt (1842–1919), took over the work at Bad Boll after his father’s death. He too gained a reputation for his divine healing and deliverance ministry. He also took his father’s kingdom theology and worked it out in the socioeconomic and political sphere, becoming one of the founders of Christian Socialism in Germany and Switzerland, serving in parliament. He was also a pacifist strongly opposed to the First World War. On Christoph Blumhardt’s theology, see Zahl, Pneumatology and Theology of the Cross, and Winn, Jesus Is Victor, ch. 3.
333. This was not an uncommon move in some circles. The most famous name associated with it is the medieval Sicilian millennialist and mystic Joachim of Fiore (ca. 1135–1202).
334. See “The New Heart” in Blumhardt, Gospel Sermons, 220.
335. See “The Great Flood of the Spirit” in Blumhardt, Gospel Sermons, 72. Italics added.
336. See “The People’s Feast and Its Effect” in Blumhardt, Gospel Sermons, 277. Italics added.
337. Winn, Jesus Is Victor, 95.
338. Johann was not always a universalist, but his later theology had a clear shift in that direction. See especially Groth, “Chiliasmus und Apokatastasishoffnung.”
339. Blumhardt, Evangelienpredigten auf alle Sonn, 190. Quoted in Groth, “Chiliasmus und Apokatastasishoffnung,” 91. Italics added.
340. Blumhardt, Die Verkündigung, 102–3. Quoted in Winn, Jesus Is Victor, 105–6.
341. Blumhardt, “Do Not Worry!” in Gospel Sermons, 53. Italics added.
342. Blumhardt, Die Verkündigung, 102–3. Quoted in Winn, Jesus Is Victor, 105–6.
343. Blumhardt, Blätter aus Bad Boll, 218–19 (unpublished translation by the Brüderhof). Blumhardt’s Gospel Sermons reveal clear universalist rhetoric in a number of the sermons: “When Will the Kingdom of God Come?” (on Luke 17:20–25; pp. 258, 260–61); “The Legacy of the Departing Savior” (on Luke 24:49–53; pp. 23–24); “Into the Kingdom of Life” (on Col 1:12–14; p. 33); “Do Not Worry!” (on Ps 55:22; p. 53); “The Little Flock” (on Luke 12:32; p. 77); “The Great Flood of the Spirit” (on Isa 44:1–5; p. 72); “The Peoples’ Feast and Its Effects” (on Isa 25:6–9; p. 277); “Without Ceasing” (on 1 Thess 5:17; p. 138); “The Wise Men’s Star” (on Matt 2:1–12; pp. 228–30); “The Fight for the Kingdom” (on Matt 6:13; p. 274); “The New Heart” (on Jer 24:7; p. 220). He clearly believes that the judgment day will bring disaster for the impenitent, but he sees the judgment as aiming at their ultimate salvation. And while he is open to the theoretical possibility of annihilation for the super-hardened (260–61), he speaks mostly as though he does not expect such a possibility to be realized. Rather, he seems cautiously confident that all will be saved.
344. Winn, Jesus Is Victor, 108.
345. Ising, Johann Christoph Blumhardt, 406.
346. Christoph, like his father, embraced universalism. He wrote, “There can be no question of God’s giving up anything or anyone in the whole world, either today or in all eternity. The end has to be: Behold, everything is God’s!” Quoted in Moltmann, “Logic of Hell,” 47.
347. On which see especially Winn, Jesus Is Victor, which is a study specifically about the influence of the Blumhardts on Barth.
348. Consider: “My ‘Theology of Hope’ has two roots: Christoph Blumhardt and Ernst Bloch” (Moltmann, “Hope for the Kingdom of God,” 4). Of these two, Blumhardt was the most important. On Blumhardt’s influence on Moltmann, see Winn, “Before Bloch.”
11
Universalism in Great Britain I
Thomas Erskine, Romantic Pioneer
The Life of Thomas Erskine (1788–1870)
The name of Thomas Erskine is not well-known in contemporary theology, but in his day he was much discussed and was certainly among the most significant British theologians of the nineteenth century.349 Tübingen theologian Otto Pfleiderer (1839–1908), writing in 1890, said that Erskine, along with John McLeod Campbell (1800–1872), represented “the best contribution to dogmatics which British theology has produced in the present century.”350 Erskine was a pioneer, anticipating several theological themes and ideas that came to dominate subsequent theology. He was also a lightning rod for controversy, most especially in his native Scotland, where conservative Calvinism ruled supreme.
Erskine was born near Dundee, Scotland, son of a Church of Scotland father and an Episcopalian mother. After the death of his father, his maternal grandmother raised Thomas in Airth Castle. While having both Presbyterian and Anglican influences growing up, Erskine was never especially interested in denominationalism and never fully accommodated himself to any one form of Christian worship. He attended Episcopalian, Presbyterian, and Congregational churches.
