Chapter 11

The Challenge of Evil

Does Universalism Have a Theodicy That Works?

A. The Argument on the Table

Every view of hell is also a view of evil. If you believe in eternal torment, you are saying that evil is so deep that some souls are beyond rescue. If you believe in annihilation, you are saying that evil can end a person. And if you believe in final restoration, you must explain how evil fits inside a story where God wins every heart. The person who thinks evil is easy has never watched a child die.

Michael McClymond knows this. Near the end of The Devil’s Redemption, he turns from history and doctrine to the raw fact of suffering. His question is sharp: does universalism have a real account of evil, or does it just wave suffering away?¹

McClymond sorts the universalist record into four broad ways of handling evil. He calls them pedagogical, dualist, illusionist, and voluntarist. Then he tests each one and finds all four wanting. His conclusion: universalism has no satisfying theodicy.²

The sorting is fair. Origen is the classic example of the pedagogical type. Jakob Böhme stands for the dualist. Barth represents the illusionist. And Augustine represents the voluntarist, who roots evil in the free will and rejects easy answers.³ McClymond thinks the Augustinian view is the most faithful to Scripture and tradition. And he thinks that universalism, by its very shape, cannot hold it.

I want to take this charge seriously. It is no cheap shot. McClymond is right that large stretches of the universalist record have handled evil badly. I agree with him about three of his four types. Where I think the argument goes wrong is the quiet assumption underneath: that these four options exhaust the field, and that a biblical universalist has nowhere left to stand.

There is a fifth option. It draws from the best of what McClymond praises in Augustine, adds the restoration that Augustine refused, and comes out with a theodicy that takes evil more seriously than eternal torment does. I call it the free-will-and-restoration account. This chapter builds it.

B. Why the Challenge Has Force

McClymond’s survey is not a straw man. The three failed theodicies are real, and the history behind them is well documented.

The dualist version is the most obviously dangerous. Böhme taught that there is a dark principle inside God, a churning ground of wrath from which creation and even evil spring.⁴ If evil lives in God’s own character, then God is not good in any recognizable sense. The Bible is direct about this: “God is light, and in him is no darkness at all” (1 John 1:5). A theology that puts darkness inside the divine nature is not Christian theology. McClymond is right to reject it, and so do I.

The illusionist version is just as dangerous from the other side. McClymond describes Barth’s tendency to declare that Christ’s coming had rendered sin an “ontological impossibility.” The sinful person, Barth said, had been altogether abolished.⁵ But the daily news makes a mockery of that claim. Children are trafficked. Wars flatten cities. Cancer eats the young. If evil is only an appearance, then the cross was an overreaction to a mirage. McClymond puts the point well: illusionism conflicts with the whole story of redemption, because if evil is not real, there is nothing for God to redeem.⁶

The pedagogical version has a different weakness. Origen assumed that every soul would eventually learn its lesson. But McClymond asks the obvious question: do people actually learn? Pharaoh had nine chances to let God’s people go. He refused every one.⁷ The prophet Hosea wrote, “The more they were called, the more they went away” (Hosea 11:2). Jeremiah pressed the same point: “Can the leopard change his spots? Then also you can do good who are accustomed to do evil” (Jeremiah 13:23). Some people do not get better with time. They get worse. The book of Revelation shows God’s judgments in chapter 16 failing to bring sinners to repentance. Instead, they curse God. A crude pedagogical model, the kind that treats suffering as a classroom lecture, does not survive contact with the real world.

McClymond also makes a striking historical observation. Universalism, he notes, has often emerged in the darkest periods of history. John Murray turned to universal hope after losing his son, his wife, and four siblings. Barth wrote his treatise on universal election during the Nazi occupation of Europe. Berdyaev and Bulgakov wrote from exile.⁸ He means this as a subtle critique: the hope may be a coping mechanism, not a doctrine. I think the observation proves the opposite. When the problem of evil is most acute, the question of whether God truly conquers evil becomes most urgent. And the universalist answer to that question is the strongest one available.

McClymond’s conclusion is that the Augustinian voluntarist approach works better than the other three. He writes that it has “positive value in ruling out answers to the problem of evil that ultimately prove to be much more theologically problematic and dangerous.”⁹ On this I agree. Augustine was right: evil comes from the wrongful will, not from a dark corner of God, not from a grand illusion, and not from a simple failure to study.

But then McClymond makes a move that does not follow. He pairs the Augustinian account of evil’s origin with Augustine’s account of evil’s ending: eternal conscious torment for the stubbornly wicked. And he assumes the two must travel together. They do not.

