Chapter 24
Rahner, Bulgakov, and the Wider Hope in the Twentieth Century
Picture a small Paris apartment in the winter of 1939. The world is sliding toward war. A Russian Orthodox priest, white-bearded, exiled from his homeland for seventeen years, sits at his desk and writes the closing pages of a book he will never see in print.1 His name is Sergei Bulgakov. The book is called The Bride of the Lamb. It will not appear in Russian until after his death in 1944, and not in English until 2002. In it he argues — calmly, carefully, with deep love for the Greek Fathers — that in the end all things will be gathered into Christ. Every last one. Even the demons. Even hell itself, finally emptied, will be folded into the consummation of all things.
Now picture another scene. Vatican City, October 1964. A short, intense German Jesuit in his fifties is moving between meetings of the Second Vatican Council. He is a peritus — pronounced "peh-REE-toos," Latin for "expert" — one of the theological advisors who do the heavy lifting behind the scenes.2 His name is Karl Rahner. He has been arguing, in print and in committee, that the Church has long understood, and must now say plainly, that God's grace reaches people who never hear the gospel by name. The bishops will agree. The document they sign — Lumen Gentium — will quietly remake Catholic teaching on the unevangelized.
And one more scene. Oxford, perhaps the early 1980s. A tall English bishop in black Orthodox robes walks through the cloisters of Pembroke College. Born Timothy Ware, baptized as a teenager into Greek Orthodoxy, he is now Bishop Kallistos. He teaches Eastern Christian studies at the university and serves a parish on a side street. In his books he tells English-speaking Christians about Origen and Gregory of Nyssa and Isaac of Nineveh. He poses, gently but unmistakably, the question that haunts him: Dare we hope for the salvation of all?3
Three figures. Three traditions. One century. This chapter is about what happens when Catholics and Orthodox — not Protestants, who get most of the attention in modern eschatology — rediscover, in the twentieth century, the long hope of their own traditions. It is one of the most striking theological developments of the past hundred years. And it is largely unknown to American evangelicals, who keep being told that the wider hope is a Protestant novelty.
Karl Rahner (1904–1984) is probably the most influential Catholic theologian of the twentieth century.4 He entered the Society of Jesus in 1922, studied under Heidegger at Freiburg, finished his doctorate at Innsbruck, and spent most of his life teaching and writing — twenty-three volumes of collected essays in English (Theological Investigations), a major systematic synthesis (Foundations of Christian Faith, 1976), and shorter pieces beyond counting. He is not light reading. His sentences pile up clauses like furniture in a small room. But the patient reader is rewarded.
Rahner's most famous and most controversial idea is the anonymous Christian. The argument is simpler than the term sounds. Rahner takes three claims he believes the Catholic tradition cannot give up. First, God truly wills the salvation of every human being (1 Timothy 2:4). Second, salvation comes only through Jesus Christ — no other name, no other path. Third, billions of people have lived and died without ever hearing the gospel.
How can all three be true? If God truly wants everyone saved, and if salvation is only through Christ, what about the rice farmer in fourth-century China, or the woman in pre-Columbian Mexico, or the toddler who died before language? Rahner's answer is that the grace of Christ is available to them even though they do not know His name. Through conscience, through self-giving love, through the search for truth — the deep movements of a human life — they encounter, anonymously, the same grace the Church names in baptism. They are, as it were, Christians without yet knowing it.5
Rahner did not invent this idea out of thin air. He read it back into a long Catholic tradition — Justin Martyr's spermatikos logos ("seed-bearing Word," the patristic idea that the Logos has been planted in every rational creature), Aquinas on the desire for the supreme good as an implicit desire for God, Aquinas's baptismus flaminis ("baptism of desire").6 The framework is old. Rahner's contribution was to bring it forward and apply it to the modern situation, where missionaries had finally counted the world and found most of it had never been counted by the Church.
This is not, by itself, universalism. Rahner never said all will be saved. He said only that the way is open to all. The will can still refuse. What Rahner ruled out was the assumption that the unevangelized are simply lost — a default that had hardened into background certainty in much of the Western tradition since Augustine (see Chapter 12) and especially since the Council of Florence's extra Ecclesiam nulla salus ("outside the Church no salvation"). On this point his influence was decisive.
