Chapter 38

Is Universalism Cultural Accommodation?

The Zeitgeist Charge and the Hope That Predates the Mood

A. The Argument on the Table

It is fashionable now to disbelieve in hell. Polls show it. Bestsellers confirm it. Pastors feel it in the room every time they preach a text about judgment. And Michael McClymond, near the close of his case against Robin Parry’s “evangelical universalism,” presses the point with a question that stings. Maybe people believe in universal salvation today not because the Bible teaches it, but because the culture finds hell embarrassing.

McClymond opens the door to the charge himself, but it is Derek Tidball who walks through it and puts words to it. In his response to Parry, Tidball raises the question that haunts the whole discussion.

McClymond endorses the question. “In light of the ideas presented in this chapter,” he writes, “this question seems apt.”² The charge is plain. The modern surge in support for universal salvation tracks the mood of the West. Our age dislikes judgment. It prizes comfort. It finds the idea of hell barbaric. And so the church has trimmed its doctrine to fit the room. On this reading, the hope is not drawn from Scripture. It is a giving in to the spirit of the age.

I want to take this charge seriously, because sometimes it is true. Some universalism really is a capitulation. When someone shrugs and says, “A loving God would never send anyone to hell,” without ever opening a Bible or reading a Greek verb, that is not theology. That is a cultural mood wearing a theological hat. I share Tidball’s worry about it. I said as much in Chapter 9, where I dealt with the claim that universalism is wishful thinking. A hope held only because it feels nice is a hope built on sand.

But here is the trouble with the charge. The doctrine it targets is not new. It is fifteen hundred years older than the therapeutic age. Gregory of Nyssa held it in the fourth century, when Roman culture was neither therapeutic nor pluralist. Origen held it in the third century, when the penalty for being a Christian at all was death. A belief that old is a strange thing to call a child of the Zeitgeist.

B. Why This Argument Has Force

Grant Tidball and McClymond their strongest point: going along with the culture is a real and constant danger in the history of the church. Paul warned Timothy about it directly.

For the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions, and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander off into myths. (2 Timothy 4:3–4, ESV)³

That warning is real, and it applies to every generation, not just the first century. The church has always faced the temptation to soften its message to match the room. When the culture prizes tolerance above truth, doctrines that sound harsh are the first ones to be filed down.

And the timing of the modern surge does look suspicious. McClymond notes that support for universalism has grown sharply in the very decades when Western culture has moved away from traditional ideas about judgment and accountability.⁴ The bestselling books, the popular podcasts, the crowded conferences: these rose alongside a broader shift in culture. Sociologists call it the “therapeutic turn,” the move from a culture of duty to a culture of self-care.⁵ If the hope of final salvation is riding that wave, then the charge lands.

Consider the Rob Bell phenomenon. When Bell published Love Wins in 2011, the book sold enormously and triggered a firestorm. The controversy was loud, but it was also revealing. Bell’s audience was made up largely of people who already felt uneasy about hell. His book gave them permission to stop believing in it. McClymond includes Bell among the “evangelical revisionists” whose work reflects a broader cultural shift.⁶ Whether or not Bell’s arguments hold up when tested against the text, the hunger for his message was clear.

De Young pushes the same worry from a different angle. He draws a line from the Puritans to the Unitarians. When churches soften their view of hell, he argues, they do not stop there. They slide from hell to universalism, and from universalism to something that is no longer Christian at all.⁷ The warning is sobering. It happened in New England over four centuries. It happened in the mainline churches. De Young sees the same forces at work today: lazy theology, cultural wealth, and a willingness to try new doctrines without counting the cost.⁸

So the charge has force. I do not dismiss it. But force is not the same as proof. And as we look closer, the argument has serious problems.

C. The Response

1. The Doctrine Predates the Modern Mood by Fifteen Centuries

The most direct reply to the accommodation charge is also the simplest. The belief that God will finally save all people is far older than the culture it is supposed to be imitating.