C. The Response

1. Reject Dualism and Illusionism Outright

The first thing to say is the simplest: the biblical universalist joins McClymond in rejecting dualism and illusionism, without reservation. There is no dark principle in God. Evil is not an illusion. These are not concessions wrung from us. They are confessions we make gladly.

The rejection of dualism is grounded in Scripture. “God is light, and in him is no darkness at all” (1 John 1:5). “Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change” (James 1:17). “You who are of purer eyes than to see evil and cannot look at wrong” (Habakkuk 1:13). No Böhmist dark ground. No eternal struggle between divine light and divine shadow. God is wholly good, and evil is a corruption of what He made good.¹⁰

The rejection of illusionism is grounded in the cross. If evil were merely an appearance, then Christ’s suffering on Calvary was a play, not a sacrifice. But the New Testament says otherwise. Christ bore real sins. He endured real wrath. He defeated a real enemy. The whole arc of Scripture treats evil as a genuine intruder that God is in the business of defeating, not explaining away.¹¹ Where Barth’s theology drifted toward treating sin as already abolished, the biblical universalist insists that evil is still here, still horrifying, and still in need of the remedy God alone can bring. (For the full rejection of illusionism and its cousin, the trivializing of evil, see Chapter 12. For the rejection of Böhme’s dark principle, see Chapter 18.)

McClymond’s critique of these two theodicies lands hard. It should. But notice where it lands. It lands on versions of universalism that this book does not hold. The dualist version belongs to Böhme and his heirs. The illusionist version belongs to one strand of Barth’s enormous project. Neither represents the conservative biblical universalism defended here.

2. A Chastened Pedagogical Element

What about the pedagogical approach? Here the picture is more complicated. McClymond is right to reject the crude version. The idea that everyone eventually “learns their lesson” through suffering fails on its face. Pharaoh did not learn. Jeremiah’s people did not learn. The book of Revelation shows sinners cursing God under judgment rather than repenting.¹²

But there is a chastened version of the pedagogical insight that McClymond’s survey does not examine. Consider the difference between two claims.

Claim A: suffering is a classroom, and everyone will graduate. This is what McClymond rightly rejects. It is naive. It assumes that pain automatically produces wisdom. It does not.

Claim B: God is able to redeem suffering without having authored it. He does not send evil as a lesson plan. But He can, in His wisdom and love, bring good out of the worst that creatures do. Not because evil was secretly good all along, but because God is the kind of God who “works all things together for good” (Romans 8:28, ESV) for those who are being brought to Him.¹³

Claim B is not Origen’s pedagogical model. It does not claim people automatically learn from suffering. It claims that God can use even suffering restoratively, on His own terms and in His own time. Joseph said it to his brothers after years of real betrayal: “You meant evil against me, but God meant it for good” (Genesis 50:20). Joseph was not saying the betrayal was secretly a classroom exercise. He was saying that God is the kind of God who redeems even what evil people do.¹⁴

Robin Parry presses a related point in his direct reply to McClymond. Parry notes that McClymond’s contrast between the pedagogical approach and the voluntarist approach creates a false either/or. Origen did not choose one or the other. He was “absolutely insistent that evil originated in the rebellious will of the creature long before Augustine did.” It was one of Origen’s core convictions and a deep disagreement with the Gnostics. But once evil arose, God used it restoratively. For Origen, Parry writes, “these are simply different components of a single approach to evil, not two alternative approaches.”¹⁵ McClymond’s rejection of the pedagogical model is aimed at one version of it: the version that says suffering is its own lesson plan. The version that says God can redeem what creatures break, and that His Spirit can soften even the hardest heart, has not been touched by McClymond’s critique. It is not a pedagogical theory. It is a claim about the character of God.

Andrew Hronich has developed this careful form of the soul-making argument in his work on universalist theodicy. His point is not that suffering is designed as instruction, but that God’s restorative purposes can operate even through the worst circumstances that creaturely freedom produces.¹⁶ Thomas Talbott presses a similar line: the love of God does not cause suffering, but it refuses to leave suffering unredeemed.¹⁷

3. A Free-Will Theodicy at the Core

The heart of the biblical universalist’s account of evil is surprisingly close to what McClymond himself favors. Evil enters the world through created freedom. God made creatures who can choose. And genuine choice means that creatures can choose badly.

Why would God permit this? Because love requires it. A world of puppets cannot love. A world of forced obedience produces compliance, not devotion. God wanted creatures who could freely say yes to Him. That “yes” would not be real unless “no” were also possible. And creatures said no. They said it in Eden. They said it in Egypt. They say it still.¹⁸

This is the free-will defense, and it is as old as Augustine himself. Alvin Plantinga sharpened it in the twentieth century.¹⁹ The logic is clean: God is not the author of evil. Creatures are. God permits evil because eliminating it would mean eliminating freedom, and freedom is the precondition of love.