That influence was felt above all at the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965), where Rahner served as a peritus. Lumen Gentium 16, the council's central statement on those outside the Church, reads almost as a Rahnerian commentary. It teaches that those who, "through no fault of their own, do not know the Gospel of Christ or his Church, but who nevertheless seek God with a sincere heart, and, moved by grace, try in their actions to do his will" may attain salvation.7 Nostra Aetate goes further still, addressing the relationship of the Church to Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, and Judaism with a respect unimaginable a generation earlier. Ad Gentes, the missionary decree, reframes evangelism not as snatching brands from the burning but as making explicit a grace already at work.
If you want to know what shifted in Catholic theology between 1959 (Pius XII's death) and 1980, this is the heart of it. Henri de Lubac's Catholicism (1938; revised 1947) had already begun the work — recovering the Greek Fathers as the deep source of Catholic teaching, recovering the social, corporate, and universal scope of grace that the post-Tridentine manuals had let slip. Edward Schillebeeckx pushed the universal economy of salvation into ecclesiology and christology. Hans Urs von Balthasar — treated at length in Chapter 22 — pressed the question of hope into its most precise modern form: not "all will certainly be saved," but "we may hope that all will be saved."
The reception was contested and remains so. The 2000 declaration Dominus Iesus, signed by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, sought to limit certain conclusions that had been drawn from the inclusivist turn — particularly the loosely-pluralist idea that other religions are independently salvific paths.8 But Dominus Iesus did not reverse the underlying inclusivism. It re-emphasized that the grace by which any human being is saved is the grace of Christ — which had been Rahner's point all along.
Within Catholic theology the spectrum runs from Avery Dulles's careful, magisterial inclusivism, to Ralph Martin's more cautious reading that insists the universal salvific will does not by itself imply universal salvation, to Edward Oakes's defense of Balthasar's hopeful universalism, to the more cautious popular preaching of John Paul II and the more expansive mercy-language of Francis. Whatever one thinks of the merits, the spectrum exists. A century ago, no such spectrum was available in mainstream Catholic teaching.
Among Rahner's younger students, one name should be better known than it is. Ladislaus Boros (1927–1981) was a Hungarian-born Jesuit who fled the communist takeover at twenty-two, entered the German Jesuit province, finished a doctorate on Augustine at Munich in 1957, and was ordained the same year.9 By the late 1950s he was on the editorial staff of the prestigious Jesuit journal Orientierung in Zurich; by 1963 he held a lectureship at Innsbruck. Both positions ended when he was laicized in 1973. He died in Switzerland in 1981, at fifty-four.
In between, he wrote a small, mystical, philosophically dense book that — for a few years in the 1960s and 1970s — was one of the most discussed works of Catholic theology in the world. It first appeared as an article in Orientierung in 1959 under the title "Sacramentum Mortis." Boros said he wrote it down currente calamo — "at breakneck speed" — over about six weeks, following what Cynthia Bourgeault, his recent editor and commentator, calls "a powerful mystical revelation concerning the final disposition of the soul in the moment of death."10 Expanded into a book in 1962 and again in 1965, it appeared in English in 1965 as The Mystery of Death. Bourgeault's edition, with her introduction and commentary, was reissued by Monkfish in 2020.
