Imagine a general who fights a long war. He wins every battle. He breaks every opposing army. His flag flies over every fortress on the map, save one. In that last province a stubborn pocket of rebels holds out, and the general decides to let them stay. Forever. He walls them in behind barbed wire, posts guards, and walks away. Would you call that a total victory? I do not think you would. A single province in permanent revolt means the war is not over. It means the general either could not finish the job or chose not to.

Now hear the apostle Paul describe the end of another campaign. This one is God's:

Read those last five words again: that God may be all in all. Not all in some. Not all in the elect. All in all.

Paul paints a picture in which every enemy is conquered and death itself is destroyed. The Son hands the kingdom to the Father so that God fills everything with His presence. The previous two chapters built the case that God wills the salvation of all (Chapter 4) and that His love and power cannot be finally frustrated (Chapter 5). This chapter asks the next question: does God actually get what He wants? Does the campaign end in total victory, or does a province hold out forever?¹

I believe the answer is here, in one of the most sweeping passages Paul ever wrote. And I believe the answer is yes.

The Text in Context

First Corinthians 15 is Paul's great resurrection chapter. The whole letter has been dealing with problems in the Corinthian church: factions, lawsuits, sexual immorality, disputes over spiritual gifts. Now Paul turns to the deepest problem of all. Some in Corinth are saying there is no resurrection of the dead (v. 12). Paul's answer is not a footnote. It is the longest sustained argument in any of his letters.²

His logic runs in stages. Christ was raised (vv. 1–11). If Christ was raised, then there is a resurrection (vv. 12–19). And if there is a resurrection, then all the consequences Paul draws in the rest of the chapter follow. Everything hangs on one fact: the tomb was empty on the third day.

In verses 20–28 Paul widens the lens. He is no longer only arguing that the dead will rise. He is describing the shape of history from start to finish. Christ is “the firstfruits,” the first sheaf of a harvest that includes everyone who comes after. Then he maps the end. Christ reigns until every enemy is put under his feet. The final enemy, death, is destroyed. And then the Son delivers the kingdom to the Father, “that God may be all in all” (v. 28).

The key verbs tell the story. In verse 22 Paul uses a clean parallel: “as in Adam all die, so also in Christ all shall be made alive.” The word “all” (Greek pas) appears in both halves. In verse 25 he writes that Christ “must reign until” every enemy is under his feet. In verse 26 the last enemy, death, is “destroyed” (Greek katargeitai, “rendered powerless, abolished”). Not preserved. Not maintained. Abolished. In verse 28 the Son is “subjected” to the Father, and the result is God “all in all.”³

Notice the direction of the whole passage. It moves from death to life, from rebellion to order, from divided reign to total union. Paul is not describing a permanent standoff. He is describing a campaign that reaches its goal. And the goal is not coexistence with evil. The goal is the total presence of God in all things.

One more thing about the context. Paul is writing to a church that doubts the resurrection. His answer is not small. He goes far beyond proving that the dead will rise. He paints the entire sweep of redemptive history. From the first Adam to the last. From the first death to the final victory. From the broken world to the world made whole. Everything in between is a campaign under way. And the campaign has a finish line.³⁴

That is the text. Now let me show you what it teaches. It teaches about sovereignty, about the “all” who are made alive, and about a God who does not stop until He is everything to everyone.

The Heart of the Case

1. The Exegetical Move: The “All” of Adam and the “All” of Christ

Start with the parallel in verse 22: “For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive.”

There is no way to limit the first “all” to a subset. Everyone born of Adam dies. No theologian of any stripe denies this. The death that came through Adam is universal and without exception.⁴

Now Paul sets the second “all” directly beside it, using the connector “so also.” The grammar points one way: the scope of the life in Christ matches the scope of the death in Adam. As George Sidney Hurd puts it in The Triumph of Mercy, both Arminians and Calvinists rest on a shared assumption: “The common denominator is that both camps assume that not all will be saved.”⁵ That assumption forces both sides to restrict the “all” in the second half of the verse. The Arminian restricts it by saying human freedom blocks God's saving will. The Calvinist restricts it by saying “all” really means “all kinds.” But Paul chose a clean parallel. He wrote “all” in both halves, and the word is the same: pas, the most ordinary Greek word for “every” or “all.”

Barnes was not a universalist. He was an opponent of the doctrine. Yet he conceded that the most natural reading of the parallel supports universal salvation, and that it is “difficult, if not impossible, to meet.”⁶ I think he was right about the grammar, even if he resisted the conclusion.

Some try to limit the second “all” by reading it as “all in Christ,” meaning only those already united to Christ by faith. But as Hurd points out, Paul writes “in Christ all” (en tō Christō pantes), not “all in Christ.” The word order matters. The phrase “in Christ” tells us how they are made alive. The word “all” tells us how many. How many? The same “all” who die in Adam.⁷

There is another line of evidence here that most commentators overlook. The Greek verb Paul uses for “made alive” in verse 22 is zōopoieō, “to give life” or “to cause to live.” Some traditionalists try to soften the universalist force of the verse by reading “made alive” as a bare physical resurrection, so that all are raised but some are raised only for judgment. Andrew Hronich, in Once Loved Always Loved, answers this reading decisively: the word zōopoieō never carries a negative sense in the New Testament. Every occurrence points to a positive, even glorious, outcome (John 5:21; 6:63; Romans 4:17; 8:11; 2 Corinthians 3:6; Galatians 3:21; 1 Peter 3:18). As Hronich asks: Paul himself would have been willing to be accursed for the sake of his brothers (Romans 9:3), and yet he eagerly awaited the resurrection. Why, unless the resurrection was something that would bring hope for everyone? Being “made alive in Christ” is not a neutral event. It is salvific. Nowhere does Paul speak of those “in Christ” as reprobate.³⁶

2. The Context Move: The Campaign That Ends in Total Victory

In verses 23–24 he lays out an order (Greek tagma, a military term for a rank or company). Christ is first. Then, at His coming, those who belong to Him. Then “the end” (Greek telos). This word can mean “the conclusion,” but it can also mean “the fulfillment” or “the final result.”⁸ And what does the end look like? Christ “delivers the kingdom to God the Father after destroying every rule and every authority and power” (v. 24).

