from glory to glory – Forging Ploughshares

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.

[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

Epektasis: Gregory of Nyssa and the Eternal Ascent of Redemption

“Brethren, I do not regard myself as having laid hold of it yet; but one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and reaching forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus” (Philippians 3:13–14).

Transcending the self, or going beyond the self (being stretched out, epektasis in Paul’s description), in Gregory of Nyssa’s interpretation, not only captures the life course of the Christian, but the eternal goal. There is an unceasing evolution toward the eternal likeness, or an ongoing progress of participation (theosis) in being joined to Christ.[1] For Paul, this simultaneously refers to “knowing Christ” in “resurrection life,” through being “conformed to his death” (3:10-11), which means “forgetting what lies behind” (3:13), even counting as “rubbish” legal accomplishment (3:8) so as to “lay hold of that for which also I was laid hold of by Christ Jesus” (3:12). There is a going beyond (past accomplishments or failures), a forgetting and moving forward, which involves what Christ has done (he “laid hold” of Paul) and Paul’s response (a “laying hold of Christ”). Paul uses the term “perfect” (τετελείωμαι), to indicate he has not achieved this end (3:12), and those who are “perfect” (τέλειοι) he indicates should have the same attitude (3:15). He may be ironic in describing them as perfect, or he may, in fact, be describing the goal as the process of perfecting.

Gregory, in his Life of Moses, presumes perfection is an unceasing growth: “The perfection of human nature consists perhaps in its very growth in goodness.”[2] According to Gregory, Paul “never ceased straining toward those things that are still to come. Coming to a stop in the race was not safe for him. Why? Because no Good has a limit in its own nature but is limited by the presence of its opposite as life is limited by death and light by darkness. And every good thing generally ends with all those things which are perceived to be contrary to the good.”[3] Progressing, evolving, perfecting, being joined to Christ, participating in the divine life, becoming like Christ and God, according to Gregory, is an eternal process.

[Paul] teaches us, on the one hand, that what is ever and again discovered of that blessed Nature that is the Good is something great but, on the other hand, that what lies beyond what is grasped at any particular point is infinitely greater; and during the entire eternity of the ages this becomes the case for the person who participates in the Good, since those who participate in it receive increase and growth in that they encounter ever greater and better things.[4]

As I previously described (here), conversion and salvation are not one-off events of the past, but as with Christ, the beginning and end are interwoven and thus eternal. The expanding and spiraling realization of divine love, through an expanded moral sense, to a broadened intellectual engagement, to a psychic experiential shift (the fruits of the Spirit) sums up the New Testament dynamic, which by definition stretches out eternally. The knowledge of God, and the accompanying expansion of virtues and understanding, and the experience of love and peace never come to an end. We are created to be in the divine image and this is an unending goal. Becoming like God, and not just self-improvement, is the human purpose, and this purpose entails the eternal. This eternality is more than a long or infinite time, but is a qualitative goal in which the finite and the creaturely are ceaselessly transformed. The limited enters the unlimited, the finite takes up the eternal, such that the stretching forth (epektasis) in God cannot be finalized.

Gregory also takes up this explanation in his homilies on the Song of Songs, which means he is describing an expanded desire or even a divine and eternal eroticism. As he describes, thirst for God is never quenched:

The wellspring of good things always draws the thirsty to itself—just as in the Gospel the wellspring says: “If anyone thirst, let him come to me and drink” (John 7:37). For in using these words, he sets no limit, whether to thirst, or to the urge to come to him, or to the enjoyment of the drinking. Rather, by the open-endedness of his injunction, he issues a continuing invitation to thirst and to drink and to be impelled toward him.[5]

While physical thirst and satisfaction has its limits, the spiritual thirst for God is unlimited as God is infinite. In the soul’s longing for God there is no ultimate satisfaction, no final union, no perfect vision, no final satiation, and to imagine there is, would amount to considering God as finite. In Gregory’s allegorical interpretation of the life of Moses, Moses is an allegorical Christian pilgrim, desiring to see God, but recognizing there is no end to this pursuit. “Whereas, Moses, your desire for what is still to come has expanded and you have not reached satisfaction in your progress and whereas you do not see any limit to the Good, but your yearning always looks for more, the place with me is so great that the one running in it is never able to cease from his progress.”[6] It is not that there is a lack of satisfaction, but an ever deepening desire and satiation. “He still thirsts for that with which he constantly filled himself to capacity, and he asks to attain as if he had never partaken, beseeching God to appear to him, not according to his capacity to partake, but according to God’s true being.”[7]

When I described this to my daughter, she said, “It sounds exhausting.” It may be that we tend to attach notions of rest and peace to stasis. Luther’s disparaging of works may tinge our conceptions of effort with a physical, or sinful agonistic struggle, but Gregory is offering up an alternative form of peace and stability. There is a stability in standing on the rock. “I mean by this that the firmer and more immovable one remains in the Good, the more he progresses in the course of virtue.”[8] It is the one who “is tossed one way and another (as the Apostle says)” or the one who is “doubtful,” or in Paul’s picture the one who seeks stability in the law, or something less than Christ, that experiences the exhaustion of effort and works. There is rest and peace to be found in putting on Christ, and this putting on is not subject to the “body of death.”

