A Larger Hope 2

by Robin A Parry

  How, then, is it possible to teach either that God is ‘Love’ or that God commands any duty—unless God has a plan for bringing each and all of us to perfection? . . .

  It is of no use saying that God is just, unless we define what justice is. In all Christian times people have said that “God is just” and have credited him with an injustice such as transcends all human injustice that it is possible to conceive.383

  This is the context within which we should try to understand the series of debates on hell and the scope of salvation that the Church of England found itself embroiled in from the middle of the nineteenth century. We shall briefly sketch these debates to indicate the gradual growing openness on the question of a wider hope.

  Frederick Denison Maurice (1805–72) and the Theological Essays (1853) controversy

  F. D. Maurice was an Anglican priest and Christian Socialist leader who occupied two professorships at King’s College London. He had been brought up Unitarian, but converted to Anglicanism and was a significant and influential theologian within the Broad Church movement.

  A controversy was stirred up over the publication of Maurice’s Theological Essays (1853).384 Theological Essays was written to address Unitarian objections to orthodox Christianity, and it was the final essay on “Eternal Life and Eternal Death”—his response to those who object to Christian orthodoxy because of the doctrine of eternal torment—that was to prove the cause of much controversy.

  Maurice concedes to the critic that many mainstream Christians did indeed embrace such a doctrine, and he laments the fact that some of them, like the Evangelical Alliance, felt the need to make it a nonnegotiable doctrine of the faith on par with the doctrine of the Trinity. He fears that the traditional doctrine of hell plays a key role in bringing the church and its gospel into disrepute, and so he seeks to show that orthodoxy is broad enough to encompass alternative views of eternal punishment.

  Maurice focuses his response on the notion of eternity. The core of his argument is the claim that, in the New Testament, aiōnios (“eternal”) is first and foremost a descriptor of God and his own “eternal” life. It has no temporal connotations; no sense of duration. So it does not mean “everlasting” or “without beginning and end.”385 Indeed, it is not even a negation of time (i.e., atemporal), but is something positive—God’s own life, righteousness, and love.

  In Maurice’s view, this divine usage should determine how we understand the other usages—both eternal life and eternal punishment. Aiōnios is a term denoting the quality, not the quantity, of life (or punishment). Thus, eternal life means a sharing in God’s own life. “The eternal life is the righteousness, and truth, and love of God which are manifest in Christ Jesus” (449).386 Eternal death, on the other hand, is a separation from that life; it is the “punishment of being without the knowledge of God, who is love” (455). Being separated from all God’s attributes, the lost are indeed in hell because all that remains to them is to be locked in their own sinful ways. So “the eternal punishment is the punishment of being without the knowledge of God, who is love, and of Jesus Christ who has manifest it” (450). “What is Perdition but a loss? What is eternal damnation but the loss of a good which God had revealed to His creatures. . . . They did not believe that Love was at the root of all things, and that to lose Love, was to lose all things” (454).387 This view, he believes, if rightly understood, is “a more distinct and awful idea of eternal death and eternal punishment than we [currently] have. . . . The thought of [God] . . . letting them alone, of His leaving them to themselves, is the real unutterable horror” (473). And this looming horror of being totally God-less is already becoming a reality in the existential experience of many people. They can relate to it in ways that they cannot relate to material images of torture in hell. “Every man who knows what it is to have been in a state of sin, knows what it is to have been in a state of death” (475). “If they fall into it, it is because they choose it, because they embrace it, because they resist a power which is always at work to save them from it” (474). (Note that God’s power is said to be always at work to save—Maurice, like Erskine, whom he held in high regard, rejected the idea that death brings to an end all opportunities for salvation.)388

  It is from this fate of sinking into sin that Christ came to rescue us. (Maurice, again like Erskine, argued that salvation should not be thought of as salvation from punishment in hell, but as salvation from sin.)

  On the issue of universalism, of whether all the damned may one day be reached by God’s love, Maurice expresses a pious agnosticism, but a deep hope.

