A Larger Hope 2

by Robin A Parry

  This doctrine has always served as a beacon of a wider hope for ordinary Christians in the church, even in periods when official teachings said that “change and progress are excluded altogether from the state into which men pass at death” (10). “We may thank God, even though the protest has come in the form of wild dreams and fantastic speculations, that the natural instincts of men have risen up in revolt, and protested against conclusions so irreconcilably at variance with all belief in the love of Christ and the Fatherhood of God” (11). Purgatory, despite its many errors, provided at least a hope for progressive purification after death for some, and hence some spiritual consolation, which Protestants have looked at with envy.

  With regard to universalism, Plumptre is eager to point out that it has deep roots in the tradition—including Origen (the “noblest, loftiest, most loving of the teachers of the ancient Church”) and Gregory of Nyssa (“to whom we owe the fullest defence of the Nicene Confession of our faith”) and many others in the East. The Church of England now even considers it “compatible with her dogmatic teaching” (13). “It has had many individual witnesses, some in the high places of the Church, some among her noblest thinkers and most loving hearts” (13) . . . and so on. So, he is certainly very sympathetic. However, there are problems with it, in particular human freedom, which we know from daily experience can frustrate God’s purpose, and biblical teachings on final exclusion from the divine presence. There are indeed biblical texts that support universalism, but there are also others that point the opposite direction and “[w]e must be content to leave this seeming contradiction as part of the great mystery of evil from which the veil has never yet been lifted” (15). We must teach that final punishment of evil is everlasting, and that while if received “as the chastisement of a righteous Father, may lead men to repentance,” it can also harden rebels against God.

  So must we be agnostic about hope? “Has no glimpse behind the veil been given us?” It is here that the “lost” article of the Creed, the teaching on Christ’s descent, comes into its own. Plumptre exegetes the text as teaching that Jesus went to the dead spirits in Hades who had been “unbelieving, disobedient, corrupt, ungodly; but who yet had not hardened themselves in the one irremediable antagonism to good which has never forgiveness” (18). Jesus, who had only just prayed, “Father forgive them, for they know not what they do,” was not there to gloat and to tell them of the kingdom that could never be theirs. He preached the gospel to them. “And it was published to them, not to exempt them from all penalty, but that having been judged, in all that belonged to the relations of their human life with a true and righteous judgment, should yet, in all that affected their relation to God, ‘live in the spirit’” (19). These sinful spirits in Hades repented and entered the gate of life. While Peter speaks of Christ preaching to those who disobeyed in Noah’s time, “[w]e have no sufficient grounds for limiting the work on which [the apostles] dwell to the representative instance or time-boundaries of which they speak” (21).

  Plumptre clearly believes that we cannot exclude the possibility that some people may harden themselves against God to the point that they are beyond recovery, so he is not a universalist. However, he is confident that, at the very least, this is not the case with the vast majority of people. And given God’s continuing work in our lives after death, we have solid grounds for hope.

  Thus, Plumptre calls for a recovery of the neglected creedal clause and the hopeful early church practice of prayer for the souls of the dead. “In every form, from the solemn liturgies which embodied the belief of her profoundest thinkers and truest worshippers, to the simple words of hope and love which were traced over the graves of the poor, her voice went up, without a doubt or misgiving, in prayers for the souls of the departed” (25). In chapter 9, Plumptre traces more carefully the ancient Christian practice of prayer for the progress of the dead in the afterlife and advocates its contemporary use. “The prayers of the faithful might hasten their progress upwards, or make them more capable of Divine compassion, or help them to a higher or earlier place in the first resurrection, or mitigate, in some mysterious way, the keenness of their pain” (26). (The problem, as Plumptre sees it, was that such prayer eventually became linked in the West with purgatory and thus, when Protestants rightly rejected purgatory, they also rejected prayer for the dead.) What is interesting about this call is that wider-hope books prior to Plumptre, perhaps because of their Protestant origins, had not made the connection with common early church activity of prayer for the dead.

  The rest of the book is a series of academic studies on issues such as life after death in the OT and NT (considering the need to maintain the tension in its teaching on the scope of salvation),400 a much more detailed study on Christ’s descent into hell in the tradition and its biblical roots, the variety of early church eschatologies (in which Augustine does not come out well),401 the salvation of the heathen (in which he defends a version of inclusivism), the wider hope in English theology from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries (including a defense of Maurice against the charge of dogmatic universalism), eschatology in modern German theology,402 prayers for the dead (an ancient and appropriate Christian practice), purgatory (a Catholic distortion of a genuine insight into the healing and purifying fire of divine correction),403 conditional immortality (which he rejects), aiōnios (in which he maintains that, with the exception of John’s Gospel, “eternal” is concerned with duration, contra Maurice), the damnatory clauses in the Athanasian Creed, and the intermediate state (defended as a mode of disembodied and conscious existence in which there can be progress toward God, even for one like Judas). Plumptre’s work was the most scholarly of the nineteenth-century hopeful universalists. He had read widely in contemporary scholarship on Scripture, patristics, historical theology, and modern theology.