Here is the key: the biblical universalist holds this same free-will defense. We agree with McClymond and with Augustine that evil comes from the wrongful will. We agree that the evil will is real, stubborn, and irrational. We agree that there is no easy explanation for why creatures rebel against a God who is pure goodness.

Where we differ is in what comes next. Augustine said the evil will can become permanently fixed. Some creatures will never turn back. Their rebellion is forever, and so is their punishment.²⁰ The biblical universalist says something different. The evil will is real, but it is not the last word. God’s love and wisdom are greater than the deepest rebellion. And God has eternity to work.

4. Restoration Completes What Quarantine Cannot

Here is where the universalist theodicy goes beyond Augustine’s, and here is where I think it handles evil better, not worse, than the traditional view.

The traditional picture says that God defeats evil by containing it. The wicked are sealed away in hell forever. Evil is quarantined. It persists in a corner of God’s creation for eternity, but it is walled off, unable to spread.

Think about that for a moment. In this picture, evil is never actually destroyed. It is managed. It is locked in a room. But it goes on, and on, and on. There is never a day when evil ceases to exist. There is never a moment when God’s creation is wholly free of rebellion, agony, and curse. The last chapter of the story still has screaming in it.

The universalist says something stronger. Evil will not merely be contained. It will be ended. God will not just wall off the cancer. He will cure it. Every rebel will be won. Every sin will be burned away. Every wound will be healed. And then, at last, “God will be all in all” (1 Corinthians 15:28) in a creation where evil is not quarantined but gone.²¹

Parry makes this same point from the patristic tradition. He notes that the evil-as-privation metaphysic that McClymond praises in Augustine was “fundamental in patristic universalism” long before Augustine wrote. One reason the early universalists held that hell could not be eternal, Parry observes, is that it would “eternalize evil”: countless good creatures would be forever falling short of their created purpose, so that God could never be “all in all.” He would only ever be all in some.²²

David Bentley Hart presses the point from a different angle. Hart grounds his argument in the classical doctrine of creation. If God made everything from nothing, freely and wisely, then the end of the story belongs to God too. An eternal hell, on this reading, does not defeat evil. It preserves evil as a permanent fixture of God’s creation. And that means God chose it.²³

Sharon Baker brings this logic down to the concrete. In Razing Hell, Baker argues that the fire of judgment is God’s own presence, and that standing before a holy God is itself the purifying ordeal. The wicked are not punished by a retributive mechanism separate from God. They are overwhelmed by a love so fierce it burns away everything impure. Baker’s vision of final judgment is severe, not soft. The fire destroys sin in the sinner, not the sinner in the sin. And when the burning is finished, only what is righteous remains, so that the purified soul freely chooses God.²⁴ This is the restorative fire that the next chapter and Chapter 24 develop at length.

I think the logic here is not complicated. If evil is a privation of the good, as Augustine taught, then it has no substance of its own. It is a wound, a lack, a corruption of something that should have been whole. A wound that lasts forever is a wound that is never healed. And a God who could heal it but chooses not to has made the wound permanent by His own decision. The full defeat of evil is not quarantine. It is restoration.

This is the universalist’s distinct contribution to the problem of evil. We do not minimize suffering. We do not call it an illusion. We do not make it a classroom exercise. We call it exactly what it is: a real, terrible intrusion of creaturely rebellion against a holy God. And we say that God’s answer to it is not to lock it in a closet forever but to destroy it, root and branch, in the fire of His love. That fire is severe. It is agonizing. It is just. But it is healing, not merely punishing. And when it has done its work, evil will be no more.²⁵

5. Honest About Mystery

I want to be careful here. No theodicy wraps evil in a bow. No argument dissolves the horror of Auschwitz, or the death of a child, or the cruelty of a slave market. If anyone tells you they have explained evil, walk away. The mystery remains.

McClymond is honest about this too. He notes that every approach to evil involves an appeal to mystery. The illusionist locates the mystery in appearances. The dualist locates it in God’s own nature. The pedagogue must explain why so many people never seem to learn. And the Augustinian locates the mystery in the evil will itself: “the cause of the evil will is the evil will.”²⁶

The free-will-and-restoration account also lives with mystery. It cannot explain why the first creature chose evil. It cannot prove that every single soul will say yes to God. (On this openness, see Chapter 26 and the book’s honest admission in every chapter that the bare logical possibility of final refusal cannot be ruled out by force.)²⁷ What it can do is hold the best of what McClymond values in Augustine’s view of evil’s origin, while offering a better ending than eternal quarantine. It takes evil seriously, roots it in created freedom, and trusts that the God who is both perfectly loving and perfectly wise will not leave a single wound unhealed.

That is not a closed system. It is a hope that faces the darkness and still trusts the character of God.

D. The Scholars on Evil and Theodicy

McClymond’s survey of the four theodicies is one of the most useful sections in The Devil’s Redemption. He names the real weaknesses of each type, and his historical examples are well chosen. His portrait of Barth’s illusionism is sharp: by declaring sin an “ontological impossibility,” Barth left himself unable to explain why anyone should take sin seriously.²⁸ His discussion of Böhme’s dualism is equally penetrating. Placing a dark ground inside God is a theological catastrophe, as even Böhme’s own followers recognized when they quietly abandoned his uncompromising dualism.²⁹

Where McClymond’s survey thins is in his treatment of the contemporary universalist response. He focuses on the historical types (Origen, Böhme, Barth) but does not engage the free-will-and-restoration model that newer universalist thinkers have developed.

Parry notices this gap and names it in his direct response to McClymond in the third edition of The Evangelical Universalist. He points out that McClymond’s key reason for thinking traditionalism handles evil better is that it roots evil in the creaturely will. “But that,” Parry writes, “is the historic mainstream tradition within universalism too.” Origen held it. Gregory of Nyssa held it. The contemporary defenders hold it. And Parry asks the question that goes to the heart of the chapter: “Does Christianity require us to hold to a belief that some people are so hardened in sin that even God’s Spirit cannot reach them? That some are, in effect, beyond all hope of salvation? Such a view overestimates sin and underestimates God.”³⁰

Talbott, writing from a different angle, builds a constructive case for the universalist theodicy grounded in divine justice. His argument begins with a question that traditionalists rarely face: what does perfect justice actually require? Talbott’s answer is that perfect justice requires not merely punishment but reconciliation and restoration. As R. Zachary Manis summarizes Talbott’s case, justice demands that sinners repent and appreciate the horror of their own actions, that God forgive repentant sinners, and that God overcome the harm that sinners do to others and to themselves. The deepest vindication of the victim comes only when the perpetrator is genuinely sorry. “But here is the paradox,” Talbott writes: “only someone on the road to redemption, only a forgiven sinner, can fully appreciate the horror of even the most monstrous acts.”³¹ If that is right, then justice itself points toward the salvation of the wicked, not merely toward their punishment.

Hronich presses this restorative vision further. Drawing on the work of Marilyn McCord Adams, he argues that only universalism gives every victim’s suffering a redemptive end. Adams defines “horrendous evils” as those whose inclusion in a person’s life gives reason to doubt whether that life could be, on the whole, a great good. On a non-universalist view, victims of such evils may face annihilation or eternal torment rather than healing. Only the universalist, Hronich argues, can promise that God’s therapeutic love will reach every sufferer, including the perpetrator who must himself be healed of the sickness that made him what he was.³²

Hart’s contribution is different but complementary. He insists that evil is a genuine privation of the good, not a rival power and not an illusion. His alignment with Augustine on the nature of evil is closer than their sharp divergence on its resolution might suggest. The shared premise is that evil has no substance of its own. It cannot stand on its own feet. Hart draws the conclusion Augustine did not: if evil is a wound without its own being, its proper end is healing, not preservation. To keep evil alive forever in an eternal hell is to grant it a permanence it does not deserve.³³

Manis, writing as a non-universalist, provides an unexpected support for the restoration model through his “divine presence” account of hell. On Manis’s reading, the suffering of the wicked is not an externally imposed punishment but the natural consequence of encountering God’s unveiled holiness. What sinners experience in the presence of God, Manis argues, is painful but also sanctifying. Baker develops the same logic in a restorative direction: the fire is God’s love itself, and standing in that love purifies while it burns.³⁴ Manis does not reach the universalist conclusion, but his model of judgment as divine encounter rather than divine retribution fits the universalist theodicy better than the view it was designed to support.

The free-will defense, developed by Plantinga and others in the analytic tradition, provides the logical backbone. God’s permission of evil is compatible with His goodness because freedom requires the possibility of misuse. The universalist adds one piece to Plantinga’s structure: the God who permits evil for the sake of freedom also has the love, the wisdom, and the time to redeem what freedom broke.³⁵

George MacDonald saw this with unusual clarity. The traditional doctrine of hell, MacDonald insisted, keeps wickedness alive in its most terrible forms. MacDonald’s conclusion was blunt: preserving evil forever is not the defeat of evil. It is evil’s triumph. God does punish, but the fire is a purifying fire, the very presence of God consuming what is not pure in the sinner.³⁶

E. Counter-Objections

First: “A Pedagogical Theodicy Still Makes God Use Suffering as a Tool”

This worry is fair, and it is exactly why the book does not hold a crude pedagogical view. God does not design suffering as a teaching method. He does not send cancer to build character. The book’s position is that God can redeem suffering after the fact, not that He engineers it as a curriculum. The difference is between a doctor who causes an illness to teach a patient about health, and a doctor who heals an illness the patient caught on his own. The first is monstrous. The second is mercy.³⁷

Second: “Free Will Does Not Explain Natural Evil”

This is one of the oldest objections to the free-will defense. Earthquakes, cancers, and hurricanes are not caused by human choice. How can freedom explain a tsunami?

I will be honest: the free-will defense does not fully explain natural evil. No theodicy does. Traditional options include the claim that the fall of creatures (human and angelic) has corrupted the natural order, and the claim that a world capable of producing free beings must have the physical features that also produce natural disasters.³⁸ The universalist has no special advantage here, but neither does the traditionalist. Natural evil is a problem for every view that affirms God’s goodness and power. What the universalist can say is this: whatever the origin of natural evil, its end is not eternal agony for its victims. Every person crushed by a natural disaster will be healed. Every child drowned in a flood will be held. That is not an explanation. It is a promise grounded in the character of God.

Third: “Saying Universalism ‘Defeats’ Evil Assumes the Very Ending in Dispute”

This is the sharpest objection, and the most honest response is to acknowledge it. The claim that restoration defeats evil while eternal torment merely quarantines it does presuppose that restoration actually happens. If it does not, if some wills are truly fixed forever, then the quarantine model is the best available.

The rest of this book argues, from Scripture and the character of God, that restoration does happen. The case for that ending is built in Chapter 25 (the universal-scope texts), Chapter 26 (freedom and the non-coercive “yes”), and Chapter 40 (the cumulative reply). If those chapters succeed, then the superiority of the restoration theodicy follows. If they fail, it does not. This chapter does not claim to have proven the ending. It claims that if the ending is true, then the universalist theodicy is stronger than the alternatives.³⁹

F. Universalism’s Theodicy and the Character of God

McClymond is right that evil is a test for every theology. He is right that dualist, illusionist, and crude pedagogical theodicies fail. He is right that Augustine’s free-will account is stronger than the alternatives he surveys. But he is wrong to assume that universalism has nothing better to offer.

The free-will-and-restoration account takes evil seriously. It does not call evil an illusion. It does not put evil inside God. It does not pretend that suffering is a classroom exercise. It roots evil where Augustine rooted it: in the freedom of creatures who chose wrongly. And then it says what Augustine did not: that the God who gave freedom is also the God who heals what freedom broke.

This is not soft theology. The fire is real. The judgment is severe. The cost of rebellion is agonizing. But the fire heals. The judgment restores. And the story ends not with evil locked in a room forever, but with evil gone. Every rebel won. Every wound closed. Every tear wiped away. “He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away” (Revelation 21:4).⁴⁰

“As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good, to bring it about that many people should be kept alive, as they are today.” (Genesis 50:20, ESV)

Joseph said that to the brothers who sold him into slavery. He did not say evil was good. He said God was greater than evil. That is the universalist’s theodicy in a single verse. God does not author evil. He does not need evil. But He is the kind of God who can take the worst that creatures do and fold it into a story that ends in life. And in the restoration of all things, that story reaches every person He has made.

I do not claim this answer dissolves the pain. A mother standing over the grave of her child does not need a philosophical framework. She needs the arms of God. But when the philosophical question does come, and it always comes, the answer that does the most justice to evil is not the one that locks it away forever. It is the one that ends it. The God who wipes every tear and makes all things new is a God who finishes what He started. And He does not finish by leaving evil in a closet. He finishes by destroying it, healing the wounded, and winning the rebel. That is what “all things new” means.

The next three chapters press the point from different angles. Chapter 12 answers the charge that universalism trivializes evil. Chapter 13 answers the claim that the argument from evil proves too much. Chapter 14 faces the worry that a universal ending empties the present of seriousness. Together, they finish what this chapter starts: the case that universalism handles evil not just adequately but with more hope, more honesty, and more confidence in the character of God than any theology that leaves evil running forever.