What the hell is Universal Salvation?

An Introduction and Early History (the shorter, free version)

See what I did there?

If my dad joke title doesn’t make any sense to you, maybe a short primer on Universal Salvation will help.

Universal Christian Salvation is a VERY OLD idea whose adherence has waxed and waned throughout Church history. Perhaps it is best defined by one of its most well-known proponents, a Christian philosopher (likely) born in Alexandria in 185 B.C. named Origen¹. Here’s a quote from Origen that I will use to introduce the idea of Universal Christian Salvation (as opposed to some other universal ideas).

A Primer on the Theory

Every being will be restored to be one, and God will be “all in all”. However, this will not happen in a moment, but slowly and gradually, through innumerable aeons of indefinite duration, because correction and purification will take place gradually, according to the needs of each individual. Thus, whereas some with a faster rhythm will be the first to hasten to the goal, and others will follow them closely, yet others on the contrary will fall a long distance behind. And in this way, through innumerable orders constituted by those who make progress and, after being enemies, are reconciled with God, there will come the last enemy, Death, that this may be destroyed and there may be no enemy left.

Quote from Origin. In Ilaria L.E. Ramelli, A Larger Hope? Universal Salvation from Christian Beginnings to Julian of Norwich, Wipf and Stock Publishers 2019 page 8-9 Kindle edition.

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For clarity, let’s tease out what Origen is implying/outright stating:

• Evil, a created thing, will ultimately end, leaving only God’s goodness.²

• ALL Humanity will retain its free will, but will ultimately succumb to God’s welcoming embrace as evil is burned away to nothing through a correction and purification fire Origen describes as aionion (otherworldly). We’ll get there later, but Origen claimed even Satan, as a created being, will ultimately return to God.³

• The burning away of this non-eternal part of humans will leave only that ‘made in God’s Image’ (Genesis 1:26), ultimately defeating Death, the final enemy.

• God will be “all in all”, with nothing but his perfect eternal creation remaining.

For those who need it explicitly spelled out, God will ‘save’ the universe from death itself. Universal salvation is easy to define, but hard to understand, because the definition is in the term, but the theory really lies in its details. When people state that Universal Christian Salvation is ________ (unbiblical, a denial of free will, heretical, a modern invention), it’s this difficulty to easily define the concept that often is the root cause. And history, alongside the historical record, makes it clear that despite what you may have heard:

• this rescue (salvation) of humanity from death itself isn’t a new, modern idea

• it wasn’t generated out of whole cloth in the 18th-21st centuries by ‘liberal’ Christians who wanted God to be nice

• it doesn’t claim there is no hell

• it doesn’t imply that humanity loses its free will

• it doesn’t avoid the ‘sin problem’; it may not answer it to your satisfaction, but it never denies or avoids it

• it believes wholeheartedly in the centrality of Christ’s death and resurrection for the salvation of humanity⁴

So, super easy to understand, right? And not particularly controversial, I might add (heavy sarcasm intended).

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Where We’re Going

This is a history blog. I subscribe to a belief that historians ALL have an agenda. I am no different than any of them, and so I’ll be clear right up front, I have an agenda. While it’s not to convince you to convert to the theory of Universal Christian Salvation, it is to speak back to thousands of years of what I perceive as ‘mis-history’, or history that fails to tell the entire story.

In executing my agenda, there will be explanatory sections of theology, but ultimately my goal is to tell you the history of Christianity. For my first act, I’ve decided to write about a touchy and tough subject; the idea of Universal Christian Salvation. In general, each blog will have 2 sections: a section titled Just the History for those who want to read about my research into Church history and a section titled Research for Yourself for those needing to know where I got the information or how to research more.

The first in any of my series (like this one) will include a Primer on the concept (see Primer section above) to help introduce it and a Where We’re Going section (see where you currently are) to lay out the Christian history I intend to cover within that particular series. The last article in each series will add a section titled CJ’s Hot Takes which will be a combination of me telling you what I think about all of it and being a smart ass. The paid version of each article will be longer and have more history, will include videos of people I interview on the topic, reviews of books I read to prepare, and a subscriber-only link to a Christian history timeline that I’m building as I write each article/series. Not a bad investment, in my opinion, for $5/month.

For this series on Universal Salvation, here’s Where We’re Going:

• Biblical Record to 100 A.D. (today’s article)

• Pre-Origenian Christian Universalists (early 2nd Century)

• Origen

• Origen apologists in the 3rd and early 4th Centuries

• “Moving West”-When Universal Christian Salvation Invaded Western Christendom

• The Middle Ages and Universal Salvation

• The Early Renaissance and Universal Salvation

• ‘Modern’ Manifestations

That’s a lot of Where We’re Going, so let’s dive right into the history.