  That Farrar and Plumptre’s books did not generate the level of furious controversy witnessed in the 1850s through to the 1870s and that, unlike Maurice, they did not lose their jobs (indeed, Farrar later became dean of Canterbury and Plumptre remained dean of Wells until his death) shows something of the changing temperature of Victorian Anglicanism.

  Thomas Allin (1838–1909) and Universalism Asserted (1885)

  The most unflinching and overt Anglican defense of universalism came from Rev. Thomas Allin. Allin was an Anglican priest from Ireland and an amateur botanist, and trained at Trinity College, Dublin. He moved to Somerset in England in 1877 and there published a significant and staunch defense of universal restoration, appropriately entitled Universalism Asserted as the Hope of the Gospel on the Authority of Reason, the Fathers, and Holy Scripture.404 The book went through nine different editions between 1885 and 1905 as Allin kept modifying it.

  One observation of relevance regarding Allin’s book was how Anglican it was. Indeed, the very structure of this book is shaped by his Anglican instinct that theological reflection needs to take seriously the so-called the “three-legged stool” of Scripture, tradition, and reason. The title makes this clear. Allin begins with reason, works through tradition, and ends with Scripture. But his burden all along is to show that these three witnesses are deeply interrelated, mutually reinforcing, and are in complete harmony in asserting the truth of a universal restoration. He also works hard to wheel in lots of names among the great and the good within the Anglican Church to support his cause. Furthermore, he is keen to suggest that universalism is actually more in tune with themes at the heart of the Anglican Prayer Book and the Nicene Creed than is eternal hell.

  It was not uncommon to hear universalists accused of believing heresy, but Allin was as concerned to avoid heresy as any nineteenth-century Anglican. Indeed, one could see the whole of his argument in Universalism Asserted as an attempt to turn this accusation back against the believers in hell. It is they, not the universalists, who are in the greatest danger of heresy!

  Now at first blush this suggestion sounds absurd. Clearly belief in hell is not formally
heretical, as most of the great orthodox theologians in the past fifteen hundred years have been believers in an eternal perdition. So how could belief in hell possibly be flirting with heresy!?

  Perhaps an example from Allin’s arguments will help us to see what he is getting at. Allin argues that if hell continues to all eternity, then sinners continue in their resistance to God for all eternity, sin continues forever, evil continues forever. As such, we end up with an everlasting cosmic dualism in which good and evil are co-eternal. Even if God can imprison sin in an eternal chamber in some corner of creation, he has merely contained it, not undone and defeated it. Yet such an idea threatens to undermine some central Christian convictions about God and evil.

  Allin also argues that a hell from which there is no ultimate restoration—whether that hell be eternal torment or annihilation—would undermine the doctrine of God (his love, his justice, his goodness, his omnipotence), the victory of Christ, the power of the atonement, and so on and so forth. Indeed, Satan would seem to achieve a good part of his purposes for the world!

  Of course, those who believe in hell also affirm God’s love and justice, omnipotence, the atonement, divine victory, etc. But Allin’s point is that when they do so they either (a) have to add in qualifications that serve to undermine the very beliefs that they affirm or (b) they have to simply ignore the contradictions in their belief set and talk out of both sides of their mouth at the same time.

  So the doctrine of hell, in Allin’s view, is perhaps a little like a cuckoo in the nest of Christian theology: it is a real and present danger to the genuine chicks. Given the oft-heard, though in my view incorrect, assertion that universalism is formally heretical, what is interesting is that the heart of Allin’s case, though he does not put it in these words, is that to maintain a consistent and healthy Christian orthodoxy we ought to jettison belief in eternal hell. Hell, in other words, is bad for orthodoxy.

  Anglican as he was, Allin was very critical of Western theology, and this very much included his own tradition. He believes that Augustine effected a seismic shift in the shape of Western Christian theology, twisting it almost out of recognition—a claim his subsequent two volumes attempted to substantiate.405 The dominance of the “traditional” teaching on hell owes a massive debt to this Augustinian de-formation in the tradition. So Allin was Anglican who opposed the legal-shaped “Latin” theology of his own church and embraced Eastern, “Greek” thought. But such Greek theology was, he believed, true to the heart of Anglicanism, and resonated well with some of the “modern” theology being taught by some Victorian theologians, even if most Anglicans have not yet perceived this.406

  The most interesting part of Allin’s book is the first section (chapters 1–3) in which he argues that the popular belief about hell is wholly untenable, clashing with conscience, ethics, and reason, and undermining the church’s task of mission. All attempts to defend it, he argues, fall apart under inspection. However, the most significant advance that Allin’s book made was its discussion of patristic material in the second section (chapters 4–5, and parts of chapter 6). Plenty of earlier books had discussed the question of hell and universalism in the early church, but none had done so with the breadth and depth of Allin’s book. While his work has now been long superseded, it contains much of continuing value and remains an often-overlooked landmark in the recovery of teaching on apokatastasis in the early church. He seeks to demonstrate that belief in universal restoration “prevailed very widely in the primitive church,” was taught by those who “were among the most eminent and most holy of the Christian Fathers,” and that it was never condemned by the church and is consistent with the catholic creeds (85). He does this by surveying a mass of material from the second century to the start of the fourth century, from the early-fourth to the mid-fifth century, then on to the twelfth century. As topping on the cake, he finally does a survey of numerous universalist sympathizers since the Reformation, with various notable Anglican clergy thrown in for good luck.

