This is the will of him who sent me, that I should lose nothing of all that he has given me, but raise it up at the last day.
A proof-text for the doctrine of universal salvation, if ever there was one: the idea that, ultimately—at the end of all things—all will be saved, all will find themselves held in that loving embrace of Almighty God that we commonly call heaven. But it is, admittedly a minority reading of the text, for a minority position in the history of Christian belief, appearing only patchily in the ancient tradition, and marginally less so in the modern age.
True, the Catholic position on the matter is that we may hope that all will be saved; but we should stop short of believing it with any certainty. The theologians of Vatican II were progressive, but not as liberal as all that. And Protestants have never really been very keen on universal salvation, and not only because some have an unseemly fondness for the idea that God predestines some to eternal damnation. There is also the rather pragmatic thing that this kind of universalism might put a damper on evangelism: we must think of the poor missionaries facing redundancy.
And yet, we should resist the easy idea that belief in God’s irresistible saving power is simply newfangled soft-mindedness, the sort of wet liberalism of a secular age in which even the faithful have lost the courage of our convictions. It is there in Origen, of course, everyone’s favourite heretic. And arguably in Gregory of Nyssa, more uncontroversially sound perhaps than the Alexandrian.
In neither case is the argument that it would be nicer if God were to save all souls; that it would be the gentlemanly thing to do. Nor is it squeamishness about punishment that is doing the theological work here: “gentle parenting” would not be invented for over a millennium-and-a-half.
+++
Over the coming years, you will hear me say more times than you will care to that the Christian doctrine of death is that it is bad. By this, I do not mean that it is unpleasant or unfortunate, infelicitous or inconvenient, though it is all those things too; but it is, in a way, a paradigm of badness itself, even of evil. From the very opening pages of our Scriptures, we assert the fundamental truth about creation, which is that it is good: life and existence are good—and death is, by any sober definition, the end, the cessation, the negation, the privation of life—the opposite of that basic good—and so, must be, bad.
As Christians, we must have no time, no patience, for the meek platitudes one hears nowadays, even at funerals, even in churches, that suggest that death is a benign thing, perhaps by virtue of that it is a natural part of life. Never mind that this commits the naturalistic fallacy of supposing all natural things good. It also commits a mereological one of confusing the absence of life with a proper part of it, as if the silent hiss of a vinyl record is a part of the album, the empty place a part of the meal. Never mind even that: it forgets not only our assertion of life’s goodness, but also our Lord Jesus Christ’s own attitude towards death.
For him, it is not a biological reality to be accepted, let alone embraced, not even tolerated: but death is an enemy to be defeated, even destroyed. So bad is death, from divinity’s perspective, that God crosses the chasm between creator and creation, entering into the life that is good, and also into death itself—the badness of nonbeing itself—in order to break it from within, with the sheer, indefatigable, infinite vitality of divine life. Christ died to destroy death; his resurrection is the sacrament of life’s victory, salvation’s triumph.
The assertion of the Christian universalist is that this victory is complete, absolute: that God’s love and power, God’s loving power, God’s powerful love is more than sufficient to meet the badness of death, enough to redeem even this most awful thing that is no thing at all but the negation of things. Death is the sign and manifestation of our alienation from God, the chasm that has fallen between creator and beloved creation. That absence and distance that we feel from the ones we love, but who have been taken from us in death; it is a reflection, a participation in the world’s absence from the God who desires nothing more than to be present with us, among us, even in us. That is the meaning of the incarnation, after all; and the eucharist also. Both proof positive of the infinite lengths to which God will go to fill any absence, bridge any chasm, whether that of sin or death. That God will accomplish this is, whatever else the philosophers might say, the meaning of omnipotence.
God will lose nothing—lose no one—in the end. And so, neither will we, who are heirs to the kingdom of heaven, who have everything, are given everything, everyone back. Our dead will be raised to us again—those whose names are on our lips today, and those whose names are uttered no more here on earth but continue to be called by the Living God who once summoned them into being and summons them still, and will summon them again, will greet them with everlasting love. As will we who grieve now, quite appropriately, because grief is the price that love pays in our mortal world; but Divine Love has paid also the price that puts an end to grief forever and ever, world without end.