Let’s weigh readings of Biblical texts in support of Christian Universalism and Christian Infernalism!
Do scales exist?
What would happen if we approached the canon of scripture seriously, as a means of measuring whether our accounts of it are accurate? I’ve found that the results can be genuinely astonishing, especially among religious people. Understandably, we regularly imagine that we at least understand some basic things about the texts we have lived with for millennia. We are regularly wrong, and this is wonderful: it means we regularly have chances to learn and grow in our relationship with the text.
For example, if we approach core Biblical texts about hell and salvation in this way, I’ve been surprised to find that the Biblical case for Christian universalism turns out to be much weightier than the case for the infernalist view, which was apparently more popular in the church at least between about 500 and 1900. To plenty of people, this sounds of absurd. It is, I think, a delightful surprise.
For a bit more context, it helps to know that universalism is a long standing view among Christians, although it was a minority view for much of church history. It apparently dates back to the very earliest texts (the letters of Paul) and to some of the most central figures in the formation of the tradition (Origen and St. Gregory of Nyssa). Christian universalists simply believe that just as in Adam all die, so in Christ all will be made alive. (1 Cor 15:22)
They also believe that overcoming evil (in our hearts and the world) remains a problem of the utmost importance and urgency, and in my experience they are generally much more morally serious about the core of Christian ethics than the infernalists I have known. There is both judgment and forgiveness in Christian universalism, to be sure. It is just that God’s justice is seen as being ultimately successful and restorative, rather than being endless and therefore unable to achieve its desired ends.
The infernalist view, in contrast, holds that some people will suffer endless torment. This view also has a long history in the church, and has enjoyed wide official popularity, especially after Augustine. Eventually this view came to be seen as officially mandatory in many influential clerical circles, and this is especially associated with the condemnations of “Origenism” that were advocated by the Emperor Justinian in the 500's. Current scholarship involves debates over whether Origen was officially condemned as part of an actual church council, as well as whether patristic universalism (such as that advocated by Saint Gregory of Nyssa) was condemned in general. Even if “Origenism” was condemned, was Nyssism condemned? No. And what’s more, based on the best available current scholarship, it might be more accurate to say that “Evagrianism” was condemned, rather than Origen’s own views.¹ It would be strange, indeed, if patristic universalism itself had ever been clearly condemned, since Saint Nyssa is himself a pillar of Trinitarian orthodoxy. He was even explicitly named on a short list of people who could reliably explain the doctrine!
Regardless of those particular debates, Origen was also central to the development of Biblical studies and the church in the 200’s, and his theology precedes the canonization of the New Testament itself. He was deeply and widely respected, and his influence is felt powerfully through the Cappadocians who played a central role in the development of the Nicene Creed. So here we have a fascinating puzzle. Why would the church’s hierarchy, centuries later, condemn such a pivotal and celebrated figure? I think it is highly significant that this condemnation only came centuries after the Synod of Arles, which signaled the slow emergence of an official demand that Christians must embrace violence. This plainly contradicted the church’s understanding of the teachings of Jesus for the first three centuries. These teachings on love and enemy love form the historically verifiable core of the early church’s distinct teaching, often referred to as “JT” or “Jesus Teaching” in historical scholarship. And of course they are at the very heart of the whole New Testament, which teaches this more clearly than it teaches just about anything else. It makes sense that Justinian’s late demand that Christians must accept the most extreme imaginable forms of spiritual violence followed a turn toward literal violence. This drastic shift really took root with Augustine and others, in the generation after Constantine, as imperial court theologians worked desperately to appropriate a deeply anti-imperial canon of scriptures and traditions. The work of exegesis can consistently help us uncover just how desperate these later efforts to overwrite scripture really were, and are.
With this background in view, we might consider looking again at Augustine’s famous (and still very frequently repeated) arguments about how to read scripture when it comes to ultimate divine violence. Famously, Augustine argued that if the phrase “aionion life” in 25:46 means that God gives some people endless life, then the parallel phrase “aionion punishment” must also indicate something endless. No endless punishment, no endless life. Plenty of people, even scholars and theologians, repeat this argument today. But is it any good, and do the people who recite this argument actually apply the measure consistently to other passages? They plainly do not. And as we’ll see here it is, transparently, a terrible argument. On closer inspection, we’ll find that the shoe is very much on the other foot here: patristic univeralists have a variety of texts that more strongly support their position than this. This includes a wonderfully direct comparison text, 1 Cor 15:22, which has the language needed to make it clear that its parallel construct is meant in a rigorously comparative way. In contrast, Matthew 25:46 does not; parallelism, as any student of literature and especially any student of the Bible should know, can draw a contrast just as easily as it can draw a comparison. When you’re done with this piece, if you attend to it, you’ll also be left wondering how an official Doctor of the Church could famously make such a terrible argument, and why people (even scholars) can keep repeating it with a straight face.