Boros's central claim is what he calls the hypothesis of a final decision. At the moment of death — not before, not after — the soul, freed for the first time from the constraints of the body, makes a fully free, fully knowing, fully personal decision for or against God in a face-to-face encounter with Christ. He puts it in compressed form in his Introduction:
Boros develops the hypothesis in three parts. Part I sets out the methodology — death as a metaphysical event, not just a biological one. Part II builds the philosophical case from seven angles: the presence of death in the will, death as the fulfillment of knowing, integral perception and memory in death, love as a projection into death, the historical-dialectical meeting-point of human life, the poetic sampling of death, and death as the consummation of kenotic existence.11 Part III is the theological discussion. It is here, especially in sections one through three and section six, that Boros's hypothesis intersects most directly with the long hope.12
Section 1 ("The Ending of our State of Pilgrimage") confronts the long-standing Latin doctrine of the terminus viae, the "end of the way": with death, the time of pilgrimage closes and the state of finality begins. Boros does not reject this. He locates the final decision in death — the metaphysical instant — rather than before it or after it. Section 2 ("The Place of our fully Personal Encounter with Christ") gives the encounter its christological shape: the One whom we meet at death is not a generic deity but the crucified, risen Christ. Section 3 ("The Universality of the Redemption") draws the universal implication: if this encounter happens at the death of every human being, and if Christ is universally savingly present, then God's universal salvific will (1 Timothy 2:4) is preserved in a way the older Augustinian framework had quietly given up.13 Section 6 ("Christological Basis for the Hypothesis of a Final Decision") roots the whole structure in Christ's own death — particularly, following Rahner, in His descent into the heart of the earth, where He becomes, as Bourgeault puts it, "pancosmic at the evolutionary mainspring."14
Strictly speaking, Boros's view is not what later writers will call postmortem opportunity (PO). It is a moment-of-death opportunity — a single instant compressed into the metaphysical transition between life and finality. But it functions in the same conceptual space. It says, against the rigid Augustinian deadline, that no human being passes into eternity without the chance of a fully informed encounter with Christ. The Catholic-Rahnerian-Jesuit lineage that runs through Boros becomes the background of much later Protestant PO scholarship — Pinnock, Sanders, Walls, Beilby — whether or not those writers cite Boros directly (see Chapter 26).15
Boros was widely read in the 1960s and 1970s. Karl Rahner endorsed the work without fully adopting the thesis. Balthasar engaged it seriously (see Chapter 22). After Boros's laicization in 1973 the book faded from theological discussion; the 2020 Monkfish reissue, with Bourgeault's substantial introduction situating Boros in the Teilhardian-Rahnerian lineage, has begun a small but real recovery.16
Cross the line between Catholic and Orthodox theology and the story takes a different shape. The Russian Orthodox theological renaissance of the twentieth century happened almost entirely in exile. After the 1917 Revolution and the 1922 expulsion of religious intellectuals by Lenin's government — the so-called "Philosophy Steamer" — much of the Russian intelligentsia ended up in Paris.17 There, around the St. Sergius Theological Institute, founded in 1925, they produced what is now called the Paris School of Russian Orthodox theology.
Sergei Bulgakov (1871–1944) was the school's leading mind. Trained as an economist (his early book on the philosophy of economics is still cited), he had been a Marxist, then a Russian religious philosopher, then a priest after his 1918 ordination. Exiled in 1922, he spent the rest of his life in Paris, serving as dean of St. Sergius. His thought is dense and at points strange. He develops a doctrine of Sophia — the Wisdom of God — as a category that mediates the relationship between God and the creation, between the divine essence and the world.18 The sophiological project was condemned by some Russian Orthodox bishops in the 1930s and defended by his Paris colleagues. The debate continues.
What is not seriously contested is that Bulgakov, in his great eschatological work The Bride of the Lamb (Russian 1939, English 2002), held to a form of universal restoration.19 The book's later chapters — especially chapter 7, "Death and the State after Death," and chapter 8, "Parousia, Resurrection, and the City of God" — engage the patristic universalist tradition (Origen, Gregory of Nyssa, Maximus the Confessor) with a depth no Protestant of his era could match. Bulgakov is not naïve about hell. He treats it at length. He takes its biblical and traditional reality with full seriousness. But he reads the hell-texts as describing a state that is real, painful, purgative, and finally not final. The fire of God's presence purifies the unrepentant heart, even if the purification is long and bitter.
For Bulgakov, this is not a denial of the Eastern tradition but its inner logic. The Greek Fathers' teaching that God is love (1 John 4:8), that Christ is the Pantokrator who fills all in all (Ephesians 1:23), that the resurrection is universal (1 Corinthians 15:22), and that the goal of creation is the deification of all rational beings, requires, when followed through, the eventual restoration of all (apokatastasis — see Chapter 8). Bulgakov is an explicit, conscious, careful Origenist — with the qualifications appropriate to a twentieth-century theologian who knows about the disputed condemnations of 553 (Chapter 11) and who does not endorse Origen's pre-existence-of-souls speculation.
