The Irrationality of Hopeful Universalism

Can we hope that all will be saved while at the same time disbelieving such will be the case? Or to put the question differently: Can we hope that all will be saved while simultaneously affirming the possibility that some will be eternally damned? This is the question that Catholic philosopher Michael Rea explores in his article “Hopeful Universalism.”¹ His thesis is simple: it is irrational to hope for the salvation of all yet withhold belief in this outcome. Hope and belief are intertwined. As Rea puts it at the beginning of his article:

My goal in this article is to argue against the rationality of a soteriological position that has occasionally been defended in print and seems to be quite common among Christian theologians, clergy, philosophers, and laity. The position is ‘hopeful universalism’, and its components include the considered unconditional hope that soteriological universalism is true together with an absence of belief that it is true. Some proponents maintain that there is simply not enough evidence to affirm or deny universalism; others believe that scriptural evidence supports its denial, so it is probably false, but nonetheless hope they are mistaken. I will argue that worshippers of God who maintain considered hope in the truth of universalism ought either to believe universalism or seek to abandon their hope in its truth, depending (in part) on how their confidence in the considerations that steer them away from universalism measure up against the background beliefs that underwrite their hope in its truth.²

A definition is in order: soteriological universalism is “the thesis that all human beings will eventually be saved, and that this outcome is somehow guaranteed by God rather than being contingent on its just happening to turn out that all human beings freely do whatever it is (if anything) that human beings must freely do in order to be saved.”³ In the literature this construal of the greater hope is typically described as strong, necessary, or dogmatic universalism. Proponents of this position range from Clement of Alexandria, Origen of Alexandria, Diodore of Tarsus, St Gregory of Nazianzus (maybe), St Gregory of Nyssa, St Pamphilius, and St Isaac the Syrian to William Law, John Murray, Elhanan Winchester, George MacDonald, Thomas Allin, Pavel Florensky, Sergius Bulgakov, Jürgen Moltmann, Thomas Talbott, Robin Parry, and David Bentley Hart. Proponents of the weaker form of universalism, typically referred to as hopeful, contingent, or soft universalism, include St Silouan the Athonite (maybe), Karl Barth, St Sophrony of Essex (maybe), Olivier Clément, Paul Evdokimov, Hans Urs von Balthasar, Kallistos Ware, Robert Barron, Jerry Walls, and a host of others. Indeed, it is not uncommon for contemporary opponents of necessary universalism to qualify their critique by saying that that while it is heretical to declare that all will be saved, it is permissible to hope for this glorious outcome.⁴

Rea notes that among contemporary philosophers a broad consensus exists regarding the nature of hope, articulated in two claims:

1. To hope for a state of affairs to obtain is, in part, to desire that it obtain.
2. It is impossible to hope for states of affairs that one knows to obtain, and it is impossible to hope for states of affairs that one confidently believes to be impossible.

Rea states that his critique of hopeful universalism presupposes claim #1 but not claim #2, though he believes that the latter may be elaborated to strengthen his case.

To hope is to desire a specific outcome deemed as good. Philosophers debate whether desire necessarily implies the perceived goodness of its object, but for purposes of his argument, Rea restricts himself to what he calls theistic desires: i.e., “the considered desires of someone who worships God, where God is understood to have the traditional theistic attributes of omnipotence, omniscience, and perfect goodness.”⁵ Theistic desire is intrinsically grounded upon and directed to God and his goods.

Note the qualification “considered.” A considered desire is stronger than a fleeting hope or mere wish. It is a desire that is reflectively held, a hope that one has embraced. “In other words,” explains Rea, “they are desires that one recognizes within oneself and allows to persist unchecked.”⁶ He offers a quotidian example:

So, for example, in writing this article I wanted to finish it, I recognized I wanted to finish it, and (of course) feeling no inner conflict over it, I allowed the desire to persist. By contrast, I might feel some inner conflict over wanting to skip my morning run, and if I do, this will probably be because I recognize a tension between that desire and other important desires I have, like wanting to stick with my routines, or to maintain my health. In recognizing that tension, I might ‘disown’ the desire. That is, I might come to view the desire as a kind of intruder, something to be got rid of, if at all possible. That’s not to say I would succeed in ridding myself of it, or even that I wouldn’t give in to it; but I would recognize it, rather than one of the conflicting desires, as an intrusion that I would prefer to be rid of. If I do disown it, then (even if it in fact persists) it is not among my considered desires because I am not allowing it to persist unchecked. If I don’t disown it, then it remains among my considered desires.⁷