Origen of Alexandria taught the restoration of all things (Greek apokatastasis, “the restoration of all”) in the third century.⁹ His student Gregory of Nyssa, one of the Cappadocian Fathers and a central architect of Nicene Trinitarian theology, held the same hope in the fourth century.¹⁰ Clement of Alexandria expressed it even earlier. These were not men living in a therapeutic culture. They were not trying to make Christianity palatable to a comfortable age. They lived under threat of persecution, in a world that prized honor, shame, retribution, and public punishment. The Roman arena was not a safe space.

David Burnfield drives this point home. These early fathers, he writes, “were Godly men who took their views directly from Scripture as well as the teachings of the apostles before them. They lived at a time during great persecution so there was absolutely no incentive to dream up the idea that all men will be saved … especially when these same ‘men’ were committing horrible acts of brutality towards Christians.”¹¹ Think about that. If the hope of final restoration were simply a product of cultural comfort, it would have no ancient pedigree. But it does. And the culture in which it first took root was the opposite of comfortable.

The nineteenth-century Anglican scholar Thomas Allin made the point with force. Writing of the early centuries, he observed that to affirm the final salvation of the persecutor and the debauched in an age of public torture and arena spectacle “required the firmest faith in the larger hope, as an essential part of the Gospel.” In such an age, Allin argued, “no idea of Universalism could have originated unless inspired from above.”¹² Whether or not one goes as far as Allin, his point stands: the early defenders of universal restoration held their view in a world that gave them every reason not to.

Ilaria Ramelli has shown this in her landmark study. The hope of final restoration was held by a real strand of early Christian thinkers, stretching across centuries and regions.¹³ Burnfield has documented the same stream, tracing it from the earliest centuries through figures whose orthodoxy on every other point was never in question.¹⁴ I developed this history in Chapter 15, and I will not repeat it here. The point is simple: you cannot call a doctrine a child of the Zeitgeist when it was born seventeen centuries before the Zeitgeist arrived.

And it was not a fringe view even then. Robin Parry draws attention to two telling witnesses. Basil of Caesarea, writing in the Greek-speaking East around 360, says that “the majority of people” (Greek hoi polloi anthrōpōn) did not believe the punishment of Matthew 25:46 was eternal. They saw it as corrective, a fire that would end once the soul was clean.⁴⁶ Sixty years later, Augustine made a similar admission from the Latin-speaking West. “Very many,” he wrote, deplore “the notion of the eternal punishment of the damned.” He disagreed with them sharply. But he could not deny their numbers.⁴⁷ Both Basil and Augustine opposed the view. But both confirmed that it was widespread in their day. Basil’s own brother and sister, Gregory of Nyssa and Macrina, were among “the many” he mentioned.⁴⁸

Andrew Hronich adds a detail that is hard to miss. Epiphanius of Salamis, the great heresy-hunter of the fourth century, listed eighty heresies in his time. The hope of final restoration (Greek apokatastasis, “the restoration of all”) was not among them.⁴⁹ Irenaeus, writing against heresies a century and a half earlier, did the same: he did not list universalism among the false teachings of his day.⁵⁰ These men made their living hunting down error. They did not treat the hope of final restoration as one. A doctrine that the ancient heresy-hunters let stand is a strange candidate for cultural surrender.

And note the kind of culture those ancient defenders lived in. Nyssa held the hope of universal restoration while defending Nicene orthodoxy against the Arian majority. He was not taking the easy road. The E. H. Plumptre entry in A Dictionary of Christian Biography captures how naturally Nyssa held this view. In his teaching on universalism, Plumptre writes, “there is no apparent consciousness that he is deviating into the bye-paths of new and strange opinions. He claims to be taking his stand on the doctrines … of the church in thus teaching with as much confidence as when he is expounding the mysteries of the divine nature as set forth in the creed of Nicaea.”¹⁵ Nyssa held the full creed, fought the heresies of his day, and still concluded that God would finally save all. That combination tells us something. The hope does not require cultural pressure. It can grow in soil that is anything but comfortable.

McClymond knows this. He has read the patristic sources more carefully than most scholars alive. But his framing of Tidball’s charge does not reckon with it. The accommodation argument works only if universalism is a new idea tracking a new mood. It is not. It is an ancient idea finding new defenders.

2. The Accommodation Charge Cuts Both Ways

Here is a question Tidball does not ask: Has the doctrine of eternal conscious torment ever tracked cultural forces?

