Appendix B
The Boundary Between the Biblical Hope and Its Counterfeits
The word universalism covers a lot of ground. Say it in a seminary classroom and one professor thinks of the apostle Paul. Another thinks of John Hick. A third thinks of the denomination down the road that left the Trinity behind two centuries ago. They are not talking about the same thing, and they know it.
This appendix exists because that confusion is real, and it matters. Every chapter of this book carries a Boundary callout. It is the teal box that asks one question of the text at hand: Does the hope here mean the biblical, Christ-centered restoration this book defends, or could it be mistaken for a version the church has rightly refused? This appendix is the standing reference behind those callouts. It is the place where the boundary is drawn once, drawn clearly, and drawn in full.
I want to be plain about why this matters to me. I hold the hope of universal salvation with deep conviction. I believe that the character of God, the scope of the cross, and the certainty of God’s purpose form a foundation. On that foundation the salvation of all in Christ securely rests. But I also know that some things called “universalism” are not the gospel at all. They trade away the cross, the creeds, or the need for faith. The tradition is right to reject those versions. I share that rejection. What I refuse to do is let the counterfeits discredit the genuine article.
So here is the line, stated as plainly as I can draw it.1
The universalism this book defends can be tested against a short list of doctrinal marks. Each mark comes from the historic creeds and from Scripture. None of them is invented for this purpose. A version of universalism that keeps all seven marks is inside the boundary. A version that drops even one is outside it.
What We Affirm and What We Refuse
| What This Book Affirms | What This Book Refuses |
|---|---|
| The full deity of Christ and the Trinity. | Any universalism that abandons the Trinity or the deity of Christ. |
| The bodily resurrection of Christ and of the dead. | Any spiritualized salvation that discards the body or the physical creation. |
| The cross as a real, objective atonement for sin. | Any universalism that treats the cross as unnecessary, symbolic, or merely exemplary. |
| Salvation through personal faith in Christ alone, for every person who is saved. | Any universalism that says faith does not matter, or that all religions save equally. |
| The reality, justice, and severity of God’s judgment, and the reality of sin. | Any universalism that denies sin, trivializes judgment, or treats evil as an illusion. |
| The full authority and inspiration of Scripture. | Any universalism built on private revelation, esoteric knowledge, or the dismissal of biblical texts as primitive error. |
| A universalism reached by these doctrines, not in spite of them: the conviction that the biblical gospel, taken to its end, saves all. | Any universalism that reaches its conclusion by setting aside or contradicting the gospel it claims to fulfill. |
That is the line. The seven marks on the left are the marks of biblical, creedal universalism. The columns on the right name what falls outside. In the sections that follow, I will put a face on each version the church has rightly refused. For each one I will explain what it claims, name the true concern it distorts, and show why it fails the marks.2
I call these counterfeits not to be unkind, but to be honest. Each of them takes something real and stretches it past the breaking point. Each of them distorts a genuine concern. And each of them gives the word universalism a meaning that the biblical hope does not carry. When a critic says, “Universalism undermines the gospel,” one of these is almost always what they have in mind. They are usually right about that version. The mistake is in assuming there is only one.3
What it claims. All religions are equally valid paths to the same God. Christ is one face of the divine among many. No single faith has a unique claim on truth, and no one needs the cross to be saved. The clearest representative of this view is the philosopher John Hick. Hick replaced the personal God of Scripture with an unknowable reality he called “the Real.”4
Why it fails the marks. Pluralism drops the fourth mark (salvation through faith in Christ alone), the third mark (the cross as real atonement), and the first mark (the full deity of Christ). It makes Jesus one teacher among many. It renders the cross a noble example rather than a saving act. As Robin Parry puts it, this kind of universalism “marginalizes Christ’s role in salvation” and is “unbiblical.”5
What true concern it distorts. Pluralism takes a real concern, the fate of the billions who have never heard the gospel, and answers it by removing the need to hear it at all. This book shares that concern deeply (Chapter 16). But the answer is not to make the cross optional. The answer is a God whose saving reach extends to every person, through Christ, with all the time eternity allows.