  I ask no one to pronounce, for I dare not pronounce myself, what are the possibilities of resistance in a human will to the loving will of God. There are times when they seem to me—thinking of myself more than others—almost infinite. But I know that there is something which must be infinite. I am obliged to believe in an abyss of love which is deeper than the abyss of death: I dare not lose faith in that love. I sink into death, eternal death, if I do. I must feel that this love is compassing the universe. More about it I cannot know. But God knows. I leave myself and all to Him. (476)

  So while Maurice was not a universalist, he was certainly open to the real possibility that universal salvation may be the outcome of creation. We should certainly hope that it will be, with a hope grounded in God’s infinite love, a love more infinite than the human resistance to it.

  The traditional view of hell laid great store in the word aiōnois, and Maurice’s revisionary understanding threatened one of the planks upon which this theology was built. It was therefore no surprise that the publication of the book led to complaints to R. W. Jelf, the principal of King’s College, and the setting up by Jelf of what amounted to an inquisition against Maurice. Jelf was simply unable to understand the position being advocated by Maurice, and despite Maurice’s regular insistence that he was not teaching that all would be saved and that his views were fully consistent with everything required of Anglican orthodoxy, Jelf and the council thought that Maurice was deliberately fudging the issue, and that in reality he was a universalist. He was therefore dismissed from his position at the college, making him what Rev. Edward Plumptre referred to as “the proto-martyr of the wider hope.”389 In spite of this, the issue did not go away and, as we shall see, some of Maurice’s colleagues, friends, and relatives took up the cause, stirring trouble as they did.

  H. B. Wilson (1803–88) and the Essays and Reviews (1860) controversy

  A massive controversy erupted after the publication of the seven Broad Church essays in the landmark volume Essays and Reviews (1860), edited by John William Parker.390 One of the two most controversial was Rev. Henry Bristow Wilson’s essay on “The National Church,” which argued that Anglicanism should be less rigidly attached to the Thirty-Nine Articles.391 In his essay, Wilson touched on eternal punishment. He believed that few people died in a state ready for God’s presence in heaven. But this, he claimed, does not mean that the majority are doomed to hell. Rather, there is room for spiritual progress in the afterlife after the great day of judgment. The dead are like seeds sent to “nurseries as it were and seed-grounds, where the undeveloped may grow up under new conditions—the stunted may become strong, and the perverted restored.” He went on to say that when Christ “shall have surrendered His kingdom to the Great Father [an allusion to 1 Corinthians 15:28]—all, both small and great, shall find refuge in the bosom of the Universal Parent, to repose, or be quickened into higher life, in ages to come, according to His Will.”392 This certainly sounds like some version of hope for universal salvation.

  His liberal views on hell were challenged in the church courts. In 1862, the judgment was delivered that Wilson’s view was incompatible with the plain sense of the Athanasian Creed (with its comments on “everlasting fire”), to which all Anglican clergy had to subscribe. He was also guilty of making one’s future fate depend wholly on moral conduct, irrespective of one’s religious
belief. Wilson was given a year’s suspension of his living. He appealed the judgment, and in 1864 the appeal was allowed. The judgment declared

  We are not at liberty to express any opinion upon the mysterious question of the final punishment, further than to say that we do not find in the [Anglican] Formularies . . . any such distinct declaration of our Church upon the subject as to require us to condemn as penal the expression of hope by a clergyman, that even the ultimate pardon of the wicked, who are condemned in the day of judgment may be consistent with the will of Almighty God.393

  This judgment started a firestorm of protest, especially from Evangelicals and Anglo-Catholics. They feared that this level of latitude over the interpretation of creeds opened the door to any and every heresy. They also thought that a weakening of the doctrine of hell removed a key motivator for moral behavior and set society on a road to moral perdition. The Oxford declaration against the essayists, organized by the Anglo-Catholics, was signed by almost 11,000 clergy. It proclaimed the historic Anglican belief in everlasting hell. The Archbishops of Canterbury and York also expressed sympathy with the Oxford declaration. However, within a decade, when the subject of hell was again a matter of intense controversy, “not only was the argument conducted against a background of a more decided agnosticism, the general tone of the debate was much calmer. A growing appreciation of the results of biblical criticism did much to weaken the simple appeal to the authority of texts, which had been so frequently employed by the defenders of eternal punishment.”394