We can also sum up the project here more poetically. For example, we might look at the way Bob Dylan tried to put it on Infidels in 1983, although he ended up pulling the track. He was working on this song as he disconnected from the Vineyard movement, the one I belong to joyfully. Still, I sympathize with every kind of disillusionment, including the sort Dylan expresses here.
This cancelled song would then be caged up in “Close Connection to My Heart.” It was eventually set free, unleashed on us in 1991 as part of the Bootleg Series. That was one of the few Bob Dylan albums I owned growing up, and I do love these lines. I don’t read them as generally anti-intellectual, but instead as voicing disillusionment with the kind of pseudo-education that is such a problem in theology.
Gettin’ harder and harder to recognize the trap
Too much information about nothin’
Too much educated rap
It’s just like you told me, just like you said it would be
It’s just like Jesus told us, it’s just like he said it would be. At the core of the problem with the educated rap in theology is that people spend a lot of time learning and reciting bad old arguments without pausing to weigh them. This is why something as simple as thinking about how scales actually work is potentially revolutionary today, much as more precise scales were revolutionary in chemistry just a couple of centuries ago.
Scales. How do they work?
Scales don’t present us with an irresolvable mystery of the universe. They work by consistent comparison.
A gram, for example, could be any weight. We don’t even need to know what, exactly, our unit of measure really is in its metaphysical essence. What matters is that the same gram is used consistently from case to case to establish a consistent means of relative comparison. If the weight of your gram is always changing, though, you won’t be able to compare things. You’ll be a measuring hypocrite: adjusting your measure as needed to get the result you want. This sort of process reveals its users’ hypocrisy and bias, but doesn’t tell us much about the matter being weighed.
Because the millenial problems here are so basic and enduring, let’s spend some time on the basics. Really, how does a scale work? Measuring really gets interesting when we have three things: a consistent measure and then two other things that are measured according to it. This lets us do all kinds of things, like set a price per pound and then fairly charge that price per pound. You can weigh some carrots with a weight, and then weigh some silver with the same kind of weight, and then trade carrots for silver at a consistent rate. Monetary exchange isn’t the only application here, but it is worthwhile to try to surpass an honest merchant. This is better than doing even worse than one. We should be careful to avoid reducing everything to monetary analogies, but we can’t get beyond the limitations of money by ripping people off and using uneven scales; good theology needs to be more than a market exchange, not less than it.
Astonishingly often in Biblical studies, what people actually do is more like this: some supposed authority takes some carrots, holds them in their hand and says, “Welp, it weighs about that much.” And then other people just point back to them as an authority, as if that settles things. In a bit, we’ll get into this example of one of our scribes doing this in response to David Bentley Hart’s work, pointing back to Augustine as if this settles anything.
If we’re serious about what we’re doing, we need to do better. At the very least we need to see if we are willing to apply the same approach consistently across texts, or if we change our approach as quickly as a crooked merchant changes his weights. As things stand, we frequently end up in a situation where almost everyone is a sucker, crook or cynic. Suckers naively accept “welp, it weighs about that much” as an informative approach. Crooks understand how easily manipulated that process is, and they take advantage of it knowingly; in the land of the suckers, crooks are kings. A natural response to this situation is cynicism: a view that it is impossible to get anywhere, and that all apparent discourse just masks the will to power, or fundamentally arbitrary preferences.
The truth is that we can actually engage in powerful relative comparisons with just a bit of effort. It really isn’t that hard. We just have to spend some time getting the basics down, and then we need to want truth more than we want to feel assured that the people who thought the Earth was the bottom of the universe, and that matter blinked in and out of existence, had it all figured out.