In daily life we are often confronted with conflicting desires, and sometimes the dissonance rises to such a level as to compel us to reorder our priorities and detach ourselves from one desire or another. Now consider how this disowning might apply to our theistic desires:

In light of this, it seems clear that rational considered theistic desires always presuppose apprehension of the object of desire as good. Worship is intimately connected with love and other related attitudes like devotion and allegiance. As such, it involves at least one of what Eleonore Stump identifies as the constitutive desires of love—specifically, desire for the good of the beloved which, in the case of God, seems equivalent to a desire to obey God and to see God’s will done on earth. It also involves a second-order desire to prioritize the satisfaction of those two constitutive desires. Human weakness virtually guarantees that we will fail sometimes to prioritize our desire for union with God and our desire to do God’s will; but if we do not at least want to want to prioritize these things, it is hard to see how we could be said to be genuine worshippers of God. But then for someone who worships God (assuming they take God to be perfectly good), desiring what they do not believe to be good will be inconsistent with their second-order desire to prioritize the constitutive desires of worship. If they are genuinely belief-neutral on whether the object of desire is good, maintaining the desire (unconditionally) is, at best, reckless in light of their second-order desires, and so hardly consistent with giving those desires priority. If they believe that the object of desire is bad, then maintaining the desire is obviously worse than reckless. Either way, then, the desire will be one that they, as worshippers of God, rationally ought to disown. Hence, it cannot be among their rational considered desires. Thus, rational considered theistic desires presuppose the goodness of what is desired.⁸

The critical flaw of hopeful universalism is evident. How can one rationally hope that all will be saved if one’s judgment has determined that the conclusion is improbable, if not impossible. Perhaps you reach the metaphysical conclusion that God cannot effect the salvation of the impenitent without overriding human freedom. Perhaps you become convinced that Jesus taught the damnation of the wicked as an expression of divine justice. Perhaps your church authoritatively and infallibly rejects universal salvation. And yet despite these considerations, and others, you continue to unconditionally desire the salvation of all. At this point the contingent universalist position has become plainly incoherent. If one believes, even as a possibility, that the Holy Trinity will everlastingly condemn the wicked, then to hope otherwise is to put oneself at odds with the Almighty:

Now consider a worshipper of God who believes that soteriological universalism is definitely, or very probably, false. In believing this, one is obviously committed either to the idea that it would be all things-considered good if soteriological universalism were true but God simply cannot make it so, or that God could have made it so but it would, for some reason, not be good for God to do so (perhaps because in guaranteeing that all are saved, God would have to sacrifice some greater good). The former alternative, to the extent that it differs from the latter, sacrifices divine omnipotence, and so it is not an option for people who remain committed to theism. The latter option, by contrast, is a traditional line on why soteriological universalism is false. God desires that everyone be saved, but God’s unilaterally bringing that about even for the steadfastly unrepentant would be inconsistent with divine justice, the preservation of divine glory, respect for human freedom, or some other very great good. So theistic belief that soteriological universalism is false carries with it commitment to the view that, even though there is something quite bad about its being false, it is nevertheless all-things considered good and the will of God that it be false, given human sin and rebellion and a variety of other facts about good, evil, and the relations among them. Of course, people often fail to accept all of the commitments that their beliefs carry; but this particular commitment is one that seems generally to be affirmed by those who have thought enough about soteriological universalism to believe that it is false despite hoping for its truth.⁹

A contingent hope in universal reconciliation presupposes at least the possibility of the realization of final reconciliation, yet if God cannot guarantee this outcome, without violating some other good (such as the integrity of personhood), or the outcome is excluded by divine revelation or infallible Church teaching—or at least by one’s good faith reading of Scripture and Holy Tradition—then the believer finds himself in a quandary. What rational choice does the hopeful universalist have but to repudiate and disown his or her eschatological desire? Even if psychologically impossible, reason obliges the Christian to at least “want to want to abandon that desire, and so not to have the considered hope that universalism be true.”¹⁰

The argument also works in reverse. If for good and decisive reasons one is unable to reject the considered desire that all shall be saved, then reason demands that one reject the possibility that some will be eternally damned:

Note, too, that although my argument started by targeting the rationality of believing that universalism is false while hoping that it is true, it might just as well have started by targeting the rationality of withholding belief one way or the other about universalism while hoping that it is true. One who withholds on universalism is committed to thinking that universalism might (for all she knows) be true. But if she also reflectively embraces hopeful universalism, she will then be in the position of having a considered desire—again, the unconditional desire that universalism be true—that conflicts with what she recognizes might be the perfectly good will of God; and so she will again have a considered desire that is inconsistent with the second-order desire to prioritize the desire to see God’s will be done, whatever it might be, over other desires of hers. The upshot, then, is that if one finds oneself unconditionally hoping that universalism is true, the rational move for one who remains committed to worshipping God is to believe that universalism is true (on the grounds that it seems all-things-considered good, and God is perfectly good) or seek to abandon one’s unconditional hope that universalism is true.¹¹

Rea cites an analogous quandary—Israel’s destruction of the Canaanites. How do we interpret the Old Testament passages that portray the LORD as commanding herem warfare? Are we to take the divine command at biblicist face value, despite our conviction that the God of absolute love would never issue such a command?

The passages describing the conquest of Canaan are notoriously difficult. Taken at face value, they seem to teach that, to help Israel secure the promised land, God commanded the wholesale slaughter of non-combatants and the taking of women into forced marriages. Many of us are deeply sold on the idea that these sorts of behaviours are evil and so could never be commanded by a perfectly good being; and it seems to me to be wholly unproblematic to reason from that vision of goodness—a vision that I, for one, believe I have inherited from the very Bible that includes these troubling passages—to a position of confidence that God did not indeed command such things, and that we are therefore in the dark about how to understand their presence in holy scripture. Indeed, it seems unproblematic to do this even while maintaining confidence in the reliability of scripture; for, after all, it does not follow from the fact that one cannot tell what certain passages of scripture aim to teach human beings that they are unreliable in whatever content they aim to teach. In saying that the reasoning here is unproblematic, I do not, of course, mean to suggest that this approach raises no theological problems whatsoever. It does; and the problems are both deep and possibly intractable. But the problems, in my view, include first-order problems about the interpretation of scripture and second-order problems about the nature and reliability of scripture; they don’t include problems about the goodness of God or the wickedness of war crimes. So too, I think, in the case of soteriological universalism.¹²

Rea has named what hard universalists like myself consider to be the key problem with the doctrine of eternal damnation. Can it be convincingly reconciled with the fundamental Christian confession of the absolute goodness of God without falling into equivocity and dissumulation?¹³ The defenders of hell often invoke the virtue of humility at this point. If our reading of Scripture has convinced us that the wicked will be condemned to eternal conscious torment, should we not humbly acquiesce and disown our hope in the salvation of all? We are, after all, but mere creatures. As the Almighty says to Job: “Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?” (Job 38:4). Transcendent goodness may well require us, therfore, to revise our most deeply held convictions of what goodness means. God has his reasons, so we are assured, for hell and the slaughter of the Canaanites. But there is another possibility. Might it be the case, asks Rea, that true piety requires that we question our hermeneutical commitments in the name of the divine goodness?

The better question, I think, is: how can it be consistent with piety or humility to leave unchallenged the hermeneutical principles that led one to interpret scripture as teaching a doctrine that, according to one’s best (and presumably scripturally shaped) conceptions of love and goodness, is inconsistent with the perfect love and goodness of God? Holding one’s hermeneutical principles doggedly fixed no matter the conclusions one reaches is not necessarily a sign of humility or piety, and is often inconsistent with both. Thus, it seems to me, what I have described as the rational move for the hopeful universalist—either embrace universalism or seek to give up the hope (depending on the outcome of one’s reflective reconsideration of one’s hermeneutical principles, among other things)—is not only a move consistent with humility and piety, but may even be required by humility and piety.¹³

In the next article we will survey the major objections to Rea’s proposal and his responses to them.

 

Footnotes

[1] Michael Rea, “Hopeful Universalism,” Religious Studies, 58 (March 2022): 266-283. This article was published online on 6 October 2020. My quotations will be from this text: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0034412520000402.

[2] Ibid., p. 1.

[3] Ibid., p. 2.

[4] A recent example: David C. Ford, “An Open Letter to Fr Aidan Kimel” (8 July 2020).

[5] Rea, p. 4.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Ibid., pp. 4-5.

[8] Ibid., p. 5.

[9] Ibid., p. 6.

[10] Ibid.

[11] Ibid., p. 7.

[12] Ibid.

[13] For an example of equivocity at work, presented as a kinder, gentler version of eternal damnation, see James Dominic Rooney, “Hell and the Coherence of Christian Hope,” Church Life Journal (29 November 2022). Rooney’s understanding of supernatural faith, combined with the infallibility of Church dogma, can be equally employed to justify divine voluntarism, double predestination, preterition, and any temporal horror attributed to divine judgment.

[14] Rea, p. 8.

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