Talbott makes an observation here that most commentators miss. Paul says “each in his own order,” and then immediately lists three stages, not two. At the head of the procession is Christ, the firstfruits. Behind him are those who belong to Christ at His coming. And behind them is the telos, the final stage of the procession. Talbott compares the scene to a novelist describing a drowning man who “desperately grasped the end of the rope.” The end of a rope is its final portion, and “the end” of a procession is its last company. Murray and others compressed three stages into two, and in doing so lost the overlooked third group: those who are made alive in Christ after the believers. Robin Parry, while preferring to translate telos as “the end” rather than “the rest,” reaches the same conclusion by a different path. Paul, he argues, “was not interested in the universalist implications of 1 Corinthians 15:22 in the context of this particular discussion,” because his immediate audience was the Corinthian church. But it is perfectly legitimate for readers to draw out those implications, since “all will be made alive” really is a universalist claim, whatever Paul's pragmatic focus.³⁷

Then comes verse 25: “For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet.” The word “must” (Greek dei) carries a note of divine necessity. This is not a wish. It is a decree. Christ reigns until the job is done.

Verse 26 names the final enemy: death. And the verb used for what happens to death is not “confine” or “quarantine.” It is “destroy” (Greek katargeō). Death is not walled off in a corner of the universe. Death is abolished.⁹

Notice the shape of this. It is not a picture of permanent stalemate. It is a march toward total completion. Every enemy falls. The last enemy falls. And only then does the Son hand the kingdom to the Father.

As Gerry Beauchemin asks in Hope Beyond Hell: if Paul says Christ must reign “until” all enemies are under His feet, and if the last enemy to be destroyed is death itself, then what room is left for an eternal prison? What room remains for souls kept alive in torment?¹⁰ If death is truly abolished, then no one is left in its grip. If every enemy is put under Christ's feet, then no province of rebellion endures.

Hronich drives this point home in Once Loved Always Loved. If the traditionalist view is correct, he writes, surely death can boast forever that it thwarted the efforts of heaven. Even one lost soul would be a victory for the grave. But Paul is emphatic that death will have absolutely no victory of which to boast: “O death, where is your victory? O death, where is your sting?” (1 Corinthians 15:55). That taunt rings hollow if billions remain in death's permanent grip. It rings true only if death loses everything.³⁹

3. The Theological Move: What “God All in All” Means

We come now to the summit of the passage. Verse 28: “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.”

“All in all” (Greek panta en pasin). Some translations render this “everything to everyone.” Either way, the phrase points to a state in which God fills every corner of reality with His presence. There is nothing left outside Him. No dark pocket. No locked ward. No permanent colony of the lost.

Gregory of Nyssa, one of the great Cappadocian Fathers and a firm universalist, read this text plainly. As Hunter Coates notes, Gregory argued: “Either God will not be in all if some evil will be left in beings, or, if it is necessary to believe that God will really be in all, then, together with this conviction, it is demonstrated that there will be no evil.”¹¹ The logic is clear: if God is truly all in all, then evil has no place left. And if evil has no place left, then the creatures who were bound by evil must have been set free.

Hurd makes the same point forcefully: if even one soul were eternally lost and separated from God, “it could not be said of God that He is all in all. And if ‘all in all’ really only means ‘all in some’ then language becomes meaningless.”¹² I find this hard to argue with. Either “all” means all, or the words have lost their weight.

Now link this to the divine-presence model of judgment, which Chapter 12 develops in full. On that model, God's unveiled presence is experienced as joy by those who love Him and as fire by those who resist Him. If God becomes “all in all,” then there is no place to hide from that presence. The fire is real. But its purpose is to burn away resistance, not to preserve it. Even the fire is God being all.¹³

As the hopeful universalist Metropolitan Kallistos Ware once conceded, this phrase “definitely suggests not ultimate dualism but an ultimate reconciliation.”¹⁴ Even a cautious voice sees it. “All in all” is not the language of a permanent standoff between heaven and hell. It is the language of total victory.

Hronich brings Origen into the conversation here. As Hronich notes, Origen recognized something critics routinely miss: the text does not say God will be “over all” but “all in all,” or “all to all,” that is, everything to everyone. This is not the language of domination. It is the language of indwelling. And Gregory of Nyssa pressed the logic one step further. He compared the subjection of all things to God with the submission of a sick person to a physician: “Just as medicine is zealously pursued by the sick, so also is subjection by those in need of salvation.” The psalmist made the same connection: “Will my soul not be subjected to God? For from him is my salvation” (Psalm 62:1, LXX). Subjection and salvation are not opposites. They are two faces of the same gift.³⁸

4. The Logical Move: The Sovereignty Argument in Narrative Form

Let me now state plainly what this text does for the argument we have been building.

In Chapter 4 we established that God wills the salvation of all. The texts say so (1 Timothy 2:4; 2 Peter 3:9; Ezekiel 33:11), and love by its nature wills the good of the beloved. In Chapter 5 we established, through Talbott's triad, that God's love and power cannot be finally frustrated. The question left hanging was this: if God wills all saved and has the power to achieve it, does He actually bring it to pass?

First Corinthians 15:22–28 answers that question in the form of a story. Watch the logic unfold in Paul's narrative:

(1) God wills the restoration of all things under Christ (the scope: “all” in v. 22; “all things” in vv. 27–28).

(2) Christ reigns until every enemy is subjected and death itself is destroyed (the power: vv. 25–26).

