Most Arguments Against Universalism are Bad
Universalism is easily dismissed, but the justifications are logically thin
A while ago I listened to a podcast from an evangelical church in the UK I have personal connections to, in which they had a lengthy, two episode debate about the sovereignty of God and salvation. Like many such debates in the church, the argument was essentially between what you would loosely call Calvinism and Arminianism, the question of whether or not we have free will or whether God chooses the elect, and like many such debates recycled exactly the tropes you would expect: Calvinism doesn’t work because wouldn’t that make God evil for sending us to hell versus Arminianism doesn’t work because what about the sovereignty of God. Interestingly, someone only off-hand mentioned universalism, merely to claim that such debates are important because otherwise we might be tempted to accept universalism and “none of us would accept that”, suggesting it is obviously wrong, heretical and undermines the gospel.
The fact that at least logically a nuanced form of universalism resolves the main points in this debate, points which are always left as uncomfortable contradictions we must accept, continues to be ignored, the gates are barred and it remains something you must not consider lest you become a heretic. It’s perfectly fine to disagree agreeably about whether we believe in a God who predestines people for eternal conscious torment, something that seems self-evidently troubling, but universalism remains firmly off limits. This is a strange fact, given that especially for Protestants the arguments against it are often not that good.
Even for non-Protestants, confusion tends to ensue when the subject is sought to be dismissed. Trent Horn, for example, was asked about universalism in a podcast with Matt Fradd and said “Hoping for the salvation of anyone is not equivalent to hoping for the salvation of everyone. So I think we have to affirm that God wants all to be saved, anyone can go to heaven if they cooperate with God’s will based on the knowledge and revelation they were given, so we pray for them, but we just don’t have a false hope that they’ll be saved.” You might notice the contradiction here, that God wants everyone to be saved, but God also grants us free will, and so the reason hell is so populated is because people choose not to “cooperate,” but, also, we should pray for them.
So what are we praying for? If God wants all to be saved and all won’t be, the choice is not God’s, so what are those prayers meant to achieve? This view, which seems to superficially appeal to our notions of free will, has so many holes in it that it’s simply untenable. Firstly, there is unavoidable evidence that our wills are contingent, you are far more likely to be converted to Christianity if you have Christian parents, live in a Christian country, have a Christian social group, and so on. Claiming the free will that destines us for an eternity in hell is sufficiently absolute to exclude the clear contingency upon which it depends is simply wrong, unless we are conceiving of a deist God who does not intervene at all and could not predict what would happen, we must presume God to be involved in those contingent factors. The people in the aforementioned podcast I happen to know are all people who grew up in the evangelical church and had Christian parents and a Christian social group growing up, and for whom remaining a Christian was, one might argue, in many ways a matter of convenience. Can they argue that a contemporary of their generation who grew up in a secular environment with atheist parents, who mostly encountered Christians as a bit weird, inherited stereotypes of religion and had never attended church, chooses an eternity in hell?
And if they do, we are faced with the problem of where exactly our free will ends and when God’s sovereignty begins. Can God alter our choices outside of the choice of salvation? Can God alter events to make us more likely to choose salvation, like a kind of massive advertising project for heaven? When confronted with the declining state of Christianity and the societies globally that are not Christian, one could argue the fault would lie not just with people not “cooperating” with God, but with the circumstances of their lives not being directed such that they do.
More than that, what makes anyone make the choice? If we are arguing that eternal destiny depends entirely upon someone making the choice to go to hell, then that choice cannot be the outcome of mere contingent circumstance, for if it were then the choice would be dependant on God’s ordaining of those circumstances not on the person themselves. Putting aside the evidence that our choices are clearly the result of contingency, this would leave the choice as the result of something like our essential nature which is revealed in the moment of choice in which we will to accept or reject God. But do we choose that nature? God would ultimately have to have created you with the nature he created you with, and we are back at a starting position in which God remains responsible for eternal conscious torment over which ultimately the freedom to will otherwise has no meaning.
Into this steps Calvinism, which purports to solve the problem by asserting the sovereignty of God in election and predestination. Because of Adam’s sin the individual is bound over until God liberates their will in an act of grace and there is nothing we can do to will or choose our own salvation, as John Piper put it: “You are commanded to believe, you are responsible to believe, but you can’t believe: you’re dead.”
If one is to not cast God as monstrous, one must ask the question of how it can be that God brings people into the world blind and punishes them for it eternally. Theologically, Calvinism claims we are deserving because of Adam’s sin, and so what is remarkable about salvation is not punishment but that God should save anyone through grace. Yet the can is merely kicked back, if Adam has free will you have the same problem of contingency or nature, if he doesn’t then punishment can’t reflect blame or be an account of any meaningful kind of justice.
In both cases there is not just a logical but a biblical tension, since all seem to agree that 1 Timothy 2:4 states that God wants all to be saved. Interestingly, in modern apologetics both Catholics and Calvinists deal with this by claiming God has two wills, a will that ultimately wants all to be saved and a will that wants justice and free will in whatever combination to be manifest. John Piper says “God wills that all be saved, but in another sense, he does not will that all be saved…because what the Bible shows over and over again is that there are, in many cases, two wants, not just one. So it’s not accurate to say that God will not do what he wants to do, since in choosing to do what he does not want to do, he’s doing, in another sense, what he does want to do.”
