Chapter 17

The English Tradition

Cambridge Platonists, Restorationists, and the Strange Light of William Law

A King's Cliffe Evening

Picture a small, weathered house in the village of King's Cliffe, Northamptonshire. The year is 1754. An old man — sixty-eight years old, frail but steady — sits at a writing desk. A single candle burns beside him. Outside, the English countryside settles into a damp evening. The man's name is William Law. Once he had been the brightest young preacher in Anglican England, a Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, the author of a book on holy living so admired that John Wesley would later say it was the book that helped make him a Methodist.¹ But for thirty years now Law has lived quietly in this village, refusing every offer of preferment, giving away his money to schools and almshouses, reading the strange German mystic Jakob Böhme by the hour, and writing books most of his old admirers wished he had never written.

The book under his hand on this particular evening is called The Spirit of Love. It is a dialogue, the second part now nearing completion. And in this dialogue, Law has done something his old friends in London would have thought impossible. He has denied that there is any wrath in God.

Stay with that sentence. Not the wrath, but the love of God plucks out the right eye. The judgments do not cease until every sinner confesses that the trouble was good. Every sinner. There is no asterisk. There is no footnote saying "except those who die unconverted." This is William Law in the last decade of his life, the most respected devotional writer in eighteenth-century England, calmly writing words that — taken at face value — make him a universalist.²

If you grew up evangelical in the English-speaking world, this is the kind of sentence that is supposed to be impossible to find before the late twentieth century. The story most of us inherited goes like this: the early Church taught endless conscious torment; the medieval Church taught endless conscious torment; the Reformers, recovering the gospel, taught endless conscious torment; the Puritans, refining the Reformation, taught endless conscious torment. Then, somewhere around 1850 or so, with the rise of liberal theology and the loss of biblical authority, a few sentimental clergy began to wobble. Then, in the late twentieth century, those wobbles became the modern universalist movement. The whole thing is a story of declension. A pristine doctrine slowly eaten away by liberalism.

And William Law sits at his desk in 1754 with his candle and his Böhme and his dialogue, and the whole story falls apart.

Law is not a one-off. He is the late flowering of an English tradition I want to introduce in this chapter — a tradition that begins in Cambridge a century before Law's pen reached The Spirit of Love, that runs through the seventeenth-century universalist underground, that surfaces again in eighteenth-century mystical Anglicanism, and that bursts into open Anglican controversy in the nineteenth century. By the time we reach the end of that nineteenth century, the question of eternal punishment is being debated in the highest courts of the realm, in Westminster Abbey itself, and in the pages of every major religious magazine in England. By 1995, the Church of England's own Doctrine Commission can issue a report saying that "Hell is not eternal torment, but is the final and irrevocable choosing of that which is opposed to God so completely and so absolutely that the only end is total non-being" — and Anglicans, by and large, will receive the report with a shrug.³

How did we get here? That is the story of this chapter.

The English long-hope tradition has its own distinctive shape. It is not exactly the Pietist tradition we met in Chapter 16, though it overlaps with it. It is not the American Universalism we will meet in Chapter 19, though some of the seeds are the same. It is not the patristic universalism of Origen or Gregory of Nyssa, though it draws deeply from them. The English tradition has its own accent — patient, ironic, often understated, almost always written by people who continued to call themselves Anglicans (or, in a few cases, Independents or Presbyterians) and who held their positions while remaining in good standing with their churches.

Above all, the English tradition is the place where the long hope first becomes respectable. By the mid-nineteenth century, an Anglican professor at King's College could publish a careful book denying that "eternal" in the New Testament means endless duration — be sacked from his chair — and within a generation be remembered not as a heretic but as a saintly forerunner.⁴ By the late nineteenth century, a Canon of Westminster Abbey could preach five sermons against the popular doctrine of hell, publish them under the title Eternal Hope, weather a storm of criticism, and end his career as Dean of Canterbury Cathedral.⁵ The cost was real. But the institutional space was real, too. And that space was carved out, paragraph by paragraph and sermon by sermon, by the figures we will meet in this chapter.

I want to begin where the English story properly begins: in Cambridge, in the middle of the seventeenth century, with a small group of philosopher-divines who refused to read Scripture in any way that made God less than good.

Mid-Seventeenth-Century Cambridge

The setting is important. In the 1640s and 1650s, Cambridge was a battlefield. The English Civil War (1642–1651) had torn the country apart. King Charles I had been executed in 1649. Parliament had abolished the bishops, the Book of Common Prayer, and the cathedral chapters. The Westminster Assembly (1643–1653) had produced its Confession (1647), with its severe doctrine of double predestination, eternal reprobation, and unyielding ECT (eternal conscious torment).⁶ Puritan Calvinists ran the universities. Many of the old Laudian Arminian dons — those who had been at home under Archbishop William Laud's high-church, ceremonial Anglicanism — had been ejected.

But not everyone in Cambridge fit either of the two warring parties. A small group of fellows, mostly at Emmanuel College and Christ's College, were uneasy with both. They thought the Calvinist doctrine of decree-driven reprobation made God arbitrary and harsh. They thought the high-church focus on ceremony missed the heart of Christianity. They wanted something else: a Christianity rooted in reason as a divine gift, in patristic learning (especially the Greek Fathers), in moral seriousness without legalism, and in a generous reading of God's love. They came to be called, in the next century, the Cambridge Platonists. In their own day they were more often called Latitude-men or Latitudinarians — a half-mocking name for clergy of broad sympathies who refused to make the sharp doctrinal distinctions then in fashion.⁷

Richard Baxter, the great Puritan pastor, describes the group with grudging respect a few decades later. He notes that they were "mostly Cambridge-men, Platonists or Cartesians, and many of them Arminians, some holding the principles of Origen about the pre-existence of souls: ingenious men and scholars of universal and free principles, abhorring imposition of little things." That is Baxter's careful way of saying: these men were learned, they were charitable, and some of them flirted dangerously with the heresies of Origen — including, sometimes, the heresy of universal restoration.⁸

I want to be careful here. Not every Cambridge Platonist was a universalist. Several of them quite explicitly were not. Cudworth, the most systematic of them, never went on record either for or against universal restoration. Smith died young. Whichcote himself was cagey. But the group as a whole was distinguished by a refusal to defend the harsher doctrines of the Westminster Confession on grounds that those doctrines turned God's justice into bare arbitrary power. And in that refusal, the door was opened. Two of their inner circle — Peter Sterry and Jeremiah White, both chaplains to Oliver Cromwell — were unambiguous universalists. Anne Conway, who studied with Henry More, became an explicit advocate of universal restoration. Henry More himself, the most prolific of the group, ended up fighting open polemical battles against the doctrine of eternal punishment as ordinarily understood.⁹

What held them together was something deeper than a position on hell. It was a way of doing theology. They believed that reason was, as Whichcote loved to say, quoting Proverbs 20:27, "the candle of the Lord." Reason was not opposed to revelation. It was a divine light placed in the human soul, lighted by God to light the way back to God. To deny reason was to deny one of God's chief gifts. And any doctrine that violated the clear sense of moral reason — any doctrine that required us to call cruel what we knew to be cruel, or to call good what we knew to be evil — could not be a true doctrine, however orthodox it sounded.¹⁰

This is the methodological move that makes the Cambridge Platonists important for the long-hope story. They did not say: "Scripture clearly teaches eternal punishment, but we feel it is harsh, so we will reject it." They said something more careful. They said: "Scripture in the original Greek does not unambiguously teach what later Latin and English translators have made it teach. Aiōnios does not mean endless. The Augustinian reading of aiōnion kolasin as 'endless conscious torment' rests on a chain of philological and theological decisions that can be questioned. And once those decisions are questioned, the moral and rational objections to ECT no longer have to be smothered. They can be heard." That move — the move from moral protest to philological re-examination — is the long-hope tradition's signature in the English-speaking world, and it begins here, in Cambridge, in the 1640s and 1650s.¹¹

One more contextual point. The civil war years (1642–1660) had broken up much of England's old censorship apparatus. For a brief window — roughly 1640 to 1665 — it was easier to print theologically unorthodox material in England than at any time before. The radical sects flourished: Levellers, Diggers, Ranters, early Quakers. So did stranger pamphlets that proposed everything from the immediate return of Christ to the doctrine of soul-sleep to (very occasionally) the universal restoration of all things.¹² The Cambridge Platonists were not radical sectarians. They were University men, deeply learned, deeply respectable. But the climate of their day made it possible for university dons to think out loud about hell in a way that would have been much harder fifty years earlier.