  Frederic W. Farrar (1831–1903) and the Eternal Hope (1878) controversy

  At the end of 1877, the archdeacon of Westminster, F. W. Farrar, who had been a student of F. D. Maurice and continued to consider Maurice a mentor, preached a series of sermons on eternal punishment, published the following year as Eternal Hope, an “epoch-making book.”395 The book was perhaps clearer in what it denied than in what it affirmed.

  Farrar sets out four views on hell: endless torment, annihilation, purgatory, and universalism. He then proceeds to deny the first three. The doctrine of endless hell he believes to be a view that is “to the utter detriment of all noble thoughts of God, and to all joy and peace in believing” (xiv). It is both unbiblical and abhorrent. Thus, “we . . . do in the high name of the outraged conscience of humanity,—nay, in the far higher names of the God who loves, of the Saviour who died for, of the Spirit who enlightens us,—hurl from us representations so cruel, of a doctrine so horrible, with every nerve and fibre of our intellectual, moral, and spiritual life” (71).396 It’s safe to say that he was not keen on the traditional doctrine. If not eternal hell, then what? He did not opt for annihilation (which he considers “ghastly”) or purgatory (in its Roman Catholic version, at least).397 On his own scheme, this leaves only universalism. So he was he a universalist?

  Farrar certainly recognized the strengths of universalism—its affirmation of God’s infinite love, its careful attention to biblical texts concerning universal restoration and Christ’s universal atonement, and its presence in the works of some great teachers in the early church and those he calls modern-day saints, such as Thomas Erskine and Bishop Ewing of Argyll. Farrar has a lot of time for universalism, and considers it an “open question” for Anglicans (85). Indeed, “[e]very man must long with all his heart that this belief were true” (xv). Nevertheless, in spite of its strong appeal, he declares, “I dare not lay down any dogma of Universalism; partly because it is not clearly revealed to us, and partly because it is impossible for us to estimate the hardening effect of obstinate persistence in evil, and the power of human will to resist the law and reject the love of God” (xvi). What we do know is that God is love, a merciful Father, not a “remorseless Avenger,” a God who desires none to perish, that sent Christ to redeem all. “[B]ut how long, even after death, man may continue to resist his will;— . . . that is one of the secret things which God has not revealed” (86).

  This is a little confusing for readers, who may wonder what will happen to those who might resist God’s love forever. If they do not face eternal torment or annihilation or purgatory and will not be saved . . . what will happen to them? Part of the answer may be found in Farrar’s modified version of “purgatory.”

  Farrar clearly affirmed that “the fate of man is not finally and irreversibly sealed at death” (86). He takes the descent of Christ into Hades to preach to the “spirits in prison” as evidence of this. (As we have seen, such a view had been gaining traction in certain circles through the nineteenth century, perhaps because it “fitted better with a dynamic, evolutionary picture of the universe, than the conception of fixed and unalterable states into which men entered at death.”)398 While rejecting the term “purgatory,” he does support the notion that God continues working for the salvation of souls who die out of a state of grace. This was a “condition in which . . . imperfect souls who die in a state unfit for heaven may yet have perfected in them until the day of Christ, that good work of God which has been in this world begun” (xix). This purification takes place “in that Gehenna of aeonian fire beyond the grave” (88), a “remedial fire” (112). Such teaching regarding the fires of gehenna serving for purification he considers to be found in many of the church fathers. Will God punish us? “Yes, punish us, because he pities us” that we “would be melted by the heat of love” (97). That said, when Farrar speaks more carefully in Sermon V, he explains that the pains of the afterlife are all self-inflicted, the inevitable consequence of our actions, and not directly inflicted by God. God creates a law-governed universe in which certain courses of life bring about certain painful results. He will work in and through those consequences to teach us and correct and purify us, but God does not directly punish us. According to Farrar, the fires of gehenna are the enlightening yet horrible pains of conscience after our misdeeds—“the glare of illumination which the conscience flings over a soul after a deed of darkness” (148). Thus, salvation is “not from Him and His wrath, but from yourself and your own self-destruction” (151–52).

