Chapter 21

Karl Barth and the Triumph of Grace

“We have no theological right to set any sort of limits to the loving-kindness of God which has appeared in Jesus Christ.”

A. The Old Man in Chicago

In April of 1962, an elderly Swiss professor stepped off an airplane in New York. He was seventy-five years old, slightly stooped, white-haired, with a pipe in his pocket and a heart condition that made his American hosts nervous. He had never crossed the Atlantic before. He would never cross it again. He had agreed to come because his son Markus, professor of New Testament at the University of Chicago, had pressed the invitation; because his health had unexpectedly held; and because he wanted, before he died, to see the country whose theology he had so deeply influenced and yet whose evangelical heartland he had never met.¹

His name was Karl Barth. Forty years earlier, his commentary on Romans had detonated like a bomb in the field of German Protestant theology — a phrase he later regretted but never quite withdrew.² Thirty years earlier, he had begun the Church Dogmatics, the longest sustained theological work of the twentieth century. Twenty-eight years earlier, he had drafted the Barmen Declaration, the founding document of the Confessing Church in resistance to the Nazi regime. The previous year, he had finished the last completed part-volume of the Dogmatics. He had not finished the work itself; the doctrine of redemption would never be written. But the doctrine of reconciliation was on the page, and it had taken him so far past the Reformed eschatological inheritance into which he had been born that nearly everyone who read him — friend or foe — suspected he had crossed over into universal salvation.

He had not. Or rather: he had refused to say so, refused with a kind of stubborn theological precision that drove his readers half mad. He preached and wrote of a grace that triumphs — over sin, over death, over the rejection of God by His creatures — with such totality that the natural conclusion seemed obvious. And then, having brought the reader to the edge of the conclusion, he would refuse to draw it. The freedom of God, he insisted, includes the freedom to save whom God will save. We have no right to make universal salvation a doctrine. We have no right to deny it as a possibility either. We have only the right to hope, and to preach, and to leave the matter in the hands of the One who alone holds it.

The Americans wanted a clearer answer. At Chicago and at Princeton, where two thousand people crowded each lecture hall and where the questions afterward ran longer than the lectures themselves, Barth was asked again and again whether he was a universalist.³ The story passed around afterward — embellished, no doubt, in the retelling — was that Barth answered, with a smile: “I am not a universalist. But I am not not a universalist either.” Whether he said it in exactly those words is contested. What is not contested is that he gave answers of precisely that shape, over and over, to the end of his life.⁴

This is the figure I want to introduce in this chapter. Karl Barth (1886–1968) is, by something close to scholarly consensus, the most important Protestant theologian of the twentieth century.⁵ Pope Pius XII is said to have called him the most important theologian since Aquinas. Whether the pope actually said it or whether the line was assigned to him afterward by enthusiastic Barthians is unclear — but the comparison is not absurd.⁶ No twentieth-century Protestant figure has been engaged at such depth by such a range of theologians, Protestant and Catholic and Orthodox alike. None has so decisively reopened the question I have been tracing through this book: the question of what God will finally do with the lost.

Here is the claim I want to defend in what follows. Barth radically reconfigured the Reformed doctrine of election in Church Dogmatics II/2 in ways that have struck nearly every reader — including the careful Calvinist G. C. Berkouwer, whose 1956 study of Barth bequeathed to us the phrase that titles this chapter — as having universalist implications.⁷ Barth himself refused, throughout his life, to draw the explicit universalist conclusion. He held what one might call objective universalism: all are objectively elected in Jesus Christ, the Reprobate-and-Elect who bore in Himself the rejection that would have fallen on us. He did not hold the corresponding subjective universalism: he would not say that all will subjectively appropriate that election in faith. He spoke instead of hope — an obligated hope, a hope we have no theological right to deny, but a hope that remains hope and not knowledge until the day God Himself completes His work.

That careful balance has been variously read by his students and successors. Some — the careful Bettises and Hunsingers — have insisted Barth is not a universalist and means what he says when he rejects the postulate of apokatastasis. Others — Tom Greggs, Oliver Crisp, David Congdon — have argued that whatever Barth says about himself, his theology necessarily entails universalism, and that to read him otherwise is to read against the grain of his own work. Berkouwer landed somewhere in between, calling Barth’s position a perpetual approach to the precipice of apokatastasis. Balthasar landed in still another place, finding in Barth the Protestant cousin of his own “hopeful universalism” in Chapter 22. The disagreements are themselves the proof of how thoroughly Barth has reopened the question.

What is undeniable is this: after Barth, the question of universal salvation is open in mainline Protestantism in a way it has not been since the magisterial Reformation. The doctrine of double predestination that the Synod of Dort had defended against Arminius and the Westminster divines had codified for the English-speaking Reformed has, in the wake of Barth, simply ceased to be the unchallenged consensus of the Reformed world. Whether one accepts Barth or rejects him, one cannot pretend his recasting of election did not happen. It happened, and it has been generative far beyond Barth’s own conclusions, and the trajectory it opened runs through Balthasar and Moltmann and on into the contemporary evangelical universalism we will examine in Chapter 25.

Stay with me here. Barth is hard. The Church Dogmatics runs to roughly six million words across thirteen part-volumes, and Barth thinks in long winding sentences that double back on themselves and gather qualifications like a snowball gathers snow. But the central moves are not as hard as the prose suggests, and they are worth the effort. They go to the heart of why the long hope tradition, after centuries of confinement to the margins of Protestantism, suddenly found itself with a respectable hearing again in the mainline. They go to the heart of what twentieth-century theology, at its most serious, has done with the doctrine of hell.

B. The Pastor Who Lost His Liberalism

Karl Barth was born on May 10, 1886, in Basel, the eldest son of Fritz Barth, a Reformed pastor and biblical scholar who would later teach at Bern. The household was pious, Reformed, and intellectually serious; Fritz was no liberal, but he was no fundamentalist either, and he raised his son in the assumption that theological study was a vocation that demanded one’s best.⁸

The young Barth studied theology in the standard pattern of the German-speaking academic world — Bern first, then Berlin under Adolf von Harnack, then Tübingen for a semester, then Marburg under Wilhelm Herrmann.⁹ Harnack and Herrmann were the leading lights of liberal Protestant theology in the years before the First World War. Harnack’s What Is Christianity? (1900) had distilled the gospel into the fatherhood of God, the brotherhood of man, and the infinite value of the human soul — with the dogma of the church largely sidelined as later corruption. Herrmann taught a kind of intense personal Christology grounded in religious experience and ethical earnestness. Barth absorbed both. He absorbed them well enough that when he came home to Switzerland to begin his pastorate, he carried liberal Protestantism in his bloodstream.

Then came August 1914.

The day Germany invaded Belgium, ninety-three of the most prominent German intellectuals signed a public manifesto endorsing the Kaiser’s war as a defense of German Kultur.¹⁰ Among the signatories were almost all of Barth’s theological teachers, including Harnack and Herrmann. For Barth, then a young pastor in the small Swiss town of Safenwil, this was not a political disappointment. It was a theological earthquake. If the theology he had been taught could not see the moral catastrophe of the Kaiser’s war — if instead it lined up behind the cannons — then something was wrong with the theology, not just with the moment. Liberal Protestantism, Barth concluded, had so identified itself with bourgeois German culture that it could no longer say no to that culture when the moment required. It had lost the prophetic word. It had lost the gospel.