A scale helps us check both the reality of the situation and our hearts. Plenty of people say that they accept the infernalist position even though they hate it. They embrace it mournfully, regretfully, because authorities have told them that the Bible just leaves them with no other choice. In many cases, I really think they feel that way. They’ve just inherited a long tradition of non-canonical reading and have never thought or been taught to weigh things consistently. People who are sincere about that are extremely likely to change their minds on this issue over the course of this article, if they actually read and comprehend it. The insincere, maybe because they are even insincere with themselves, will not change their minds in the face of sound analysis. So it goes. This article can still help people sort out which is which, because we can observe how people respond to it. A scale is a very useful tool to have around: even where it doesn’t persuade, and even where it doesn’t reveal all, it can still reveal enough about a merchant to inform our next choice. Do you want to do business with people who get mad and start slandering everyone around them when you bring out an even scale?
Letting the Canon Measure Us
So let’s weigh our reading strategies against the canon. We’re going to study two texts that seem to lead to diametrically opposite conclusions: one yielding Christian universalism, the other yielding Christian infernalism. I’ve chosen the texts that I consider to be the strongest for each side in the dispute, with the hope that a detailed engagement with our readings of these texts (in their context) will let us address the much wider project microcosmically. That is to say, I have carefully chosen two texts that can suggest the shape of the whole dispute.
First, there is a verse that has been read in a universalist way for almost two millennia, 1 Cor 15:22 (NASB):
For as in Adam all die, so in Christ all will be made alive.
Second, a verse that has been read in an infernalist way for almost two millennia, Matthew 25:45–46 (NASB):
Then He will answer them, ‘Truly I say to you, to the extent that you did not do it for one of the least of these, you did not do it for Me, either.’ These will go away into eternal (aionion) punishment, but the righteous into eternal (aionion) life.
One of the core arguments that Augustine advanced involved this passage, from a part of Scripture that he cited especially often. His claim was that the punishment must be endless because the life is endless. Since then the argument has been repeated thousands of times, maybe hundreds of thousands of times. Even our scribes repeat it as if it is a sound argument. Anyone discussing these issues is bound to encounter it in short order.
Augustine’s premise is deeply flawed, and makes us far worse readers if routinely adopted
There’s a fundamental problem with the measure by which Augustine tries to weigh the canon, though: nouns modify their adjectives, even in parallel constructs like this. Consider this sentence, for example:
My grandmother lived a long life, but my uncle died a long death.
What does “long” mean here, exactly? Is Augustine right that in a parallel construction the adjectives must carry the same meaning? No he is not. Not at all.
“Long” could mean all kinds of things, and I can speak with a special kind of authority on that sentence because I wrote it. The point is that my grandmother lived a full and long life, relative to the length of a life. And my uncle died a long death, relative to the length of a death (maybe a couple of years?). On the face of it, there’s nothing to even suggest that the ‘longs’ are comparable durations, even if the structure is meant to compare rather than contrast.
But even more than this, the parallel phrasing invites us into a deeper reflection on life and death themselves. These sentences invite us to consider their entire lives. Part of what is being said is that my grandmother really lived. She lived a good long life. But my uncle’s life was a kind of dying. This semi-fictional uncle was a Rush Limbaugh fan, and so you can understand how his entire life was a kind of balled up rage bound for death: he spent his whole life dying, while my semi-fictional grandmother was telling tall tales and leaping on rollercoasters to the end. We might expand on the electricity between these lines in this way: my uncle did not “live a long life”. Instead of really living, he spent his life dying a long death.
The word “long” here is doing a lot more than indicating various lengths of time, relative to their nouns: it is inviting a wider reflection on everything in its grammatical field. This is the sort of thing that normal language is doing all the time, drawing us out from the particular words into broader and deeper and richer linguistic structures: into the phrases and sentences and paragraphs and chapters and books and bodies of literature and lives and communities that produce them. Parallelism, in general, can contrast just as easily as it can compare, and there can be all kinds of shades of similarity and difference revealed by it. That’s part of the beauty and wonder of the technique. It can teach the wisdom that is gained through careful comparison and contrast.
So by the time we’re trying to read more than isolated words, which is to say by the time we’re truly reading at all, we will be a hundred miles down the road from Augustine’s absurd, and absurdly illiterate, idea that a parallel structure requires (or even desires) that adjectives have the same meaning. His approach to exegesis doesn’t allow us to enter into the life of language, but instead is a kind of deadly linguistic vivisection.