Unusually for such an influential theologian, Erskine was not a Christian minister of any sort, nor did even he have any formal theological training. (Indeed, it was his lay status that exempted him from some of the ecclesiastical control that could otherwise have sought to constrain his more radical ideas.) Erskine went to Edinburgh University, where he studied law and was admitted to the Faculty of Advocates in 1810. However, in 1816 he inherited a family estate in Linlathen, near Dundee, and retired from the legal world, giving himself to the study of theology and the pursuit of holiness. Although lacking a theology degree, he had a sharp, inquisitive mind, as well as a voracious appetite for learning and for rethinking the theological tradition in ways more relevant to the modern world, influenced as it was by the mood of Romanticism.
Erskine was very well-connected in the Christian world of his day, and was regarded as a good and pious man, even by his outspoken opponents. He knew many of the key ministers in his native Scotland and in England, and he went on three extended tours of Europe to observe and support Protestant missionaries (1822–25, 1826–27, 1837–39), especially in France, Italy, and Switzerland, where he made friends with numerous ministers, theologians, and philosophers. He was also friends with various novelists, poets, and other influential figures. As we shall see, many of the subsequent nineteenth-century universalists owed an intellectual debt of one kind or another to Thomas Erskine, both through his publications and through personal contact.
Erskine’s publications cluster in the period of 1820–37. After that he published no more books prior to his death in 1870, though he did authorize the posthumous publication of some essays and short fragments in The Spiritual Order in 1871. This is where we find perhaps his most overt extended statement of universal salvation in the essay entitled “The Purpose of God.”
Theology
Erskine lived in a rapidly changing world, a world that posed various difficult challenges to traditional Christianity, and he sel
f-consciously set out to construct a theology that he felt was true to Scripture and the tradition, but that also resonated in the cultural climate of his day.
One of the cultural shifts at work during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was a move toward emphasizing the subjective side of reality—the conscience of the individual, and the importance of moral and spiritual transformation, ethics, personal experience, and human feelings. Schleiermacher’s theological project was a Continental attempt to reconstruct theology around such a subjective center; Erskine did something very similar in Britain. (Interestingly, Erskine never refers to Schleiermacher or his work, which is surprising given the number of similarities between them, but there is no question that he knew of it.351)
The theological tradition that Erskine had inherited was that of Scottish Federal Calvinism, which was very much constructed in terms of legal categories: God the Lawgiver and Judge gives and enforces laws, but humans break the laws and thus incur righteous penalties from the Judge. God’s justice demands that the infringements of his holy law be punished by everlasting damnation. The problem is that God cannot simply forgive people without at the same time denying his own justice. This is the dilemma that the gospel provides the solution for: Christ was punished by God for human law-breaking, exhausting his wrath, thereby satisfying the requirement of justice that such violations be punished. Thus, God is now able to forgive us and to legally impute Christ’s own righteous status to us, so that although we are still sinners we are now legally righteous before God (i.e., we are justified). To this it should be added that, according to Calvinism, God only sent Christ to represent and die for the elect, the chosen few, not for all people.
Erskine hated this whole approach to theology, even though his training was in law. He thought that it misrepresented God and misunderstood the real problem of sin and the divine answer found in the gospel. Indeed, as we shall see, he thought it actively stopped people from experiencing the salvation available through Christ. So his mission became that of providing what he considered a more authentically Christian alternative.
Before outlining Erskine’s theology, we need to step back for a moment to appreciate his theological method, for it was different from that of his Calvinist opponents. Critical to Erskine was the authority of our “reason and conscience.” Authentic religion needs to resonate with our inner self, to “ring true,” to witness in our spirits. If I merely accept some theological claim as true on the basis of some external authority (such as the Bible or tradition) then I do not adequately believe it. It is the affirmative response of my reason and my conscience—the inner authorities—that enables me to affirm the teachings of Scripture and tradition and to grasp their truth. Religion, he claims, must be able to make sense of my human experience—my spiritual awareness of divine transcendence, my innate moral sense and my acute awareness of moral failure (both confirmed by my conscience), and human suffering—if it can make any claims to truth. His whole theological method works by taking the importance of subjectivity and its inner authority as core; not as a substitute for Scripture and tradition, but as a way of engaging them.352
God as Father
As a central theological move, Erskine switched the key metaphor for God from Judge to Father, a move he thought justified by the New Testament and one that resonated with his conscience. This switch had far-reaching effects, allowing him to reconfigure theology around an intimate relational image, rather than a forensic and cold one. For Erskine, the unselfish love of God takes center stage. God created all people as his children with the intention of perfecting them in righteousness. Everything that God does in his relation with humans is, according to Erskine, governed by his Fatherly love. Consequently, any theology that proposes unfatherly behavior by God toward humans is anathema. For instance, God is not some indignant King who looks at us with rage for snubbing his authority, nor a Judge who must dispassionately ensure we pay the price for our transgressions; he is a Father who desires to transform us and perfect us.