What he did in response is among the more remarkable acts of theological self-education in the modern period. He went back to the Bible. He went back to the Reformers. He went back to the sermons of Calvin and the Heidelberg Catechism. He spent his evenings in his parsonage at Safenwil — between sermons, between visits to dying parishioners, between disputes with the textile factory owners over the wages of his working-class congregation — tearing apart the liberal Protestant theology of his teachers and rebuilding from the foundations.¹¹

The first product was Der Römerbrief (The Epistle to the Romans), first edition 1919. The first edition is a kind of socialist-prophetic exposition of Paul, deeply marked by Barth’s engagement with Christoph Blumhardt of Bad Boll — the Württemberg Pietist preacher whose “Jesus is Victor!” motto would echo in Barth’s theology for the rest of his life, and whose deep connections back to the Pietist universalist tradition we traced in Chapter 16.¹² The first Romans was a notable book. The second edition, in 1922, was a revolution.

The 1922 Romans — the one English readers know in Edwyn Hoskyns’s translation of 1933 — struck Protestant theology with the force of a thrown grenade.¹³ Its central image was the infinite qualitative distinction between God and humanity, the Wholly Other who breaks into the world vertically from above, the Yes of the gospel that cannot be domesticated into the Yes of religion or culture or moral progress. The Catholic theologian Karl Adam famously said that the book had “fallen like a bombshell on the theologians’ playground.” Barth himself later said he felt like a man who, climbing in a dark tower, reached out for the rail to steady himself, only to discover he had grabbed the bell rope — and then the whole town came out to see what the noise was.¹⁴

The bell rang loudly enough that the academic establishment, despite Barth’s lack of a doctorate or a habilitation, gave him a chair. He went to Göttingen as honorary professor in 1921, then to Münster in 1925, then to Bonn in 1930. He gathered around him a group of younger theologians — Friedrich Gogarten, Eduard Thurneysen (his oldest friend), Emil Brunner, Rudolf Bultmann — who collectively launched what came to be called dialectical theology or the theology of crisis. The journal Zwischen den Zeiten (“Between the Times”) was the movement’s mouthpiece from 1923 to 1933.¹⁵ The movement did not last in its early form. The friendships frayed; the participants drew different conclusions. But the moment had broken nineteenth-century liberalism’s monopoly on serious German Protestant thought, and Barth was its acknowledged leading figure.

Then 1933. Then 1934. Then Barmen.

When the Nazi regime came to power, the German Protestant churches split. The Deutsche Christen — the “German Christians” — sought to align Protestantism with the regime, purging the Old Testament, downplaying the Jewishness of Jesus, swearing loyalty oaths to Hitler. The Confessing Church (Bekennende Kirche) refused. In May 1934, at a synod meeting in the city of Barmen, the Confessing Church adopted a brief theological declaration drafted principally by Karl Barth — the Barmen Theological Declaration. Its first article remains one of the great theological sentences of the twentieth century: “Jesus Christ, as he is attested for us in Holy Scripture, is the one Word of God which we have to hear and which we have to trust and obey in life and in death.”¹⁶ Against the German Christian claim that the German people, the state, history, race, or blood could be additional words of God alongside Christ, Barmen said: no. There is one Word. He is Jesus.

The next year, in 1935, Barth refused to swear the loyalty oath to Hitler that had been required of all German civil servants, including university professors, since August 1934.¹⁷ He was dismissed from his chair at Bonn and expelled from Germany. He returned to his native Basel, where he was promptly given a chair at the university. There he remained for the rest of his life — thirty-three years of teaching, writing, preaching in the Basel prison, and grinding out the Church Dogmatics at the rate of roughly one part-volume every two or three years, with the help of his secretary and theological collaborator Charlotte von Kirschbaum and a small army of assistants.

The Church Dogmatics itself runs to thirteen part-volumes, the last of them unfinished, published between 1932 and 1967.¹⁸ Volume I: the doctrine of the Word of God. Volume II: the doctrine of God (including II/2, the doctrine of election). Volume III: the doctrine of creation. Volume IV: the doctrine of reconciliation, in three large part-volumes plus a fragment. Volume V, the doctrine of redemption, was never written. Barth died on December 10, 1968. He was eighty-two years old. The pipe was on the desk; an unfinished page was in the typewriter; Mozart was on the gramophone. (Barth said in old age that the angels in heaven, when they have time off, play Mozart for their own pleasure. The Holy Trinity, he said, takes pleasure in listening too.)¹⁹

I have run quickly through a life that deserves a chapter on its own, because the architecture of this chapter is built around the theology, not the biography. But the biography matters because it shapes the theology. The man who wrote Church Dogmatics II/2 is not an abstract systematician working from a desk in vacuum. He is a pastor who lost his theology in 1914, who rebuilt it in a Swiss village parsonage, who watched the German Christians try to capture the gospel for Hitler and refused, who saw the catastrophe of the twentieth century at close range. When that man, in 1942, writes about election, he writes with the knowledge that everything depends on whether God has truly elected humanity in Christ — or whether God has, perhaps, secretly reserved the right to reject some. Barth had seen too much rejection. He had seen what humans do when they believe themselves elect and others rejected. He went looking, in II/2, for a doctrine of election that would close that door forever.

What he found, or what found him, is the subject of the rest of this chapter.

C. What Barth Actually Wrote

C.1 The reconfiguration of election (Church Dogmatics II/2)

The single most important volume Barth ever wrote — for our purposes in this book, and arguably for the whole twentieth century of Reformed theology — is Church Dogmatics II/2, published in German in 1942 and in Bromiley’s English translation in 1957.²⁰ It is the volume on the doctrine of God. Its central topic, occupying roughly five hundred pages, is the doctrine of election. And what Barth does there is not modest. He attempts — with a kind of measured confidence that one cannot help admiring even where one resists the conclusions — to rewrite the Reformed doctrine of election from the ground up.

The Reformed tradition into which Barth was born held, in its classical form, what is sometimes called double predestination. Before the foundation of the world, God elected some individuals to salvation (the elect) and passed over or actively rejected others (the reprobate). The election of the elect was eternal, gracious, unconditional, and unchangeable. The reprobation of the rejected was also eternal, and although the Reformed scholastics differed about whether it was active or merely permissive, it was understood to be a real divine decree. Calvin called it “the dreadful decree” (decretum horribile) and meant something by the adjective; he did not enjoy the doctrine, but he held it.²¹ The Westminster Confession enshrined it. We have traced this whole inheritance in Chapter 15.

What Barth does is to take this entire architecture and rotate it ninety degrees. Election, he says, is not first a decree about which individual humans will and will not be saved. Election is first a decision God makes about Himself. Election is the eternal decision of the triune God to be God-for-us in Jesus Christ. In electing humanity in Christ, God elects Himself to be the God who is for us in Christ. Election is the “sum of the gospel” — the good news that God has, from before the foundation of the world, chosen not to be God without humanity.²²

From this starting point everything else follows. If election is first God’s self-determination in Christ, then the subject of election — the One who is elected — is in the first instance not a list of individuals but Jesus Christ Himself. Christ is the elect human being, the one in whom God has chosen humanity. And here Barth makes the move that has done so much theological work since: Christ is also the reprobate human being. He is the one who has borne the rejection that hung over us. The decree of rejection is not exhausted in a vague way against humanity in general. It is exhausted, concretely and historically, in Christ’s cross.