What it claims. The human soul is a fragment of the divine, a “spark” trapped in matter, and salvation is the natural return of that spark to God. Salvation comes not through grace or through the cross, but through secret knowledge (Greek gnōsis, “knowledge”). The body and the physical world are problems to be escaped, not gifts to be redeemed.6
Why it fails the marks. Gnostic universalism fails the second mark (bodily resurrection), the third (the cross as real atonement), and the sixth (the authority of Scripture). It replaces the gospel with a mythology of divine sparks and cosmic returns. It has no place for the God who took on flesh, died on a cross, and rose bodily from the grave. Michael McClymond, in his massive two-volume study The Devil’s Redemption, traces a lineage from second-century gnostic teachers through Origen, the Kabbalists, and Jakob Böhme to modern universalism. He identifies a “unity-diversity-unity” pattern common to gnostic thought: a primal spiritual oneness with God, a fall into diversity understood as evil, and a final return to that original oneness. McClymond argues that the logic of universal restoration requires this framework and that all universalism is finally rooted in it.7
That charge is serious, and it deserves a serious answer. Robin Parry has given one. He demonstrates that the Christian story runs on a different pattern altogether: creation, fall, redemption, and consummation. The gnostic scheme collapses creation and fall into a single event (the emergence of diversity is itself the disaster), but the biblical narrative keeps them apart. God made the world good. The fall is a catastrophe within that good creation, not the creation itself. And redemption is the healing of the created order, not an escape from it. Gregory of Nyssa, one of the strongest universalist voices in the early church, rejected the pre-existence of souls and so removed a key plank of the gnostic model while keeping the hope of restoration. As Parry observes, very few Christian universalists in the modern era have held to the gnostic framework at all.8
What true concern it distorts. The gnostic version takes a real intuition: human beings were made for God and are restless until they find their way home. Augustine said the same. But Gnosticism builds a false story around that longing. This book affirms that we were made for God. But we were made as creatures, not as pieces of God. And the way home is through the cross, not through secret knowledge.9
What it claims. Everyone is basically fine. God is too nice to judge anyone. Sin is not that serious. Hell is a scare tactic. There is no real need for the cross, because there is no real problem to solve. Love wins because love overlooks.10
Why it fails the marks. Sentimental universalism fails the third mark (the cross as real atonement) and the fifth (the reality of judgment and sin). It often fails the sixth as well, since it simply ignores the hard texts. It offers comfort without cost. It has no doctrine of sin and no doctrine of judgment. It asks nothing of the creature and gives God nothing to do.
What true concern it distorts. The sentimental version takes the real truth that God is love and strips away everything that makes that love serious. Love without justice is not love. A God who overlooks evil is not good. This book affirms the love of God with everything it has (Chapter 2). But the love it affirms is the love that sent the Son to the cross. It is the love that refines with fire (Chapter 7) and will not rest until every sin is dealt with and every sinner is restored.11
What it claims. Since everyone is saved in the end, sin does not matter. Grace means freedom from moral demands. Repentance is optional. Holiness is irrelevant. The law is abolished, and so is any real consequence for breaking it.
