This revelation was accompanied by a deep inner conviction as to its truth—“And from that moment I have never had one questioning thought as to the final destiny of the human race. . . . The how and the when I could not see; the one essential fact was all I needed—somewhere and somehow God was going to make everything right for all the creatures He had created. My heart was at rest about it forever” (205). Andrew Jukes’s book served to consolidate and reinforce this conviction, resonating deeply with it, but the conviction itself was grounded in her spiritual experience, not his book.
She rushed to search the Scriptures and was amazed to find it illuminated in a new way, as her eyes were opened to perceive what had previously been hidden—the final restitution of all things. “I turned greedily from page to page of my Bible, fairly laughing aloud for joy at the blaze of light that illuminated it all. It became a new book” (206–7). This too reinforced her new conviction.
She continued to build up more arguments from the Bible and Christian theology to support this conclusion, including arguments for interpreting God’s defeat of his enemies and his fiery wrath as part of the means of salvation, but the basic core conviction came in a moment of “insight” in Philadelphia. When she tried to encapsulate the insight in a single phrase it was this: “the unselfishness of God.” She finally saw that God’s love did not fall short of her ideal of love, as she had previously feared it did, but far exceeded it. “I found out that He was far more than loving;—He was love, love embodied and ingrained. I saw that He was, as it were, made out of love, so that in the very nature of things He could not do anything contrary to love. Not that He would not do it, but actually could not, because love was the very essence of His being” (211). This insight completely revitalized and reshaped Hannah’s spiritual life.
Hannah’s experience of motherhood was important in her theological reflections. “My feelings as a mother, which had heretofore seemed to war with what I believed of God, now came into perfect harmony” (213). Her tender feelings toward her children shaped the way she thought of the bliss of heaven and of the love of God: “I think this feeling has taught me more of what God’s feelings are towards His children than anything else in the universe. . . . In fact most of my ideas of the love and goodness of God have come from my own experience as a mother.” (213). She conceives of a mother’s love as a reflection of God’s love, for humans are divine images. God’s love, therefore, cannot be inferior to a mother’s own love for her children—for the latter is only a pale reflection of the former—it must infinitely exceed it. This divine love she calls “the mother-heart of God” (215).
Hannah quickly announced her views on Restitution and was met with great disapproval from the Plymouth Brethren, resulting in “what might be called persecution” (220). This did not put her off, as she saw herself as the enlightened one in the midst of those in darkness. “And on this ground I have always rather enjoyed being considered a heretic, and have never wanted to be endorsed by anyone” (220).
She did not shove her new views down people’s throats, but if doors opened and opportunities arose, she took them. And she would not accept any speaking engagements unless those requesting her knew what her “heretical” views were. On one occasion, she was asked to speak in Brighton, England, on condition that she did not mention her views on Restitution while in Britain. She wrote back, refusing the condition, saying, “I compromise for nobody” (224). The committee immediately dropped the requirement and invited her anyway.
During their time in New Jersey, William E. Boardman (1810–86), an influential American holiness teacher and healer, became impressed by Robert and Hannah and persuaded them to come to England with him and speak on “the Higher Life.” This they did in 1873–74, and an important door was opened up for them in England and Europe as a result.
Before Hannah could hold the “Higher Life” meetings in London, she met with some influential Evangelical women. Their task was to decide whether to endorse her. As a funeral went past the group, she expressed how she was not sad, but happy, for she trusts in the love of God for everybody. That was a risky thing to say in such a context, but she immediately won the respect and affection of the very wealthy Lady Mount Temple, who promptly invited Hannah to some meetings at Broadlands, her house in Hampshire. This was the start of a series of important conferences at Broadlands, which proved critical for Hannah’s work in England and elsewhere. Indeed, her “heretical” views proved not to be an obstacle at all to her influential ministry in England.
The Broadlands conferences hosted by Lord and Lady Mount Temple were an important tributary feeding into the Keswick conventions, Evangelical holiness convocations that continue annually to this day in the UK. Their focus was the “Higher Life”—holiness, moral transformation, and entire surrender to God. What is interesting is that those initial conferences gathered an eclectic group of delegates with a range of theological views, often with a mystical bent, and included several prominent universalists. Not only was Hannah there as a key speaker, but so were George MacDonald and Andrew Jukes, Hannah’s universalist guide. In addition, Julia Wedgewood and Emelia Russell Gurney, both strong devotees of Thomas Erskine’s theology, were present, as was John Brash who, along with George MacDonald and the Mount Temples, was much-influenced by F. D. Maurice. The thought of all these thinkers fed into the brew that became Keswick’s spirituality. And so it was that universalists played an important (though often unrealized) role in the launching of a significant British Evangelical movement with a strong conservative flavor. Perhaps there is some irony there.
Hannah’s ministry in England was a major success in 1873–74 and again, after a brief return to America, in 1875. She and Robert addressed literally thousands of Christian ministers at key events in Brighton, Oxford, London, Manchester, Leicester, and Dublin. Hannah’s Bible readings at these conventions made a major impression. Her influence through preaching and publishing reached very many thousands of Christians.