That is the setting. Now meet the men.

Benjamin Whichcote (1609–1683)

Benjamin Whichcote was the senior figure of the group, and in some ways the one who set the temperature for the whole school. Born in Shropshire in 1609, he matriculated at Emmanuel College, Cambridge — the most determinedly Puritan college in the university — in 1626, under the tutorship of Anthony Tuckney, a strict Calvinist of unbending convictions. Whichcote took his B.A. in 1629–30 and a fellowship at Emmanuel in 1633. From the Trinity Church pulpit in Cambridge through the 1630s, and later as Provost of King's College (1644–1660), he became the most influential preacher in the university. He was widely admired across party lines. Bishops admired him. Puritan tutors admired him. He published almost nothing in his lifetime; his Aphorisms and various volumes of sermons appeared only after his death in 1683, when his friend the Third Earl of Shaftesbury and others took up the task.¹³

Whichcote's signature theme — the one Tuckney would attack him for in their famous 1651 letter exchange — was his use of Proverbs 20:27: "The spirit of man is the candle of the Lord, searching all the inward parts." Whichcote read this as a charter for the dignity of human reason after the Fall. The Fall had bent the candle but not extinguished it. Reason, conscience, and moral sense remained — wounded, often misused, but not abolished. The Christian life consisted in trimming that candle and letting its light grow. Religion was not the violation of natural reason; religion was the perfection of it.¹⁴

Tuckney smelled trouble. In his letters to Whichcote in 1651 — three of them, with Whichcote's careful replies, later published — Tuckney accused his former pupil of leaning too heavily on the Greek Fathers, too lightly on the Reformers, of letting moral reason override the harsher edges of biblical revelation, and of preaching in such a way that ordinary Christians no longer feared the punishment of the wicked. Whichcote's replies are some of the most graceful documents in the history of seventeenth-century English theology. He insisted he had not abandoned the Reformation; he had only refused to let any reading of Scripture make God less good than the candle in his own soul told him God was.¹⁵

Whichcote never explicitly taught universal restoration. He did, however, refuse on principle to teach the harshest version of ECT. He preferred to speak of God's judgments as medicinal, of the punishment of the wicked as still serving the divine love, and of the goal of all of God's dealings with us — even his harshest dealings — as the recovery of the image of God in his creatures. Those are themes we will see again and again in the figures who followed him. Whichcote made the move from a doctrine of bare retributive justice to a doctrine of restorative justice. He did not make the further move to universal restoration himself. But he made the first move respectable, and that mattered.¹⁶

Ralph Cudworth (1617–1688)

Cudworth is the systematic philosopher of the group. Born in Somerset in 1617, educated at Emmanuel, Fellow of Emmanuel and later Master of Christ's College, Cambridge (1654–1688), he was the most learned of the Platonists by a comfortable margin. His massive True Intellectual System of the Universe (1678) is one of the great works of seventeenth-century English philosophy — a thousand-page demolition of materialist atheism that took the form of an enormous engagement with ancient philosophy, patristic theology, and rabbinic learning. His Treatise concerning Eternal and Immutable Morality, published posthumously in 1731 by his daughter Damaris Masham (a close friend of John Locke), defended the view that moral truths are not arbitrary divine commands but eternal verities that even God's will does not invent.¹⁷

That last point matters a great deal for the long-hope story. The Calvinism that dominated mid-seventeenth-century England was, in its sharpest form, a voluntarist theology. Voluntarism (from Latin voluntas, "will") is the view that what makes something good is just that God wills it. There is no standard above God's will. If God decrees that a child who dies in infancy goes to eternal torment, then that decree is just, because justice is whatever God wills. If God decrees that the elect are saved without regard to anything they do, and the reprobate damned without regard to anything they do, then that is just too — for the same reason.¹⁸

Cudworth attacked voluntarism root and branch. Justice, he argued, is not arbitrary. Goodness is not whatever God happens to will. There are eternal and immutable moral standards, and God's own nature is the source and ground of them — not because God chose them, but because they belong to what God is. From this premise, certain doctrines of hell simply collapse. If "eternal conscious torment" cannot be reconciled with what we know — by reason, by conscience, by the candle of the Lord — to be just, then it cannot be the right reading of Scripture, no matter how the Westminster divines were arranging their proof-texts.

Cudworth was too careful to draw out the eschatological consequences in print. He published almost nothing of his theological positions on the fate of the dead. But his philosophical framework was a gift to those who followed him. Once moral realism was in place, once justice was prior to (and not the product of) divine decree, the most ferocious Augustinian readings of the punishment-texts had to defend themselves on moral as well as exegetical grounds. And once they had to do that, the long-hope tradition had its opening.¹⁹

Henry More (1614–1687)

If Cudworth was the systematic philosopher of the school, Henry More was its public face. Born in Grantham, Lincolnshire, in 1614, More entered Christ's College in 1631 and became a Fellow in 1639. He stayed for the rest of his life — fifty-five years in the same set of rooms, never marrying, declining bishoprics and deaneries, publishing prolifically. He wrote poetry, philosophy, theology, biblical commentary, even a book on apparitions and witchcraft. He corresponded with René Descartes (the great French philosopher) and helped introduce Cartesian philosophy to England. He was, in his own day, one of the best-known religious thinkers in the country.²⁰

More was raised by Calvinist parents. His own description of his childhood is striking: even as a small boy he could not, as he put it, "swallow that hard doctrine" of double predestination and reprobation. He was sent to Eton, then to Christ's, and in the course of his theological education he became persuaded that the Greek Fathers offered a more biblical and a more humane Christian vision than the Latin scholastics or the Westminster Calvinists. The Greek Father he came to admire most was Origen. More read Origen not as a heretic but as one of the great mystical and biblical theologians of the early Church — a reading that Richard Baxter, watching from outside the group, noticed and worried about.²¹

More's eschatology is most fully developed in his Divine Dialogues (1668), a long Platonic dialogue in five books with characters discussing God's attributes, providence, the soul, and last things. He had laid groundwork earlier in An Antidote against Atheism (1652), The Immortality of the Soul (1659), and An Explanation of the Grand Mystery of Godliness (1660). In all of these works, More argues that God is morally perfect, governed by absolute standards of goodness, and constrained by his own nature to act in accordance with what is best. From this it follows that God could not arbitrarily condemn his creatures to endless torment. Whatever the punishment of the wicked is, it must be reconcilable with God's perfect goodness.²²

More walked carefully here. He never simply denied the doctrine of eternal punishment in print. He held the doctrine of the immortality of the soul firmly — against the Anabaptist soul-sleep tradition we met in Chapter 16 — and he held that the wicked would be punished after death. But he developed several moves that made the punishment less than what the Westminster Confession required. He distinguished the biblical word aiōnios (a Greek adjective often translated "eternal" or "everlasting") from strict philosophical eternity, arguing that biblical usage routinely uses aiōnios for periods of limited (though long) duration.²³ He suggested that the souls of the wicked, after death, could continue to grow, change, and (under God's pedagogical pressure) potentially repent and turn. He held out the possibility — sometimes explicitly, more often by implication — that the eventual outcome of God's dealings with his creatures was not their endless misery but their gradual reformation.