The reception of Bulgakov in the Orthodox world has been mixed. His sophiology has been the lightning-rod. His eschatology has been quietly absorbed. Major modern Orthodox theologians — Olivier Clément, Kallistos Ware, Hilarion Alfeyev — operate in a theological climate Bulgakov did much to shape, even where they keep critical distance from his sophiological idiom.
Vladimir Lossky (1903–1958) was, in his own time, often taken as the great Orthodox alternative to Bulgakov.20 Trained in medieval philosophy under Étienne Gilson at the Sorbonne, Lossky was instrumental in the 1935 condemnation of Bulgakov by the Moscow Patriarchate and wrote, against Bulgakov's idiom, a more apophatic, more Palamite, more "neo-patristic" Orthodox theology. His Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church (French 1944; English 1957) became the standard English-language introduction to Eastern theology for an entire generation. Lossky refuses the label universalist. He believes God respects human freedom absolutely, including the freedom to refuse God forever. And yet, as more recent scholars (Brandon Gallagher, Aristotle Papanikolaou) have argued, Lossky's "antinomic" method — holding two seemingly opposed truths in paradoxical tension — is closer to Bulgakov than Lossky himself wanted to admit.21 The Eastern tradition's "hopeful texture," even where it stops short of declared universalism, is real.
Olivier Clément (1921–2009), a French convert from atheism to Russian Orthodoxy and a professor at St. Sergius, was perhaps the most pastorally sensitive Orthodox writer of the late twentieth century. His Roots of Christian Mysticism (French Sources, 1982; English New City Press, 1995) is an anthology of patristic texts laced with his own warm, accessible commentary.22 Clément reads the Greek Fathers with a sympathy for their universalist undertow that few Western patristic scholars have matched. He does not write polemic. He invites the reader into a longer tradition than the modern Western reader knew was there.
Kallistos Ware (1934–2022) — Timothy Ware before his conversion to Greek Orthodoxy in 1958 — was for decades the most influential Orthodox voice in the English-speaking world. His Orthodox Church (1963) and Orthodox Way (1979) introduced millions of readers to Eastern Christianity. His collected essays in The Inner Kingdom (St. Vladimir's, 2000) close with a long, careful chapter titled "Dare We Hope for the Salvation of All?" in dialogue with Origen, Gregory of Nyssa, Isaac the Syrian, and Silouan the Athonite.23 Ware's position is hopeful universalism — what Balthasar would have called "dare we hope" — though in his later years he was willing to step closer to confident universal restoration. He always insisted, in the Eastern manner, that the question is held in prayer and pastoral love, not closed by dogmatic pronouncement.
Hilarion Alfeyev (b. 1966), now Metropolitan of Budapest and Hungary, did the major modern English-language scholarly work on Isaac of Nineveh. The Spiritual World of Isaac the Syrian (Cistercian Publications, 2000), with a foreword by Kallistos Ware, recovers Isaac as a witness — in the Syriac tradition itself, not just as a footnote in Greek patristics — to the hope of universal restoration after the purifying fire (see Chapter 10).24 Alfeyev is careful. He does not press Isaac into a modern category. But the texts speak for themselves. They speak warmly.
Behind all these figures stands the recovery of Isaac, of Gregory of Nyssa, of Maximus the Confessor (see Chapter 11), and of Greek patristic theology generally. The twentieth-century Orthodox recovery has been, at heart, a return to the Fathers. And the Fathers turn out to have held a great deal more diversity on the fate of the dead than the post-Justinian Eastern manuals had let on.
Step back. By the year 2000, all three of the major Christian traditions — Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, and Protestant — had recovered substantial resources for what an older generation would have called the "wider hope." The Catholic recovery moved through Rahner, Vatican II, Boros, Balthasar, and the Catholic absorption of these influences in popular preaching. The Orthodox recovery moved through Bulgakov, the Paris School, the recovery of Isaac and Gregory of Nyssa, and the gentle universalist drift of Lossky, Clément, Ware, and Alfeyev. The Protestant recovery — which the next several chapters take up — moved through Barth (Chapter 21), Moltmann (Chapter 23), the evangelical universalists (Chapter 25), the postmortem-opportunity advocates (Chapter 26), and the hopeful universalists (Chapter 27).
What is striking is how little these recoveries depended on one another. Bulgakov did not need Barth. Rahner did not need Wesley. Ware did not need Moltmann. Each tradition went back to its own deep sources — and each found there a Christian hope wider than the rigid restrictivism of the late-Western consensus had allowed. That convergence is one of the most important and least-noted ecumenical developments of the past hundred years.
The convergence has features the Protestant tradition often lacks. The Catholic and Orthodox traditions retained, throughout the centuries when the West tightened its restrictivism, a living liturgical practice of prayer for the dead. The early funeral services, the requiems, the petitions for the departed on All Souls' Day in the West and at the Divine Liturgy in the East — these never stopped. A church that prays for its dead has, in its bones, an eschatology that does not slam the door at the grave. Catholic and Orthodox theology has also held the descent of Christ in living tradition without the Calvinist symbolic-only reduction (see Chapter 15). And both traditions, especially in their twentieth-century recoveries, have read the Greek Fathers more deeply than the Protestant tradition typically has.
What can we conclude about the twentieth-century Catholic and Orthodox recoveries? Several things, and some of them carefully.
First, the recoveries are real and large. They are not the work of a few cranks at the margins. Rahner shaped Vatican II. Vatican II shaped post-conciliar Catholic teaching on the unevangelized. Boros's small mystical book was, for a while, one of the most-discussed works of Catholic theology in the world. Bulgakov was the major theological mind of the Paris School. Ware was the most widely read Orthodox author in English in the second half of the twentieth century. These are mainstream figures, not fringe ones.
Second, the recoveries are not uniform. Rahner is an inclusivist, not a universalist. He says salvation is open to all; he does not say all will accept. Boros holds a moment-of-death encounter, not an extended postmortem opportunity. Bulgakov holds explicit universal restoration. Lossky resists the universalist label while sharing many of the underlying instincts. Ware moves through hopeful universalism toward something more confident. Alfeyev is careful and patristic. The spectrum is wide, and any honest description must acknowledge its width.
Third, the recoveries depend more on the patristic sources than on twentieth-century innovation. Rahner appeals to Justin and Aquinas. Boros draws on Aquinas and the Latin tradition on the moment of death. Bulgakov draws on Origen, Gregory of Nyssa, and Maximus. Ware draws on Isaac, Silouan, and the whole Eastern tradition. Alfeyev recovers Isaac himself. None of these figures is making things up out of thin air. They are recovering, with twentieth-century tools, theological commitments that lived in the Christian tradition long before Augustine made restrictivism the Western default.
Fourth, the recoveries do not settle the contemporary debate. A traditionalist Catholic can read Lumen Gentium 16 as opening only a narrow window. A traditionalist Eastern Orthodox can read Ware as straying beyond what the tradition can bear. A confident universalist can read Bulgakov as confirming what every faithful Christian must finally affirm. The texts are what they are; the readings vary. But what cannot honestly be claimed any longer is that the strict deadline doctrine of late-Western evangelicalism is "the" historic Christian view.
For evangelicals especially, the Catholic and Orthodox recoveries matter for three reasons.
First, they decisively undercut the "modern Protestant innovation" charge against postmortem hope. If Catholics and Orthodox — two traditions that did not undergo the Protestant Reformation, that did not lose the patristic inheritance, and that did not generally need to be told what the Greek Fathers actually said — have, in the twentieth century, gone back to their sources and found there a hope wider than late-Western restrictivism allowed, the historical claim is settled. The wider hope is not a recent Protestant fad. It is older than Augustine, older than the Reformation, and present in living tradition in both halves of the divided Church.