Stay with me here, because this is the hinge of the entire chapter. In classical Reformed theology, the decree of reprobation is part of God’s eternal counsel about who will and will not be saved. Some are elect; others are reprobate; both decrees stand from eternity. In Barth, the decree of reprobation is still real — he does not deny it — but it has been concentrated on a single person. The Reprobate is Christ. The rejection that should have fallen on us has fallen on Him. And because it has fallen on Him — really, historically, definitively at Calvary — it cannot fall on us in the same way. There is, in Barth’s vocabulary, no “rejected man” (der verworfene Mensch) apart from Jesus Christ. There is only the rejected One, and there are those whose rejection has been borne by Him.²³

Notice what Barth has done. The Reformed doctrine of double predestination, which always had a kind of dark mirror quality — some chosen, others passed over, both by God’s sovereign will — has been transformed into a Christological event. The “Yes” of election and the “No” of rejection both fall on the same person. He is the elect human being, and He is the rejected human being, and the doctrine of election is at bottom the doctrine of who He is and what He has done. The cross is not just a means to deliver some elect individuals from a wrath that hangs threateningly over them. The cross is the place where the “No” of God against humanity is concentrated and exhausted in the One who stood under it for us.

Now think about what this means for the question of who is finally saved. In the classical Reformed scheme, the elect are saved because the wrath of God passes over them (it falls on the reprobate or on the Christ who substitutes for them, depending on how one parses limited atonement). The reprobate are damned because the wrath of God falls on them. In Barth’s recasting, the wrath of God has already fallen, in the cross, on the one Reprobate who is Christ. There is no other place for it to fall. If there is no “rejected man” apart from Christ — and there isn’t, in Barth — then anyone who is finally rejected would have to be rejected somehow apart from the rejection that fell on Christ. And in Barth’s system that is structurally impossible.

So is Barth a universalist?

This is where the careful reader needs to slow down, because Barth himself slows down. He has constructed a doctrine of election whose internal logic seems to head straight at universal salvation. And then, at the crucial moment, he refuses to draw the conclusion. He refuses for theological reasons, which we will need to understand.

C.2 Barth’s explicit treatment of apokatastasis

Barth knows perfectly well what his readers will say. Within the same volume in which he sets out the doctrine of election, he turns directly to the question of universal salvation — apokatastasis, the Greek term he inherits from the patristic tradition (see Chapter 8 for the Origen background). In a section of II/2 entitled “The Determination of the Elect,” near pages 417 and following of the English edition, he addresses the question head-on.²⁵

The argument runs roughly as follows. Yes, the implications of the doctrine of election as Barth has set it out do seem to point in a universalist direction. The theological consistency of the system would seem to demand the conclusion. But theological consistency is not the only theological virtue. There is also the virtue of recognizing that God’s grace is grace, and that grace is given as a free gift — not as something we can “postulate” or hold God to in advance. To say in advance, dogmatically, “all will be saved” is to turn grace into a structural feature of the universe, into something we can count on the way we count on gravity, rather than into the personal address of the personal God who is always free to do as He pleases.

This is not a casual or evasive move. It is the same instinct that runs through every part of Barth’s theology: the radical insistence that God is God, that God’s freedom is real, that the human being is not in a position to legislate to God what God may or may not do. We may not domesticate God’s grace, even — or especially — by making it universal. So Barth refuses the postulate.

But notice what he then says — and this is, in many ways, the more striking move. Having refused to affirm universal salvation as a doctrine, he then refuses to deny it. The very same passage that rejects the postulate of apokatastasis turns immediately to the question of whether we should therefore say the opposite — whether we should say that we know some will be finally lost. And here Barth’s answer is equally firm. We have no right to say this either. To set limits to God’s loving-kindness in Christ is to do exactly what we were forbidden to do in setting limits to it the other way. The God who would not be bound by our affirmation of universalism will also not be bound by our denial of it.

Read those two sentences slowly. Barth is not saying we know universal salvation is true. He is saying we may not, in the name of theological caution, hedge God’s grace. We may not establish a doctrinal cordon around the loving-kindness of God that says “here, but not further.” Our duty is the opposite. Our duty is always to see that loving-kindness as greater than we had thought. To set up a doctrinal limit — to say “God may save some, but not all” or even “God could save all but probably will not” — is to do precisely what Barth says we have no right to do.

This careful balance — refusing to affirm apokatastasis as a postulate, refusing to deny it as a possibility, refusing to set any limits to the loving-kindness of God — is the position Barth held for the rest of his life. The II/2 statement is the foundational one. The later treatment in IV/3.2 (which we will reach in a moment) does not contradict it. It extends and clarifies it. To call this position “reverent agnosticism,” as George Hunsinger has called it, is one good description.²⁷ To call it “hopeful universalism,” as some of Barth’s readers in the Balthasarian tradition prefer, is another. To call it “objective universalism without subjective universalism,” as the framing I introduced in the opening section of this chapter has it, is a third. Each captures something true. None quite captures the whole.

C.3 The mature treatment in the doctrine of reconciliation (CD IV)

If II/2 was where Barth laid the foundation, volume IV is where he built the house. Across the three large part-volumes of the doctrine of reconciliation — IV/1 (1953), IV/2 (1955), IV/3 in two parts (1959) — Barth works out, at enormous length and with characteristic three-fold structure, what the cross and resurrection actually accomplished.²⁸ The reader who comes to volume IV expecting a tidy doctrine of atonement will be disappointed; Barth is doing something larger. He is working out the implications, for every doctrinal locus, of the claim that in Jesus Christ God has reconciled the world to Himself.

Three features of volume IV bear directly on the question of this chapter.

First, the universal scope of the atonement. Barth’s account of the cross is unrelentingly universal in its reach. Christ died, and rose again, not for a select group of the elect but pro nobis in a sense that includes the whole human race. The Judge has been judged in our place — the famous title of §59.2, which is one of the great pieces of theological writing in the twentieth century.²⁹ “In our place” is no narrow phrase. Christ took the place of every human being. He bore the rejection due to every human being. The cross is not a private transaction between Christ and the elect. It is the place where the world’s rejection has been borne and exhausted.

Second, the relationship between the objective and the subjective dimensions of reconciliation. Barth distinguishes carefully between what is true objectively — what God has done in Christ for all humanity — and what is true subjectively, in the lived experience of human beings as they come to faith. The objective truth of reconciliation does not depend on the subjective response. It is true that Christ died for all whether or not all believe. But the subjective appropriation of that truth in faith is also part of God’s purpose. The Christian community exists as those who have been awakened to recognize what is true for all. Mission exists as the announcement to those who do not yet know.³⁰

Third — and this is the part that has occasioned the most debate — the question of whether subjective unbelief can “undo” the objective work of Christ. Barth’s position is that it cannot. The objective reality of reconciliation is not contingent on the human response. But Barth also will not say in advance that no one will finally refuse. He will not say that human freedom is irrelevant. He will not say that we know all will come to faith. He will say that God’s grace is greater than human refusal, that God is faithful when humans are unfaithful, that God’s “Yes” in Christ is louder than the human “No.” But he holds open the formal possibility of final rejection — while in nearly the next breath refusing to give it any specific content.