It has. In the Roman Empire, where Christianity became the state religion in the fourth century, the harshest versions of hell-doctrine flourished alongside the harshest forms of imperial justice. Public execution, torture as a tool of the state, and punishment as a spectacle: these were the cultural air that shaped the harshest forms of hell-doctrine.¹⁶ When Augustine championed eternal torment, he did so in a world where the emperor’s justice was brutal and public. The idea that God’s justice should look the same felt natural, not shocking.¹⁷

McClymond himself traces how hell-doctrine hardened over the centuries, not in a vacuum but in dialogue with prevailing assumptions about justice and punishment.¹⁸ The medieval sermon tradition, with its graphic descriptions of torment, reached its peak during an era when public torture was a normal part of civic life. Heretics were burned. Criminals were broken on the wheel. The cultural imagination had no trouble picturing God doing the same, forever.

In that same medieval period, the fear of damnation was a tool of social control. It is no accident that the most vivid depictions of hell appeared during the centuries when the institutional church had the most to gain from keeping people afraid.¹⁹ I developed this argument in Chapter 35, and the genetic fallacy in Chapter 3. The point is not that the doctrine of hell is false because it served power. The point is that every age’s theology bears its culture’s fingerprints. If the modern mood can explain universalism, the imperial mood can explain eternal torment. And if that argument does not refute eternal torment, this one does not refute universalism.

The accommodation sword cuts both ways. Or it should not be swung at all.

3. Conviction Can Run Against the Culture

If universalism is a comfortable accommodation to what the culture wants to hear, you would expect its holders to be rewarded. You would expect that claiming the hope makes life easier, not harder. You would expect approval, not opposition.

That is not what happens.

Robin Parry himself is the proof. When he first published The Evangelical Universalist in 2006, he did it under a pseudonym: “Gregory MacDonald.” Why? Because he worked as an editor at a British evangelical publishing house, and he feared the fallout of being tied to what evangelicals call a “heresy.”²⁰ Think about that. A man who is supposedly accommodating to the culture had to hide his own name to avoid losing his job. That is not what accommodation looks like.

McClymond notes this himself. Parry’s choice, he writes, was driven by “his wish to spare his publisher the unfavorable publicity that might result from having an editor associated with the ‘heresy’ of universalism.”²¹ When Parry finally came out publicly in 2009, he acknowledged that the risk was real. Even then, he said, “We’re not there yet.”²²

McClymond also notes a long history of universalists writing under false names. George Rust defended Origen anonymously in 1661. Georg Klein-Nicolai published under the pseudonym Paul Siegvolck in 1753. Charles Chauncy quietly circulated his universalist manuscript for thirty years before publishing anonymously in 1782. His friends spoke in code, asking each other at clergy meetings whether they had “tasted the pudding.”²³ These are the marks of a doctrine that costs its holders something. People do not hide their names to follow a trend.

I can speak to this personally. Holding this hope has cost me more than I expected. Relationships have changed. Ministry doors have closed. People who once respected my work look at me differently now. I have watched friends hesitate before introducing me to their pastors. None of that proves I am right. But it does prove that the accommodation charge misfires. Whatever I am doing, I am not making my life easier.

David Bentley Hart’s experience tells the same story. When his book That All Shall Be Saved appeared in 2019, the reaction from its critics was, in Hart’s own words, unlike anything he had experienced before. The topic of eternal hell, he wrote, “apparently touches deeper springs of disquiet” than any other, provoking polemic “so shrill, intellectually diffuse, and rhetorically abandoned as to suggest unhealthy psychological sensitivities.”²⁵ Whatever one makes of Hart’s tone, the firestorm he received is not what a man riding the Zeitgeist should expect. Accommodation is easy. Hart’s experience was not.

McClymond notes that early in the 1800s, evangelicals saw universalism as “logically incoherent and morally corrosive.”²⁶ An 1848 writer warned that its teachings were “so palatable” and “so much in accordance with the taste of our depraved natures” that believers were “in danger of being seduced by its allurements.”²⁷ That tone has not gone away. Within conservative evangelical circles today, affirming universalism is still one of the fastest ways to lose standing. Whatever the broader culture may think about hell, the world where most universalist scholars live and work still treats their view as a mark against them.

Paul asked the Galatians a pointed question: “Am I now seeking the approval of man, or of God? Or am I trying to please man? If I were still trying to please man, I would not be a servant of Christ” (Galatians 1:10, ESV).²⁸ That question applies to every believer, including universalists. And the answer, for many of us, is that this conviction runs against the grain of our communities, not with it.

4. Distinguish the Held Version from the Popular Mood

Tidball’s charge gains its power from a blur. It takes the wider culture’s squeamishness about hell and paints every universalist with the same brush. But there is a world of difference between these two people. One shrugs at judgment because the culture has trained her to dislike it. The other has spent years in the Greek text, in the early fathers, and in serious talks with the strongest critics. She has come to a careful, creedal, cross-centered hope.

The first person may indeed be accommodating. I have met people like that. They have no doctrine of sin, no understanding of the cross, no sense of why judgment matters. They just think hell sounds mean. And I agree with McClymond that this kind of universalism is shallow and dangerous. I said so in Chapter 37, where the book sided with McClymond against any universalism where the cross recedes.

But the second person is doing something entirely different. She holds a hope anchored in the scope of the atonement, the character of God, and the witness of the early church. She takes judgment seriously. She takes sin seriously. She has read McClymond cover to cover and come out the other side with a conviction that is tested, not borrowed from the air.

The accommodation charge treats these two people as the same. They are not. And the difference between them is exactly the boundary this book has been drawing from the start (see Chapter 2 and Appendix B).

McClymond himself notes Parry’s seriousness. He credits Parry as the most thorough biblical reader among today’s universalists. Parry, he writes, “seems never deliberately to have dodged a difficult question.”²⁹ That does not sound like the work of someone bending to the mood of the age. It sounds like hard work. And it is the work, not the mood, that marks the version of the hope this book defends.

5. Keep It on the Texts

There is a deeper problem with the accommodation charge, and it is a problem of method. Even if universalism’s modern surge tracks perfectly with the culture’s mood, that correlation tells us nothing about whether the doctrine is true.

Truth is not settled by sociology. A doctrine is true or false because of what Scripture says and what God has revealed, not because of who happens to like it at a given moment in history. If the culture suddenly decided that the resurrection sounded nice, the resurrection would not become less true. If the culture decided that forgiveness felt outdated, forgiveness would not become wrong. The Zeitgeist is not a judge of doctrine.

Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect. (Romans 12:2, ESV)³⁰

Paul’s command applies here. The question is not whether the culture approves of final restoration. The question is whether Scripture teaches it. That is a question settled by careful reading. The “all” texts are treated in Chapter 25. The meaning of the age-words is developed in Chapter 22. The apostolic writings on judgment are weighed in Chapter 33. And the character of the God who revealed himself in Christ runs through the entire book. I treated the argument from Scripture’s silence in Chapter 30.

To answer a doctrine by pointing at the culture that likes it is to commit a version of the genetic fallacy: judging a claim by its origin rather than its content. I treated the genetic fallacy in Chapter 3. The same logic applies here. Where a belief comes from, and who happens to find it appealing, does not determine whether it is true. Only the evidence does that.

Whether the culture likes a doctrine or hates it tells us nothing about whether the doctrine is true. The accommodation charge may identify a danger. It does not settle a question. And the question of universal restoration is settled by Scripture and the character of God, not by the Zeitgeist.

D. Engagement with Specific Scholars

McClymond and Tidball are not wrong to raise the concern. I want to be clear about that. McClymond notes that from the 1780s onward, anti-universalism was one of Anglo-American evangelicalism’s defining traits, and that the recent surge of interest represents a real shift in the landscape.³¹ He observes that universalism from the 1890s onward found a home in mainline Protestant liberalism and became identified as a distinctly liberal tenet.³² These are fair points. The link between universalism and liberal theology is not made up. It is real, and it is one of the reasons this book draws the boundary so carefully.

Tidball adds the sociological edge. He argues that the shift from particular salvation to universal hope fits a broader pattern of going along with culture. He connects it to other areas where evangelicals have softened their stances to stay socially welcome.³³ His concern is pastoral and genuine: he fears that the church is losing its nerve.