This is the sovereignty argument in story form. God sets out to bring all things under His rule. He does not stop halfway. He finishes. And the finished product is not a universe divided between the saved and the lost, but a universe in which God is everything to everyone.¹⁵

Consider how the sovereignty of God is handled in Scripture more broadly. Kenneth Keathley, writing from a Molinist perspective, notes the repeated biblical testimony: “The LORD does whatever He pleases in heaven and on earth” (Psalm 135:6). “My plan will take place, and I will do all My will” (Isaiah 46:10). “There is no one who can hold back His hand or say to Him, ‘What have You done?’” (Daniel 4:35).¹⁶ If these texts mean anything, they mean that God's purposes are not finally thwarted.

Eric Reitan, in Troubled Paradise, drives this point home with admirable clarity. Scripture keeps coming back to two themes, he observes: God desires the redemption of all, and God achieves what God desires. Texts like 1 Timothy 2:3–4 and 2 Peter 3:9 establish the first; texts like Isaiah 46:10–11, where God declares “My purpose shall stand, and I will fulfill my intention,” and Ephesians 1:11 establish the second. When you accept both themes together, Reitan writes, the conclusion follows: “God saves all. Why? Because God wants to save all, and God gets what God wants.”⁴¹ First Corinthians 15:22–28 tells this same story in narrative form: God sets out, God reigns until every enemy is conquered, and the result is God “all in all.”

But the traditionalist asks us to believe that God's deepest purpose, the salvation of those He loves, is the one purpose that fails. He can hold back the sea. He can raise the dead. He can steer the course of empires. But He cannot, or will not, save His own children. I find this picture incoherent. If God is sovereign over all things, then He is sovereign over the end. And the end Paul describes is “all in all.”

Even some non-universalist philosophers see the force of this point. R. Zachary Manis, who does not himself embrace universalism, concedes that its “principal strength” is this: it can proclaim “without reservation or equivocation, God’s maximal love for all persons and complete control over both history and its end.” Manis adds that even if this is not the right way to understand sovereignty, the idea is “firmly entrenched in Christian thought, and one that is not easily given up.”⁴⁴ I think he is right about the entrenchment. The question is whether the traditionalist has any good reason to give it up. First Corinthians 15 suggests not.

Hurd states this vividly in The Triumph of Mercy. Both the Arminian and the Calvinist, he argues, are driven by their shared assumption that most people will be lost. The Arminian protects human freedom at the cost of God's sovereignty: God wants to save all but cannot. The Calvinist protects sovereignty at the cost of God's love: God can save all but does not want to. The universalist alone can affirm both without contradiction: God wants to save all, can save all, and does save all. Each in his own order. Each in due time.¹⁷

5. The Molinism Move: Sovereignty Without Coercion

But wait. Does sovereignty mean that God simply forces people to bow? If so, have we traded one problem for another? A coerced “yes” is not really a yes. And a God who bulldozes free will into submission is not the God this book defends.

This is where the concept of middle knowledge becomes important. I will develop it fully in Chapter 14, but the short version is this: middle knowledge is God's knowledge of what each person would freely choose in any situation He might place them in.¹⁸ If God has this knowledge, He does not need to override anyone's will. He can arrange the right circumstances, the right timing, the right appeal, so that the person freely says yes.

Keathley captures the key insight of this approach when he describes the Molinist model: “The distinctive difference between Calvinism and Molinism is that Calvinism sees God accomplishing His will through His omnipotent power while Molinism understands God’s using His omniscient knowledge.”¹⁹ God does not overpower. He outknows. He places each person in the circumstances where that person would freely believe.

This is what makes the picture in 1 Corinthians 15 so powerful. The subjection Paul describes is not the subjection of a conquered enemy held down by force. It is a subjection modeled on the Son's own subjection to the Father. Notice the text: “the Son himself will also be subjected to him who put all things in subjection under him” (v. 28). Is the Son forced to submit? No one would say so. The Son submits freely, in love, in perfect union of will with the Father.²⁰

Hurd makes this observation with precision. The same Greek word for “subjected” (Greek hupotassō) is used for Christ's subjection to the Father and for the subjection of all things to Christ. “It follows that if the subjection is voluntary on the part of Christ, then it will also be voluntary on the part of all the others.”²¹

As Andrew Hronich has asked: “Would Jesus truly be subject to His Father if His will was opposed to the Father, but He merely lacked the power necessary to overthrow His Father?” Of course not. Subjection without agreement of wills is not subjection in the way Paul means it. It is captivity.²²

And so sovereignty and freedom are not rivals in this picture. God achieves His goal. But He achieves it by winning hearts, not by breaking them. He meets each person with the perfect appeal, in the perfect moment, with full knowledge of what would open that person's eyes. He waits as long as it takes. And in the end, every knee bows freely, every tongue confesses willingly, and God is all in all. Not all over all. All in all. The difference is everything.

Engagement with Specific Scholars

Among the universalist defenders, the reading I have set out above draws on a long tradition. Thomas Talbott, in The Inescapable Love of God, provides what may be the most thorough philosophical analysis of this passage. He argues that the scope of “all” in verse 22 is genuinely universal, that Murray's attempt to restrict it is “fallacious reasoning,” and that Paul's second “all” is in fact less restrictive than the first, “because he immediately expanded it in the following verses to include not only the descendants of Adam, but every competing will as well.” Christ must continue to reign, Talbott insists, until He brings all things into subjection, and there is but one exception: the Father Himself. When Christ overcomes all separation from God, all persons will be in subjection to Christ “in exactly the same sense” that Christ places Himself in subjection to the Father, a sense that implies “spontaneous and glad obedience.”²³ Robin Parry, writing as Gregory MacDonald in The Evangelical Universalist, reads 1 Corinthians 15:22–28 as the climax of a sweeping biblical storyline: creation, fall, redemption, restoration. Parry notes that while Paul’s pragmatic focus in the chapter is on the hope of Christian believers, the claim of verse 22 is genuinely universal. The “all things” subjected to Christ are the same “all things” created through Him (Colossians 1:16). Parry also draws on Gregory of Nyssa, who argued that for God to be “all” in a creature requires that all sin be purged from that creature, so that it is “filled with God.” If any rebellion or recalcitrance remains, God is not “all in all.”²⁴