  Nevertheless, the problem remains: one may still wonder at the fate of those dead souls who continue to defy God right up “until the day of Christ.” What happens to them? Farrar does not venture to say, taking his cue from Jesus’ answer to the question of whether only few will be saved—Jesus refused to answer the question and warns to questioner to make sure that they themselves are saved (Luke 13:23–24, Sermon IV). Farrar does likewise.

  So, Farrar took the stance, as Maurice before him, of pious agnosticism, while affirming “a distinct hope” (xxi) in the final victory of the love of God.399 He said, presumably if the end should fall short of universal salvation, “my hope is that the vast majority, at any rate, of the lost, may at length be found” (88). This is because God will save “all who do not utterly extinguish within their own souls the glimmering wick of love to God” (116). Yet protest as he might, many mistakenly believed that he was in fact a full-blown universalist.

  Farrar’s work generated some hostility, as one would expect, but also a lot of sympathy. The Contemporary Review commissioned a series of reflections on it by thinking churchmen who took differing views on the subject. The most important response, however, came from Edward Pusey, the celebrated Oxford Anglo-Catholic. Pusey was deeply concerned by Farrar’s abandoning hell, fearing that it would open the floodgates of immorality by removing an important incentive to avoid sin. In 1880, he published his reply in a scholarly work entitled What Is of Faith as to Everlasting Punishment? Unlike many defenses of eternal hell, this one took the more unusual line of arguing that much of the perceived problem with hell was generated by the Protestant two-destiny view of the afterlife. The idea that everyone was destined for heaven or hell did not seem to match our experience of real people with all their shades of grey. Purgatory as a preparation ground for heaven helped deal with this. Pusey also expressed his view that we have no solid grounds for supposing that the majority of humanity would be damned,
so we can reasonably hope for the salvation of the bulk of the human race. However, he did see our choices in this life as the only opportunity we have to avoid eternal damnation.

  Farrar was pushed into writing a much more scholarly book in response to Pusey, entitled Mercy and Judgment (1881). He still denied being a universalist, arguing that his and Pusey’s views were not as far apart as Pusey thought, and continued to assert that all but the most reprobate would make spiritual progress in the intermediate state.

  Edward Plumptre (1821–91) and The Spirits in Prison (1884)

  Rev. Edward Hayes Plumptre had links with several of those we have already examined. He was the brother-in-law of F. D. Maurice and, like Maurice, was for many years a theological professor at King’s College London. He was also a friend with F. W. Farrar,

  who had dedicated his book Eternal Hope to Plumptre. In addition, it is worth knowing that Plumptre, like Maurice, knew Thomas Erskine and George MacDonald. It is perhaps no coincidence then that Plumptre also published in the area of eschatology and the wider hope, nor that he dedicated his book to Maurice.

  Plumptre’s book, The Spirits in Prison and Other Studies on Life After Death, was published in 1884, while he was serving as the Dean of Wells Cathedral in Somerset. Plumptre was, like Maurice and Farrar, open to the possibility of universal salvation, though reverently agnostic as to its truth or falsity.

  The Spirits in Prison was in fact a collection of various studies written over a number of years on issues concerning the afterlife. The central essay, after which the book is named, is a sermon preached in 1871 at St. Paul’s Cathedral. It is an examination of the idea that Christ “descended into hades” (as the Creed declares) and “preached unto the spirits in prison” (1 Pet 3:19). This hopeful doctrine had a high profile in the early church yet in post-Reformation England was almost lost. In Hades, Christ gathered the righteous dead around him, while “others, worthy of but a lower place, had yet found mercy. They had perished in God’s great judgment, when the flood came upon the world of the ungodly, but they had not hardened themselves against His righteousness and love, and therefore were not shut out utterly from hope” (5).