Biblical Record to 100 A.D.

If you believe its proponents, the theory of universal salvation is ancient. Like, the writing of the Hebrew Scriptures ancient.⁵ In this first article in the series, we’re looking at some of the most ancient (up to 100 A.D.) indicators that Universalists point to when making this claim. The first indicator is an interpretation of the texts within the Hebrew and Christian scriptures, what most of us think of as the Bible. Universalists claim the text itself indicates that the theory of Universal Salvation has always been a part of the Christian faith. The second indicator is several logical deductions Universalists point to from their interpretation of the historical facts available. While deductions aren’t necessarily ‘smoking guns’, much of history and what we believe about our past is based upon our deductions from the facts as we understand them.

The Biblical Record

Universalists and Patristic church historians assert that there are numerous indicators that Universal Christian Salvation is the theology Biblical writers intended to express.

Ilaria Ramelli, in an extensively researched book titled A Larger Hope? Universal Salvation from Christian Beginnings to Julian of Norwich” devotes a chapter in the book to root verses for Universal Christian Salvation in both the 'Hebrew Bible’ and ‘The New Testament’ saying “many passages in the Bible can be taken to support a doctrine of universal salvation and were understood by many in the early church to do precisely that.”⁶ Verses Dr. Ramelli believes the Early Church asserted in support of Universal Christian Salvation from the Hebrew Bible include:

• Genesis 12:3

• Isaiah 19:23-25, 42:1-4, 49:6, 49:15, 51:4-5, 66:18, 66:23

• Ezekiel 16:54-55, 33:11

• Lamentations 3:22 and 3:31-33

Lamentations 3:31 to the end of the chapter will, for brevity's sake, have to act as a representative of the whole:

For the Lord will not cast off forever; for though He causes grief, He will have pity according the multitude of His kindnesses. For He does not afflict from His heart, nor does He grieve the sons of man. To crush all the prisoners of earth under His feet; to turn aside the judgment of a man before the face of the Most High; to wrong a man in his cause; this the Lord does not see.⁷

Like the verse from Lamentations above, the ‘Hebrew Scriptures’ are FILLED with examples of the seemingly unending mercy (“will not cast off forever”) of God. Time and again, he says he will wipe out his OWN people and time and then, he is seemingly talked out of it by righteous representatives of his people. Right alongside these stories, however, are verses that indicate a level of judgment and frankly violence that remains frightening in its intensity. At it’s core, then, the question is, which ‘version’ of God are we dealing with? Or are we missing something significant in the stories that seemingly contradict one another? Can these seemingly diverse perspectives be unified into a cohesive whole? If you’re like me, you always felt like something was missing in your church pews on Sunday and perhaps this apparent contradiction never completely made sense to you. Christian Universalists claim that contradiction is unnecessary; God IS full of wrath and judges, but right alongside that judgment is a stronger grace.

Christian Universalists will also point out that, in addition to Old Testament scripture that may (or may not) point to Universal Christian Salvation, there is little, if any, Old Testament writing that points to a doctrine of eternal damnation⁸. This to a degree is proving the point by lack of evidence; i.e. God intends to save all because he never claims otherwise.

Dr. Ramelli also quotes extensive scripture from the ‘New Testament’ that she asserts represents “some of the biblical seeds of hope that were sown into the soil of early Christianity”⁹ including:

• Matthew

  • 17:11

  • 19:25

• Mark 9:49

• Luke 16:16

• John 1:29

• John 3:17

  • 12:47

• Acts

  • 3:20-21 (the only time the word apokatastasis appears in the Bible is Peter’s exhortation to the Jews at Pentecost)