It is not easy for us to appreciate how novel this approach was in his day, for such was his influence that by the end of the nineteenth century the themes of the Fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man had become mainstream, at least in the liberal tradition. But he, along with his friend John McLeod Campbell, was one of the key pioneers who pointed theology in that direction.
In Erskine’s hands, the doctrines of creation, sin, salvation, election, and judgment are all reconstructed around God’s Fatherhood.
Creation
All humans are created “in the Son” so that they may share in the Son’s eternal relationship with his Father. All human beings are made in the image of God, as children of God. This proposal was novel in the 1820s, and flew in the face of the more common view that we become children of God through faith in Christ (John 1:12). Erskine claimed that, in creation, Christ is the head of humanity, and humanity is his body—a relationship traditionally reserved for the church and Christ.353 In addition, and also very controversially, Erskine claimed that Jesus indwells all human beings by virtue of their creation in Christ. This innate “Jesus light,” which draws us Godward, is what underlies our reason and conscience, and is what Christ seeks to awaken within us by his Spirit through the gospel. Divine revelation will thus resonate with us at the deepest levels of our created being, even if we resist it for a time because of sin. The influence of William Law is clear here and elsewhere.354
Creation itself is not merely ordered according to physical laws, described by the blossoming sciences, but also by spiritual laws, laws of love directed to our spiritual perfection in holiness.355
At the core of his theology of creation lies Erskine’s conviction that God “must create only for good” and that the moral intelligences he creates must be “created to be good” with a goodness that can come only from God’s Son himself, the source of all goodness. So we are created to indwell the Son and to share in his overflowing goodness.356
Sin
But all is not well with creation. Sin diverts humans away from God and their creational purpose in Christ. Sin is not first and foremost the infringement of a law, but the spurning of divine love and the separation of oneself from God and from the human calling to living together in relationship with God. Sin leads to a self-imposed condition of suffering, misery, and death, but it does not lead God to hate us, to spurn us, nor to seek to crush us. He hates sin, because sin damages us. Indeed, his absolute hatred of sin underlies his unwavering commitment to deliver us from it. So we reject God; he does not reject us. God’s “holy love . . . is the union of an infinite abhorrence towards sin, and an infinite love towards the sinner.”357
Salvation and forgiveness
Salvation is not some legal fiction, an “imputed righteousness” that is nothing more than a legal status before God in which God regards us as righteous, even though we are not. Indeed, salvation is not even deliverance from punishment, but is instead a deliverance from sin itself: “Salvation is not forgiveness of sin; it is not the remission of penalty; it is not safety. No, it is the blessed and holy purpose of God’s love accomplished in the fallen creature’s restoration to the divine image.”358 As such, salvation is not a once-and-for-all granting of a legal status, but an ongoing transformation into the image of Christ. As Don Horrocks puts it:
Salvation . . . was not an external forensic fact but existential deliverance from within, a transforming condition of the human soul resulting from the innate, creative power of the gospel to reveal “righteousness,” defined relationally by Erskine as “the loving fatherly purpose of God.” When this was believed . . . the gospel automatically regenerated and justified those appropriating it, resulting in the truth itself becoming personalized within the individual.359
Christ is the agent of salvation. The second person of the Trinity came as a human being and lived as the perfect Son of the Father—totally dependent on him in filial
trust. He was the model human with true faith in God, and we are called to enter into his faith-full relationship with the Father. Reassuringly, the “revelation of the Son . . . gives the fullest and most absolute demonstration that our sin had not made God cease to be our Father, or abandon His purpose of training us into a participation of the Son’s character and blessedness.”360
The death of Christ was not a mechanism to rescue us from punishment or to change God’s attitude toward us. God’s attitude toward us is that of unchanging and unconditional love. The cross displays God’s love for us and, when we inwardly grasp this truth, makes it possible for that divine love to transform us and be formed in us. Our own lives become cross-shaped. Christ thus dies for us as our representative head (but not instead of us as our substitute)—we are then united by the Spirit with him in his death, surrendering our lives to the Father with him, and thereby joining him in his resurrection. In this way, Christ is the one who opens the path for the restoration of human nature. This atonement model is a significant shift away from the penal substitution theory that characterizes Calvinism (and several versions of earlier post-Reformation universalism) and it sets the agenda for nineteenth-century universalism.361
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