How far did More go? Scholars still argue about this. Robert Crocker, in the major modern biography of More, reads him as someone who held to a doctrine of pedagogical postmortem punishment leading, in many or even most cases, to eventual restoration — without quite committing himself to strict universalism. Sarah Hutton sees him as more cautious, holding the door open without walking through it. D. P. Walker, in his classic The Decline of Hell, treats More as one of the central figures whose work made the seventeenth-century challenge to ECT respectable.²⁴ What we can say with confidence is that More refused the strictest Augustinian-Reformed reading of hell, that he engaged Origen sympathetically, that he developed careful philological arguments against the reading of aiōnios as strict endlessness, and that his published work made it possible for other Cambridge thinkers to go further than he himself was willing to go in print.

The most important of those others, in many ways, was a woman.

Anne Conway (1631–1679)

Anne Finch — later Anne Conway, Lady Conway — was one of More's pupils. They met in 1650, when she was nineteen and he was already a distinguished Fellow at Christ's. She suffered from terrible chronic headaches for most of her life. She studied under More's tutelage by correspondence (since Cambridge would not admit women), reading philosophy in Latin, Hebrew, and Greek. Late in her life, under the influence of her physician Francis Mercury van Helmont and the Quaker mystic Henry More had introduced her to, she developed her own philosophical system. Her Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy, written shortly before her death in 1679 and published posthumously in 1690, is one of the most striking philosophical works of seventeenth-century England. It is also unambiguously universalist.²⁵

Conway argued that all created substances are capable of transformation, that punishment is medicinal rather than retributive, and that no creature can be eternally cut off from God because no creature can simply cease to be God's creature. The very nature of being a created spirit, she held, is to be capable of further change — and therefore of further restoration. Her book was admired by Leibniz, who borrowed from it in developing his own metaphysics of monads. It influenced the Quakers (with whom she became associated in her last years). And it stands as proof that the universalist current within the Cambridge Platonist circle was not a private suspicion of a few cautious men. It was capable of being stated clearly and worked out into a full philosophical system by one of the sharpest minds of the period.

George Rust (d. 1670)

One more Cambridge figure deserves mention. George Rust was More's pupil at Christ's, became Dean and later Bishop of Dromore in Ireland, and was the author of a remarkable little book called A Letter of Resolution Concerning Origen and the Chief of His Opinions (1661). This was a sympathetic re-presentation of Origen's eschatology, including his apokatastasis, with arguments for why it should not be considered as straightforwardly heretical as the Latin tradition had taken it to be. The book was published anonymously and was widely read in the Latitudinarian circles of the next generation. Rust is the proof that even within the Anglican episcopal bench in the 1660s, sympathetic readings of Origen's universal restoration were possible.²⁶

The Cromwellian Universalists: Sterry and White

Two figures in the Cambridge Platonist orbit went much further than More or Cudworth dared to go in print. Both happened to be chaplains to Oliver Cromwell. Both happened to publish their universalist works only after their deaths. And both have been largely forgotten by modern evangelicalism, which is a shame, because they wrote some of the most beautiful and theologically careful universalist prose of the seventeenth century.

Peter Sterry (1613–1672)

Peter Sterry was born in Surrey in 1613. He went up to Emmanuel College, Cambridge, in 1629, where he came under the influence of Whichcote and the proto-Platonist circle. He took his M.A. in 1637 and remained at Emmanuel as a Fellow until the early 1640s, when the Civil War swept him into a different life. He became chaplain to Lord Brooke, a leading Parliamentary general; sat as a member of the Westminster Assembly (the body that produced the Westminster Confession) — though, importantly, he disagreed with much of its strict Calvinism; and after Lord Brooke's death in 1643 became chaplain to Oliver Cromwell himself. He preached before Parliament on great occasions. He was, for a moment in the 1650s, one of the most influential Independent preachers in England.²⁷

After Cromwell's death in 1658, Sterry withdrew with friends to a quiet community in East Sheen, near London, where he spent his last years writing. His Discourse of the Freedom of the Will, written in the 1660s, was published posthumously in 1675. A second work, The Rise, Race, and Royalty of the Kingdom of God in the Soul of Man, appeared in 1683. A long manuscript treatise on the eventual restoration of all things, with the unforgettable title That the State of Wicked Men after This Life Is Mixt of Evill, & Good Things, was published from a manuscript in the mid-1680s.²⁸

What is striking about Sterry is how he combines his universalism with a strong Reformed doctrine of grace. He is not a Pelagian. He does not think the will, left to itself, can choose God. He holds that God's grace alone saves; that human beings are radically dependent on divine initiative; that the Reformed emphasis on God's sovereignty is right. But where the Westminster Confession took God's sovereignty in a strict double-predestinarian direction — God elects some to be saved and reprobates the rest to eternal punishment — Sterry took it in the opposite direction. If God is truly sovereign, then his sovereign love must finally prevail. If grace is truly irresistible (as the strict Calvinists said), then irresistible grace must reach all in the end.

Robin Parry, in his recent reflections on Sterry, has called him a "Calvinist universalist," and that label is not nonsense. Sterry believed in election. He believed in irresistible grace. He believed in the sovereignty of God. He simply applied those doctrines to a wider field than his Calvinist contemporaries did. For Sterry, God elects to save every human soul in the end — not by overriding their freedom, but by drawing them, slowly and irresistibly, through whatever pedagogical means are required, until each freely turns and is restored.²⁹

Jeremiah White (1629–1707)

The other Cromwellian universalist was Jeremiah White, born in 1629, admitted as a sizar at Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1646, taking his B.A. in 1649 and his M.A. in 1653. The Dictionary of National Biography records that in his student years he experienced "much mental distress owing to religious difficulties, but ultimately found consolation in the doctrine of the restoration or restitution of all things." On leaving the university he became domestic chaplain to Cromwell and preacher to the Council of State. There is a charming and probably apocryphal story about him secretly courting Cromwell's youngest daughter Frances; when Cromwell caught them, White (who was, by all accounts, quick on his feet) talked his way out of it by claiming he had been seeking Frances's help in courting one of her waiting women. Cromwell, amused or skeptical or both, promptly married White to the waiting woman on the spot.³⁰

White lived through the Restoration of 1660 — the restoration, that is, of King Charles II to the throne, not the restoration of all things — and survived another forty-seven years as a Nonconformist minister in straitened circumstances. His great manuscript, on which he had been working for decades, was the treatise that would be published five years after his death under the title The Restoration of All Things: Or, A Vindication of the Goodness and Grace of God to be Manifested at Last in the Recovery of His Whole Creation out of Their Fall (1712).³¹

White's book is one of the great unsung treatises of the English long-hope tradition. It argues, with biblical patience and patristic citation, that the goodness of God, the universality of Christ's atonement, the meaning of apokatastasis in Acts 3:21, and the witness of the Greek Fathers all converge on a single conclusion: the salvation of all souls. White cites Clement of Alexandria, Origen, Gregory of Nyssa, and several other early Greek voices. He treats the Cambridge Platonist methodology of reason-as-the-candle-of-the-Lord as a working assumption. He holds — like Sterry — that God's grace will eventually prevail in every soul, and that the salvation of all is, in his memorable phrase, "a done thing with God" because the work of Christ has already secured it.³²

Why did White not publish in his lifetime? D. P. Walker observes that English universalism, even in the relatively tolerant Cromwellian and post-Restoration periods, remained legally and socially dangerous. As late as 1648 Parliament had passed an Ordinance against Blasphemies and Heresies that made it a capital offense to deny, among other things, the doctrine of "endless torments." That ordinance was never enforced against any major figure; but its existence cast a shadow. To publish open universalism in the 1670s or 1680s was to court loss of office, social ostracism, and at the worst conceivable extreme, criminal prosecution. So Sterry's and White's books waited. Their manuscripts were carefully prepared and sat on shelves in their friends' libraries until those friends could get them into print after the authors were beyond the reach of the law.³³

William Law (1686–1761)

The eighteenth-century chapter of the English long-hope story belongs, more than to any other single figure, to William Law. He is one of the great strange birds of English religious history. He was born in 1686 in the village of King's Cliffe, Northamptonshire — the same village to which he would return in middle age and where he would die — to a respectable grocer's family. He went up to Emmanuel College, Cambridge (the old home of Whichcote and Sterry), took his B.A. in 1708, his M.A. in 1712, and was elected a Fellow of Emmanuel in 1711.