Then a scandal in which Robert was suspected of committing adultery broke, from which his ministry never fully recovered. Hannah’s ministry, however, continued to flourish. Her book The Christian’s Secret of a Happy Life (1875), a book on “the joy of obedience,” became quite possibly the most influential text in the holiness movement (and foundational for the Keswick doctrine of sanctification), and remains read to this day.483 She was often asked to speak on Christian spirituality and holiness and also became involved with proto-feminist campaigns through the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, which she helped to found in 1874. Her teaching on holiness to the WCTU gave her direct input to around sixty thousand Christian women. The family moved permanently to England in 1888.484
In 1903, Hannah published her autobiography, The Unselfishness of God and How I Discovered It. The title itself puts Hannah’s universalism front-and-center, and one of the major sections of the biography is devoted to her conversion to the larger hope. Indeed, she says, “If I were called upon to state in one sentence the sum and substance of my religious experience, it is this sentence [i.e., the unselfishness of God]” (ch. 1). However, subsequent editions removed the offending three chapters for fear that they were too controversial. In this way, while Hannah’s teaching on the higher life continued to influence the Christian public, that public was protected from her dangerous eschatological hope.
Hannah takes her place as one of several influential female believers in the larger hope, alongside the likes of Ann Conway (1631–79), Jane Lead (1624–1704), Johanna Eleonora Petersen (1644–1724), Judith Sargent Murray (1751–1820), and Josephine Butler (1828–1906), not to mention the many society-shaping women in the Universalist denomination in America.485 In a patriarchal world in which a woman’s place was very clearly demarcated and prescribed, these women were exceptional and ground breaking, finding a certain level of acceptance in their unusual vocations, just as their early-church and medieval precursors, such as Macrina the Younger
(324–379) and Julian of Norwich (1342–1416), had before them. And Hannah has no qualms about bringing her insights as a woman, as a mother, to the task of theological reflection, offering an insight that the male-dominated theology of the church has often been blind to.
Hannah is not the most significant theologian with universalist instincts, but she represents the irrepressible vitality of that instinct, how even when it is deliberately locked away deep underground in a theological prison, kept out of sight and mind, it refuses to stay locked up and keeps on breaking out. It is an irrepressible “heresy.” Why this should be so will depend on the analyst. For some its constant reappearing reflects the ever-rebellious sinful desires of humans, who seem constitutionally incapable of submitting to divine revelation. For others, it is that universal salvation is an idea implicit in the biblical gospel itself, an idea that the core doctrines of Christian theology reach out toward in hope. As such, as long as the gospel is proclaimed in the church, there will be those who find themselves swept along by its wave in the direction of a larger hope.
463. For biographical information on Jukes, especially his later years, see Jeaffreson, Letters of Andrew Jukes. On Jukes’s secession from the Church of England, his expansive ecclesiology, and his links with the Brethren, see Randall, “I Felt Bound.”
464. On this, see esp. Randall, “I Felt Bound.”
465. This book included a postscript of quotes from William Law on universal restoration. The rest of the book was given almost entirely to biblical interpretation.
466. John Nelson Darby (1800–1882), for instance, wrote a strong critique of Jukes in his “Examination of the Book.” Darby argued that Jukes taught we are saved through our own suffering and death, rather than through Christ’s.
467. The following in-text citations in this section on Jukes are from Second Death, unless otherwise stated.
468. Jukes also seeks to show that the adjective aiōnios does not mean “eternal” or “everlasting,” even when applied to God, the covenant, or redemption. As we have already looked at such arguments, we shall not repeat them here.
469. Jukes is keen to stress that the fact that the ages to come are not everlasting in no way undermines “the true eternity of bliss of God’s elect” (55), for this life is a participation in the divine nature and the indestructibility of the resurrection body.
470. Jukes then has the obligatory chapter in which he seeks to respond to critics of his view. He considers criticisms under the categories of tradition, reason (which is mostly theological objections), and Scripture.
471. The New Connexion of Dan Taylor had broken away from the earlier General Baptists, who had become increasingly deviant from Christian orthodoxy in their theology.
472. Heap, “Baptists and the Afterlife,” 4.
473. Foster, Letter of the Celebrated John Foster.
474. Most of this information on Cox comes from the Dictionary of National Biography, 1901 supplement.
475. See sermon 3 on the Adam and the Christ (Resurrection, 60–84).
476. Carpus, “Heaven,” The Expositor 1 (1875) 268–74.
477. His resignation in 1888 was due to failing health.
478. In a kind of Protestant one-upmanship move, he accused the traditional view of hell, so beloved by Evangelicals, to be a hangover from Catholicism, rather than a biblical doctrine. His critics repaid the favor by suggesting that it was Cox, with his quasi-purgatorial view, who was borrowing from Catholicism.
479. In fact, the notion of the cross as a revelation of divine self-giving love that we are to imitate as we take up our crosses can already be found in the writings of Hans Denck in the sixteenth century. This was part of Denck’s concern that Reformed theology of the cross and justification can lead to antinomianism. George MacDonald’s thought is also close to Denck in this regard.