Hunter Coates, in Grace Abounds, brings in the patristic voices. He notes that Gregory of Nyssa read verse 28 as teaching that “all will become one body, and one spirit, through one hope to which they were called,” and that for Gregory, the subjection of all to God is a freely chosen unity of wills. Coates also notes that even non-universalist commentators have conceded the force of this text. Metropolitan Kallistos Ware, a cautious hopeful universalist rather than a confident one, admitted that “all in all” “definitely suggests not ultimate dualism but an ultimate reconciliation.”²⁵

Eric Reitan and John Kronen, in God’s Final Victory, link the sovereignty argument to divine benevolence: a God who genuinely wills the good of all and who has the power to achieve it will not settle for a partial victory. The will-and-power connection, they argue, is exactly what Paul narrates in 1 Corinthians 15.²⁶

Reitan develops this line further in his solo work, Troubled Paradise. There he lists 1 Corinthians 15:22 and 15:28 among the texts that “favor universalism on their most straightforward reading.” He then makes a move that sets his treatment apart from most exegetical discussions: he identifies the sovereignty argument not as a single text but as the natural synthesis of two recurring biblical themes. The first is that God desires the redemption of all. The second is that God achieves what God desires. Accept both, and the conclusion writes itself. And the weight of Paul’s narrative in 1 Corinthians 15, Reitan observes, lies squarely behind that synthesis. What the passage adds is the story of how God brings both themes to their fulfillment.⁴³

Hronich adds a point that Parry develops at length. The same cosmic scope appears in two parallel texts. In Colossians 1:20, God reconciles “all things” to Himself through the blood of the cross. In Ephesians 1:9–10, God’s hidden purpose is “to unite all things” in Christ, “things in heaven and things on earth.” Parry notes that the “all things” reconciled in Colossians 1:20 are the same “all things” created in Colossians 1:16. Every single created thing. Not “all without distinction” but “all without exception.” And the reconciliation is described as making peace through the blood of the cross. For Paul, that language clearly expresses salvation. One could hardly imagine Paul supposing that an enemy suffering eschatological punishment was in a state of peace with God. These parallels confirm that the “all in all” of 1 Corinthians 15:28 is not an isolated phrase. It is the summit of a pattern that runs through Paul’s entire theology.⁴⁰

On the other side, the critics work hard to limit the passage. Michael McClymond, in The Devil’s Redemption, argues that the “all” who are made alive in Christ are “those who belong to Christ” (v. 23), and that the subjugation of hostile powers in verses 24–28 cannot be read as glad, willing submission. He writes that references in Paul to the subjugation of demonic powers “cannot be equated with the notion of a free, glad, or voluntary submission of Satan and demons.”²⁷ This is a fair point about the demonic powers, and I will address it in a moment. But it does not settle the question for human persons, and it leaves the force of “all in all” unaddressed.

James De Young, in Exposing Universalism, takes a similar approach. He argues that “all in Christ” means all believers and that “all in all” describes God being all in all to the redeemed. De Young contends that the “final state” described in verse 28 includes “some in everlasting subjection and conquest,” held down rather than freely reconciled. He presses the point sharply: “If universalism is correct, who will serve as the footstool of his throne?”²⁸ But this drains the phrase “all in all” of its plain force. If God is “all in all” to only the saved, then He is all in some, not all in all. As Hurd presses further: if “all in all” refers only to a state or condition rather than to all persons, then we must ask what it means for God to be “all in” an impersonal state that includes hell and evil. That reading creates more problems than it solves.³⁵

Counter-Objections

“All in Christ” Means All Believers, Not All People

This is the strongest counter-reading, and I want to give it its full weight. The argument goes like this: verse 23 says “those who belong to Christ” will be raised at His coming, and this limits the “all” of verse 22 to believers. “All shall be made alive” means all believers shall be made alive.

But look at the passage again. Verse 23 describes an order, not a limit. Paul names two ranks: Christ the firstfruits, then those who are Christ's at His coming. Then comes “the end.” The text does not say the end is the same group as those who belong to Christ. The end (Greek telos) could be a third group, the final rank in the procession of those being made alive. The NRSV even notes in a footnote that telos here could be rendered “the rest.”²⁹

Even aside from that, the Adam parallel remains. If the “all” who die in Adam is every human being, then the “all” who are made alive in Christ should be equally broad. Breaking that parallel requires inserting a restriction Paul did not write. And it requires forcing the verb zōopoieō (“made alive”) into a sense it never carries anywhere in the New Testament: a neutral resurrection that could end in condemnation. Every other use of this verb points to a positive, life-giving outcome. Being “made alive in Christ” is salvific, not judicial.³⁰

Some commentators try a different move. F. F. Bruce, for example, argued that when Paul says “all,” he means “all without distinction rather than all without exception.” Members from every group of humanity have representatives among the saved, but not every individual is saved.

Philosopher Keith DeRose, as cited by Reitan in Troubled Paradise, exposes this reading with a sharp thought experiment. Imagine a man under legal investigation who is told to hand over “all” his files. He hands over half of them, picks a few from each category, and insists he did hand over “all” the files. “All without distinction,” he says. Just not “all without exception.” DeRose's verdict: the defense is not merely slippery. There is no good sense of “all” that would make it true.

Reitan adds that if we accept this logic, we could apply it anywhere. Revelation 21:4 promises that God “will wipe every tear from their eyes.” But maybe “every” tear means every tear “without distinction,” not every tear “without exception.” The blessed would go on weeping forever, just with every kind of tear represented. The reading collapses under its own weight.⁴²

“Subjection Is Not Salvation; Enemies Can Be Subdued Without Being Saved”

This objection says: fine, all enemies are put under Christ's feet, but that does not mean they are reconciled. A defeated enemy can be chained and locked away. Subjection is conquest, not conversion.