Trent Horn argues similarly that: “God desires all be saved and come to the knowledge of the truth, yet God also desires that we not sin and yet we still sin. God’s antecedent will or his general desire is that we always choose good over evil and that all people will choose him. But God’s consequent will differs because it reflects God allowing people to sin and even to remain in their sin. To make an analogy I might antecedently will that every student pass a theology class that I teach, but I may not consequently will that because I choose to accurately grade students who have freely chosen to fail the course. God desires the good for all his creatures, but because God has given all human beings and angels the gift of free will, it follows that God will allow us to enjoy or suffer the consequences of this good gift, even if it means eternal separation from him.”
The problem here is that like any will God’s wills reflect God’s purposes. If God has some reason for sending people eternally to hell, then he does not exactly have a “secondary will” so much as a will that reflects his purposes at large. In Calvinism, the purpose is a kind of glorification that results from a display of justice and grace, in which punishment for sin is demonstrated and the elect are redeemed as an act of God’s grace. For those who apply free will such as Trent, the good is in the “gift of free will,” which as I have already argued either requires you to reduce God to deism or to have some responsibility over what we choose. In either case, the analogy of the exams renders the purpose of free will pointless. For the examiner there is a process of winnowing those who have applied themselves not out of justice but basic practicality and purpose in the field or learning or of work. The abstraction of free will or choosing not to work for your exams is as irrelevant as you not being intelligent enough to pass them. The secondary will that does not pass everyone is related to a purpose that people improve in their learning, the analogy would be more like if an examiner gave out an exam they knew someone people would not have the ability to pass and then, well, punished them forever for it.
So if universalism squares some of these circles, why is it rejected as obviously false? The answer, generally, involves three claims: the biblical data, church tradition, and the dilution of the gospel. I have previously addressed some key biblical passages here and the church tradition here, but the latter claim is often the one that is reached for first. Trent in his video on universalism claims that universalism causes religious indifference: “it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see how universalism leads to religious indifference, sharing the faith often involves the risk of having negative encounters with people that range from mildly awkward to extremely angry. Most people don’t like conflict so they’ll look for any excuse to avoid it, as a result instead of taking a risk and sharing their faith with someone, the person who is adverse to conflict might just say ‘well I’m sure they’ll go to heaven anyways so I’m not going to raise a fuss about it. What ends up happening to Christians who hold this view is that they see the church no longer as the bark of saint Peter that saves people from being lost but as a kind of NGO, that only exists to do act of charity.”
This assumes universalists not to believe in hell in any form, even as a metaphor, take any of the language of hell seriously and to think everyone is saved immediately, something that absolutely would render the gospel pointless. Instead, one would point out that church Fathers like Origen or Gregory of Nyssa saw hell as purgatorial, as Macrina says in her dialogue with Gregory in On the Soul and Resurrection: “not in hatred or revenge for a wicked life, to my thinking, does God being upon sinners these painful dispensations; He is only charming and drawing to Himself whatever, to please Him, came into existence…to get the good separated from the evil and to attract it into the communion of blessedness.”
The language of hell and the consequences of actions as they relate to our choices is not something serious universalists would avoid, nor is it justified to claim it nullifies the gospel. Firstly, just like Calvinists who believe that God has already chosen to save who he will save but still believe in evangelism, a universalist would still see the desire to share the gospel as an aspect of a person being transformed by relationship with God, meaning the reason would be about sharing something good as much as about aversion, even if that aversion would still remain. The claim that people who don’t like conflict might not want to might be true in any case, and even so in the age of non stop political arguments online one can hardly claim most people are afraid of expressing their opinions because of what someone might think of them. Insofar as universalism would be an excuse to dilute Christianity or have your cake and eat it, it would not reflect genuine relationship with God.
None of that is to mean you cannot make any kind of case against universalism, but it is increasingly frustrating to see it dismissed as heresy on the basis of arguments that really consider neither it nor their own internal logic. As David Bentley Hart put it in his book on universalism, “in the end, we must love the good.” Those who argue for eternal conscious torment must not only show it aligns with biblical data, even as it seems to contradict what God claims to want, but that it reflects the unfolding of God’s ultimate goodness. Calvinists are right to say that no creature is entitled to believe we are somehow deserving of salvation, but at the same time one must face the logic of the claim that a conscious creature be created incapable of meeting the command that it will be punished endlessly for failing. The Jonathan Edwards view, that we should rejoice at the glory of God’s justice being enacted in hell, remains influential on much of the Protestant and evangelical church, even though one might point out they hardly act as if everyone they meet outside of the church is destined for eternal torment. Like many of the readings of scripture that characterise the modern church, one might claim they take much more of it literally than they do seriously.
But Matt, the only reason why the love I have for my wife is worth anything, is if there is a possibility to hate her.
One reason universal salvation is dismissed is that a lot of Christians treat Augustine as infallible. This is especially strange behavior for us Protestants, but I see it all the time; we like to cite Augie as if he’s Scripture, and this leads to some big interpretative fallacies (e.g. calvinism) as well as the outright unbiblical view that Adam’s original sin imputes guilt onto every human being.