The crucial passage on these questions in volume IV is in IV/3.2, around page 477 of the Bromiley translation. Here, near the end of the doctrine of reconciliation as Barth ever completed it, he returns directly to the question of universal salvation. The reasoning is dense but worth working through carefully.³¹

Barth begins by acknowledging the perverted human situation — the way sin remains a real and palpable threat, a continual movement against the truth, a falsehood that the human attempts to make into truth. Can we count on the fact that this threat will not finally be executed? Can we say in advance that even the worst sinner, even the most hardened unbeliever, will not finally come to rest under the wrath he or she has continually summoned upon themselves? Here is what Barth writes:

One could stop here and conclude, as Roger Olson and others have, that this is a clear and unambiguous rejection of universalism.³³ Barth says, in so many words, that no such postulate can be made. He says it even while granting that theological consistency would seem to demand it. He says it on the page after he has finished the longest sustained Christological account of reconciliation in the modern period.

But one must not stop here. The very next paragraph, on the very next page, opens up a second move that is just as crucial as the first. Having refused the universalist postulate, Barth immediately refuses to deny it. There is, he says, “no good reason why we should forbid ourselves, or be forbidden, openness to the possibility” that in the reality of God and humanity in Jesus Christ much more is contained than we had thought — including the unexpected withdrawal of that final threat, the final deliverance of all human beings.³⁴ We may not postulate it. We may — indeed we must — be open to it. We must be open because closing ourselves to the possibility would itself be to set a limit to God’s grace, which is exactly what II/2 had already forbidden us to do.

This is Barth’s settled position. It is not an evasion. It is not a piece of dialectical wordplay. It is a theological discipline. He is saying that the right Christian posture toward the question of the final fate of all human beings is not to assert universalism as a doctrine, but it is also not to assert the opposite. It is to hope, to pray, to preach, and to leave the matter in the hands of the One who is free to do as He pleases — with the firm conviction that what He pleases will be greater, not lesser, than what we had thought.

C.4 The Brunner exchange: Nein! and the question of those outside the church

I want to pause briefly on a controversy from earlier in Barth’s career, because it bears on the question of those who have not heard the gospel — a question intimately connected with the long-hope tradition. In 1934, the same year as Barmen, Emil Brunner published a short book entitled Natur und Gnade (Nature and Grace), arguing that there is a “point of contact” (Anknüpfungspunkt) between God’s revelation in Christ and the natural human capacity to receive that revelation. Brunner’s position was a modest one. He was not arguing for a Pelagian capacity to save oneself. He was arguing that the human being, even in the fall, retains enough of the image of God that the gospel, when it comes, finds something in the human being to which it can address itself.³⁵

Barth’s response was Nein! Antwort an Emil Brunner (“No! An Answer to Emil Brunner”), one of the most ferocious tracts in twentieth-century theology and one that ended a friendship Barth and Brunner had shared since the early dialectical theology years.³⁶ Barth said: there is no point of contact. There is no natural theology. There is no human capacity in the fallen creature that the gospel can address as if it were already, in some weaker form, looking for the truth that the gospel brings. The gospel comes from outside. It creates its own point of contact. It does not negotiate.

Why does this matter for our chapter? Because Barth’s rejection of natural theology cuts both ways on the question of those outside the church. On the one hand, it appears to close the door on any account of salvation that would proceed through human religiosity or natural awareness of God or implicit faith. The pagan, the unevangelized, the lifelong unbeliever cannot be saved by some hidden recognition of God in his or her own religion. There is one Word, and it is Christ. On the other hand — and this is where the matter becomes complicated — Barth’s rejection of natural theology also rules out any confident assertion that the unevangelized are lost. The doctrinal architecture that supports the claim “those who have not heard Christ in this life are damned” rests, in classical Protestant scholasticism, on a doctrine of natural theology (creation reveals God enough to render humans inexcusable) plus a doctrine of perspicuity of the gospel-call. Take away natural theology in Barth’s sense, and the inference loses its lower premise. Barth was perfectly aware of this and willing to live with the result.

The mature treatment in IV/3 of the relationship between Christianity and other religions, and of what Barth calls “true words” (wahre Worte) that may be spoken outside the visible church, is one of the more careful sustained engagements with the question by any twentieth-century theologian.³⁷ Christ alone is the Word. But because Christ is Lord of all, His Word may be heard in unexpected places. The Church does not have a monopoly on the witness. The non-Christian may speak the truth without knowing whose truth he or she is speaking. None of this is universalism. But all of it loosens the rigid sixteenth-century connection between visible church membership and eternal salvation, and it does so in a way that will reverberate through the post-Barthian discussions of the wider hope in Chapter 24, Chapter 26, and elsewhere.

C.5 The Blumhardt inheritance and the “Jesus is Victor!” motif

I want to spend a few minutes on a thread that often gets passed over in the standard accounts of Barth and that matters very much for placing him in the long-hope tradition. Barth did not invent his Christocentric universalism-with-restraint out of thin air. He inherited a significant portion of it from the Württemberg Pietist tradition, mediated to him through the Blumhardts of Bad Boll — Johann Christoph Blumhardt the elder (1805–1880) and Christoph Friedrich Blumhardt the younger (1842–1919).³⁸

The Blumhardts have already played a role in this book. We met them briefly in Chapter 16, where I traced the line that runs from Johann Albrecht Bengel through Friedrich Christoph Oetinger through the Württemberg pietistic tradition and into the Bad Boll community where the cry “Jesus is Victor!” (Jesus ist Sieger!) became the organizing word of a small movement that proved to have an outsized theological reach. The elder Blumhardt coined the motto after the famous Möttlingen exorcism in 1843–1844. The younger Blumhardt carried the motto forward, gave it a more eschatological-political shape, and through his preaching influenced an entire generation of younger German-speaking theologians.

Barth’s contact with the Blumhardt theology came principally through his closest friend, Eduard Thurneysen, who had studied at Bad Boll under the younger Blumhardt in 1904.³⁹ Thurneysen introduced Barth to the Blumhardt literature in the years immediately around the 1914 crisis. Barth visited Bad Boll in the spring of 1915, meeting the younger Blumhardt in the last years of his life. The visit was a turning point. Over a period of thirty years Barth wrote three significant essays on the Blumhardts. He gave them major notice in the Church Dogmatics. And the motto he chose for his own theology — the phrase he came back to in old age when asked what his life’s work had been about — was the Blumhardt motto: “Jesus is Victor.”⁴⁰

This matters because it places Barth, despite his own Reformed self-understanding, downstream of the very tradition we traced in Chapter 16. The triumph of grace Barth wrote about in Church Dogmatics II/2 is the Reformed expression of the Pietist hope his teachers’ teachers had spoken of. The fact that the German Reformed academic establishment had treated the Petersen-Oetinger-Bengel-Blumhardt tradition as marginal Pietism throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries did not prevent it, in the twentieth, from becoming the engine of the most powerful Protestant theology of universal grace since the Reformation. It is one of those quiet historical ironies: the “respectable” mainstream had to be re-evangelized by the “marginal” current it had ignored.

C.6 The Humanity of God (1956) and the late Barth

In 1956, Barth gave a lecture to the Swiss Reformed Ministers’ Association in Aarau entitled Die Menschlichkeit Gottes (The Humanity of God), which was published the following year and translated into English in 1960.⁴¹ The lecture is often cited as marking a softening, or at least a re-emphasis, in the late Barth’s theology. It is worth a brief look.

Barth begins by recalling the “Yes” and the “No” of his early dialectical period. In the Romans commentary of 1922, Barth says, the emphasis had fallen on the “No” — the radical distinction between God and humanity, the “Wholly Other,” the negation of human religiosity by the divine address. That emphasis had been right and necessary in its moment, against the cultural Protestantism that had domesticated God into a function of German Kultur. But it had been one-sided. It had not adequately expressed what the gospel actually says about God’s relationship to humanity. The gospel says that God has freely chosen, from eternity, to be God-for-us. The gospel says that God has clothed Himself in human flesh, taken on the human condition, suffered the human death, and been raised in the human body. The gospel says that God, in the Incarnation, is not merely the One who stands over against us. He is the One who has become, in the deepest sense, for us and with us.

This, Barth says, is the “humanity of God” (die Menschlichkeit Gottes). It does not contradict the divinity of God. It is the form in which the divinity of God is concretely revealed. And from this center, Barth says, certain things follow that the early dialectical theology had not adequately developed: the seriousness of the human creature, the importance of the church, the meaning of the Christian life, the warmth of God’s “Yes” in addition to the severity of God’s “No.”⁴²

For our question, the late Barth’s emphasis on the humanity of God reinforces the long-hope direction of his work. If God has so identified Himself with humanity in Christ that the divine and the human are inseparable in the person of the Mediator, then the question of who is finally outside that humanity is no small question. To be excluded from final salvation, in the late Barth, is not just to be excluded from Christ. It is to be excluded from the human race as God has constituted that race in the Incarnation. The structural difficulty of imagining anyone’s being so excluded is part of why the late Barth’s readers have so often pressed him toward an explicit universalism. And it is part of why Barth, even in the late years, refused. He kept the door open in both directions until the day he died.

C.7 A note on Bromiley and the question of translation

Before we leave the primary sources, a brief word on the translation in which most English readers encounter Barth. Geoffrey W. Bromiley, the principal English translator of the Church Dogmatics (and, with T. F. Torrance, the general editor of the T&T Clark edition), worked across the entire Dogmatics over roughly three decades, producing a translation that has been the standard English text since the 1950s.⁴³ Bromiley’s translation is generally regarded as faithful and reliable, but his rendering of certain key terms and constructions has occasionally been criticized — sometimes for softening Barth’s harder edges and sometimes for the reverse.

The most discussed cases involve Barth’s German verbs for divine activity (where English lacks the precise modal force of the original), his careful use of Sein versus Wesen in the doctrine of God, and his handling of the German aufheben (with its Hegelian double sense of “abolish” and “preserve”). For the question of universalism specifically, the contested passages are not so much mistranslations as places where the German leaves more theological possibility open than the English easily conveys. Bruce McCormack, who reads Barth in German and writes in English, has pointed out several instances where the rhetorical balance in Bromiley sits slightly differently from the rhetorical balance in the Kirchliche Dogmatik.⁴⁴ The careful reader should be aware of this without overreacting to it. Bromiley is reliable. He is not infallible. For most pastoral and lay-theological purposes the English text is more than adequate. For technical theological argument, especially at the edges of the universalist question, going back to the German is often necessary.

D. Reading Barth: Six Readings of a Contested Position

If Barth’s own position is delicate, his readers’ positions on what his position actually amounts to are more varied still. Within five years of the publication of Church Dogmatics II/2 in German, the question “Is Barth a universalist?” had become a small subgenre of theological writing in its own right. It has remained one ever since. I want here to map out six of the major readings, not to settle the question but to show how complicated the matter has become.

D.1 G. C. Berkouwer: the perpetual approach to the precipice

The Dutch Reformed theologian Gerrit Cornelis Berkouwer published De triomf der genade in de theologie van Karl Barth (The Triumph of Grace in the Theology of Karl Barth) in 1954, and the English translation appeared from Eerdmans in 1956. The book is, among other things, the source of the phrase that titles this chapter.⁴⁵

Berkouwer was a careful, sympathetic Calvinist reader of Barth — closer to Barth in spirit than to the polemical Van Til wing of Reformed orthodoxy, but firmly Calvinist nonetheless. His central thesis was that “the triumph of grace” dominates the whole architecture of Barth’s dogmatics: it shapes Barth’s creation, his election, his reconciliation, his eschatology. Berkouwer admired the move. He saw it as recovering something the Reformed scholasticism of his own tradition had buried under decretal abstraction. But he also saw it as creating a problem that Barth himself never adequately addressed: if grace truly triumphs in the way Barth describes, then how can the gospel call to repentance and faith have the urgency Scripture gives it? If the rejection of God by the creature has already been borne by Christ — really, definitively, exhaustively — then how is the human being’s present unbelief really unbelief, with real consequences?

Berkouwer’s most striking image was that of Barth being brought “continually to the precipice of apokatastasis.”⁴⁶ The logic of the system, Berkouwer thought, drives Barth to the edge again and again. Barth steps back each time. He refuses to fall. But the perpetual approach itself, Berkouwer thought, ought to occasion some discomfort about the underlying architecture. Either Barth’s denial of universalism is a piece of pious incoherence (Crisp’s later view) or Barth has built a system that should not bring him to the precipice every time. Berkouwer himself preferred a different Reformed move: dissociate from the doctrine of the double decree but also refuse the universalist conclusion, while preserving a more traditional emphasis on the genuine peril of unbelief.

Berkouwer’s book remains, sixty years on, one of the most clarifying engagements with Barth from a careful conservative Reformed perspective. Its title bequeathed the phrase “triumph of grace” to subsequent Barth scholarship. The phrase, in turn, became almost a slogan for what Barth had recovered in the Reformed tradition — and Berkouwer’s anxiety about whether that triumph was being asserted at the cost of the seriousness of human refusal has remained one of the standing complaints from the Reformed side ever since.

D.2 Joseph Bettis: not a universalist (the careful reading)

In December 1967 — a year before Barth’s death — Joseph D. Bettis published in Scottish Journal of Theology an article entitled “Is Karl Barth a Universalist?” that has set the terms for one important line of reading ever since.⁴⁷ Bettis’s answer to his own title is no — with care. Barth, Bettis argues, is not a universalist, and he is not because he refuses to occupy any of the three positions Bettis takes to exhaust the Protestant field: double predestination, Arminianism, and universalism. Barth is doing something else.

What Barth is doing, on Bettis’s reading, is preserving the freedom of God in such a way that the future of every creature remains genuinely future, genuinely open, genuinely a matter of God’s personal decision rather than of the working-out of a systemic implication. To say in advance “all are saved” would, in Barth’s logic, be to predetermine the divine decision in a way Barth’s entire account of God’s freedom forbids. The right Christian posture is not to assert universalism but to live and preach in such a way that the genuine peril of unbelief is taken seriously and the genuine promise of God’s grace is preached without reservation.

Bettis’s reading is widely shared in mid-twentieth-century Barth scholarship. It is, in essential outline, Barth’s own self-description. The challenge to Bettis — which would be pressed by Tom Greggs forty years later — is that Bettis takes Barth at his explicit word in ways that may not adequately reckon with the internal logic of Barth’s own system. But for the purposes of representing Barth as Barth represented himself, Bettis is hard to improve on.