Why it fails the marks. Antinomian universalism fails the fifth mark (the reality of sin and judgment). It treats grace as a license rather than a liberation. The New Testament is clear that grace teaches us to say no to ungodliness (Titus 2:11–12), not to say yes to it.12
What true concern it distorts. The antinomian version takes the real truth that salvation is by grace, not by law-keeping, and runs with it past the finish line. Grace is free, yes. But grace transforms. The universalism this book defends holds that every person will be brought to free, saving faith in Christ, and that faith always bears fruit in repentance, holiness, and love. Judgment is real, and sin carries real consequences, even if those consequences are restorative rather than endless (Appendix D).13
What it claims. Universal salvation is not merely hoped for or even expected. It is metaphysically necessary. The rational will, when it truly understands God, cannot refuse Him. Freedom, rightly understood, just is the movement toward God. A final “no” to God is not a real possibility, because no rational creature could sustain it. The most brilliant recent statement of this view comes from the Orthodox theologian David Bentley Hart in his That All Shall Be Saved.14
Why it fails the marks. This one needs care. Necessitarian universalism does not fail the first six marks the way the other counterfeits do. Hart is fully Trinitarian. He affirms the creeds, the deity of Christ, the incarnation, the atonement, the resurrection, and the authority of Scripture. He is not a pluralist, not a gnostic, and not sentimental about sin. On exegesis, patristics, and the nature of God, his work is among the most valuable resources this book draws on.15
The issue is narrower than doctrine. It is philosophical. Hart argues, especially in his Fourth Meditation, that rational freedom is the movement of the will toward the Good. Because God is the Good in its fullness, a will that truly sees God can only choose God. Every refusal of God, on this account, is a symptom of ignorance or bondage, not an exercise of genuine liberty. Hart draws on a long tradition here, from Maximus the Confessor’s distinction between the “natural will” (which tends only toward God) and the “gnomic will” (which can stray, but only through blindness). The conclusion is sharp: a final, free rejection of God is, in Hart’s words, not only unlikely but “a logically vacuous idea.”16
I find this argument powerful, and I am drawn to much of it. I agree that most actual refusals of God run on ignorance, deception, or wounded pride, and that grace which removes those barriers is liberation, not coercion (Chapter 22). But I part company with Hart at the point where he turns this insight into a metaphysical impossibility of final refusal. This book keeps libertarian free will. A real “yes” requires the possibility of a real “no.” I believe the love and wisdom of God will win every heart. But I hold that as an overwhelming conviction shaped by who God is, not as a logical theorem that eliminates the alternative in advance.17
What true concern it distorts. Hart’s concern is real and important. The traditional picture of eternal conscious torment makes nonsense of divine goodness. And the idea that a rational creature could stare at infinite beauty and refuse it forever is hard to credit. I share both concerns. But the answer is not to define freedom in a way that makes refusal impossible. The answer is a God who knows what each person would freely choose in any setting and who meets every soul with the most persuasive appeal it could receive, with all the time eternity allows. That is the optimal grace this book defends (Chapter 22), and it reaches the same destination as Hart by a different, and in my judgment safer, road.18
A Note on Hart: A Source, Not a Counterfeit
I want to be very clear about something. David Bentley Hart is not a counterfeit universalist. He is a fully orthodox, creedal Christian whose exegetical, linguistic, and patristic scholarship has been invaluable to the case this book builds. His work on the meaning of aiōnios (“age-long”) and kolasis (“corrective punishment”), his translations of key New Testament passages, and his recovery of the patristic universalist tradition are gifts to the church (Appendix C). This book uses him gratefully. The one place where I part from him is the philosophy of freedom: he turns the overwhelming probability that all will freely say yes into a metaphysical certainty that no one can say no. I keep the freedom. That is a real disagreement, but it is a disagreement between allies, not between a defender and a counterfeit.19
What it claims. Unitarian Universalism (the denomination, usually called “UU”) traces its roots to two strands of American Protestantism: the Unitarians, who rejected the Trinity, and the Universalists, who affirmed the salvation of all. In their 1961 merger and in the decades since, the denomination has moved far beyond both. Most UU congregations today do not confess the deity of Christ, the Trinity, the authority of Scripture, or the necessity of the cross. Many do not confess a personal God at all. The movement has become, in most of its expressions, a post-Christian ethical community built on shared values rather than shared doctrine.20
Why it fails the marks. Unitarian Universalism typically fails the first mark (the Trinity), the third (the atonement), the fourth (salvation through Christ), and the sixth (the authority of Scripture). It is the version that most people on the street think of when they hear the word “universalism,” and it is the reason many pastors flinch at the word.
What true concern it distorts. The early Universalists, people like Hosea Ballou, held a genuinely Christian hope. They believed a loving God would not torment His creatures forever. That concern is real, and this book shares it. But the movement’s historical trajectory shows what happens when the hope is cut loose from the doctrines that ground it. The cross, the creeds, the Trinity, and the authority of Scripture are not obstacles the hope must outgrow. They are the soil in which the hope is planted.21
McClymond uses this trajectory as a cautionary tale, arguing that the slide from Christian universalism to post-Christian liberalism follows a natural internal logic. But Parry has answered that charge carefully. He finds no persuasive arguments in McClymond’s work showing that the doctrine of restoration (apokatastasis) leads, by any internal necessity, to the abandonment of the Trinity, the atonement, or any other core doctrine. The UU denomination’s trajectory was shaped by Enlightenment pressures common to all of liberal Protestantism, not by any logic unique to the universalist hope.22
This book reclaims the word universalism from that hollowing-out. The hope of the salvation of all does not belong to a denomination that has left the gospel behind. It belongs to the gospel itself.