That’s a simple illustration of the point, and I used my own sentence first because authorial intention enters into these discussions, even if meaning is obviously much more than that as well. You can’t credibly claim that I don’t understand the explicit intention behind my own sentence, if I’ve elucidated it for you. So that was the warm-up round, and if you still respect Augustine’s method it is because you also don’t respect me enough to let me tell you how my sentence works. Make a note of that, either way.
Still, does Scripture work this way? Of course it does, and extensively. Here’s one example, from Jeremiah 34:17 (NASB):
Therefore this is what the Lord says: ‘You have not obeyed Me in proclaiming release (דְר֔וֹר), each one to his brother and each to his neighbor. Behold, I am proclaiming a release (דְּר֜וֹר) to you,’ declares the Lord, ‘to the sword, to the plague, and to the famine; and I will make you a terror to all the kingdoms of the earth.
If Augustine were the measure of Scripture, rather than Scripture being the right measure of Augustine, we would need to insist that the word translated as “release” has the same sense and implications both times. But how should we read this? Is the text saying that because we (the audience) didn’t liberate each other from slavery and bondage, God will liberate us to plagues and death? That’s not liberation. Wait, wait, no. Maybe it is saying that because we didn’t expose our slaves to the horrors of freedom, God will expose them to plague. What is the meaning of “release” here, liberation or catastrophic exposure? Hopefully you’re laughing at least a little bit inside, even amid the horror of what we’re discussing.
The beauty and power of Biblical language regularly depends, precisely, on a kind of punning wordplay that contrasts two sides of the word’s range of possible meaning. Here the force of the parallelism lies entirely in the ironic contrast between the two senses of the word, captured fairly well by “release” in English. This is just how the text expresses a deeply ironic, poetic justice.
This helps us see the real damage done by Augustine’s exegetical principle. To accept his approach is to become less literate. People sometimes say that Augustine didn’t know Greek, but this isn’t true, he did know it. The problem ran much deeper than that. Augustine didn’t know how to read well, regardless of the language. Or more precisely, the Augustine who tried to weigh Matthew 25 arbitrarily in his hand here, without any serious effort to let the canon test his method, was tipping his hand and betraying his own vicious desires. He was like a merchant grabbing a bunch of his carrots and loudly shouting, “Welp, it weighs about five pounds … that’ll be $20.” Then you put it on a scale and find that his carrots only weigh about a pound. Except in this case, we have almost 2,000 years of people saying, “Augustine said they weigh five pounds so they weigh five pounds…”
So Augustine’s exegetical premise is not only unsound, but actually damages our ability to read well. His premise is bad. Having said that, there are still more problems to unpack here. Suppose we grant his premise for the sake of argument, and we live in a vastly inferior parallel universe called “The World of Wooden Prose.” Here, adjectives in parallel constructs necessarily have the same meaning. Are there still more problems with Augustine’s argument? Yes.
Augustine assumes his conclusion
What if “aionion” doesn’t mean everlasting? (That is to say, what if we don’t assume Augustine’s conclusion for him?) For example, what if “aion” means “lifetime” (as it does, by the way), and “aionion” is following Plato’s Timaeus? In that case, “aionion” is a special philosophical term that refers to particular lifetimes that are the copies of the general form, the universal Lifetime. (The article linked above goes much deeper into this.) Then we might well translate the verse this way:
Then He will answer them, ‘Truly I say to you, to the extent that you did not do it for one of the least of these, you did not do it for Me, either.’ These will go away into their lifetimes’ punishment, but the righteous into the life of lives.
But you don’t need to accept that particular translation for the general point here to hold, which is that aionion could mean any number of things here, and Augustine has simply slipped that assumption underneath his flawed premise. This is a very effective technique of rhetorical manipulation: assume the conclusion, and then quickly build something else on top of it. It is harder to notice the sleight of mind, because now you’re distracted by the argument. To show you this trick, we need to directly question the prior: does aionion mean endless at all? Whether we ultimately agree on the meaning of the word, we should notice that Augustine doesn’t engage seriously with this important philological question. Even if he happened to be right, we can still understand that the structure of his argument is flawed: if he were an honest merchant he would, at the very least, have acknowledged the importance of this discussion.