I think this misreads the kind of subjection Paul describes. Look again at verse 28. The Son himself is “subjected” to the Father, using the very same word (Greek hupotassō) that describes the subjection of all things to Christ. Is the Son conquered? Is the Son chained? Plainly not. The Son submits freely, in love, in a union of wills. If that same word describes the subjection of “all things,” the natural reading is that the subjection of all things is likewise willing and relational, not coerced and hostile.³¹

And look at the result of this subjection: “God all in all.” That phrase describes presence and filling, not domination. A God who is “all in all” is not standing guard over a dungeon. He is filling every creature with His life. And this links naturally to Philippians 2:9–11, where every knee bows and every tongue confesses “that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.” A forced confession does not bring glory to God. A free one does.³²

Finally, consider what is destroyed in this passage. The last enemy is death. Not some of the dead. Death itself. If death is abolished, then no human being remains under its power. There is no one left in the grave, no one left in the second death, no one left unreached. The enemy is gone. And with it, any ground for a permanent hell.

Conclusion

Paul describes a campaign. Christ rises from the dead as the firstfruits of a coming harvest. He reigns until every enemy is subjected. Death itself, the last and worst enemy, is not imprisoned but destroyed. Then the Son hands the kingdom to the Father. And the result is this: God is all in all.

What kind of victory leaves a permanent pocket of the lost? What kind of “all in all” means “all in some”? The “all” who die in Adam is every human being. The “all” made alive in Christ matches it. The last enemy is destroyed, not preserved. God fills everything with His presence. If all of that is true, then the end Paul describes is not a universe forever split between heaven and hell. It is a universe healed.

This text supplies the last piece of the sovereignty argument. God wills the salvation of all (Chapter 4). God's purpose cannot be finally frustrated (Chapter 5). And here Paul tells us the end of the story: God gets what He wants. Every knee bows. Every tongue confesses. God is all in all.³³

But this victory is not won by brute force. The God of this passage does not drag the unwilling into His presence. He wins hearts. He meets each person with perfect wisdom and perfect patience. As we will see in Chapter 14, God’s middle knowledge gives Him everything He needs to arrange the appeal that opens each person’s eyes. As we will see in Chapter 15, He saves without forcing. The sovereignty this chapter celebrates is the sovereignty of a love that does not quit.

I believe Paul meant what he wrote. God will be all in all. Not all in most. Not all over all. All in all. And if that is the end, then nobody is left outside it. The war is not over until the general holds every province. And the General of this story holds them all.

There is another reason to trust this reading, and it will be the subject of the next chapter. If God truly will be all in all, then the promise of Revelation 21:4 stands as written: God “will wipe every tear from their eyes,” and death, mourning, and pain will be no more. As Eric Reitan argues in Troubled Paradise, the only way to make good on that promise is for God to remove every proper occasion for grief. Limited salvation does not do that. Universal salvation does.⁴⁵

The cumulative weight of this, together with the arguments from love, will, and power in the preceding chapters, will be weighed as part of the full case in Chapter 29. But even here, standing alone, this text is hard to read any other way: God finishes what He starts, and what He starts is the salvation of all.

And this brings us back to the character of the God we are talking about. He is not a general who abandons a province. He is not a Father who gives up on a child. He is a God whose love is as stubborn as it is tender, whose patience is as deep as His power is great. And the picture Paul paints at the end of the story is not a divided kingdom. It is a Father holding all His children, filling all things with Himself, with nothing left outside His embrace. That is the God I recognize. And that is the end I trust Him to bring about.

Notes

↑ 1. The chapter title is borrowed from George Sidney Hurd’s chapter heading in The Triumph of Mercy: The Reconciliation of All through Jesus Christ, 2nd ed. (2018), ch. 3, “Does God Get What He Wants?” The question frames the sovereignty argument at the heart of this chapter.

↑ 2. First Corinthians 15 is often called Paul’s locus classicus on the resurrection. The chapter runs 58 verses and constitutes the longest unbroken argument in the Pauline corpus. See Gordon D. Fee, The First Epistle to the Corinthians, rev. ed., NICNT (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2014), ch. 15 introduction.

↑ 3. The Greek katargeō (rendered “destroyed” in the ESV at v. 26) carries the sense of “render inoperative, abolish, bring to nothing.” It does not mean “contain” or “quarantine.” Paul uses the same word in Romans 6:6 (“that the body of sin might be brought to nothing”) and in 2 Timothy 1:10, where Christ “abolished death and brought life and immortality to light.” In every instance the force is abolition, not mere suppression. See BDAG, s.v. katargeō.

↑ 4. That “in Adam all die” refers to every human being without exception is conceded across the theological spectrum. Reformed, Arminian, Catholic, and Orthodox commentators all accept this as universal in scope. The question is whether the second “all” matches the first.

↑ 5. George Sidney Hurd, The Triumph of Mercy: The Reconciliation of All through Jesus Christ, 2nd ed. (2018), ch. 3, “The Common Denominator between Arminians and Calvinists.”

↑ 6. Albert Barnes, Barnes’ Notes on the New Testament, on 1 Corinthians 15:22. Cited in George Sidney Hurd, The Universal Solution: Presenting Biblical Universalism as the Solution to the Debate between Calvinists and Arminians (2016), ch. 3, “All in Christ is the Same ‘All’ that was in Adam.” Barnes’s concession is striking: he admitted the universalist reading is the “natural and obvious interpretation” and called it “difficult, if not impossible, to meet,” yet he resisted it on other grounds.

↑ 7. Hurd, The Universal Solution, ch. 3. The word-order point is important: en tō Christō pantes places the prepositional phrase “in Christ” first, indicating the sphere or means by which “all” are made alive, not a restriction on which “all” is in view. See also C. K. Barrett, A Commentary on the First Epistle to the Corinthians, 2nd ed., BNTC (London: A&C Black, 1971), 352.