If you tell someone you are a universalist, brace yourself. The word means different things to different people, and most of the meanings they will hear are not the one you hold. This is not their fault. The word has been used for too many things.
So here is my advice. Lead with charity. When someone objects to universalism, do not assume they are objecting to yours. Ask which version they mean. If they mean the pluralist version, agree with them. If they mean the sentimental version, agree with them. If they mean the UU version, agree with them. You are not surrendering anything by saying, “Yes, I reject that too.” You are making room for the real conversation.23
Then, when the ground is clear, state what you do hold. State it positively, not defensively. Say something like: “I believe the God who sent His Son to die for the world will not stop until every person He made is freely, gladly reconciled to Him through Christ. The cross is not optional. Faith is not optional. Judgment is real. But the story does not end with judgment. It ends with ‘God, all in all’” (1 Corinthians 15:28).24
And if they press further, hand them this table. The seven marks are public, doctrinal, and testable. They are not ad hoc labels invented to dodge embarrassment. They are the creeds, the cross, and the Scripture. Any universalism that keeps all seven is inside the boundary. Any that drops one is outside it. The line is not hard to find. It is hard to ignore.
A Word to the Skeptic of This Boundary
Some will say this is special pleading: I relabel the embarrassing versions “counterfeit” and claim the good name for my own. But the marks are not my invention. They are the public doctrines of the historic Christian faith: the Trinity, the deity of Christ, the atonement, salvation through faith, the reality of sin and judgment, the authority of Scripture. If a version of universalism keeps all of those and adds only the conviction that God’s saving work will finally reach everyone, the burden of proof is on the critic to show what has been lost, not on the defender to apologize for what has been gained.25
Robin Parry has drawn this line with care. His imaginary representative of evangelical universalism, a figure he names Anastasia, “believes in the inspiration and authority of the Bible” and “all those crucial Christian doctrines concerning the Trinity, creation, sin, atonement, the return of Christ, salvation through Christ alone, by grace alone, through faith alone.” On most things, Parry says, “you’d be hard pressed to tell her apart from any other evangelical.”26 That is the profile of the universalism this book defends. It is not a different gospel. It is the same gospel, believed all the way to its end.
Parry also makes a point that deserves repeating. A universalist “could maintain all the central elements of orthodox Christian faith. Universalism, in other words, is quite compatible with belief in the Trinity, in creation, fall, and redemption, in the inspiration of scripture, in incarnation, in mission, and so on.”27 Hunter Coates has reinforced this same case more recently from an Orthodox perspective, arguing that the hope of restoration belongs not to the margins of Christian theology but to what he calls “the genuine, deep structure of orthodoxy.”28 The question is not whether universalism can be orthodox. It can. The question is whether a given universalism is orthodox. And that is what the seven marks are for.
This appendix has drawn a line. On one side stands a universalism that keeps the cross, the creeds, the faith, and the Scripture, and adds only the conviction that God’s love will not fail. On the other side stand six versions that trade away one or more of those things. The first five are ideas. The sixth is a denomination. All six have given the word universalism a reputation it does not deserve, at least not when the word refers to the biblical hope this book defends.
The tradition is right about the counterfeits. A universalism that makes the cross unnecessary is not the gospel. A universalism that treats sin as an illusion is not the gospel. A universalism that leaves the Trinity behind is not the gospel. I say so plainly, and I mean it.
But the tradition is wrong to let the counterfeits close the door on the genuine article. The deepest doctrines of the faith, the character of God (Chapters 2–7), the cross for all (Chapters 8–12), the will to save all (Chapters 13–17), and the victory of God (Chapters 18–23), point together toward one conclusion: love never fails (1 Corinthians 13:8). That conclusion is not a counterfeit. It is the hope the gospel was always pointing toward.29
The line is drawn. The hope stands on the right side of it. And the boundary is not a wall to keep people out. It is a guardrail to keep the hope honest.