• Romans

  • 3:3-4

  • 5:18-19

  • 8: 35-39

  • 11:11-32

  • 14:11

• 1 Corinthians

  • 15:22-23

  • 3:14-15

  • 5:5

  • 15:24-28

• 2 Cor

  • 5:19, 35

• Phil 2:10-11

  • 3:21

• 1 Tim

  • 1:20

  • 2:4-6

  • 4:10

• 1 Peter 3:19-21

• 2 Peter 3:9

• Titus 2:11

• Hebrews

  • 2:9

  • 2:14-15

  • 9:19

  • 9:11-13

  • 10:5-10

• 1 John

  • 2:2

  • 4:8

  • 4:10

  • 4:14

  • 4:16

• Jude

  • 6¹⁰

• Revelation 20:10-15

  • 21:8

Like the ‘Hebrew Scriptures’, there is little text in the New Testament to intimate that damnation is eternal. To be fair, there isn’t much about ‘hell’ to work with in the New Testament at all. The word often translated as hell is Gehenna and it is mentioned once by James (chapter 3) and ~11 times by Jesus himself. Not a significant # of mentions for such a supposedly vital theory. Other descriptions of similar words that might reference something related to hell include Tartarus (2 Peter 2), a concept identified from Greek mythology and Hades (Revelation 1, 6, 20, Acts 2 (quoting Psalm 16) and Christ in Matthew 11, Luke 10, Matthew 16, and Luke 16).¹¹ By my count that’s 20 instances of the word or words that would indicate eternal damnation. Check for yourself, Strong’s Concordance for the New Testament lists hell as mentioned somewhere between 13 times in the NIV and 23 in the King James.

Before my reader becomes incensed at my claim that hell is seldom mentioned and that eternal damnation is given limited or no attention, it is important to note that EVERYTHING that we, in the modern world, think about scripture has undergone some interpretation. We interpret Hebrew for our ‘Old Testament’ and Greek for our ‘New’. We interpret which meaning of the Hebrew or Greek word is used in the context we are reading as many words are context-dependent in both languages. We interpret what the original writer (or their scribe or future generations) meant based on our understanding of the history of the time we are studying. Interpretation is ALL we have; none of us were there, most of us don’t speak or read these obscure languages, and few are Biblical scholars. You are, of course, entitled to believe what you wish about Dr. Ramelli’s interpretation skills or my own research of this topic, but mainly she says that there are several ideas throughout the ‘New Testament’ at play here:

• aionios: context dependent, this adjective never means eternal unless it’s indicating God. When descriptive of other things like life, death and fire, it is translated “belonging to the world to come” “otherworldly” or “divine”.

• aidios: context dependent again, this adjective is used to indicate “eternal” things. and it is only used in this context with “life in the other world”. “In the Bible, only life in the other world is called “eternal” proper (aidioc/aidios), whereas death punishment, and fire are never called aidia but only aiwvia, “otherworldly”.¹²

• pantes/panta: translated as “all beings” “all people”. Obviously Dr. Ramelli believes that this “all beings” is used when the author intends to indicate that ALL will be saved.¹³

As before, a single text will have to represent the whole. As Paul is often quoted by both Origen and Gregory of Nyssa, let’s use 1 Corinthians 15:22-28:

For as all die in Adam, so also all will be made alive in Christ. But each in his own order: Christ, the first-fruit; afterward those of Christ at His coming. Then is the end-when He delivers the kingdom to God, even the Father; when He makes to cease all rule and all authority and power-for it is right for him to reign until He puts all the enemies under His feet; the last enemy made to cease is death. For He subjected all things under His feet; but when He says that all things have been subjected, it is plain that it excepts Him who has subjected all things to Him. But when all things are subjected to Him, then the Son Himself also will be subjected to the One who has subjected all things to Him, that God may be all things in all.¹⁴

Logical Deductions?

This section is a bit trickier than listing scripture and arguing about the meaning of words. There are other reasons to believe that the early church held the theology of Universal Salvation. Still, such assertions are tied more to why it’s illogical to think otherwise or alternative explanations for where the theory of eternal damnation came from if not the Biblical texts (it had to come from somewhere if it wasn’t from the Bible, correct?). 4 areas of history from this period (to 100 A.D.) buttress my claim regarding early Christian belief in the Universal Salvation of all peoples:

• Rise of Rome. The coincidence of the Rise of Rome and Early Christianity, no doubt, influenced our ability, thousands of years later, to point to ‘proofs’ about ANYTHING that the Early Church believed. Texts were destroyed, records weren’t kept while Early Christians often ran for their lives, and generally there is LITTLE documentation from this period. This fact alone makes it extremely difficult to point to what the Early Church believed (or didn’t) regarding Universal Christian Salvation.

• Theories of End Times (Eschatology) were not a priority. In addition to running for their lives (see Rise of Rome above), Early Christians weren’t focused on theories about ‘where you go when you die.’ They were mostly focused on spreading the Good News (Evangelion), dealing with their lives and issues of their day, and how to live with this new Jesus TODAY. What did he say about relationship? About helping others? About LIVING for and with God? Serious questions about end-times, actually theology in general, were all questions that earnestly began in later centuries.