↑ 8. The Greek telos can mean “end,” “completion,” or “final result.” The NRSV footnotes that “then comes the end” could be rendered “then come the rest.” Talbott favors this reading, citing Lietzmann and Weiss, though he “does not insist on this point” (Parry’s summary), since the universalist reading of the passage holds on either translation. Parry himself prefers “the end” but argues this makes no difference: even as a reference to God’s completed purposes, it must, given the claim of verse 22 that “all will be made alive in Christ,” include the raising to life of everyone. See also Beauchemin, Hope Beyond Hell, on 1 Corinthians 15:23–24.

↑ 9. Death here is the “last enemy.” If the last enemy is destroyed, then the state of being dead and separated from God is itself abolished. This is difficult to reconcile with any view of the afterlife that leaves souls in a permanent state of death or torment. See Anthony C. Thiselton, The First Epistle to the Corinthians, NIGTC (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000), 1230–32.

↑ 10. Gerry Beauchemin, Hope Beyond Hell: The Righteous Purpose of God’s Judgment (Olmito, TX: Malista Press, 2007), ch. 1, on 1 Corinthians 15:22–28. Beauchemin writes: “What is the goal of all being subjected to Christ? That God may be all in all.”

↑ 11. Gregory of Nyssa, as cited in Hunter Coates, Grace Abounds: A Holistic Case for Universal Salvation (2024), on 1 Corinthians 15:28. Coates provides the English rendering. For the original, see Gregory of Nyssa, In Illud: Tunc et ipse filius (PG 44). Ilaria Ramelli discusses Gregory’s universalism at length in The Christian Doctrine of Apokatastasis (Leiden: Brill, 2013).

↑ 12. George Sidney Hurd, A Defense of Biblical Universalism: A Biblical Response to James B. De Young’s “Exposing Universalism” (2019), on 1 Corinthians 15:28.

↑ 13. The divine-presence model of hell, on which the “fire” of judgment is God’s own unveiled presence experienced differently by those who love Him and those who resist Him, is developed fully in Chapter 12. On this model, even judgment is God being “all”; the fire is His love. See also the Orthodox tradition (Isaac the Syrian, Kallistos Ware) on the same theme.

↑ 14. Metropolitan Kallistos Ware, as cited in Hunter Coates, Grace Abounds, on 1 Corinthians 15:28. Ware is a hopeful universalist rather than a confident one, but his concession about the direction of the text is significant.

↑ 15. The sovereignty argument in its narrative form: God sets out (v. 22, “all shall be made alive”), God reigns until every enemy is subjected (vv. 25–26), and the result is God “all in all” (v. 28). The formal statement of the argument is: (1) God wills the salvation of all (Chapter 4, from 1 Timothy 2:4 and the character of divine love). (2) God’s will to save all cannot be finally frustrated (Chapter 5, from the inconsistent triad). (3) Therefore, God will achieve the salvation of all. 1 Corinthians 15:22–28 supplies the second premise in story form and narrates the conclusion.

↑ 16. Kenneth Keathley, Salvation and Sovereignty: A Molinist Approach (Nashville: B&H Academic, 2010), 21–23. Keathley surveys the biblical testimony on sovereignty and lists the representative texts cited here.

↑ 17. Hurd, The Triumph of Mercy, ch. 3, “Free-Will?” The universalist resolution of the Calvinist-Arminian impasse is also developed in Hurd, The Universal Solution, throughout.

↑ 18. Middle knowledge (Latin scientia media, “knowledge between”) is God’s knowledge of what every free creature would do in every possible set of circumstances. Named for the sixteenth-century Jesuit Luis de Molina, who located it “between” God’s natural knowledge (of all possibilities) and His free knowledge (of what He decrees). The full treatment is in Chapter 14 and Appendix D.

↑ 19. Keathley, Salvation and Sovereignty, 155–56.

↑ 20. The parallel between the Son’s submission to the Father and the submission of all things to Christ is one of the strongest textual indicators that the subjection Paul envisions is willing. No orthodox theologian would claim that the Son is forced into submission. But the same word (hupotassō) describes both relationships. See Hurd, A Defense of Biblical Universalism, on 1 Corinthians 15:27–28.

↑ 21. Hurd, A Defense of Biblical Universalism, on 1 Corinthians 15:27–28. Hurd counts the occurrences of hupotassō in these two verses and draws the parallel explicitly.

↑ 22. Andrew Hronich, as cited in Coates, Grace Abounds, on 1 Corinthians 15:28. The rhetorical question highlights that the kind of subjection Paul describes is not a matter of raw power overcoming resistance. It is a union of wills.

↑ 23. Thomas Talbott, The Inescapable Love of God, 2nd ed. (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2014), Part II, “How to Read the Pauline Epistles.” Talbott’s analysis of Murray’s reasoning is especially sharp: Murray “fell prey to the same kind of fallacious reasoning” as Moo, assuming that the first “all” includes persons who will never belong to Christ, an assumption that “begs the whole question of the correct interpretation of the passage.” Talbott argues that Paul’s second “all” is in fact less restrictive than the first, because Paul “immediately expanded it in the following verses to include not only the descendants of Adam, but every competing will as well.” On the three-stage procession and “spontaneous and glad obedience,” see the same Part II. The source is resident in this project.

↑ 24. Robin Parry [Gregory MacDonald], The Evangelical Universalist, 3rd ed. (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2024), ch. 4, “1 Corinthians 15:20–28.” Parry surveys the de Boer, Bell, Hillert, and Talbott interpretive strategies for verse 22 and concludes that it “really is a universalist claim,” even though Paul’s pragmatic focus in the chapter is on Christian believers. On Gregory of Nyssa and panta en pasin, see Parry’s discussion citing Gregory of Nyssa, In Illud: Tunc et ipse filius: “If any rebellion, resistance, or recalcitrance remains, then God is not ‘all in all.’” The source is resident in this project.

↑ 25. Coates, Grace Abounds, on 1 Corinthians 15:20–28. The citation from Ware and the Gregory of Nyssa material are both drawn from Coates’s discussion of verse 28. Gregory’s statement about panta en pasin and the Psalms is cited by Coates from Gregory’s commentary on Psalm 150.