So you can disagree with my own reading of aion and follow any number of other interpretations with real warrant. For example, you might see “aion” as relating to the Messianic Age and a great transition between two ages. Currently, the most common Biblical translation for “aion” is as “age” in Matthew 24, and so this approach has the charm of being relatively conservative at the moment. It is the approach Hart takes in his New Testament translation. In this sense, a brutally literal translation of “aionic” would be “ageic”. Since we don’t have that word in English, a slightly less brutal translation would be “life of the age.”
Still, we haven’t gotten through all of the serious problems with Augustine’s argument. There’s still more here.
Augustine distorts our understanding of the relationship between theology and scripture
We don’t need a good translation, like these options, to point out one other way in which Augustine’s argument is wrong and wrong-headed. For the sake of the illustration, let’s just say that “aionion” means “ionized” or something arbitrary. The point is that this alternative meaning doesn’t matter for this argument, so think of anything you want. Let’s just assume the question is a complete mystery.
Whatever the text would then be saying about ionized punishment and ionized life, the church’s full doctrine of endless life certainly doesn’t hinge on this verse. The verse can just be talking about something different than endless life in Christ, and we can affirm that life in Christ is endless for other reasons. For example, we might view the life as endless because it is life in Jesus Christ, who is God, who is therefore endlessly alive. And we might view the correction or punishment as having an end because it is also correction in Jesus Christ, who died on the cross for the forgiveness of sins, and therefore the corrective effect is endless even as the pain of correction is not. The punishment falls within history, but having taken up its weight, Jesus resurrected lives forever in victory over sin, with all who are in him restored in him.
In other words, Christians don’t need the word “aionion” at all, and they don’t need it to mean anything in particular at all, to build their case that life in Christ is endless and that, on the other side of sin, there is endless redemption in him. Surely the doctrine doesn’t hang on the contestable translation of a single strange word invented by a philosopher.
While some theologians do a great deal of prooftexting, it is an insult to Christian theology to treat it as the kind of prooftexting game that Augustine treats it like here. To make it seem like our faith dangles from a single word is to give it astonishingly short shrift. Just as the argument damages our capacity to read well, if accepted, it also damages our capacity to understand how Christian doctrine relates to Christian faith and to the Bible. To follow Augustine’s approach to biblical theology is to become something even worse than a bibliolator: it is to become a worshipper of a single stoicheion, a single basic element of the text. And one who doesn’t even make a serious effort to understand the fetishized but ignored word that is worshipped but not comprehended.
The importance of rejecting Augustine’s style of argument
Regardless of where you come down on the actual subject of this discussion, you should reject Augustine’s argument because to think like him is to think far worse about all kinds of things. To sum up the case on Augustine’s argument: even if we grant his false premise, his conclusion still doesn’t follow from it, and the conclusion he assumes about the meaning of aionion is also bad. The argument is rotten from snout to tail.
So in the end it is true that Augustine didn’t know how to read Greek, but this wasn’t a peculiar deficiency when it came to Greek. His Greek was as passable as any of his language skills. The problem was that he simply didn’t know how to read well, at least when he had some rhetorical dirty work to do. And over the last 1700 years, he has spawned countless proud imitators of his utter incompetence (at discourse), but deep skill (at rhetorical manipulation).
Still, it needs to be said that St. Augustine is both a saint and a Doctor of the Catholic Church, and I’m all for it. The moral of the story might not be the one that was once imagined, though. If they’re even letting this guy in, maybe we can all be Doctors of the Church. As Jesus said, who are you calling Rabbi? We’re supposed to have one teacher, and that is God. Beyond that, we can be grateful that the bar has been set so low for the rest of us.
Where an argument like Augustine’s actually has some weight
What’s fascinating here is that Augustine nonetheless had some kind of an inkling of how a scale might work. He was smart, at least, to focus on a passage that gives us a relationship between two things (aionion life and aionion correction/punishment). It really is illuminating to compare and contrast! Still, what if we had another text that didn’t just provide us with a parallel construct, but one that actually used logical language to make an explicit and clear comparison between the two parts? And what if this text provided strong support for the view that Paul believed that all of humanity will be saved, because we will ultimately be in Christ in the end? By some miracle or luck, the canon does, in fact, provide us with just such a text for our consideration.
Here it is again, with the key logical terms in Greek written out:
For as (hosper gar) in Adam all die, so (houtos kai) in Christ all will be made alive.