• The early Christians had no Biblical Texts available to them that included a theology of Eternal Damnation. The text available to them until at least 60 A.D. would have been the ‘Old Testament’ and this text has limited mention of eternal damnation (see section on ‘Hebrew Scriptures’ above).

• Alternative origination possibilities. There are so many places even a poorly read Early Christian may have derived the idea of eternal damnation. Given that Christianity is a Jewish religion, the beliefs of the Pharisees are particularly relevant. Aside from them, however, surrounding ancient cultural beliefs in a place of torment are extensively documented and may provide an alternative explanation for where the idea originated.

So, there you have it. Universal Christian Salvation, if you accept the arguments, has multiple Biblical texts that can be taken to support it. Jewish conceptions of the afterlife don’t explicitly state a doctrine of eternal damnation and claims that concepts like hell are heavily referenced in either Testament rest on improper translatations of the original language. There are many alternative explanations for where the concept of eternal damnation came from than the Bible, and many plausible deductions about why we don’t have records of a written, well-defined theory of Universal Christian Salvation in its place. That said, I DON’T expect you to take my word for it, so let’s transition to how you can research this topic for yourself.

Research for Yourself

Universalism History:

• A Larger Hope? Volume 1: Universal Salvation from Christian Beginnings to Julian of Norwich. Ilaria L.E. Ramelli

• Universalism The Prevailing Doctrine Of the Christian Church During Its First Five Hundred Years (and showing the influence of Greek Mythology and pagan philosophy on Christian Doctrine). J.W. Hanson

• Ancient History of Universalism, from the time of the apostles to the fifth general council, with an appendix tracing the doctrine to the Reformation. Hosea Ballou 2d.

• Universalism: a historical survey Richard Bauckham.

• The History of Universalism. Part 1 and 2. Christian Universalist Association.

General Church History:

• Encyclopedia of Ancient Christianity Edited by Angelo DiBerardino.

• Backgrounds of Early Church History. 3rd Ed. Everett Ferguson.

• The Didache. Christian History Institute.

• A History of Early Christian Literature. Edgar J. Goodspeed.

Primary Sources:

• BlueLetterBible.org. For this article, I used it to gain access to Strong’s Digital Concordance.

• Perseus Digital Library. For this article, I looked up ancient texts including The History of Rome, Book I by Livy and Geography by Strabo.

• The Interlinear Bible Hebrew-Greek-English. Jay P. Green Sr. Editor.

• Jewish Virtual Library.

People:

Places:

Events:

Theology:

• Love Wins (Enhanced Edition). A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived. Rob Bell.

• Raising Hell. Christianity’s Most Controversial Doctrine Put Under Fire. Julie Ferwerda. Julie’s substack is also fantastic and you should consider subscribing.

I hope you liked this post and got as much out of it as I did writing it. Next up (these take me a minute so I’m not committing to a specific delivery date), Pre-Origenian Christian Universalists, proving that the idea wasn’t invented solely from a single, though brilliant, individual.

1. Angelo Di Berardino, Encyclopedia of Ancient Christianity, InterVarsity Press, Translated from Italian 2006-2008.

2. Ramelli pg 9.

3. Ramelli pp 9-10.

4. Ramelli pg. 14.

5. Throughout, I will interchangeably use the “Hebrew Scriptures” and the “Old Testament” interchangeably, though I know they are not exactly 1:1 the same.

6. Ramelli pg. 9.

7. Jay P. Green, Sr. General Editor and Translator. The Interlinear Bible Hebrew-Greek-English. Hendrickson Publishers, 2nd Edition 1986.

8. J.W. Hanson, D.D. Universalism The Prevailing Doctrine Of the Christian Church During Its First Five Hundred Years. Universalist Publishing House. 1899. Pages throughout the section “Whence Came the Doctrine?” in section III (Origin of Endless Punishment). See also “Afterlife” in Jewish Virtual Library for references to the lack of a doctrine (https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/afterlife) as well as Rob Bell’s Love Wins Companion to Chapter Three on Hell with a lot of good information about what the Old and New Testaments ACTUALLY say about hell. Bell’s chapter on hell itself is also very informative.

9. Ramelli pg. 18.

10. J.W. Hanson, D.D. Universalism The Prevailing Doctrine Of the Christian Church During Its First Five Hundred Years. Universalist Publishing House. 1899

11. Rob Bell. Love Wins. A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived. Harper Collins Publishers. Page 75 of the Kindle Edition.

12. Ramelli pg. 10. I would note that there are no Greek letters in Substack and so much of these words are phonetic versions of the Greek.

13. Ramelli pg. 15.

14. Green, pg. 893.