↑ 1. The boundary is developed at greater length in Chapter 1 and stated in compact form in Part Two of the master architecture. The present appendix serves as the standing reference to which every chapter’s Boundary callout points. For the book’s detailed articulation of each pillar, see Parts One through Four.
↑ 2. The typology of universalisms used here draws on a classification developed by Robin Parry in 2003 for the volume Universal Salvation? The Current Debate, ed. Robin A. Parry and Christopher H. Partridge (Carlisle, UK: Paternoster, 2003), xxi. Parry refined it in the “Intellectual Geography of Universalisms” section of The Evangelical Universalist, 3rd ed. (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2026), 5–9. The present appendix adapts and expands that taxonomy for the purposes of this book.
↑ 3. Stephen Jonathan, Grace Beyond the Grave: Is There Hope for Those Who Die without Christ? (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2018), 25–28, provides a helpful overview of the varied positions, including the distinction between pluralistic, inclusivistic, and Christian universalisms. His typology follows Sanders, Pinnock, and Strange. See also Trevor Hart, “Universalism: Two Distinct Types,” in Universalism and the Doctrine of Hell, ed. Nigel M. de S. Cameron (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1992), 1–34, for the basic distinction between pluralist and Christian universalism.
↑ 4. John Hick, Death and Eternal Life (London: Collins, 1976). Hick replaced the personal God of Christian theism with “the Real,” a noumenal reality behind all religions. His developed position appears in An Interpretation of Religion: Human Responses to the Transcendent (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989).
↑ 5. Robin Parry, The Evangelical Universalist, 3rd ed. (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2026), 6.
↑ 6. The term gnōsis (Greek γνω̃σις, “knowledge”) gave Gnosticism its name. The gnostic systems of the second and third centuries (Valentinus, Basilides, et al.) held that the material world was the product of an ignorant or malevolent sub-deity, and that salvation consisted in escaping matter through secret knowledge of one’s divine origin.
↑ 7. Michael McClymond, The Devil’s Redemption: A New History and Interpretation of Christian Universalism, 2 vols. (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2018). McClymond identifies a “unity-diversity-unity” metanarrative that he finds in both gnostic and Christian universalist thought (vol. 1, pp. 10–11). Gnostic teachers, on his account, portrayed salvation as the reversal of a cosmic catastrophe: a primal spiritual unity with God, a lapse into diversity understood as evil, and a final return to that original unity. McClymond argues that this triadic pattern persists from the second-century gnostics through Origen, the Kabbalists, Jakob Böhme, and modern universalists, and that the logic of universal return requires the gnostic starting point (see his general conclusion, ch. 12, vol. 2, pp. 1005–11). The claim is sweeping: it amounts to saying that all universalism is finally gnostic in its DNA.
↑ 8. Robin Parry, The Evangelical Universalist, 3rd ed., appendix 5, “A Response to Michael McClymond,” 283–86. Parry demonstrates that the Christian metanarrative of creation-fall-redemption is structurally distinct from the gnostic unity-diversity-unity triad: in the biblical story, creation is good, the fall is a catastrophe within creation, and redemption is the healing of the created order, not a return to pre-material oneness. Gregory of Nyssa, for example, rejected the pre-existence of souls (On the Making of Man 28.3), removing a key plank of the gnostic model, while maintaining his universalist hope. As Parry observes, “few Christian universalists of modern and contemporary times have entertained” the doctrine of pre-existent souls. George Sidney Hurd’s survey of early universalist witnesses confirms the same point: a significant number of early church fathers held the hope of restoration on purely biblical and christological grounds, without the gnostic baggage. See Hurd, The Triumph of Mercy: The Reconciliation of All through Jesus Christ, 2nd ed. (2014), ch. 12, “The History of Universalism.”
↑ 9. Augustine, Confessions I.1: “You have made us for yourself and our hearts are restless, until they find rest in You.” This longing is not gnostic. It is a consequence of the doctrine of creation: we were made by God and for God. Parry makes this point carefully in his response to McClymond; see The Evangelical Universalist, 3rd ed., 284.