The point is really quite straightforward: literally everyone will be made alive in Christ, because this is the human condition, at least as much as Adam characterizes the human condition. It isn’t that everyone is in Christ now. There are some now who are not yet in Christ. But in the fullness of time, all will be made alive in Christ, which must be the endless life of Christ because Christ lives forever.
Here is where our scale analogy really kicks in. If someone was convinced by Augustine’s very light argument from parallelism, and they are using even weights, they will be vastly more convinced by the logical connection between the two parts of this verse. The explicit logical parallelism shows us the kind of text for which Augustine’s premise would actually carry some weight, even though it doesn’t carry it with respect to Matthew 25. We can state it explicitly: where a direct logical comparison is explicitly drawn, parallel language should be read in a comparative and analogical way rather than in a contrasting way. Where this kind of logical analogy isn’t provided, we need more context to understand the play between parallel language, which is much more flexible in those cases. Recall that this sort of richly generative parallelism lies at the heart of Hebrew poetry and the poetic structure of the Christian canon itself: our Bible is a tale of two temples that invites comparison and contrast, and which leads us to the third and final Temple, Jesus.
To draw this out a bit more fully, whatever we say about Adam here, we must at least say about Christ. Insofar as there is a divergence between the power of Adam and Christ, Christian theology can only ever attribute infinitely more power to Christ, and cannot attribute to Christ a diminished power relative to Adam’s. To do so would literally be infinitely worse than Arianism, which erred (according to St. Gregory of Nyssa at least) in failing to see Christ as eternal God. But Arianism is extremely close to Trinitarian theology compared to the theology that places Christ beneath Adam.
(Notice the scaling method at work here in the comparison with Arianism as well. The argument doesn’t require that we know, exactly, how wrong or right Arianism was. I think it was wrong, but the scale doesn’t depend on my knowledge of good and evil. Instead, as throughout our discussion, it is about relative weights and our capacity for comparison. Incidentally, this is how knowledge in a vast array of fields has been progressing over the last several centuries: rigorous comparison is enormously powerful, at least in pulling planks out of our eyes and helping us spot our own voluminous human b.s.)
So what is the best infernalist response to this argument? Interestingly, it runs parallel to discussions about the meanings of “aionios”, and rightly so. After we look at the logical premises of our analysis and the logical structure of the statement, it makes a lot of sense to pay deep attention to the particular words and how they work. Importantly, every word in this verse is a common one with relatively unambiguous meaning. This contrasts starkly with “aionios” which has a fascinating history of contestation around its meaning because it is apparently a philosophical term that Plato invented in the Timaeus. Still, against the weight of this clear language, a worthwhile rejoinder is consistently raised: “all” doesn’t always mean “all”. This is undoubtedly true, in the sense it is usually used. For example, if I point at a jar of marbles and say, “Give me all the marbles,” you’d probably be right to think that I want all of the marbles in the jar and not all of the marbles in the universe. You would be wrong, however, to think that I’m asking for most of the marbles. All does mean all, it just means all of some set. And it is worth exploring what the set is, whenever “all” is invoked. (Precisely because all is a common word in both Greek and English, this is all very intuitive.)
So what kind of “all” is in view? “Adam” is used to refer to all of the human condition, that which all humanity shares. And while there are some traditions about some people not dying (such as Elijah), Paul’s usage here would seem to either be all-inclusive, or to make room only for an exception like Elijah. The “all” in view is either entirely inclusive of humanity, or else Elijah is the exception and Elijah did not get consigned to endless torment. And so by the direct logical structure of the parallel, and by the simple language used, and by the theological relationship between Christ and Adam, the implication is clear: according to 1 Cor 15, literally everyone (except maybe Elijah? but that’s a serious stretch) ends up in Christ in the end. It doesn’t mean they’re all there yet. But they will be there, in the fullness of time, in Paul’s view.
From here, the main infernalist rejoinder with respect to this particular text might be an appeal to some fascinating and strange theology. Having taken all of this on board, they sometimes suggest that some will be tormented in Christ forever. If that’s true, it means that even as they are tormented, it is also the very torments of Christ that also carry on without end. To be clear, there’s a longstanding tradition in Christianity which holds that the fire of judgment is precisely the fire of God’s love as well. It’s just that the very same fire is experienced differently by different people: in resistance to reconciliation, it is experienced as horror, but in the work of reconciliation it becomes sweet and warm. In other words, the true nature of God’s restorative justice is the joy of reconciliation, and only the denial of that work makes it seem to be torment.