Second, the Catholic and Orthodox recoveries remind Protestants that we are part of a larger conversation. The questions the long hope raises are not parochial. They are the questions of the whole Church. The answers Christians have given, across two thousand years, are more varied than the streamlined American evangelical version suggests. A conservative Protestant who takes seriously his or her catholicity — small-c catholicity, the universality of the Christian faith — has to take seriously the witness of these traditions.
Third, the Catholic and Orthodox recoveries point toward what might come next. The ecumenical convergence on the wider hope is one of the most quietly significant developments in modern theology. Protestants discover the Greek Fathers. Catholics discover the Reformers. Orthodox discover the Western mystics. The walls between the traditions on this set of questions are lower than they have been in centuries. When the long hope is taken up again, in our own time, by writers who genuinely know all three traditions — David Bentley Hart (an Orthodox), Hans Urs von Balthasar (a Catholic), Robin Parry (an evangelical), Brad Jersak (a Pentecostal turned Orthodox) — what we are hearing is, in a way, the whole Church beginning to talk to itself again.
That conversation is still going on. The next chapter takes up its most articulate contemporary voices.
↑ 1. Sergei Bulgakov, The Bride of the Lamb, trans. Boris Jakim (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002). The Russian original (Nevesta Agntsa) was completed in the late 1930s and published posthumously. The English translation by Boris Jakim runs to roughly 550 pages and includes Jakim's introduction.
↑ 2. A peritus (plural periti) is a theological expert appointed to advise the bishops during a council. The role gave several mid-century theologians — Rahner, Joseph Ratzinger, Yves Congar, Hans Küng, Henri de Lubac — outsized influence on the final documents of Vatican II.
↑ 3. Kallistos Ware, "Dare We Hope for the Salvation of All? With Reflections on the Writings of Origen, St. Gregory of Nyssa, St. Isaac the Syrian, and St. Silouan the Athonite," in The Inner Kingdom, Collected Works, vol. 1 (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, 2000), 193–215.
↑ 4. Standard biographical treatments include Karl-Heinz Weger, Karl Rahner: An Introduction to His Theology, trans. David Smith (New York: Seabury, 1980); and Geoffrey B. Kelly, ed., Karl Rahner: Theologian of the Graced Search for Meaning (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1992). Rahner died on 30 March 1984, shortly after his 80th-birthday celebration, and was buried in the Jesuit Church in Innsbruck.
↑ 5. The classic Rahner essays on the topic are "Christianity and the Non-Christian Religions," Theological Investigations 5 (Baltimore: Helicon, 1966), 115–34; "Anonymous Christians," Theological Investigations 6 (Baltimore: Helicon, 1969), 390–98; "Atheism and Implicit Christianity," Theological Investigations 9 (New York: Seabury, 1972), 145–64; "Anonymous Christianity and the Missionary Task of the Church," Theological Investigations 12 (New York: Seabury, 1974), 161–78; and "Observations on the Problem of the Anonymous Christian," Theological Investigations 14 (New York: Seabury, 1976), 280–94.
↑ 6. For the patristic-Scholastic background see Justin, First Apology 46 (treated at length in Chapter 5); Aquinas, Summa Theologiae III, q. 68, a. 2 (on baptismus flaminis); and de Lubac, Catholicism (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1988 [revised 1947]).
↑ 7. Lumen Gentium 16, in The Documents of Vatican II, ed. Walter M. Abbott (New York: America Press, 1966), 35. The decisive phrase reads in the Latin: "qui sine culpa Evangelium Christi Eiusque Ecclesiam ignorantes, Deum tamen sincero corde quaerunt."
↑ 8. Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Dominus Iesus: On the Unicity and Salvific Universality of Jesus Christ and the Church, 6 August 2000 (released publicly 5 September 2000). The text is widely available on the Vatican website. Dominus Iesus §20 specifically affirms that those who are not formally part of the Catholic Church can be saved.
↑ 9. Biographical details from Cynthia Bourgeault, "Boros, Teilhard, and The Mystery of Death: An Introduction and Commentary," in Ladislaus Boros, The Mystery of Death (Rhinebeck, NY: Monkfish, 2020), section "A Failed Vocation?"
↑ 10. Bourgeault, "Boros, Teilhard, and The Mystery of Death," in Boros, Mystery of Death (Monkfish, 2020), introductory section. The original essay appeared as "'Sacramentum Mortis': Ein Versuch über den Sinn des Todes," Orientierung 23 (1959): 61ff., 75ff.
↑ 11. Boros, Mystery of Death, Pt. II, sections 1–7 (Monkfish ed., 2020). For Bourgeault's commentary on Boros's use of Romano Guardini in Part II §5 see her introduction, section "The Four Consents."
↑ 12. Boros, Mystery of Death, Pt. III, §§1–3 and §6 (Monkfish ed., 2020). These four sections form the dogmatic-theological core of the work.
↑ 13. Boros, Mystery of Death, III.3 (Monkfish ed., 2020). The argument from 1 Timothy 2:4 (God's will that all be saved) drives this section.
↑ 14. Bourgeault, "Boros and Teilhard" (commentary section), in Boros, Mystery of Death (Monkfish, 2020); see also Boros, Mystery of Death, III.6. Boros develops the "pancosmic" presence of Christ in death following Karl Rahner, On the Theology of Death, Quaestiones Disputatae 2 (New York: Herder & Herder, 1965).
↑ 15. The link from Boros and the Rahnerian framework to the modern Protestant PO conversation is developed in James Beilby, Postmortem Opportunity: A Biblical and Theological Assessment of the Idea of a Second Chance to Be Saved after Death (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2021), particularly his historical chapters. See Chapter 26.
↑ 16. The Monkfish reissue is Ladislaus Boros, The Mystery of Death: Awakening to Eternal Life, with Introduction and Commentary by Cynthia Bourgeault (Rhinebeck, NY: Monkfish Book Publishing Co., 2020). Bourgeault's substantial commentary situates Boros in the Teilhardian-Rahnerian lineage and is itself the major recent interpretive treatment.
↑ 17. The standard scholarly treatment of the Paris School in English is Paul L. Gavrilyuk, Georges Florovsky and the Russian Religious Renaissance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). See also Antoine Arjakovsky, The Way: Religious Thinkers of the Russian Emigration in Paris and Their Journal, 1925–1940, trans. Jerry Ryan (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2013).
↑ 18. The classic short statement of Bulgakov's sophiology is Sophia: The Wisdom of God: An Outline of Sophiology (1937; English Hudson, NY: Lindisfarne, 1993). On the 1935 condemnation by the Moscow Patriarchate (under Metropolitan Sergii Stragorodskii) see Gavrilyuk, Florovsky and the Russian Religious Renaissance, esp. ch. 4.
↑ 19. Bulgakov, The Bride of the Lamb, esp. chs. 7 ("Death and the State after Death") and 8 ("Parousia, Resurrection, and the City of God"). For an English-language overview of Bulgakov's eschatology see Paul Valliere, Modern Russian Theology: Bukharev, Soloviev, Bulgakov (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000).
↑ 20. Vladimir Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, English trans. (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, 1976; original French 1944).
↑ 21. Brandon Gallagher, "The 'Sophiological' Origins of Vladimir Lossky's Apophaticism," Scottish Journal of Theology 66, no. 3 (2013): 278–98; Aristotle Papanikolaou, Being with God: Trinity, Apophaticism, and Divine-Human Communion (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006).
↑ 22. Olivier Clément, The Roots of Christian Mysticism: Text and Commentary, trans. Theodore Berkeley and Jeremy Hummerstone (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 1995; original French Sources, Paris: Stock, 1982).
↑ 23. Ware, "Dare We Hope for the Salvation of All?" in The Inner Kingdom, 193–215. On Ware's life and conversion see his own foreword to the third edition of The Orthodox Church (London: Penguin, 1993).
↑ 24. Hilarion Alfeyev, The Spiritual World of Isaac the Syrian, foreword by Kallistos Ware, Cistercian Studies Series 175 (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 2000). For Isaac's universalist eschatology, see esp. Alfeyev's chapters on the spiritual life and on eternal life.