As Gregory describes, there can be a futility of effort, on the order of climbing a hill of sand, in which one is ever sliding back down the hill. There is a lot of effort but no progress. “But if someone, as the Psalmist says, should pull his feet up from the mud of the pit and plant them upon the rock (the rock is Christ who is absolute virtue), then the more steadfast and unmovable (according to the advice of Paul) he becomes in the Good.”[9] Gregory compares it to putting wings on the heart, and flying upward through the upward stabilizing draft of the good.

The cleft of the rock, in which God placed Moses during his vision of God (his being planted on the rock), Gregory says is “a heavenly house not made with hands which is laid up by hope for those who have dissolved their earthly tabernacle.”[10] The heavenly home, or the spiritual rock, is absolutely secure and stable, but this is not a delimiting stability, but a rock of ascent. According to Liviu Petcu, there is a stability in this “continuous ascension” on the order of climbing the rungs of a ladder, with each step leading to a higher step. “This movement is born out of the forever infinite distance between what he is from God and Who God is. The spiritual life is thus a permanent transformation of the soul in Christ, in the form of an ardour which grows more and more, as it becomes more united with and stabilised in God.”[11]

As Gregory says of Paul, “he is still hastening toward something higher and never leaves off his ascent by setting the good he has already grasped as a limit to his desires.”[12] There is a continual surpassing of the self or self-transcendence, as “God is always within us in unification and always outside of us, in His transcendency.”[13] The move toward God who is simultaneously dwelling within, and yet beyond and without, is not an object obtained at death, but a person with whom one is continually converging in eternal life.

Hence we find that the apostle taught this truth concerning the nature of the inexpressible goods when he said: “eye has not seen” that Good even if it be ever gazing upon it (for it does not see as much as there is, but only as much as the eye is capable of taking in); and “ear has not heard” the full extent of what is revealed, even though its hearing be ever receiving the Word; and “it has not entered into the human heart” (1 Cor 2:9) even though persons who are pure in heart may regularly see as much as they are capable of.[14]

There is a progression from glory to glory, a continual moving beyond to the ever-greater, the ever-fuller, and the ever-higher. While there is rest and peace that are incorporated into knowing God, this rest does not mean stasis but effort toward completion. “But now finish doing it also, so that just as there was the readiness to desire it, so there may be also the completion of it by your ability” (2 Cor. 8:11). With every end accomplished there is a new beginning, for where the beginning is in the end (which is Christ), the beginning is eternally stretched out, enabling a new step in the ascent to divine likeness. “Thus, no limit would interrupt growth in the ascent to God, since no limit to the good can be found nor is the increasing of desire for the good brought to an end because it is satisfied.”[15] There is a continuing depth of desire and satisfaction that knows no end in the stretching forth of being joined to Christ.

(Sign up for the upcoming class, “Lonergan & the Problem of Theological Method.” The course will run from the weeks of February 16th to April 11th. Also sign up for Sin and Salvation: An in-depth study of the meaning of sin and a description of the atonement as a defeat of sin and the basis of an alternative community in Christ. This course will run through the beginning of February to the end of March. Register here https://pbi.forgingploughshares.org/offerings)

[1] Gregory spells this out in his sermons on the Song of Songs. Gregory of Nyssa, ‘Homilies on the Song of Songs’, in Gregory of Nyssa: Homilies on the Song of Songs, ed. and trans. Richard A. Norris (Atlanta, GA: Society of Biblical Literature, 2012).

[2] Gregory of Nyssa, The Life of Moses, trans. Abraham J. Malherbe and Everett Ferguson, (New York, NY: Paulist Press, 1978), Book I paragraph, 10, p. 31.

[3] Life of Moses, I:5, 29.

[4] Gregory, Homily 8, 259.

[5] Gregory, Homily 8, 268.

[6] Life of Moses, II, 242, p, 116.

[7] Life of Moses, II, 230, p. 114.

[8] Life of Moses, II, 243, p. 117.

[9] Life of Moses, II, 244, pp. 117-118.

[10] Life of Moses, II, 245, p. 118.

[11] Liviu Petcu, “The Doctrine of Epektasis. One of the Major Contributions of Saint Gregory of Nyssa to the History of Thinking,” in Revista Portuguesa de Filosofia (ISSN 0870-5283; 2183-461X, Pages 771-782, 2017) 774.

[12] Gregory, Homily 8, 259

[13] Petcu, 774.

[14] Homily 8, 259-261.

[15] Life of Moses, 239, p. 115.