The Inescapable Love of God

I read The Inescapable Love of God by Thomas Talbott in 2011. I do not recall who directed me to this book. All I know is that I read it cover to cover and found it com­pel­ling. At the time I was what is called a “hopeful univer­sal­ist” and had been since reading Dare We Hope “That All Men Be Saved”? by Hans Urs von Balthasar in the mid-90s. I found it an easy step from C. S. Lewis’s God who invites us to take a bus ride to heaven to Balthasar’s God of absolute love who has embraced every human being in the death and resur­rec­tion of Christ. Yet we live under judg­ment, Balthasar reminds us: while we may hope that all will be saved, we cannot claim to know that such will be the case. We still await final judgment. No problema. Who was I to argue with the great Balthasar. I’d rather hope for the salvation of all than not. But the distinction between hope and knowing continued to needle. It didn’t make sense to me at the level of proclamation and faith. Later I discovered Met Kallistos Ware invoking the same distinction.

When I read The Inescapable Love of God, I found my hope for universal reconciliation growing exponentially. Such is the quiet forcefulness of Talbott’s exegesis of the New Testament (especially of the Apostle Paul) and his philosophical critique of traditional formulations of eternal damnation. Is it really obvious that Jesus and his Apostles taught everlasting perdition? If God is omnipotent Love, is it really beyond his resources to effect the salvation of all without compromising the integrity of personal freedom? If God is merciful Love, then how could his justice require the condemnation of even a single human being to everlasting torment? And what is freedom? What is justice? What is love? Talbott tackles all of these questions with precision and care. But most importantly, he offers a vision of the victorious gospel of Jesus Christ that is worthy of proclamation and faith:

The gospel presents, for our consideration, a vision of God and his creation that makes one want to shout with joy, a vision that can free us from all of the fears and the guilt and the worry within which we so often imprison ourselves. That vision may not always satisfy our wishful sentiments . . . but it does satisfy our deepest yearnings; it may at times devastate human pride, but it could never, ever devastate human hope. It is a vision altogether worthy of being true, and that is also, I believe, an indispensable condition of its being true.¹

Talbott begins his analysis of damnation and universal restoration by presenting us with three propositions:

(1) All human sinners are equal objects of God’s redemptive love in the sense that God, being no respecter of persons, sincerely wills or desires to reconcile each one of them to himself and thus to prepare each one of them for the bliss of union with him.

(2) Almighty God will triumph in the end and successfully reconcile to himself each person whose reconciliation he sincerely wills or desires.

(3) Some human sinners will never be reconciled to God and will therefore remain separated from him forever.²

Each of these propositions enjoys support within the Christian tradition:

1. The universality of God’s salvific will is affirmed by Eastern Christians, Lutherans, Anglicans, Arminian Protestants. Matters are a bit more confusing in Latin Catholicism because of the historical influence of St Augustine’s formulation of absolute predestina­tion; but recent magisterial teaching has clarified that God offers salvation to all.
2. The decisive triumph of God’s salvific will was affirmed by universalists in the patristic period (most famously by Origen, St Gregory of Nyssa, and St Isaac of Nineveh) and in a different way by St Augustine of Hippo and his followers in the Latin Church, who restricted the triumph of the divine salvific will to the predestined. Today support for the proposition is largely restricted to Calvinist and universalist circles.
3. Belief in the eternal damnation of the incorrigibly wicked has characterized ecumenical Christianity since the seventh century.

One immediately notes the logical inconsistency of the three propositions. One can reasonably affirm two of them; but one cannot affirm all three without contradiction.

If I believe that God genuinely loves every human being and desires their eternal salvation and that, nevertheless, some human beings will be eternally lost, then I cannot logically affirm the eschatological triumph of God’s universal salvific will. If I believe that God will effectively bring his elect to eternal salvation and that, nevertheless, some human beings will be eternally lost, then I cannot logically affirm that his love intends every human being. And if I believe that God loves every human being and that his atoning work is decisively efficacious, then I cannot logically affirm the eternal damnation of some.

Talbott acknowledges that not all Christian theologians consistently think through the logic of their respective evangelical claims:

Now a good way to classify Christian theologians and their theological systems, I want to suggest, is according to which of our three propositions they finally reject. Of course, a theologian could always remain a skeptic on this question, but such skepticism would tend to undermine the entire discipline of systematic theology and is virtually nonexistent, therefore, among traditional theologians. Instead of skepticism, however, we sometimes do find a kind of subterfuge: a theologian may embrace, clearly and emphatically, two of the propositions and then try to waffle on the third, either by redefining a crucial term or simply by pretending to hold the third proposition in abeyance. Someone who embraces our first two propositions, for example, may try to ignore the third or to dismiss it with the comment: “The ultimate fate of the wicked is a mystery to be left in the hands of God.” Another may reject proposition (1), which states that God sincerely wills or desires to reconcile all sinners to himself, and then try to identify some artificial sense in which we can still say that God offers salvation to all. But the fact is that a theologian must reject at least one of our three propositions; and when we look carefully at a given theologian’s writings, it is usually rather easy to say which one the theologian in fact rejects.³

If you think of yourself as a hopeful universalist, you find yourself in an awkward position at this point. You affirm the universality of God’s salvific will, and though you would also prefer to reject the eternal damnation of one or more human beings, you do not feel that you can, either because of the dogmatic commitments of your Church or because of the ambiguities and conflicts that you see in the biblical witness. Hence a policy of agnosticism would seem to be necessary regarding propositions #2 and #3. If, as you hope, hell turns out to be empty, then proposition #3 is disproven and proposition #2 validated. This stance has the advantage of theological modesty (and is thus more likely to sneak by the dogma-censors); but it’s too wishy-washy to preach well, and it’s certainly not going to ignite anyone’s evangelical passion. It lacks both the power of unconditional promise and the existential sobriety of perditional threat.

Which one of the above propositions do you deny?

(11, 15 February 2015; rev.)

[1] Thomas Talbott, The Inescapable Love of God, 2nd ed., pp. 32-33.

[2] Ibid., p. 38.

[3] Ibid., p. 41.

(Go to “Was St Paul a Universalist?”)