480. She later came to see a religion that was focused on having the right emotions as a tyrannous kind of faith that generates a self-focus and despair. Instead of focusing on God, the focus was on your own feelings about God.
481. Hannah does not provide the date of her conversion to universal restoration in her autobiography. Readers can only infer that the revelation took place prior to her speaking at camp meetings in 1873 and the publication of The Christian’s Secret of a Happy Life (1875) and some years after joining the Brethren around 1858. The incident took place in Philadelphia so it is plausible that it occurred while they were living nearby (i.e., before 1864 or after a move back in 1869). However, from her personal correspondence in 1873 she says that the revelation described in the autobiography occurred “at the beginning of the year” (letter to Anna Shipley, August 6, 1873). The earliest evidence we have of the theological shift is a letter from Hannah to her husband Robert dated April 3, 1873. My thanks to the Quaker historian Carole Spencer for uncovering the correspondence and sending me copies of the letters.
482. Letter to Anna Shipley, her closet friend, dated August 6, 1873.
483. Though she wrote it only reluctantly, in response to her husband’s persistent requests.
484. In 1894, one of her daughters, Alys Pearsall Smith, married the mathematician and philosopher Bertrand Russell. Their marriage began to come apart in 1901, when Russell decided that he no longer loved Alys and embarked on a lifestyle of numerous affairs. Russell and Alys were finally divorced in 1921. Russell never hid his strong dislike for Hannah.
485. See http://uuhhs.org/womens-history/notable-women-biographies/.
Conclusion
Looking back across the period from the Reformation to the end of the nineteenth century, we can see that right from the start a tiny spring of universalist thinking began to bubble up among some of the grass roots. The spring became a small-but-steady stream of hopeful Christians that continued to flow across the centuries. Its journey was one of twists and turns, and its fortune was afflicted by droughts and floods; sometimes it became a mere trickle, sometimes it even seemed to disappear out of sight in one place only to reappear somewhere else, and at one point it included a fairly sizable denomination. The stream took on different appearances in different contexts, under different conditions, but on it flowed.486
Genealogies of Hope
Throughout this tour, I have aimed to clarify the connections that the various individuals we have considered had with each other, whether directly or indirectly. This enables us to trace some lines of influence, genealogies if you will. We can also observe some “intermarriages” of different universalist families as some individuals combine aspects of more than one family line.
One line of influence that reaches back beyond our period is the Origenian tradition itself, which experienced something of a revival in certain quarters in the seventeenth century. Among the Cambridge Platonists, who esteemed Origen, some were drawn to his theology of apokatastasis. This never caught on in Protestantism as a whole, but once the ideas were put forth again, they began to have a shaping effect. We have seen how even those who may not have read Origen for themselves could have been influenced by those ideas. This was illustrated through Jane Lead, who, while she never once mentions Origen, actually has multiple points of convergence with his theology and with his exegesis of certain texts. Origen was not the major influence on many of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century believers in the larger hope that we have considered; nevertheless, a lot of them were aware of him and had read parts of his work, so his theology did continue to exert some direct influence. His presence did increase in the twentieth century, especially among some Orthodox and Catholic theologians, as the result of a major restoration of Origen’s reputation among patristics scholars, stripping away centuries of suspicion and fear. In our day, Origen is at last being reclaimed as a saintly and important theologian for the church.
But that story belongs to another book.
It can sometimes be hard to know whether similarities between the patristic doctrine of apokatastasis and later universalisms are a case of “descent” or of “convergent evolution.” After all, once one has started to pursue that kind of theology, certain similarities with apokatastasis are inevitable. So a good dose of caution is required. Nevertheless, certain notions—such as the idea common to most versions of eighteenth-century universalism that the final restoration, in which God is “all in all,” would occur after the end of all ages, including the age to come—resonate so strongly with patristic theology, and are not in any sense demanded by universal salvation per se that an Origenian influence, either direct or indirect, seems possible.
Another notable influence for many universalists in the period covered is Jakob Böhme, the Lutheran mystic. Of course, some disliked Böhme (e.g., Relly, Murray, and Chauncy), and others were appreciative but very cautious (e.g., Peter Sterry), while many were enamored (especially Jane Lead, the various Pietist groups, and William Law) or at least selectively appreciative (Thomas Erskine, George MacDonald, Andrew Jukes). Why the recurring interest in Böhme? In many ways, it is not surprising. He was esteemed by the Philadelphians in Britain and Germany before they embraced universalism. Consequently, they did not simply spread the message of universal salvation, but also a Christianity with varying degrees of a Böhmist tinge. Similarly, William Law’s influence on certain later universalists mediated some of that tinge to those outside the direct line of descent from Radical Pietists (Erskine, MacDonald, Jukes). Böhme was not the source of their belief in universal salvation, but he did flavor some important strands of their theology and spirituality to varying degrees. (See the appendix for a response to what I consider a recent over-estimation of Böhme’s role.)
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