D.3 George Hunsinger: reverent agnosticism

The American Barth scholar George Hunsinger has been, since his 1991 monograph How to Read Karl Barth: The Shape of His Theology, one of the principal English-language guides to Barth’s thought.⁴⁸ In a 1998 article in Scottish Journal of Theology entitled “Hellfire and Damnation: Four Ancient and Modern Views” (later reprinted in his 2000 collection Disruptive Grace), Hunsinger introduced the phrase that has stuck to Barth’s position on universalism better than any other: “reverent agnosticism.”⁴⁹

The phrase captures Barth’s carefully maintained refusal in both directions. We do not know — we may not claim to know — whether all will be saved. We do not know — we may not claim to know — that some will not. We are, with respect to the final outcome, agnostic. But this agnosticism is not the agnosticism of philosophical doubt or theological exhaustion. It is the agnosticism of reverence. It is the agnosticism that arises from recognizing that the matter belongs to God and not to us. It is the agnosticism of one who has heard the warning against arrogating to oneself the gift God alone gives. Reverent agnosticism is not a failure to reach a conclusion. It is itself a theological posture, and one Barth would have us occupy not by default but by choice.

Hunsinger’s reading has the great virtue of taking seriously both halves of Barth’s carefully balanced statements. It refuses to flatten the position in either direction. The trouble with the reading, some critics have said, is that “reverent agnosticism” describes the posture without quite explaining how the underlying architecture supports it. If Barth’s doctrine of election really has the universalist tilt that nearly every reader senses, then reverent agnosticism may be a description of where Barth lands rather than an account of why he ought to.

D.4 Tom Greggs: universalism in the Son, particularity in the Spirit

Tom Greggs’s 2009 monograph Barth, Origen, and Universal Salvation: Restoring Particularity, published by Oxford University Press, is the most thorough recent attempt to read Barth as a coherent universalist while preserving everything that is right in his insistence on the freedom of God and the seriousness of the human creature.⁵⁰ Greggs sets Barth in conversation with Origen of Alexandria (whose own apokatastasis we treated in Chapter 8), reads both as universalists, and argues that the right way to hold universalism is to ground it in the particularity of Christ rather than in a general principle of divine love or in a deterministic claim about what must be the case.

Greggs’s key move is to distinguish between the universalism of the Son and the particularity of the Spirit. In the Son, all are objectively reconciled. The particularity through which that reconciliation is appropriated — the personal encounter with Christ, the formation of disciples, the calling of witnesses — is the work of the Holy Spirit, who meets each person particularly and individually. Universal salvation, in Greggs’s reading of Barth, is not the leveling of all human particularity into a generic salvation-for-all. It is the particular completion, in each person, of the work the Son has already done for all.

An earlier version of the argument appeared in Greggs’s 2007 Scottish Journal of Theology article “‘Jesus is Victor’: Passing the Impasse of Barth on Universalism.”⁵¹ Robin Parry, the contemporary evangelical universalist whose work we will examine in Chapter 25, has drawn explicitly on Greggs at this point, noting that Greggs’s “universalism grounded in particularity” addresses some of the standard worries about how a universalist can hold together the universal and the particular dimensions of salvation.⁵²

D.5 Oliver Crisp and David Congdon: the question of necessity

Oliver Crisp, an analytic philosophical theologian, has argued in several places — most extensively in his book Deviant Calvinism (Fortress, 2014) — that Barth’s theology entails universalism by structural necessity, regardless of what Barth himself says about it.⁵³ Crisp’s case is essentially logical. If the rejection of God by humanity has been borne by Christ exhaustively, and if there is no “rejected man” apart from Christ, then there is no place for the wrath of God to fall on any human being apart from where it has already fallen on Christ. The denial of universalism becomes, on Crisp’s reading, simply an inconsistency within Barth’s own system — an inconsistency one ought to resolve by going one direction (full-throated universalism) or the other (returning to a more classical Reformed position), but which one cannot consistently maintain.

David Congdon, in a 2014 Scottish Journal of Theology response to Crisp, has tried to defend Barth’s refusal as theologically coherent.⁵⁴ Congdon argues that Crisp’s logical analysis misses the way Barth’s theology operates at multiple levels simultaneously — with what Eberhard Jüngel called “eschatological necessity” coexisting with genuine contingency at the level of the encounter with the Spirit. Whether Congdon’s defense succeeds is contested. What is not contested is that the Crisp-Congdon exchange has clarified the stakes: either Barth is a universalist who has refused, for theological reasons, to say so; or Barth’s system contains a tension he never fully resolved; or both at once.

D.6 The neo-Reformed critique: Sproul, Van Til, Venema

From a quite different direction, the conservative Reformed tradition in North America has read Barth as a crypto-universalist and rejected him on those grounds. Cornelius Van Til, the Westminster Theological Seminary apologist, devoted significant energy throughout the 1940s and 1950s to demonstrating that Barth’s theology was not really orthodox Reformed theology at all but a new modernism dressed in Reformed clothing.⁵⁵ R. C. Sproul, in works including Willing to Believe and several popular treatments, has argued that Barth’s reformulation of election abandons the Reformed doctrine of effectual calling and substitutes a Christological universalism that the Reformed confessions explicitly reject.⁵⁶ Cornelis Venema, in The Promise of the Future, has carefully laid out the case that Barth’s system, whatever its rhetorical disclaimers, ends in a position confessional Reformed theology cannot accept.⁵⁷

The neo-Reformed critique is in some ways the mirror image of Crisp’s. Where Crisp says the structure of Barth’s theology makes universalism necessary and the denial is the inconsistency, the neo-Reformed critics say the structure of Barth’s theology makes universalism the inevitable conclusion and that this is itself the reason to reject the whole structure. Both readings, from opposite ends, agree against Bettis and Hunsinger that the architecture is doing more work than Barth himself admitted. They disagree only about whether the resulting universalism is a feature or a bug.

D.7 The evangelical universalist reception: Parry, Talbott, Hart

The contemporary evangelical universalist movement — whose major figures (Robin Parry, Thomas Talbott, David Bentley Hart, Brad Jersak, Heath Bradley) we will treat at length in Chapter 25 and Chapter 27 — has read Barth with characteristic selectivity. Robin Parry, in The Evangelical Universalist, draws on Greggs’s reading of Barth to suggest that universalism grounded in the particular reality of Jesus Christ addresses the standard worry about how a universalist holds together the universal and the particular.⁵⁸ Talbott’s analytic philosophical defense of universalism does not depend directly on Barth, but his account of the inconsistent triad in Chapter 25 picks up on Barthian Christocentric moves.⁵⁹ Hart’s That All Shall Be Saved (Yale, 2019) is sharper than Barth in tone and goes further than Barth in conclusion, but the architecture of his case — the impossibility of a creature finally rejecting the God whose love is the source of its own being — bears Barthian fingerprints.⁶⁰

The evangelical universalist reading of Barth is, in essence, that he said as plainly as he could that universal salvation is theologically obligatory while refusing the rhetorical move of asserting it as a doctrine. This is a possible reading. It is not the only possible reading. But it is the reading that has gained the most traction in the last twenty years of long-hope theology, and it would be misleading to pretend otherwise.

D.8 The Catholic reception: Hans Urs von Balthasar

One final reading deserves brief mention here, though we will engage it at full length in the next chapter. In 1951, the Swiss Catholic theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar published Karl Barth: Darstellung und Deutung seiner Theologie, an extensive and sympathetic Catholic engagement with Barth’s dogmatics that became, for an entire generation of Catholic theologians, the principal entry point into Barth’s thought.⁶¹ Balthasar read Barth’s doctrine of election as a profound recovery of something the Catholic tradition needed to relearn, and he found in Barth’s “objective universalism” a deep affinity to what would become his own position in Dare We Hope That All Men Be Saved? (1986).