Still, if Christ is God-with-us, wherever someone is in torment he is there with them. As Elder Sophrony reportedly told Olivier Clement: “You may be certain that as long as someone is in hell, Christ will remain there with him.” To this, I’d add that if we follow 1 Cor 15:22 it isn’t that he is beside them, but they are in fact within him, and he is presumably suffering whatever they suffer. In the wake of any decent reading of this text, I think the only real solution for an infernalist is to develop some horrifying and novel doctrine that Christ himself is endlessly tormented there in the fire inside of him along with Satan and all of his angels, if torment truly is endless and those who are in him are forever there. Infernalists often try to suggest that universalists are coming up with a new and non-Biblical doctrine, but they aren’t. After this discussion, I think that the scales really are very much going just the other way. If they hope to salvage their position after this, the infernalists are the ones who need to come up with a horrifying novelty: that Christ is tormented without end with the Slanderer and Death and all of their angels. Universalists, on the other hand, need only appeal to Paul.
Now in this discussion, I haven’t done a broader contextual reading of 1 Corinthians or Matthew’s Gospel. You’ll find my extensive discussion of Matthew’s Gospel here. I hope to write a similarly comprehensive analysis of 1 Corinthians later. For now, I would suggest that reading a single pair of verses well is already much better than trying to read a pile of prooftexts poorly. We need to start with the flesh of the text, the particular details and words at the smallest scale, before we can speak meaningfully about the broader context.
Still, the broader context of 1 Corinthians deeply supports and builds on what we have shown within the details of the verse. The argument within 1 Cor 15 is aiming to persuade the Corinthians of the reality of the resurrection of Jesus, and Paul is arguing to this conclusion from the premise that they already believe in the salvation of all through Christ. Paul’s point is essentially that because they already endorse the salvation of all, they should also support the resurrection, because their conviction of universal salvation is grounded in that very resurrection! Because this is taken as a premise of Paul’s argument, rather than as the conclusion, he is treating it as a particularly secure point of agreement between him and his interlocutors.
One can reasonably object that Paul’s dialectical mode of argument means that he is sometimes able to question a premise, as in Romans 1–2. However, this is precisely why, if we hope to see what Paul actually affirms as clearly as possible, we need to look to the ends of his arguments rather than the earlier parts. Yes, before he reaches the conclusion or telos of his arguments, he can bait and switch his audience to teach their minds and hearts to recognize what it is like to fall prey to self-righteousness. And this is why it is so significant that the universalism in Paul’s mature work comes out most clearly in his conclusions, like 1 Cor 15 and Romans 11. (I analyze Romans 9–11 in some detail here.) Therefore, a careful contextual reading of Paul deeply and powerfully supports the claims that we already have substantial clarity on, based on our close reading of 1 Cor 15:22.
The charge is often made that Christian universalist readings ignore context. As with so much else in this debate, the exact opposite is the truth. Close reading of a particular verse, as well as complete reading of books and the canon, support universalist positions more strongly the more people dig into them with integrity. What have the infernalists been doing all these years that they have ruled the roost through their threats? Prooftexting, fleshy reading, and rhetorical manipulation, rooted in terror and the abuse of human threat responses. Of course they have. In systems like that, projection and slander are the norm because they are at the root of the imperial cultures that are built through imperial court theologies. More on that in this article.
So based on my work on the broader contexts of both verses, both the cotexts of Scripture and the social context of history, I think that our microcosmos (our little ordering of the texts here) is deeply reflective of the broader order in which they are embedded. Like the stars and the lifeforms in our remarkably transparent universe, it is there for anyone to see if they care to look closely and slowly enough. But those who just glance will miss almost all that there is to see, here and there and everywhere.
I hope that this has helped illuminate Scripture for you. And I hope that it has also sparked a kind of joyful hope in you. What if it isn’t all a matter of suckers, crooks and cynics? What if scales exist, and what if the canon of Scripture is just such a scale? We could use it to help root out the cynic and the crook and the sucker in us, and find someone else whispering beneath the din: a reconciler at work within.
[1] From Fr. John Beh’rs Origen and his On First Principles from Oxford University Press:
