Universal Salvation After Death?

My neighbor, who is a good Christian man, who has raised four of his own children and then raised three more grandchildren, is dying. He has been suffering and his family is sad but seem to feel some relief, but I had another feeling. I have not always felt this (e.g., at especially painful or terrible deaths) but did at both my father’s and mother’s death. A certain sense of completion, and dare I say, satisfaction. I have never spoken of such things or tried to articulate it, but I have come to understand what may be behind this feeling.

If salvation is being made like Christ, becoming full participants in the divine likeness, ridding ourselves completely of sin and taking on the perfection of Christ, then this process inaugurated now must continue after death. Death is not expectation of fear and judgment but of being perfected, of being brought to fulness, “age after age.” There is a stretching out, a striving toward completeness, that in Paul’s picture is never ceasing (Philippians 3:13–14). There is a progression from glory to glory, a continual moving beyond to the ever-greater, the ever-fuller, and the ever-higher (2 Corinthians 3:18).

This Christian hope of being brought to completeness after death, makes sense of the striving toward maturity in life. It is not cut short, but death will be an extension and acceleration of the good work begun in Christ. The ideal is before me, but my love of neighbor or love of enemy is in no way perfected, though I believe this is the goal toward which life now and in the future is converging. This love is at work in me, though I am a hard nut, but nonetheless I believe this work is the completion toward which death is a next step. The failures are shameful, the slip ups so numerous, the creatureliness sometimes disturbing, but I feel I am improving and will do so into eternity. But could it be that, as severe as the improvements I require, that there is nothing or no one beyond God’s redemption?

There are many passages of Scripture that indicate as much: “The LORD’S loving kindnesses indeed never cease, for His compassions never fail” (La 3:22). “For no one is cast off by the Lord forever. Although he causes grief, he will have compassion according to the abundance of his steadfast love; for he does not willingly afflict or grieve anyone” (La 3:31-33). This verse appears in the midst of a time when the Jewish world was falling apart, Jerusalem and the temple destroyed, and Jews sent into exile in Babylon (around 587 BC.). The temple was the microcosmos ordering the Jewish world, so for Jews this was a disaster of cosmic proportions, but in the midst of this universal disaster is assurance of an unfailing love. God does not, and because of his character cannot, reject forever. Judgment and heartache and destruction are never the end of the story but always followed by mercy. God’s judgment, we learn from Lamentations, is not retributive but restorative.

Ezekiel tells us that in the worst case, that even the people of Sodom will be restored: “I will restore their fortunes, both the fortunes of Sodom and her daughters, and the fortunes of Samaria and her daughters, and I will restore your own fortunes in their midst” (Ezekiel 16:53). There is no people worse than Sodom in Jewish estimate. Jude says they will suffer “eternal fire” (Jude 1:7). This fire must not be retributive but purifying and cleansing as God says, “I will restore the fortunes of Sodom.” The only thing that burns forever is God himself, who is a “consuming fire” (Hebrews 12:30). As David Artman puts it, “The eternal fire of God is the fire of God’s holy presence which finally burns away everything that is not holy.”[1] God’s presence cleanses of sin.

According to George McDonald, “God will never let a man off with any fault. He must have him clean.” Likewise: He “will have you clean,” and “will neither spare you any needful shame, nor leave you exposed to any that is not needful.”[2] Everything about you must be saved. There is an all-inclusive depth to salvation that is universal in that it includes everything about each of us and everything about all of us and the world. The perfection required may be terrifying in its thoroughness, yet outside this universal completeness there is no salvation. Thus, the cleansing “worm does not die” and the purifying “fire is not quenched” (Mk 9:44). There is no end to the restorative action of God. “For love loves unto purity,” though this is often experienced as wrath, “as the consuming fire that will not be content until our sinful nature, everything that separates us from God, is burned away.” According to McDonald, “God’s anger is at one with his love.” Mercy and punishment, love and justice, are not opposed, “for punishment—the consuming fire—is a means to an end, that we might be the creatures he intended us to be. God’s punishment, his justice, can be his most merciful act.”[3] The singular work of God in his fiery love is that we should be as he is, and for this he ascended the cross and he descended into the depths of hell so as to retrieve everyone. God is not satisfied with anything less than total salvation, as heaven would be hellish if it is, as Aquinas pictured, an eternity of watching our loved ones burning in hell.

Peter describes the common belief of early Christians that Christ descended to hell or hades to preach to the dead, proclaiming the liberation of the Gospel to those imprisoned by death: “He went and made proclamation to the spirits now in prison, who once were disobedient, when the patience of God kept waiting in the days of Noah, during the construction of the ark, in which a few, that is, eight persons, were brought safely through the water” (I Pe 3:19-20). As Peter goes on to say, “For the gospel has for this purpose been preached even to those who are dead, that though they are judged in the flesh as men, they may live in the spirit according to the will of God” (1 Pe 4:6). Paul indicates that not even death can separate us from the love of God (Rom 8:35-39). Neither death nor judgment limit God’s grace but are in fact a means of grace. As William Barclay argues, “Jesus Christ not only tasted death but drained the cup of death, that the triumph of Christ is universal and that there is no corner of the universe into which the grace of God has not reached.”[4] God “desires all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth” (1 Tim 2:4) and nothing can thwart God’s desire. He is “not wishing for any to perish but for all to come to repentance” (2 Pe 3:9) and thus “at the name of Jesus every knee will bow, of those who are in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and that every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father” (Php 2:10-11).

Death holds out the possibility of completion, of total reconciliation, of reunion with God and family, and final universal reconciliation. McDonald, has the murderer, Leopold, in one of his novels describe the possible salvific properties of death: ‘Oh!’ he sighed, ‘isn’t it good of God to let me die! Who knows what he may do for me on the other side! Who can tell what the bounty of a God like Jesus may be!’[5] McDonald describes death as “that blessed invention which of itself must set many things right.”[6] For some death may mean relief, for others reunion, and for some death may be the last resort. Of the miserable reprobate, the suicidal, the insane, the hopeless it might be said, “He has gone to see what God could do for him there, for nothing more could be done here.”[7] For everyone death must mean the next step in ongoing perfection toward which he is drawing all things.

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[1]  David Artman, Grace Saves All: The Necessity of Christian Universalism (p. 25). Wipf and Stock, an Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers. Kindle Edition. 

[2] George MacDonald, “Justice,” Unspoken Sermons, III (London: Longmans, 1889), p. 147; “The Child in the Midst,” U.S., I, p. 25. Cited in David M. Kelly, The Treatment of Universalism in Anglican Thought From George McDonald (1824 – 1905 ) to C.S. Lewis (1898- 1963 ), (Unpublished Dissertation, University of Ottawa, 1988) 135.

[3] McDonald, “The Consuming Fire,” from Unspoken Sermons – http://www.online-literature.com/george-macdonald/unspoken-sermons/2/

[4] Barclay, Letters of James and Peter in New Daily Study Bible (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2003) 280. Cited in Artman, 29.

[5] MacDonald, Thomas Wingfold, III, p. 157. Also, Robert Falconer, pp. 291, 325, 337-8; Wilfred Cumbermede, pp. 208, 329. Cited in  Kelly, 148.

[6] MacDonald, Wilfred Cumbermede, p. 208. Cited in Kelly, 148.

[7] MacDonald, Sir Gibbie, p. 35. Also, “The Hardness of the Way,” U.S., I I , p. 29. Cited in Kelly, 148