↑ 10. Sentimental universalism has no major theological representative, which is part of the point. It is the popular-level assumption that love means niceness and that a nice God would never judge. It is the version most often targeted by evangelical critics, and the version least representative of serious universalist scholarship.
↑ 11. On restorative justice as the biblical model of divine judgment, see Chapter 7. On the judgment texts treated honestly, see Appendix D. The book’s foundational treatment of God’s love as the love that sent the Son to the cross is in Chapter 2.
↑ 12. Titus 2:11–12 (ESV): “For the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation for all people, training us to renounce ungodliness and worldly passions, and to live self-controlled, upright, and godly lives in the present age.” Grace teaches, it does not indulge. See also Romans 6:1–2: “Are we to continue in sin that grace may abound? By no means!”
↑ 13. The restorative character of divine judgment is developed at length in Chapter 7 (the refiner pattern in Hebrews 12, Malachi 3, and Isaiah 1) and applied to the specific judgment texts in Appendix D.
↑ 14. David Bentley Hart, That All Shall Be Saved: Heaven, Hell, and Universal Salvation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019; paperback with 2021 preface). Hart’s case is built in four “Meditations,” with the freedom argument concentrated in the Fourth Meditation, “What Is Freedom? A Reflection on the Rational Will.” The First Meditation treats God’s moral character in light of creation ex nihilo; the Second treats biblical eschatology and the language of judgment; the Third addresses personhood and the imago Dei; and the Fourth develops the account of rational freedom on which the necessitarian case rests.
↑ 15. Hart’s linguistic and exegetical contributions are engaged throughout this book. His treatment of aiōnios and kolasis is reflected in Appendix C and Appendix D. His New Testament translation (The New Testament: A Translation [New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017]) is cited at several points where his rendering illuminates the text. Hart’s catalog of universalist-leaning passages (23 texts gathered in his own renderings at Second Meditation §I) is a valuable reference for the scope of the biblical witness.
↑ 16. Hart, That All Shall Be Saved, Fourth Meditation, “What Is Freedom?” Hart draws on Maximus the Confessor’s distinction between the “natural will” (thelēma physikon), which tends only toward God as its true end, and the “gnomic will” (thelēma gnōmikon), which can stray but only through blindness to the Good. Hart extends this to argue that the rational appetite is constitutionally ordered toward what the mind perceives as good, and that the highest objects of desire are the transcendentals: being, truth, goodness, and beauty, which are convertible with one another and ultimately with God. On this account, a will that truly sees God can only choose God. See also the Introduction to the 2021 paperback edition, where Hart notes that no adverse review has yet identified, let alone refuted, the Fourth Meditation’s central claims.
↑ 17. The book’s full engagement with the freedom question, optimal grace, and middle knowledge is in Chapter 22. On the one open question (the bare logical possibility of final refusal) and the conditional-immortality fallback, see also Chapter 1 and Chapter 24. Timothy A. Stratton, Human Freedom, Divine Knowledge, and Mere Molinism, 2nd ed. (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2026), provides a sustained defense of libertarian free will as the ground of rational responsibility (see esp. ch. 12, “The FreeThinking Argument”), which supports the book’s insistence that genuine freedom requires the possibility of refusal.
↑ 18. The distinction between Hart’s necessity and this book’s conviction is not a rejection of Hart’s conclusion, which I share, but of the philosophical route by which he reaches it. Kirk R. MacGregor, in Molinist Philosophical and Theological Ventures (Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2022), ch. 8, “The Relationship between Molinism and Eventual Universalism,” argues that if God possesses middle knowledge, and if there are feasible worlds in which all creatures eventually embrace God freely, then an all-loving God would create such a world. MacGregor concludes that Molinism furnishes the only philosophical framework under which God could guarantee universal salvation while preserving libertarian freedom. This is precisely the route this book takes: not necessity, but optimal grace guided by perfect knowledge. See also Andrew Hronich, Once Loved, Always Loved: The Good News of the Gospel from Genesis to Revelation (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2024), ch. 9, where Hronich engages Hart’s freedom argument with care and explores how libertarian freedom can be preserved within a universalist framework.