In 1714, on the accession of King George I, Law's career as an Anglican clergyman effectively ended. He was a non-juror — that is, he was one of those Anglican clergy who refused to swear allegiance to the new Hanoverian monarch on the grounds that they had already sworn allegiance to the displaced Stuart kings. This refusal cost him his Cambridge fellowship and any prospect of advancement in the Church of England. He spent the next decade or so as a private tutor in the household of Edward Gibbon (the grandfather of the great historian of the Roman Empire), and as a writer of devotional and apologetic works.³⁴

Law's Earlier Period

In this earlier period Law wrote the book that made his reputation: A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life (1729). The Serious Call is one of the most influential devotional books in the history of English Christianity. John Wesley read it as an Oxford undergraduate and would later say it played a role in his own conversion. Samuel Johnson read it and said it was "the finest piece of hortatory theology in any language." The young Henry Venn, the young John Newton, the young William Wilberforce — all of them read it. It is a thoroughly mainstream Anglican-Arminian book of devotional moral exhortation. Nothing in it would have raised any eyebrows in the strict Westminster confessional churches across the Channel.³⁵

What happened between the Serious Call in 1729 and The Spirit of Love in 1754? Law discovered Jakob Böhme.

The Böhme Turn

Jakob Böhme (1575–1624) was a German shoemaker-mystic, the author of strange and luminous works on the inner life of the Trinity, the nature of fall and redemption, and the structure of created being. (We met some of his theological context in Chapter 14 with the medieval mystical inheritance, and his influence on Lutheran Pietism in Chapter 16.) Böhme's writings had been translated into English in the 1640s and 1650s. Some of the radical sectarians had read him with enthusiasm. Henry More had read him with suspicion. But it was Law, in the 1730s, who fell for Böhme the way some readers fall for Dostoevsky — completely, all at once, with a sense of having finally found the writer who answered the questions he had been asking all his life.³⁶

From the late 1730s on, Law's writing changes. His prose becomes denser, stranger, more visionary. The polite Anglican exhortations of the Serious Call give way to something far more radical. The Way to Divine Knowledge (1752). The Spirit of Prayer (1749–1750). And the great work of his last years, The Spirit of Love (Part I in 1752, Part II in 1754).

In these late works, Law's universalism — or something extraordinarily close to it — becomes unmistakable. The core argument is theological. God, Law insists, is pure love. There is no wrath in God. Wrath is a creaturely experience, the experience of those who turn from love and so meet love as a fire that burns. But God himself does not have wrath as one of his attributes. God simply is love. And because God is love, God cannot abandon what he has made. He pursues every creature until that creature returns. The fire of judgment is the fire of love itself, doing its work in resistant souls until they yield.

Notice how careful that sentence is. Law does not deny the cross. He does not deny that Christ suffered and died for our salvation. He insists that Christ's death is "the same Victory over Death and Hell" as the resurrection — that is, both events together accomplish a single saving work. What he denies is the penal substitutionary account of the cross that had become standard in English Reformed circles by his day: the picture in which God's wrath had to be appeased before God could forgive, and in which Christ's suffering was the payment of a debt to an offended divine justice. For Law, all of that turns God into something like a creditor with a grudge. The real God, he insists, is pure self-giving love. The cross does not change God's mind; the cross reveals what God has always been.

From this Christology, Law's universalism follows. If God is pure love and cannot abandon his creatures, then no human soul can be eternally lost. The "everlasting punishment" of the New Testament must be understood not as the endless infliction of vengeance but as the working out of love itself in souls that resist it. The fire is real. The pain is real. The duration of the pain depends on the resistance of the soul. But the goal of the fire is restoration, and the love that lights the fire will not give up.³⁷

It is worth saying clearly: Law's later writings are not always easy to read. He inherits Böhme's elaborate metaphysical language and his idiosyncratic accounts of the three principles of nature, the role of fire and light and water in the divine economy, and the place of human beings in the cosmic drama of fall and restoration. Some of this is strange. Some of it is, frankly, off the rails. But under the strangeness is a sustained vision of God as love, and of all created things as destined — through whatever painful pedagogy — for restoration.

Wesley and Law

John Wesley's relationship to Law is one of the great stories of eighteenth-century English Christianity, and it is more complicated than is usually told. As a young Oxford fellow in the late 1720s and early 1730s, Wesley revered Law. He visited Law at his lodgings in Putney several times to seek spiritual counsel. He recommended the Serious Call to his Holy Club at Oxford. He carried it on his missionary journey to Georgia in 1735.

But after Law's Böhme turn, Wesley's relationship soured. He came to see the later Law as having abandoned the gospel for a kind of mystical theosophy. In 1738, after his Aldersgate experience, Wesley wrote Law a sharp letter accusing him of having failed to direct his pupil to Christ for justifying faith. The correspondence is awkward on both sides; Law replied with restrained dignity. By the 1750s the breach was complete. Wesley would still recommend the Serious Call; but he would denounce The Spirit of Love and the Way to Divine Knowledge as dangerous mysticism. (We will return to Wesley in Chapter 18.)³⁸

The split is instructive. Wesley's "wider hope" had its limits. Wesley believed in universal salvific will, in resistible grace, in the breadth of God's mercy. But he could not accept Law's universalism. The Methodist tradition would carry Wesley's wider hope forward without quite following him into Law's mystical universalism — although, as we will see, post-Wesleyan Methodism would drift in Law's direction more than Wesley himself ever did.

Law's Influence

Law's influence on subsequent English Christianity has been quietly enormous. He shaped the early Methodist movement (through his early writings, even after Wesley repudiated his later ones). He influenced the Quaker tradition, which found his late mystical writings congenial. He left a deep mark on the nineteenth-century Anglican mystical tradition. Hans Urs von Balthasar, in our own century, would mention Law sympathetically as one of the English forerunners of the more hopeful Catholic eschatology Balthasar himself was developing. And — through the strange chain that connects mystics to other mystics — Law's writings reached Andrew Michael Ramsay, to whom we turn next.³⁹

Andrew Michael Ramsay (1686–1743)

Born in the same year as William Law, Andrew Michael Ramsay was a Scottish Catholic convert, a friend of François Fénelon, an honorary doctor of civil law at Oxford (1730), and one of the most cosmopolitan religious thinkers of his generation. He had been born into a Scottish Presbyterian family in Ayr, but as a young man he traveled to the continent, became a disciple of Madame Guyon and (through her) of Fénelon, and converted to Catholicism. He spent most of his adult life in France in the household of the Duc de Bouillon. He wrote the biography of Fénelon (1723) that introduced English readers to French Catholic mysticism. His Travels of Cyrus (1727) was a popular educational novel modeled on Fénelon's Télémaque.⁴⁰

What concerns us here is Ramsay's last and largest work, the great two-volume Philosophical Principles of Natural and Revealed Religion, Unfolded in a Geometrical Order. He worked on it for decades. He died in 1743 before he could complete it. His widow and his friend Francis Hutcheson (the founding father of the Scottish Enlightenment) saw the first volume through the press in 1748; the second volume followed in 1749. The book reiterates many of the arguments of Cyrus but in a more philosophical and systematic key. And it is, in its closing books, openly universalist.⁴¹

That sentence sums up Ramsay's argument. God's positive will — what God genuinely intends — cannot be eternally frustrated. If God positively wills the salvation of every human creature (as Ramsay believed Scripture clearly teaches), then God's will must eventually be done. The damnation of some, as a permanent feature of the cosmos, would represent the eternal frustration of God's stated will. And the eternal frustration of God's will is incompatible with God's perfections. Therefore the damnation of any creature must be temporary; therefore restoration of all is the only possible final state.