The affinity is not accidental. Balthasar saw, more clearly than many of Barth’s Protestant interpreters, that the careful refusal of explicit universalism combined with the equally careful refusal of explicit particularism was not an evasion. It was a theological posture worth occupying. The Christian, on this Balthasarian reading of Barth, is not in the business of pronouncing the final word on the fate of any human being — not the universalist’s final word and not the traditionalist’s final word. The Christian is in the business of hoping, of praying, of preaching, and of leaving the matter in the hands of the One in whom all things hold together. We will see what Balthasar did with that posture in Chapter 22.

E. Assessment: What We Can and Cannot Conclude

I have laid out, in some detail, what Barth wrote and how his readers have read him. Now I want to step back and offer my own best historical-theological judgment about what Barth actually held, what is contested in his work, and where the limits of any confident reading lie. The reader is free, of course, to disagree with my assessment; I will try to be transparent about what I find compelling and where I think the evidence does not allow a definitive verdict.

E.1 What Barth got right

Let me begin with what Barth got right, because for all the difficulties of his position, his contribution to the long-hope tradition is enormous and is worth naming clearly.

First, the Christological centering of election. Whatever one makes of Barth’s specific conclusions, his decisive move — making the doctrine of election fundamentally a doctrine about who Jesus Christ is, rather than a doctrine about which individuals God has secretly chosen — is a genuine theological achievement. It recovers something the patristic East had always known and the Latin West, after Augustine, increasingly forgot: that the doctrine of predestination is not first about us. It is about God’s self-determination to be God-for-us in Christ. Once one sees this, much of the moral horror of late medieval and Reformed scholastic predestinarianism — the secret divine ledger, the hidden decree, the God who appears warm in the Word but cold in the eternal counsel — simply dissolves. There is no hidden God behind the revealed God in Barth. The God revealed in Christ is the God who has elected humanity in Christ from eternity. This is right, and it is profoundly biblical, and the long-hope tradition owes Barth a great debt for putting it back where it belongs.

Second, the refusal to make God’s decree a secret about individuals. The pastoral cruelty of the classical doctrine of double predestination — the worry that one might not be among the elect, the impossibility of any certainty about one’s eternal state, the loved one who died apparently in unbelief and the agonized question of whether they were “passed over” from eternity — has produced more pastoral wounds than perhaps any other Protestant doctrine. Barth’s reformulation does not eliminate the seriousness of unbelief, but it removes the cruelty. We need not wonder whether God has secretly written our name on the wrong list before the foundation of the world. The decree is not about that. The decree is about Christ.

Third, the preservation of God’s freedom. This is the move on which Barth most insists, and it is the move many of his readers find frustrating. But it is also, I think, a real theological virtue. Barth will not let universalism become a system. He will not let it become an entitlement. He will not let the human creature say to God, “You must save all, because the logic of your own theology requires it.” The God of Barth is genuinely free — free to do what He pleases, even when what He pleases is greater than we had thought, even when what He pleases is something we would not have predicted, even when what He pleases includes saving us when we had no right to expect it. This emphasis on divine freedom is what keeps Barth’s “objective universalism” from collapsing into a kind of cosmic determinism. It is what makes the gospel still gospel and not a metaphysical necessity. Universalists who claim Barth as their own often, I think, do not quite hear this. Their universalism turns into a system Barth would not have signed off on, even if he sympathized with its conclusions.

Fourth, the seriousness about Scripture. Barth was a biblical theologian before he was anything else. The Church Dogmatics is, in addition to everything else, a sustained exegetical work. Barth’s smaller print sections (often, in the original edition, in smaller type to distinguish them from the larger expository prose) run to thousands of pages of exegetical engagement with specific biblical texts. His reading of Romans 9–11 in II/2, in particular, is one of the most careful sustained exegeses of those chapters in the modern period. Whatever one thinks of his conclusions, no one can accuse Barth of arriving at his doctrine of election by short-circuiting the biblical text.

E.2 What is contested

Now the harder questions. Several aspects of Barth’s position remain genuinely contested in the scholarship, and I want to be honest about where the contestation lies.

The first contested question is whether Barth’s carefully balanced refusal of both universalism and explicit particularism is theologically stable. The Crisp critique I described above has real force. If there really is no “rejected man” apart from Christ, then it is genuinely hard to see what theological space remains for the final rejection of any individual. Barth’s appeal to the freedom of God is meant to preserve that space. But the freedom of God, in Barth’s own account, is the freedom to be the God He has chosen to be in Christ — not the freedom to be some other, hidden God who might do something different from what Christ reveals. If Christ reveals a God who has borne all rejection in His own person, then the freedom of God to act otherwise becomes hard to specify. Barth never quite answered this. Whether the silence is appropriate theological reverence or a real instability in the system is a judgment readers will make differently.

The second contested question concerns the relationship between objective and subjective reconciliation. Barth’s emphasis on the objective reality of what God has done in Christ for all humanity is one of the great strengths of his system. But this emphasis tends to make the subjective dimension — the personal coming-to-faith of the actual individual — somewhat secondary in his exposition. Barth’s account of mission and conversion is real and serious, but it is sometimes thinner than his account of objective reconciliation. The question is whether Barth has adequate theological resources to take seriously what most Christian traditions have taken seriously: that the personal faith-response of the individual is not just the recognition of what is already objectively true but is itself a constitutive part of the reality of being saved. Conditional immortality advocates and postmortem-opportunity advocates have particular reasons to press this question, since both traditions hold that the personal encounter with Christ — whether in this life or in some postmortem encounter — is the means by which the objective work of Christ becomes subjectively appropriated. A purely objective reconciliation that bypasses the personal encounter altogether is, on those views, not quite the gospel.

The third contested question is what Barth meant by “hope.” When Barth says we may — we must — hope that all are saved, what kind of hope is he speaking of? Is it a confident expectation grounded in the cross? Is it a longing prayer that does not know the answer? Is it the formal possibility of an outcome that the system makes likely but does not establish? Different passages support different readings. The careful Bettis-Hunsinger reading takes Barth’s “hope” in the weaker sense of a posture of openness. The Greggs-Crisp reading takes it in the stronger sense of a near-confidence that the system makes obligatory. Balthasar, as we shall see, will pick up the language of hope and turn it into a settled Catholic posture that splits the difference. Where exactly Barth himself stood on this spectrum is, I think, not finally determinable from the text alone.

E.3 Where I land

For what it is worth — and the reader is welcome to weigh this lightly, since I am, on the question of historical theology, only one voice and not the deciding one — here is where I land.

Barth was not a universalist by his own description, and his denials of the postulate of apokatastasis are theologically meant and not rhetorical evasions. They reflect his deepest commitments about the freedom of God and the gift-character of grace. To represent Barth as a closeted universalist who would have said so if only he had been braver is, I think, to misrepresent him.

At the same time, Barth’s system tilts unmistakably toward universal salvation in a way his readers from every direction have noticed. The doctrine of election as developed in II/2 is constructed in such a way that the universal conclusion is the natural one and the contrary conclusion requires the additional theological move that Barth keeps refusing to make. The careful refusal does not eliminate the tilt. It only keeps the tilt from becoming a system.