But the reply voices deserve to be heard. And now that the evidence is laid out, they speak with real force.

Parry goes further in the third edition of The Evangelical Universalist. In his new Appendix 5, he responds directly to McClymond’s related charge that universalism is a “slippery slope into heresy.” McClymond argues that the American Universalist denomination shows the pattern: they began as evangelical universalists and ended by abandoning the Trinity, the atonement, and even the deity of Christ. Parry replies that McClymond has misread the story. The link between their universalism and their later doctrinal drift was not the doctrine itself but the attitude of mind that was willing to question any tradition. And that attitude, Parry notes, was shaped by “the rationalism of the Enlightenment,” not by the hope of final restoration. From the start, Hosea Ballou’s theology was “deeply impacted by deist rationalism,” and that, Parry writes, “not belief in universal salvation, is what led him to reject the Trinity as unintelligible nonsense.”⁵¹

Parry adds a sharp question: “one can trace similar drift to unitarianism, unorthodox Christologies, and exemplarist atonement theologies among numerous Presbyterians and Congregationalists in the eighteenth century. Are we to conclude from this that the strict Calvinism of the Westminster Confession of Faith is a game-ending move?”⁵² The question answers itself. Doctrinal drift happens in communities for complex reasons. Blaming it on one belief in the chain is the kind of post-hoc reasoning the genetic fallacy is named for (see Chapter 3).

Notice, too, what McClymond himself says about Parry’s own work. He calls The Evangelical Universalist “the most ambitious attempt at a complete, canonical reading of the Bible” in the universalist tradition, “rivaling and surpassing all its predecessors.”⁵³ That is not how you describe the work of someone bending to the mood of the age. That is how you describe hard, sustained biblical scholarship. And when McClymond answers the deeper charge that universalism lacks a proper theological foundation, Parry’s reply is worth hearing. The case for universal restoration, he writes, “draws not simply on reason and experience, but also on Scripture and tradition. The theological defense stands on four legs, not two.”⁵⁴

Robin Parry, in his appendix responding to McClymond in A Larger Hope?, Volume 2, goes right at the heart of the charge. McClymond’s central thesis, Parry writes, is “very simple: universalism does not arise from biblical or Christian theological instincts, but is an alien import.”³⁴ Parry finds this too neat. He notes that McClymond’s case often passes over major universalist works that do not fit the model. Charles Chauncy’s The Mystery Hid from Ages and Generations, for instance, receives “some passing mentions, but no discussion,” even though Chauncy “became a universalist through his studies of the Bible,” and his book was “an unusually scholarly attempt to defend that thesis from Scripture.”³⁵ The same, Parry adds, could be said of George Stonehouse’s three publications, which receive only a single footnote in McClymond.³⁶ These were scholars who came to universalism by reading the Bible, not by reading Boehme. McClymond’s framework does not have a clear place for them.

Burnfield traces the same stream. He shows that the patristic universalists grounded their hope in Scripture. Steven Harmon, after studying Clement, Origen, and Nyssa in depth, concluded that each maintained the hope because “the Scriptures taught these things. As thinkers whose minds were shaped first and foremost through their reading of the Bible, this third rationale was the most significant.”³⁷ That is a far cry from cultural accommodation. These men read the Bible and concluded that God would restore all things. The culture did not ask them to.

McClymond presses the point that Parry’s journey into universalism “began with a revised concept of God that was itself defined primarily by rational or philosophical argumentation” rather than exegesis.³⁸ That is a fair point about the starting place. But many theological breakthroughs began with a crisis that sent the thinker back to the texts. Luther’s break with Rome began with a personal crisis over guilt and merit. That does not make justification by faith a product of Luther’s psychology. What matters is whether the texts bear the reading. And that question belongs to exegesis, not biography.

E. Counter-Objections

1. “The Timing of the Modern Surge Is Damning, Whatever the Ancient Precedent”

A traditionalist might press: “Fine, Origen held it. Nyssa held it. But the reason it is surging now is clearly cultural, not exegetical. The ancient precedent does not explain the timing.”