Ramsay's universalism comes through Fénelon, Madame Guyon, and the French Catholic mystical tradition. It also draws on his independent reading of Origen and Gregory of Nyssa. And — this is what makes him important for the English-speaking world — through his books in English (the Cyrus, the Philosophical Principles), Ramsay served as one of the chief conduits by which French Catholic universalist sensibility entered English Protestant thought. The young John Wesley read Ramsay. Charles Wesley read him. Through them, the universalist undertow in the Wesleyan tradition gets some of its impetus.⁴²

One should not overstate Ramsay's reach. He was less widely read than Law, less influential than the Cambridge Platonists. But his book mattered. It carried explicit universalism into respectable English-language print in the late 1740s, just as Methodism was rising and the Cambridge Platonists were being read by the next generation. It belongs in the line.

Into the Nineteenth Century: Thomas Erskine of Linlathen

The English long-hope tradition lay quiet through the second half of the eighteenth century. The mid-century evangelical revival under the Wesleys and George Whitefield brought a great deal of preaching about hell back into the mainstream of English religion. The High-Church revival (the Oxford Movement, beginning in the 1830s) was, on its own terms, no friend of universalism. Within continental Lutheran orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism, ECT was still the default. But under the surface of English Christianity, the older tradition was quietly being read. Cudworth's True Intellectual System stayed in print. The Cambridge Platonist sermons circulated. White's Restoration of All Things went through several reprints. Law's late works found a small but devoted readership.

Then, in 1828, a Scottish lay theologian published a book called The Unconditional Freeness of the Gospel, and the conversation broke open again.

Thomas Erskine was born in Edinburgh in 1788 to a respectable Scottish family. He trained as an advocate (a Scottish barrister) but inherited the estate of Linlathen in Forfarshire on the death of his elder brother, retired from the bar in his thirties, and devoted the rest of his life to theology. He never took holy orders. He never had a parish. He never held an academic post. He simply lived at Linlathen, read deeply in the Scriptures and in the writings of the older mystics (especially Law), wrote books, and conducted an enormous correspondence with what may have been the most distinguished theological circle of his generation: F. D. Maurice, John McLeod Campbell, Edward Irving, Madame de Staël (the younger), Alexandre Vinet of Lausanne, Adolphe Monod, Thomas Carlyle, Dean Stanley, John Brown. Carlyle in particular wrote of Erskine with deep affection as one of the most luminous Christian minds of the century.⁴³

Erskine moved by stages. His first book, Remarks on the Internal Evidence for the Truth of Revealed Religion (1820), defended Christianity by arguing that its truth was attested by its moral and spiritual effects in the soul. The book was admired by the orthodox. His Essay on Faith (1822) followed in the same vein. But in 1828 he published The Unconditional Freeness of the Gospel, in which he argued — controversially, then — that the gospel is a free, universal pardon offered to all, without preconditions, without sorting humanity into elect and reprobate. This was a frontal assault on the Westminster doctrine of limited atonement, and it provoked a storm in Scottish Presbyterian circles.⁴⁴

In 1831 the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland deposed John McLeod Campbell, minister of Rhu, for preaching this same doctrine of universal atonement and pardon. Erskine warmly supported Campbell. The two became lifelong friends. And Erskine, in private letters and in his later writings, went further than Campbell. He held that not only is the atonement universal, but its effect is universal too — that ultimately, all men would be saved and restored to the image of God by the work of Christ.⁴⁵

Erskine's universalism is most clearly expressed in his Brazen Serpent, or Life Coming Through Death (1831) and in his many letters published after his death in 1870. He held — like Law before him — that God's love is over all his works, that life is "an education rather than a probation," and that the goal of all of God's dealings with us is the final restoration of the divine image. He drew his arguments not primarily from speculative philosophy but from a close, devotional reading of Scripture, and from a powerful conviction that the conscience of the Christian — properly formed by long meditation on the gospel — could not finally believe in the eternal torture of the wicked.

Erskine had no parish, no chair, no platform. What he had was friendship. And through his friendship with one particular Anglican theologian — F. D. Maurice — his ideas entered the bloodstream of Victorian Anglican thought.⁴⁶

F. D. Maurice and the King's College Controversy

Frederick Denison Maurice was born in 1805 in Suffolk, the son of a Unitarian minister. His youth was spent in the swirl of religious experiment. Some of his sisters became evangelical Anglicans. One became a Calvinist Baptist. Another remained Unitarian. The Maurice household was at once a model of intense religious devotion and a microcosm of the doctrinal divisions of nineteenth-century English Christianity. Maurice himself moved gradually from his father's Unitarianism into trinitarian Christianity, was baptized into the Church of England, and was ordained in 1834.⁴⁷

He became chaplain to Guy's Hospital in London in 1836 and published The Kingdom of Christ in the same year — a remarkable work arguing that Christ is the actual head of every person, that all human beings are bound to one another by their common life in Christ whether they know it or not, and that the Church's task is to make that universal fellowship visible. By 1846 he was Professor of Theology at King's College, London. In 1853 he published Theological Essays, a volume of essays on the major doctrines of Christianity addressed to young people troubled by what they were being taught.

The last essay in the book is on "Eternal Life and Eternal Death." Maurice begins by noting that the word "eternal" (aiōnios in Greek) is used in the New Testament to describe both the life of the saved and the death of the lost. If "eternal" means primarily endless duration, then both must be endless. But, Maurice argues, this is to misunderstand what the New Testament means by the word. "Eternal life" in John 17:3 is defined as "this is eternal life, that they may know thee, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom thou hast sent." Eternal life is a quality of relationship with God, not primarily a length of time. By the same token, "eternal death" is a quality — the quality of being cut off from that knowledge — and cannot be measured by simple duration either.⁴⁸

What does this mean for the doctrine of endless punishment? Maurice carefully refused to commit himself to outright universalism. He insisted that he had "no faith in man's theory of a Universal Restitution." But he equally refused to teach endless conscious torment as a positive doctrine. His position, expressed to Dr. Richard Jelf, the Principal of King's College, in a famous correspondence, was that he could not apply the concept of time — of endless duration — to the New Testament word "eternal." If asked to dogmatize on the duration of future punishment, "I cannot do so. I find there at least nothing on the subject. I cannot apply the idea of time to the word eternal."⁴⁹

Jelf was scandalized. He wrote to Maurice on 8 July 1853, demanding an explanation. The correspondence dragged through the summer and into the autumn. On 27 October 1853 the Council of King's College, on Jelf's motion, voted to dismiss Maurice from his chair. The official ground was that Maurice's views on eternal punishment were "of dangerous tendency, and calculated to unsettle the minds of the theological students." The unofficial grounds, as more recent scholars have come to recognize, included Maurice's leadership in the Christian Socialist movement — a movement that combined Anglican theology with practical concern for the urban working poor, and which conservative Anglican opinion found at least as alarming as Maurice's theology of hell.⁵⁰

Maurice's view of hell came in for sustained criticism from the orthodox press at the time and for decades afterward. But it also won him deep admirers. Charles Kingsley defended him. The young Westcott (later Bishop of Durham) read him with sympathy. F. W. Farrar, whom we will meet next, named Maurice as one of his chief teachers. Through Maurice, the position that "eternal" in the New Testament denotes quality more than quantity entered the Anglican mainstream and stayed there. It is impossible to read serious twentieth-century Anglican theology — Westcott, Inge, William Temple, A. M. Ramsey, John Robinson, Tom Wright — without sensing the long shadow of Maurice's careful, refusing-to-dogmatize position on the duration of punishment.⁵¹