↑ 26. Eric Reitan and John Kronen, God’s Final Victory: A Comparative Philosophical Case for Universalism (New York: Continuum, 2011), §5.1, “An Argument from Divine Benevolence,” 68–71. Reitan and Kronen present the Argument from Divine Benevolence (AB) as a formal chain: (1) benevolence is an essential divine attribute; (2) God’s benevolence roots in Him an internal impelling cause to will what is best for every rational creature; and so on through to the conclusion (8): “God wills that every rational creature be saved.” The argument then adds (9): unless it is metaphysically impossible for God to bring this about, or all the available means are morally impermissible, all will be saved. The link between will and power is the load this chapter carries: if God wills the salvation of all and His purpose cannot fail, then 1 Corinthians 15:22–28 narrates the result.

↑ 27. Michael J. McClymond, The Devil’s Redemption: A New History and Interpretation of Christian Universalism, 2 vols. (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2018), V 2, 962–63. McClymond writes: “References in the Pauline Letters to the neutralization or subjugation of hostile, demonic powers to God and God’s kingdom (1 Cor. 15:24–28; Col. 2:13–15) cannot be equated with the notion of a free, glad, or voluntary submission of Satan and demons.” He adds that this gives context for “every knee should bow” in Philippians 2:10–11: “every indication we have in the Pauline Letters is that these powers are coerced into submission and not persuaded to abandon their hostility to God. Demons do not become angels.” McClymond’s point about demonic powers is fair, and the book handles it by distinguishing the human case from the demonic one (see Chapter 28). But his argument does not settle the question for human persons, and it leaves the force of “all in all” unaddressed.

↑ 28. James B. De Young, Exposing Universalism (Silverton, OR: Lampion House, 2015), ch. 9, “Enemies Are the Footstool of Jesus’ Feet.” De Young writes that the “all” in 1 Corinthians 15:22 “must refer only to those who have believed in Christ,” and that in vv. 23–28, “the final picture in these texts concerns that time, future to us, when all his ‘enemies’ become totally subjected to him … The enemies are pacified by conquest.” He concludes: “These final words depict the final state; no other condition is foreseen. It means, therefore, that some are in everlasting subjection and conquest. This can hardly be a ‘loving embrace of Jesus Christ.’” De Young also presses: “If universalism is correct, who will serve as the footstool of his throne?” Hurd’s reply in A Defense of Biblical Universalism is that this reading makes “all in all” mean something other than “all in all.”

↑ 29. See the NRSV footnote at 1 Corinthians 15:24. Beauchemin also notes this alternate reading in Hope Beyond Hell, on 1 Corinthians 15:23–24. The Greek telos can carry the sense of “the final group” as well as “the end.”

↑ 30. This point about the Adam parallel is developed in Hurd, The Universal Solution, ch. 3, and in Talbott, The Inescapable Love of God, Part II. The burden of proof falls on the person who wishes to break the parallel Paul constructed, not on the person who reads it as it stands. On the exclusively positive sense of zōopoieō in the New Testament, see Hronich, Once Loved Always Loved, on 1 Corinthians 15:22 (resident in this project). Hronich notes that “nowhere does Paul speak of those being ‘in Christ’ as being reprobate.”

↑ 31. On the hupotassō parallel, see Hurd, A Defense of Biblical Universalism, on 1 Corinthians 15:27–28, and Coates, Grace Abounds, on the same passage. Both observe that the same verb used for the Son’s willing subjection to the Father is used for the subjection of all things to Christ. Paul also uses hupotassō in Romans 10:3 in the context of submitting to God’s righteousness through faith, which further supports a willing reading. See Beauchemin, Hope Beyond Hell, on 1 Corinthians 15:28.

↑ 32. Philippians 2:9–11 is Paul’s other great “every knee” text, drawn from Isaiah 45:22–24. In Isaiah the context is a call to salvation: “Turn to Me and be saved, all the ends of the earth.” And the confession is made “to the glory of God the Father.” A coerced confession from gritted teeth would not glorify God, any more than a forced wedding vow would honor a bride. See also Coates, Grace Abounds, on Philippians 2:9–11, for the patristic and grammatical evidence that the bowing here is voluntary.

↑ 33. The full cumulative case, weighing every thread of argument from Chapters 3 through 28, is reserved for Chapter 29. The sovereignty argument (God wills all saved, God’s purpose cannot fail, therefore God saves all) is one of the strongest single threads, and 1 Corinthians 15:22–28 gives it its most direct scriptural grounding.

↑ 34. The scope of Paul’s argument in 1 Corinthians 15 runs from the historical fact of the resurrection (vv. 1–11) to the cosmic consequences of that fact (vv. 20–28) to the nature of the resurrection body (vv. 35–58). The passage under discussion here (vv. 22–28) is the cosmic-consequences section, where Paul draws out the full implications of what God set in motion when He raised Christ from the dead.

↑ 35. Hurd, A Defense of Biblical Universalism, on 1 Corinthians 15:28: “If God will not be all in all people but simply all in all things, how could God be said to be all in all that which is inanimate if evil and hell are inanimate? If He is all in all in every state and condition rather than all in all people, and hell and evil are an eternal state, will He then eternally inhabit evil and hell?”

↑ 36. Andrew Hronich, Once Loved Always Loved: A Restorationist Defense of the Reconciliation of All in Christ (2024), on 1 Corinthians 15:22 (resident in this project). Hronich surveys every occurrence of zōopoieō in the New Testament: John 5:21a, 21b; 6:63; 14:6; Romans 4:17; 8:11; 1 Corinthians 15:22, 36, 45; 2 Corinthians 3:6; Galatians 3:21; 1 Timothy 6:13; 1 Peter 3:18. Each carries a positive, life-giving sense. He adds that “life in Adam, as Paul recounts in 1 Corinthians 15 and Romans 5, is that of death and condemnation, but life in Christ is conjoined to resurrection, justification, and new life. For Paul’s heightened emphasis on the surpassing work of Christ to be effective, one would think that what Christ accomplishes must be the converse of that which transpired through Adam.”

↑ 37. On the three-stage procession: Talbott, The Inescapable Love of God, Part II, and see also Lietzmann and Weiss, cited by Thiselton in The First Epistle to the Corinthians, 1231. Talbott writes: “It is as if he had in mind the image of a procession and then quickly listed three segments of the procession. At the head of the procession is Christ, the first fruits; behind him are those who belong to Christ at the time of his coming; and behind them are those at the end of the procession, which is the third and final stage of Paul’s ‘each in his own order.’” On Parry’s pragmatic-context argument: Parry, The Evangelical Universalist, 3rd ed., ch. 4; he agrees with Hillert that Paul’s “only real focus in the chapter is with the death of, and future hope for, Christians” but that the universalist claim of verse 22 is genuine (both sources resident in this project).

↑ 38. On Origen: Hronich, Once Loved Always Loved, on 1 Corinthians 15:28, citing Origen’s commentary. Hronich notes that “over and against those who would have the text read, ‘God will be over all,’ the passage says quite plainly that God will be all in all, or all to all (everything to everyone!).” On Gregory of Nyssa comparing subjection to seeking a physician: Hronich citing Gregory of Nyssa, and see also Gregory’s In Illud: Tunc et ipse filius (PG 44). On the Psalm 62:1 (LXX 61:2) connection between subjection and salvation: Hronich’s same discussion (resident in this project).

↑ 39. Hronich, Once Loved Always Loved, on 1 Corinthians 15:55 (resident in this project). Hronich writes: “Death will have no victory of which to boast. Yet, if the traditionalist view is correct, surely death can boast forevermore that it thwarted the efforts of heaven, but Paul is emphatic that it will have absolutely no victory of which to boast. Even one lost soul is a victory for the grave, but no such victory awaits the forces of evil.”

↑ 40. On Colossians 1:20 and Ephesians 1:9–10 as parallels to 1 Corinthians 15:28: Parry, The Evangelical Universalist, 3rd ed., ch. 3 (“Colossians 1:15–20”) and Appendix 1 (“Ephesians 1:10”), and Hronich, Once Loved Always Loved, on the same texts (both resident in this project). Parry’s argument is that the “all things” reconciled in Colossians 1:20 are the same “all things” created in 1:16, and that the reconciliation through “the blood of his cross” described as making “peace” cannot plausibly refer to eschatological punishment. Hronich develops the Ephesians parallel at length, concluding with Lincoln that both passages “presuppose that the cosmos has been plunged into disintegration on account of sin and that it is God’s purpose to restore the original harmony in Christ.”

↑ 41. Eric Reitan, Troubled Paradise: Limited Salvation and the Problem of Heavenly Grief (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2024), ch. 8, “Universalism and Scripture.” Reitan identifies the sovereignty argument as a synthesis of two recurring biblical themes: God desires to save all (1 Timothy 2:3–4; 2 Peter 3:9; Ezekiel 33:11) and God achieves what God desires (Isaiah 46:10–11; Ephesians 1:11; Job 42:2). His summary is characteristically direct: “Because God wants to save all, and God gets what God wants.” The source is an uploaded file present in this chat (NRSVue is Reitan’s Scripture translation; cited by chapter and section heading per §5.4).

↑ 42. Reitan, Troubled Paradise, ch. 8, “Universalism and Scripture.” Reitan cites the philosopher Keith DeRose’s critique of F. F. Bruce’s “all without distinction rather than all without exception” reading of 1 Corinthians 15:22. DeRose’s thought experiment of the legal investigation exposes the reading as untenable: there is no good sense of “all” that would let the investigator keep half his files and still claim to have handed over “all.” Reitan then extends the logic to Revelation 21:4: if “every tear” wiped away means every tear “without distinction” but not “without exception,” the promise loses its force entirely. Reitan also observes that “we ignore the obvious parallel between ‘all’ who die in Adam and ‘all’ who are made alive in Christ if we treat the latter ‘all’ as meaning something different from the former.”

↑ 43. Reitan, Troubled Paradise, ch. 8, “Universalism and Scripture.” Reitan lists 1 Corinthians 15:22 and 15:28 among the passages that “favor universalism on their most straightforward reading,” alongside Romans 5:18–19, Romans 11:32, Colossians 1:19–20, and John 12:30–32. His distinctive contribution is treating the sovereignty argument not as an exegesis of a single verse but as a synthesis of two scriptural themes, each independently well attested, whose conjunction yields the universalist conclusion. He distinguishes this synthesis from texts that express only God’s universal salvific desire (1 Timothy 2:4; 2 Peter 3:9), which by themselves do not entail universalism unless paired with the claim that God achieves what God desires.

↑ 44. R. Zachary Manis, Sinners in the Presence of a Loving God: An Essay on the Problem of Hell (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020), 154. Manis is not a universalist; he defends a version of the divine-presence model of hell (see Chapter 12). His concession about the “principal strength” of universalism on the sovereignty question is therefore all the more striking. Even a philosopher committed to a non-universalist outcome sees that the universalist can affirm both God’s maximal love and God’s complete sovereignty without contradiction, while the non-universalist must sacrifice one or the other. The source is resident in this project.

↑ 45. Reitan, Troubled Paradise, ch. 1, “An Initial Statement of the Problem.” Reitan construes the promise of Revelation 21:4 as “the promise that all proper occasion for grief will be wiped from God’s creation” and argues that “the doctrine of limited salvation rejects this promise.” The full argument from heavenly grief is the subject of Chapter 7; here, the point is simply that the “all in all” of 1 Corinthians 15:28 and the “every tear” of Revelation 21:4 point in the same direction. See also Robin Parry’s endorsement of Reitan’s work in The Evangelical Universalist, 3rd ed., 18: “Eric Reitan’s superb book . . . painstakingly examines every attempt to argue that eternal damnation is compatible with the joy of the redeemed in heaven and . . . shows that none of the arguments is successful.”

Does God Get What He Wants?

The Text on the Table