Fair enough, as a question. But the timing has other explanations. The modern surge also tracks the rise of serious biblical scholarship on the age-words and the “all” texts. It tracks the recovery of patristic sources in English translation. It tracks Ramelli’s landmark work making the ancient evidence available. It tracks the publishing of Parry, Talbott, and Hart, whose arguments are exegetical and philosophical, not sentimental.⁴⁰ The timing also follows the information revolution that let ordinary readers access Greek lexicons, church history, and scholarly commentary for the first time. The overlap with the culture is real. But overlap is not the same as cause.

2. “Nyssa Was a Rare Exception; the Mass Appeal Today Is Cultural”

Another push: “You keep citing Gregory of Nyssa, but he was one figure. The mass appeal of universalism today is clearly driven by people who have never read Nyssa and are just following the mood.”

I do not deny that some of the popular appeal is cultural. I said so at the start of this chapter. But the existence of a shallow version does not discredit the deep one. There are shallow versions of every doctrine. Some people believe in the resurrection because it sounds comforting, not because they have weighed the historical evidence. That does not make the resurrection less true. And Nyssa was not alone. Ramelli has catalogued a real stream of early thinkers: Clement of Alexandria, Origen, Gregory of Nyssa, Didymus the Blind, Evagrius, and others.⁴¹ Burnfield adds Diodore of Tarsus, Theodore of Mopsuestia, and more, drawing on Ramelli’s own comprehensive list.⁴² They were not a fringe. They were a minority, yes, but a serious and central minority (see Chapter 19).

3. “You Admit Some of It Is Accommodation. How Do You Know Yours Is Not?”

The sharpest version of the charge: “You concede that some universalism is cultural capitulation. How can you be sure your own version is not the same thing wearing better clothes?”

I cannot prove it by introspection alone. No one can fully see their own blind spots. But I can name the tests. This book’s version of the hope keeps the cross at the center (Chapter 37). It takes sin and judgment with full seriousness (Chapter 12). It insists on personal faith in Christ as the means of salvation (Chapter 9). It holds the historic creeds without qualification. It rests on exegesis, not on a feeling about what a nice God would do. And it has cost me something to hold it. None of that amounts to proof, and I do not offer it as proof. But it is a sign that this is not the work of someone caving to the mood. The strongest guard against giving in is not suspicion of every belief the culture happens to share. It is steady, careful attention to the text.

F. Conclusion

Tidball and McClymond are right to worry about accommodation. The danger is real. Every generation of Christians faces the temptation to reshape the faith to fit the room. Jude urged his readers to “contend for the faith that was once for all delivered to the saints” (Jude 3, ESV),⁴³ and that command stands regardless of which direction the conformity runs.

But the accommodation charge, applied to the hope of universal restoration, fails on the facts. The doctrine is fifteen centuries older than the culture it is supposed to be imitating. Its holders have paid real costs, not reaped cultural rewards. The hardening of hell-doctrine also tracked cultural forces, so the sociological sword cuts in both directions. And in the end, whether a doctrine is true is settled by Scripture and the character of God, not by whether the culture happens to agree.

I have felt the weight of this charge myself. It is a question worth sitting with. Every universalist should ask it honestly: Am I holding this because I want it to be true, or because the evidence compels me? The answer matters. And the way to answer it is not by looking at the culture. It is by looking at the texts, the creeds, the cross, and the God who stands behind all three.

John warns against loving the world or conforming to its patterns: “Do not love the world or the things in the world” (1 John 2:15, ESV).⁴⁴ I take that warning seriously. And I believe the hope I hold passes the test. It is built not on the mood of the age but on the witness of Scripture, the ancient church, and the God who “desires all people to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth” (1 Timothy 2:4, ESV).⁴⁵

Accommodation is a real danger. This book guards against it, chapter by chapter, by insisting on the cross, the creeds, and the authority of Scripture. But a danger is not a refutation. And a doctrine that was believed before the Zeitgeist was born does not owe the Zeitgeist an apology.

We will see in Chapter 39 that McClymond presses a related but distinct charge: that universalism breeds antinomianism and esoteric excess. The answer there, as here, is to keep the boundary sharp and the counterfeits named. The hope this book defends is not the hope the critics wound. And the path to Chapter 40, where the cumulative case is gathered, runs through this distinction at every step.