↑ 19. Hart himself, in the Preface to the 2021 paperback edition of That All Shall Be Saved, describes his Fourth Meditation’s logic as “classically Christian” rather than novel, rooted in Maximus, Gregory of Nyssa, and the broader intellectualist tradition of the rational will. The disagreement, then, is not over whether that tradition is respectable (it is), but over whether it eliminates libertarian alternatives to its own account of freedom. This book says it does not. The distinction matters because the charge that universalism overrides freedom is the single most common objection the hope faces in evangelical settings, and a universalism that keeps freedom real can answer that charge in a way that a necessitarian universalism cannot.
↑ 20. The Unitarian Universalist Association was formed in 1961 by the merger of the American Unitarian Association and the Universalist Church of America. On the theological trajectory of the American universalist movement, see Robin A. Parry with Ilaria L. E. Ramelli, A Larger Hope? Volume 2: Universal Salvation from the Reformation to the Nineteenth Century (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2019), which traces the historical development of universalist thought in the early modern and modern periods and helps explain the social and intellectual forces at work in the movement’s evolution. See also Parry, The Evangelical Universalist, 3rd ed., appendix 5, 281–82.
↑ 21. Parry’s analysis in The Evangelical Universalist, 3rd ed., 281–82, is instructive here. He notes that the gradual transformation of the American Universalist denomination from a Christian church into a post-Christian movement was not a direct or necessary implication of the doctrine of universal salvation. The trajectory was driven by broader Enlightenment and liberal-Protestant pressures that affected many denominations, universalist or not.
↑ 22. Parry writes that he has “been unable to find any persuasive arguments in McClymond’s book that show how the doctrine of apokatastasis has implications that lead to the abandonment of any of the other doctrines he thinks are at risk” (The Evangelical Universalist, 3rd ed., 282). McClymond’s suggestion that universalism functions like a first move in a chess game, inevitably leading to other doctrinal concessions, is, in Parry’s analysis, asserted without supporting argument. The fact that other doctrines were lost in the UU case does not show that the universalist hope caused their loss.
↑ 23. Jonathan’s typology in Grace Beyond the Grave, ch. 1, is useful here. He distinguishes hard restrictivism, pessimistic and optimistic agnosticism, inclusivism, and several forms of universalism within a single spectrum of positions. Seeing where the conversation partner stands on that spectrum is the first step toward honest dialogue.
↑ 24. 1 Corinthians 15:28 (ESV): “When all things are subjected to him, then the Son himself will also be subjected to him who put all things in subjection under him, that God may be all in all.” See Chapter 19 for the full treatment of this text.
↑ 25. Parry addresses this charge directly: “It is important in assessing the orthodoxy of universalism to ask the question, ‘Does universalism entail the denial of any claims central to orthodox Christian faith?’” His answer: no. “A universalist could maintain all the central elements of orthodox Christian faith” (The Evangelical Universalist, 3rd ed., p. 206).
↑ 26. Robin Parry, The Evangelical Universalist, 3rd ed. (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2026), 6.
↑ 27. Parry, The Evangelical Universalist, 3rd ed., 206. Parry’s list is worth hearing in full: “Universalism, in other words, is quite compatible with belief in the Trinity, in creation, fall, and redemption, in the inspiration of scripture, in incarnation, in mission, and so on.”
↑ 28. Hunter Coates, Grace Abounds: A Holistic Case for Universal Salvation (Eugene, OR: Resource Publications, 2024). Coates builds his case from an Orthodox theological framework, covering biblical, historical, and philosophical ground. His Introduction frames universalism as belonging to “the genuine, deep structure of orthodoxy” (as John Milbank endorses in the foreword), and his sustained engagement with the patristic tradition, the harrowing of Hades, and the christological shape of the hope reinforces the point that creedal universalism is not a modern invention but a recovery of ancient Christian conviction.
↑ 29. 1 Corinthians 13:8 (ESV): “Love never ends.” The Greek piptei (πίπτει) carries the sense of “falling” or “failing.” The NKJV renders it “love never fails.” Both translations serve the book’s title text. See Chapter 24 for the full treatment.