The Case for Christian Universalism

Gospel and Apokatastasis.

The Annunciation by Henry Ossawa Tanner, 1898

There is a thought experiment designed to challenge the validity of a loving God called the “Evil God hypothesis.” What is proposed is that there exists a God who has all the aspects of classical theism except instead of being loving he is malevolent, and the claim is made that you cannot distinguish on the basis of evidence that this would be any less true.

If ever Christianity has veered towards the Evil God hypothesis, it is in the tenants of strict Calvinism. By taking Augustine’s original sin to its extreme, Calvin created a reality in which a child is brought into this world deserving eternal punishment, condemned by sins they have no power to not commit. Calvin said in the Institutes that “The guilt of original sin is sufficient to condemn all children.” According to Calvinism, God creates almost all of humanity as “vessels of destruction” to quote Romans 9, giving them no free will, and declining to extend to them the irresistible call of salvation that he extends to the elect, the few that he decides to save in order to demonstrate his glory.

The problem with this view of reality is not just that it is morally abhorrent, it’s that it is logically incongruous. For Calvinists, one man, Adam, had free will. By sinning Adam condemned all humanity to be born without free will into “total depravity,” absolutely dependent on God’s grace to be saved from their bondage to sin. Yet at the same time, God has already only predestined the “elect” to be saved. Thus the idea that Adam’s free will condemns us is moot anyway, we are sovereignly created without free will and God specifically chooses out of his mysterious will who he will and won’t extend grace to. This God, Calvin also believed, is perfectly and infinitely loving and good.