The best description of Barth’s position, in my judgment, is something close to what Hunsinger called “reverent agnosticism” — with the qualification that the agnosticism is not symmetrical. Barth’s reverence cuts both ways, but his hope cuts one way. He hopes for universal salvation. He does not hope for the eternal damnation of any. He preaches in the hope that all will hear and be saved. He does not preach in the hope that some will be lost. The agnosticism is not the agnosticism of one who has no opinion. It is the agnosticism of one who has every opinion but refuses to make it a doctrine.

From my own theological position — conditional immortality with postmortem opportunity, open to conservative biblical universalism — Barth’s contribution is significant but partial. The Christological centering of election is something I receive gratefully and find consistent with my own commitments. The refusal to make the unevangelized’s salvation hinge on accidents of geography is, I think, a real theological gain. The preservation of God’s freedom and the gift-character of grace are commitments I share. Where Barth’s system seems to me underdeveloped is on what I would call the shape of the personal encounter with Christ — the recognition that the objective reality of reconciliation in Christ has to be subjectively appropriated through a genuine personal encounter, and that the question is then where and when that encounter happens for those who never had it in this life. Barth’s framework leaves space for postmortem encounter without developing it. The development would belong to other figures in this book — to the Catholic figures of Chapter 24, especially Ladislaus Boros and Karl Rahner, and to the postmortem opportunity advocates of Chapter 26. But the space Barth opens for them is real, and without Barth’s reconfiguration of election, much of the subsequent twentieth-century work on the wider hope would have been harder to do.

E.4 What we can definitely say

One thing we can say with confidence, regardless of how we resolve the contested questions: after Barth, the question of universal salvation is open in mainline Protestantism in a way it had not been since the magisterial Reformation. The Reformed doctrine of double predestination, which had stood as the unchallenged consensus in the Westminster-confessional tradition for three hundred years, has been so thoroughly reconceived by the twentieth century’s most important Protestant theologian that no Reformed theologian working today can simply ignore him. One may agree with Barth or disagree with him — many do both, on different days — but one cannot pretend the recasting did not happen. It happened, and it has generated a Reformed eschatological conversation more various, more open, and more pastorally generous than the inheritance Barth received.

This is the major historical-theological achievement we can point to without hedging. The careful theological balance of Barth’s own position may forever remain contested. But the recasting of the field within which Reformed theology operates is no longer contested. That field is wider than it was. The long-hope tradition has, in Barth, a major Protestant exponent whose work no future Protestant eschatology will be able to avoid.

F. Why This Matters

Let me close by drawing out what Barth’s work contributes to the larger argument of this book.

The thesis of the whole book is that the long hope of postmortem opportunity, in some form, has been part of the Christian conversation from the beginning. It is not a novelty. It is a recovery. Barth’s work is one of the clearest twentieth-century proofs of that thesis — not because Barth is a universalist in the explicit sense (he refused to be) and not because Barth taught postmortem opportunity in the explicit sense (he did not really address it as a separate doctrine), but because Barth shows what can happen to the most rigid Reformed eschatological inheritance when it is taken back to its Christological roots and rewritten from there. The Augustinian-Calvinist deadline doctrine — the conviction that the moment of death seals one’s eternal fate and that the divine decree fixes which way that seal will fall — does not survive Barth’s reconfiguration intact. It does not survive even in the Reformed tradition. Once you have made election a decision about Christ rather than a decision about individuals; once you have made the rejection borne by Christ the only rejection there is; once you have made grace a triumph and not a competition; the inherited deadline doctrine becomes very hard to maintain in its classical form.

This is one of the quiet but profound contributions Barth makes to the long-hope tradition. He did not advocate for postmortem opportunity. He did not argue for universal restoration. He did something stranger and perhaps more lasting: he showed that the Reformed tradition’s most rigid eschatological commitments could be rewritten from within, on classically Reformed principles, in a way that opens the field to all of the hopes the tradition had spent centuries trying to suppress. After Barth, the conversation about the fate of the dead in Reformed Protestantism became a conversation again. It had been a settled doctrine. Now it was something one could think about. And once one could think about it, the suppressed voices — the Pietists, the Cambridge Platonists, the Anabaptists, the Wesleyan restorationists, the patristic universalists — could be heard again.

Barth also matters for what I have called the modern-innovation charge. The popular evangelical argument that postmortem opportunity (or universal restoration, or conditional immortality, or any of the wider-hope positions) is a modern innovation has, as one of its load-bearing premises, the claim that the Christian tradition has historically been united on the deadline doctrine. The historical record we have traced in this book has already exposed how false that claim is. Barth completes the exposure for the modern era. The twentieth century’s most important Protestant theologian was not a deadline-doctrine theologian. The major Catholic theologian of his generation (Balthasar) was not either, and the Catholic recovery of the patristic long hope (Rahner, Boros, Bulgakov, Clément) was happening at the same time. The Reformed theologians who carried the deadline doctrine into the twentieth century — Berkhof, Bavinck, the Westminster-confessional tradition — remained influential, but they did so as one party among others, not as the consensus of Reformed theology.

The reader who has been told that postmortem opportunity is a modern innovation needs to hear: the twentieth century’s most important Protestant theologian held a position so thoroughly reconfigured from the inherited Reformed eschatology that the leading Calvinist students of his thought have spent seventy years trying to figure out whether to call it universalism or hopeful universalism or reverent agnosticism. Whatever it is, it is not the deadline doctrine. And the trajectory it opens up — through Balthasar in Chapter 22, through Moltmann in Chapter 23, through the Catholic and Orthodox recoveries in Chapter 24, through the contemporary universalists in Chapter 25, and through the postmortem opportunity advocates in Chapter 26 — is in important respects the dominant trajectory of twentieth-century mainline and serious Catholic eschatology. The deadline doctrine is the position of a particular American evangelical tradition. It is not, and has not been for a hundred years, the position of most of the rest of Christian theology.

One more thing. I want to come back, in closing, to the old man in Chicago. Barth in 1962 was at the end of a long road. He had buried friends. He had watched his theology become a movement, an industry, a small institutional empire. He had answered the question “Are you a universalist?” so many times he had probably stopped enjoying the joke. And what he kept saying, in his quiet Swiss-German English, was something like this: do not domesticate the loving-kindness of God. Do not draw circles around it and call the inside of the circle “salvation” and the outside “damnation.” God has no use for our circles. God will do what God will do, and what God will do is, in Jesus Christ, greater than we have yet imagined. Hope for that. Pray for that. Preach what you have heard. And leave the final outcome where it belongs, which is not in our hands.

That is not yet universal salvation. It is not yet conditional immortality with postmortem opportunity. It is not yet anything one could put in a creed. But it is the doorway through which most of the twentieth-century recovery of the long hope has had to walk. Barth held the door open. He did not insist on which way one had to go through it. But the door is open, and that is more than most of the previous five hundred years of Protestant theology had managed.

In the next chapter we cross from Protestant to Catholic and turn to a theologian whose work is in many ways the Catholic counterpart to Barth’s: Hans Urs von Balthasar, whose 1986 book Dare We Hope That All Men Be Saved? took up the same posture Barth had occupied and gave it a Catholic vocabulary. The two careers were intertwined — Balthasar’s 1951 study of Barth was the seed of his own later position — and the two contributions belong together in the story of how the long hope re-emerged in the twentieth century.