  The final section of the book is an overview of biblical doctrines (creation, incarnation, atonement, sacraments, resurrection, eschatological death, judgment and fire, election, covenant) and texts (OT and NT), seeking to show that the larger hope is firmly rooted in Scripture. At times, Allin turns again to the church fathers to show that they often interpreted the biblical texts and doctrines under inspection in universalist ways.

  We do not know how or when Allin embraced universalism, but we do know that he read widely on the subject and his published work, coming after many of the other nineteenth-century publications mentioned in this section, was able to draw on them (e.g., Foster, Erskine, Maurice, Farrar, Plumptre, Jukes, and Cox). In some ways, his work represents a culmination of universalist arguments throughout the century, though he went much further than the very cautious hope of fellow Anglicans Maurice, Farrar, and Plumptre. What is also of interest is that, so far as we can tell, his book generated far less heat and controversy than those of his predecessors, further indicating the continuing change in theological climate.

  Taking stock of nineteenth-century developments in the Church of England

  Tracing the decreasing heat in the various hell debates from 1853 to 1887, one can detect a broadening out of Anglicanism over the second half of the nineteenth century. This is perhaps seen most clearly in the “resolution” to the debates over the Athanasian Creed.

  In the 1870s, controversy raged within the Church of England over the damnation clauses in the Athanasian Creed.407 The Creed not only ends with a declaration that at the judgment those who have done evil will depart “into everlasting fire,” but it also condemns all who do not affirm the faith as set out in the Creed to “perish everlastingly.” The Book of Common Prayer required the use of the Athanasian Creed on certain important feast days. In practice, this often did not happen, but the Oxford Movement led to a tightening up on such laxity. Increasing numbers of worshippers thus found themselves confronted with and disturbed by this text. In 1867, a Royal Commission looked into the rituals of the Church of England, and the issue of this creed became a focus, setting off a wider debate. The fate of those who had never heard the gospel was a particular sticking point. The debate about the merits and demerits of using the Athanasian Creed rumbled on among the clergy through the 1870s. Should it be dropped from the Prayer Book? Should some explanatory clause be added to qualify its damnation clauses? Passions were high. For some, it was an authoritative statement of the catholic faith; for others, it was a stumbling block. In the end, no clear resolution was reached, but considerable latitude on its interpretation was allowed. In 1873, a convocation agreed on a statement that the Church of England affirms the necessity of the saved holding fast to the catholic faith, and the peril of not doing so. But this allowed plenty of room to maneuver on hell. By the 1890s, the Archbishop of Canterbury declared, perhaps a little hyperbolically, that no one in the Church of England took the hell clauses in the Athanasian Creed literally any longer.

  Thomas Allin clearly saw various eminent figures in the Anglican establishment of his day as sympathetic to the wider hope. In addition to some of those already mentioned, he claims B. F. Wescott; the eminent NT scholar and Bishop of Durham, Canon Charles Kingsley; the famous novelist, social reformer, priest, and theologian, Canon Basil Wilberforce (grandson of William); and a number of other named clergy.

  By the 1890s, ex-Prime Minister William Gladstone could comment, albeit with some concern for the impact on morality, that hell had been banished “to the far-off corners of the Christian mind . . . there to sleep in deep shadow as a thing needless in our enlightened and progressive age.”408

  381. Though there is evidence that disquiet over hell was deeply felt among the working classes too. See Rowell, Hell and the Victorians, 147–49.

  382. Holyoake, Heaven and Hell, 8. Quoted in Wheeler, Heaven, Hell, and the Victorians, 185.

  383. Nightingal
e, “A ‘Note’ of Interrogation”; italics mine.

  384. On the Maurice controversy, see Rowell, Hell and the Victorians, 76–89; Laufer, Hell’s Destruction, 119–24.

  385. After all, he says, even on the traditional view, eternal life and punishment cannot be life and punishment “without beginning” (449–50). It is worth noting that Maurice’s understanding of aiōnios is different from the interpretations found in previous universalists. They did not deny an important temporal aspect to aiōnios, indeed they relied upon it.

  386. The following in-text citations in this section on Maurice are from Theological Essays, unless otherwise stated.

  387. It is of some interest that when Maurice considers Jesus’ warning to his disciples to “fear him which, after he hath killed, hath power to cast into hell” (Matt 10:28), he argues that it makes no sense to suppose “that this enemy is—not the devil, not the spirit who is going about seeking who he may devour, not him who was a murderer from the beginning,—but that God who cares for the sparrows! They are to be afraid lest He who numbers the hairs of their head should be plotting their ruin” (469). This interpretation was revived more recently by New Testament scholar N. T. Wright, though it remains uncommon.