F. W. Farrar and Westminster Abbey

Twenty-four years after Maurice's dismissal, on five Sundays in November and December of 1877, Canon Frederic William Farrar of Westminster Abbey preached a series of sermons on the future life. He titled the series Eternal Hope. He published the sermons, with extensive notes and an introduction, in early 1878. The book caused the greatest religious controversy in late Victorian England.⁵²

Farrar (1831–1903) was no fringe figure. He had been an outstanding student at Cambridge, a master at Harrow and then headmaster of Marlborough College, a respected New Testament scholar (his Life of Christ, 1874, went through dozens of editions), Honorary Chaplain to Queen Victoria, and — at the time of the sermons — Canon of Westminster and Rector of St. Margaret's Westminster. He was a pallbearer at Charles Darwin's funeral in 1882. He would later be made Archdeacon of Westminster (1883) and Dean of Canterbury (1895). Whatever else might be said about his views, no one could call him a sectarian or a radical.⁵³

What Farrar said from Westminster pulpit in November–December 1877 was this. The popular Victorian doctrine of hell — endless conscious torment of literal fire, applied to every unbaptized infant, every unconverted heathen, every nominal Christian, every honest doubter — was not, he insisted, the doctrine of the New Testament. It was the result of a long historical chain of mistranslation, especially of the Greek words aiōnios, kolasis, and gehenna, and of an Augustinian reading of those words that the original Greek would not bear. The Eastern Fathers (Origen, Gregory of Nyssa, the Antiochenes) had known better. The Latin tradition had taken a wrong turn.

The sermons were measured. Farrar did not preach explicit universalism. He insisted that there is real future punishment, that sinners face genuine consequences after death, and that there is no easy or automatic salvation. What he denied was that this punishment must be understood as the endless conscious torment of the popular Victorian imagination. He insisted that the conscience of his hearers could not believe in such a doctrine, that the New Testament did not actually teach it, and that the long historical witness of the Church included voices — important ones — who had taught otherwise.

The reception was thunderous. The orthodox press attacked him. Edward Bouverie Pusey, the venerable leader of the Oxford Movement, then in his late seventies, published a 300-page reply called What Is of Faith As to Everlasting Punishment? (1880). The Anglican magazines were full of criticism. Petitions circulated. Sermons against Farrar's sermons were preached up and down the country.

But the controversy also showed something else. Farrar was not silenced. He was not deposed. He was not removed from Westminster Abbey. Within five years he was Archdeacon. Within eighteen years he was Dean of Canterbury. And in 1881 he followed up the sermons with a much longer scholarly treatment, Mercy and Judgment: A Few Last Words on Christian Eschatology, which engaged Pusey at full academic length, drew on the work of the Cambridge Platonists, Maurice, and the Greek Fathers, and made the case in detail. Eternal Hope and Mercy and Judgment together remained the standard English-language popular case against strict ECT for the next half-century, and influenced an enormous number of Anglican clergy and educated laity.⁵⁴

The most important development of the same decade, however, did not come from a single preacher. It came from the highest court of the realm.

Essays and Reviews and the Privy Council Ruling of 1864

In March 1860 — six months after Charles Darwin's Origin of Species and partly overshadowed by it — seven Anglican churchmen (one of them a layman) published a volume of essays called Essays and Reviews. The contributors were all members of the Broad Church party of Anglicanism: men who favored the application of historical criticism to Scripture, who were open to the new sciences, and who chafed under the strict Tractarian and evangelical doctrinal boundaries then dominant. Among the essays was one by Henry Bristow Wilson, vicar of Great Staughton, titled "Séances Historiques de Genève: The National Church." In a few paragraphs near the end, Wilson denied that the New Testament definitively teaches endless punishment, suggested that spiritual progress is possible after death, and held out hope for the eventual restoration of all souls.⁵⁵

The conservative storm broke immediately. The contributors were nicknamed "The Seven Against Christ." Two of them, Rowland Williams and H. B. Wilson, were prosecuted in the Court of Arches (the Anglican ecclesiastical appeal court) on charges of heresy. Wilson was charged specifically with denying the Anglican formularies on the doctrine of endless punishment. In 1862 the Court of Arches, presided over by Dr. Stephen Lushington, found Wilson guilty.

Wilson appealed to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council. The Judicial Committee — the highest court of appeal in the Empire — handed down its judgment on 8 February 1864. The Lord Chancellor, Lord Westbury, wrote the majority opinion. He overturned the conviction.

The legal effect of Westbury's ruling was clear. The Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England, the Book of Common Prayer, and the other formal Anglican formularies did not contain such a clear and binding declaration on the duration of future punishment as to require the deposition of clergy who held the "wider hope." Anglican clergy could, henceforth, openly hold and even teach that there is some form of postmortem opportunity, some possibility of restoration after death, or some hope short of endless conscious torment, without thereby ceasing to be in good standing with the Church of England.⁵⁶

The reaction was furious. A wit observed that the Privy Council had "dismissed hell with costs." Eleven thousand clergy and 137,000 laity signed petitions of protest. A declaration in favor of biblical inspiration and eternal torments was drawn up at Oxford and circulated among the clergy. The Convocation of Canterbury voted "synodical condemnation" of Essays and Reviews in 1864.

But the legal ruling stood. From 1864 on, the question of endless punishment was openly debatable within the Church of England. Maurice had been dismissed eleven years earlier; from 1864 on, no equivalent dismissal would be legally possible. By the time Farrar preached at Westminster in 1877, the legal ground was already prepared. The Cambridge Platonists' theological case had become — over two centuries — the constitutional law of the established Church.

The Long Quiet and the 1995 Report

The decades from the 1860s through the 1930s saw a steady erosion of strict ECT in the British religious mainstream. By 1900 it was openly acknowledged that the harsh Victorian doctrine had largely ceased to be preached in Anglican parishes. The Free Churches (Methodist, Congregationalist, Baptist) were divided. Scottish Presbyterianism, after the Erskine and Campbell controversies, had quietly relaxed its strict line. By the time of the First World War, much British Protestantism had effectively become inclusivist — at the level of preaching, if not always at the level of formal confession.⁵⁷

The mid-twentieth century saw a further shift. C. S. Lewis, in The Great Divorce (1945) and The Problem of Pain (1940), articulated a free-will defense of hell that left room for the kind of postmortem development Maurice and Law had hinted at. Balthasar's "dare we hope" thesis entered English-language theology in the 1970s and 1980s. The Anglican Doctrine Commission, in a series of reports beginning in 1985, gradually addressed the question.

The decisive moment came in January 1995, when the Anglican Doctrine Commission published The Mystery of Salvation: The Story of God's Gift. On a single page near the end of the 225-page report, the Commission stated its view of hell:

The press immediately seized on the report. The Observer ran an editorial saying the Church of England had "abolished hell." The conservative Anglican press protested. But the report did not, in fact, abolish hell. It changed the question. Hell, in the Commission's account, is not the endless infliction of conscious torment. It is the final non-being chosen by the soul that absolutely refuses God. Whether any actual creature in fact makes this absolute and irrevocable refusal — the report leaves open. The implicit position is something like the conditional immortality with which the present author identifies, combined with a strong dose of Lewis-Balthasar hopeful agnosticism. It is also, recognizably, the position toward which the Cambridge Platonists, Maurice, and Farrar had all been pointing.⁵⁸

The report has no binding doctrinal status; the Church of England does not work that way. But it has had an enormous influence on Anglican preaching and pastoral practice. Most Anglican clergy today, asked about hell, would say something close to what The Mystery of Salvation said in 1995. The tradition that began with Whichcote in Cambridge in the 1640s had, by the end of the twentieth century, become the de facto mainstream of the English-speaking Anglican world.

How the Tradition Was Received

The reception of the English long-hope tradition tells a story all its own. It is not the story of a fringe movement on the margins of the Church. It is the story of a stream that flowed quietly through the heart of English-speaking Christianity, sometimes underground, sometimes in the open, but always available to anyone who was willing to look for it.

The Cambridge Platonists themselves were widely read in the eighteenth century. Cudworth's True Intellectual System ran through multiple editions and was translated into Latin in 1733 by the German Lutheran theologian Johann Lorenz von Mosheim — bringing the Cambridge philosophical case into the heart of continental Lutheran scholasticism. More's Divine Dialogues remained in print, was excerpted in anthologies, and was studied by everyone from Samuel Taylor Coleridge in the 1820s to William James in the 1890s. Whichcote's sermons were collected and reprinted at intervals through the eighteenth century, and his maxims circulated as private spiritual reading. Anne Conway's Principles entered the philosophical mainstream through Leibniz's appropriation of her thought.⁵⁹

The Cromwellian universalists — Sterry and White — were less widely known but never quite forgotten. Their books circulated among the Quakers and among the various dissenting groups of late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England. Through the Quaker tradition, Sterry's mystical universalism reached Robert Barclay, William Penn, and the early American Quaker communities. White's Restoration of All Things went through several reprints in the eighteenth century and influenced the early American Universalist movement that we will meet in Chapter 19. Elhanan Winchester, the eighteenth-century Restorationist, knew White's book and cited it.⁶⁰

William Law's influence was more diffuse but in some ways deeper. His Serious Call remained a staple of Anglican devotional reading. His later mystical works found a steady, if smaller, audience. Andrew Jukes (1815–1901), the Anglican author of The Second Death and the Restitution of All Things (1867), drew heavily on Law's late writings. Through Law, the Böhmenist mystical strand entered nineteenth-century English universalist thought and contributed to the gradual recovery of patristic eschatology in Anglo-Catholic circles. Even today, the Carmelite scholar Iain Matthew and the Anglican mystic Martin Israel both pointed back to Law's late writings as decisive influences.⁶¹

Maurice's Theological Essays, after the initial controversy, went through multiple editions and became standard reading in Anglican seminaries by the early twentieth century. His memoirs, published posthumously in 1884, made him into a kind of saintly figure of the moderate Anglican mainstream. Westcott (1825–1901), the great Cambridge New Testament scholar and later Bishop of Durham, was deeply influenced by Maurice. So was William Temple (1881–1944), Archbishop of Canterbury during World War II and one of the most important Anglican theologians of the twentieth century. Through Westcott and Temple, Maurice's careful position on the meaning of "eternal" passed into the bloodstream of twentieth-century Anglican theology and shaped everything from the writings of John Robinson and Michael Ramsey to the present-day work of N. T. Wright and Sarah Coakley.⁶²

Farrar's Eternal Hope and Mercy and Judgment were widely read in the late Victorian and Edwardian periods. They became standard reading for any Anglican clergyman interested in the question. They were also exported across the British Empire and the Anglican Communion, reaching the United States, Canada, Australia, and parts of South Africa. American Universalist writers cited them. Conditionalist writers — even those who, like Edward White, were not strict universalists — drew on Farrar's lexical work on aiōnios. Through Farrar, the case against the popular Victorian doctrine of hell became respectable in Anglican parsonages from Manchester to Melbourne.⁶³

Erskine of Linlathen, on the other hand, has been less famous but more deeply influential than his public profile suggests. He shaped Maurice, he influenced John McLeod Campbell (whose Nature of the Atonement, 1856, is one of the great Scottish theological works of the nineteenth century), and through Carlyle and the Edinburgh literary circle he reached a wide readership. Modern Scottish theology — from the McLeod Campbell revival in the early twentieth century through the work of T. F. Torrance — continues to bear Erskine's imprint, especially in its insistence that the love of God is unconditional and that the atonement is universal in scope.⁶⁴

It is worth saying, against this background, what the long-hope tradition's reception did not include: it did not include condemnation by any major Anglican synod, deposition of any major figure (Maurice's dismissal from King's College being an institutional, not an ecclesial, sanction), or any binding declaration that long-hope positions were heretical. The Privy Council ruling of 1864 essentially ratified what had been quietly true for two centuries: that the Church of England's formal doctrinal standards were silent enough on the duration of punishment that wider hope positions could be held in good conscience and good standing.

The Critics: Pusey and the Tractarian Response

Of course there were critics, and they should be heard. Edward Bouverie Pusey (1800–1882), one of the great leaders of the Oxford Movement and Regius Professor of Hebrew at Christ Church for over fifty years, was the most distinguished. His reply to Farrar, What Is of Faith As to Everlasting Punishment? In Reply to Dr. Farrar's Challenge in His "Eternal Hope" (1880), is a 300-page work of formidable patristic and exegetical learning. Pusey argued that the witness of the Fathers, the medievals, and the Reformers, taken together, overwhelmingly supports the doctrine of endless conscious torment. He insisted that the moral objections to ECT were essentially modern sentimentalism, and that the Church had always understood the relevant biblical texts in their plain sense.⁶⁵

Pusey's book deserves engagement. His marshaling of the patristic evidence is impressive, even when one disagrees with how he weighs it. He is right that the majority of the post-Augustinian Latin tradition taught ECT in its strict form. He is right that the doctrine has deep roots and serious theological motivation. What he was wrong about — and what the Cambridge Platonists, Maurice, and Farrar all saw — was the assumption that the post-Augustinian Latin majority simply was the historic Christian tradition. The Greek Fathers had said other things. The early conditionalist tradition (which we will meet at length in Chapter 20) had said other things. The medieval mystics had said other things. The Christian tradition, properly heard, contains all these voices. Pusey heard mostly the loud ones.

Pusey was also wrong about the lexical question. The case Farrar made about the New Testament Greek words for "eternal," "punishment," and "fire" was not the invention of liberal Victorian sentimentalism. It was a careful scholarly case that the Cambridge Platonists had already developed in the seventeenth century, that the Greek Fathers themselves had understood, and that subsequent scholarship — from Westcott and Hort through C. F. D. Moule to David Bentley Hart — has continued to refine and defend.⁶⁶

One other critic worth noting: the long-hope tradition had its in-house disputants too. The evangelical conditionalist Edward White (no relation to Jeremiah White), whom we will meet in Chapter 20, was uneasy with Cambridge Platonist and Maurice-style universalism. He believed the New Testament's language of "destruction" required a doctrine of annihilation, not a doctrine of eventual restoration. The English long-hope tradition was never monolithic. It contained conditionalists, restorationists, hopeful agnostics, and full universalists — sometimes in the same room.⁶⁷

What We Can and Cannot Conclude

So what should we conclude about the English long-hope tradition? Let me try to be careful and honest.

First, what is established beyond reasonable doubt. From the mid-seventeenth century onward, the English-speaking Christian world has produced a continuous tradition of theologically careful, biblically argued, patristically grounded opposition to strict eternal conscious torment. This tradition was not a fringe phenomenon. It included Fellows of Cambridge colleges, chaplains to the head of state, Anglican parish clergy, distinguished theologians of every major university, Canons of Westminster Abbey, members of the House of Bishops, and eventually the formal Doctrine Commission of the established Church. It was published in books that went through multiple editions, in sermons preached from the most prominent pulpits in the country, in essays that became the subject of national controversy. To claim that the long hope is a "modern innovation" in the English-speaking world is, simply, historical illiteracy. The tradition has been here all along.⁶⁸

Second, what is less clearly established. Not every figure I have treated in this chapter was a strict universalist. Whichcote refused the harshest ECT but did not commit himself to apokatastasis. Cudworth left the eschatological question largely undeveloped. More moved cautiously and never made a clean public commitment. Maurice carefully refused to be classed as a universalist and insisted he had "no faith in man's theory of a Universal Restitution." Farrar held a "wider hope" but stopped short of full universalism. Even Law, the most thoroughgoing of them all, was not always consistent in his late writings. The tradition is a tradition of long hope — of openness to postmortem opportunity, conditional immortality, eventual restoration, or various combinations of these — rather than a tradition of a single uniform position.

This is, in my view, one of the great strengths of the English tradition. It does not require the reader to take a strict position on whether all will finally be saved, whether some will be annihilated, or whether some other configuration is correct. It simply requires the reader to acknowledge that there is room within faithful Christianity for hope to extend beyond the moment of physical death; that the strict Augustinian-Westminster reading of the punishment texts is one option among several; and that the long history of Christian reflection has produced careful, faithful, scripturally grounded alternatives.

Third, what is genuinely contested. Scholars disagree, for example, about how far Henry More really went. Robert Crocker reads him as a quiet near-universalist; Sarah Hutton sees him as more cautious; the editors of the Cambridge Platonism online project (an excellent resource based at the Divinity Faculty at Cambridge) treat him as a difficult case. Similar debates surround Maurice. Was he a universalist who refused to call himself one to keep his post? Was he a careful agnostic on the duration of punishment? Or was he, as he himself insisted, a believer in the reality of judgment who simply refused to dogmatize about its length? Different scholars have given different answers. My own reading is that Maurice was honestly closer to a hopeful conditionalism than to a strict universalism, but I hold this judgment loosely.⁶⁹

There are also questions about how to read William Law's late work. Is the universalism in The Spirit of Love a real consistent position, or is it a rhetorical excess that Law himself would have qualified if pressed? Patrick Grant's careful biographical study reads Law as having moved, in his last decade, into a position that was substantially universalist in its theological commitments, while continuing to use traditional language of punishment when expounding particular biblical texts. I find Grant's reading persuasive. But it is a reading. Other interpreters have argued that Law remained, formally, a more traditional Anglican who flirted with universalist language without ever committing to it. Both readings have textual support.⁷⁰

Fourth, what the tradition does not settle. Reading the English long-hope tradition does not by itself decide the contemporary debate among conditionalism, postmortem opportunity, and universal restoration. The English tradition gives us a long, varied, biblically thoughtful set of voices — and those voices include conditionalists, postmortem-opportunity advocates, restorationists, and hopeful universalists. Wesley's wider hope is not Law's mystical universalism, which is not Maurice's careful agnosticism, which is not Farrar's lexical case, which is not Erskine's universal pardon. These are different positions, and the historical record itself does not arbitrate among them.

What the tradition does establish is the negative claim: that strict, unyielding eternal conscious torment is not the only Christian option, that careful and faithful Christians in the English-speaking world have for centuries believed otherwise, and that the modern revival of postmortem opportunity, conditional immortality, and hopeful universalism is a recovery rather than an invention.

Why This Matters

Why does any of this matter for the contemporary conversation?

It matters, first, because the modern-innovation charge is the most common rhetorical move made against postmortem opportunity, conditional immortality, and hopeful universalism in conservative evangelical circles today. When a careful evangelical thinker raises the question of whether the moment of physical death is really the cutoff for salvation, the response from the gate-keeping side is almost always the same: "This is liberalism. This is modern sentimentalism. The historic Church has always taught otherwise." Anyone who has been in those conversations knows the script.

The English tradition is one of the strongest responses available to that script. Because the English tradition is not Greek-patristic, not continental Catholic, not exotic. It is the tradition of the same English-speaking Protestant world from which most contemporary evangelicalism arose. The Cambridge Platonists, William Law, F. D. Maurice, F. W. Farrar — these are not figures one needs to translate culturally before evangelical Americans or evangelical Britons can hear them. They were Anglican churchmen, mostly. They wrote in English. They quoted the King James Bible (in some cases helped revise it). They lived within recognizably Protestant institutions. And they held positions that the modern evangelical consensus has tried to read out of the tradition.⁷¹

It matters, second, because the English tradition shows what faithful exegesis of the disputed biblical texts has looked like in the hands of careful, mainstream Anglican scholars. The lexical case against reading aiōnios as strict endlessness is not a recent liberal invention. Henry More made it in the 1660s. Maurice made it in the 1850s. Farrar made it in the 1870s. Modern conditionalists (Edward Fudge, treated in Chapter 28) and modern universalists (Talbott, Parry, Hart, treated in Chapter 25) continue to make it. The case has been developed over centuries by people who knew Greek, who knew the patristic context, and who had no axe to grind against orthodox Christianity. The contemporary version of the case stands in a long line.

It matters, third, because the English tradition models a particular kind of intellectual virtue worth recovering. The Cambridge Platonists' refusal to read Scripture in a way that traduced God's character — without thereby abandoning the authority of Scripture — is a hermeneutical move worth pondering. They were not biblical liberals. They held the Bible as authoritative. But they read the Bible in conversation with their own moral conscience and the Greek-patristic interpretive tradition, and they refused to accept readings that turned God into something other than the Father of Jesus Christ. That is, I think, a deeply right way to read Scripture. And it is something my own evangelical heritage has too often forgotten.

It matters, fourth, because the English tradition makes a contribution that no other branch of the long-hope story quite makes. The patristic universalists (Origen, Gregory, Isaac) speak from outside the modern Protestant world. The continental Pietists (the Petersens, Bengel, Oetinger) speak from outside the English-speaking world. The American Universalists (Murray, Ballou) speak from outside the established-Church world and rapidly slid into unitarianism. The English tradition is the one that holds together: established-Church respectability, Protestant theological seriousness, lifelong communion in the historic Christian fellowship, and a long-hope position. It is not a denomination that broke away. It is a stream within the historic Anglican mainstream — and through Anglicanism, within the broader Protestant world.

For evangelical readers in the American context (where the long-hope tradition is often perceived as foreign or suspect), the English story is especially worth knowing. Many of the great American evangelical figures of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were shaped, directly or indirectly, by the English tradition. The Wesleyan-Holiness movement carried Wesley's wider hope into American revivalism. Princeton Reformed theology drew heavily on the Cambridge Platonist case for moral realism (Charles Hodge engaged Cudworth at length, even where he disagreed). Modern American conditionalists (LeRoy Edwin Froom, Edward Fudge) drew on the English conditionalist tradition (Edward White, Constable, Pétavel — Chapter 20). The American postmortem-opportunity tradition (Pinnock, Sanders, Walls, Beilby — Chapter 26) draws on the same well.

One final word, more personally. As someone working from a position of conditional immortality with postmortem opportunity, while remaining open to conservative biblical universalism, I find the English tradition deeply hospitable. It is a tradition that holds together the love of God, the seriousness of judgment, the reality of postmortem encounter, the possibility of restoration, and the firm conviction that God's saving will is broader than the strict cutoff at the moment of physical death. It does not insist on a single answer to the question of whether all will finally be saved. It insists, instead, on the prior question: is the deadline doctrine — the claim that death seals the soul's fate at that instant, with no further opportunity, no further encounter, no further possibility of grace — itself a doctrine that the Christian tradition is bound to teach?

The English long-hope tradition answers, with three centuries of careful witness: no, it is not. Other positions are open. They have been held, in good standing, by figures we recognize as faithful and learned Christians of the historic Church. Whichcote, Cudworth, More, Sterry, White, Law, Ramsay, Erskine, Maurice, Farrar — these were not fringe figures. They were the people who taught at Cambridge, who preached at Westminster Abbey, whose books sat on the shelves of every educated Anglican rectory in the country. They are part of the Christian inheritance. Anyone who claims that the strict modern evangelical consensus is "what the Church has always taught" has not yet met them.

To meet them — to read them, to hear their voices, to recognize that they were as faithful and as learned as the figures we have been told to admire — is the beginning of a different conversation. It is the conversation this book is trying to make possible.

We turn next to one more strand of that conversation: the great Wesleyan tradition, with its own wider hope, its own debt to Bengel and to Law, and its own enduring contribution to the long-hope story in the English-speaking world.