In grad school, I attended an inter-religious consortium of seminaries and institutes. One term while taking a class over at the Unitarian Universalist seminary, I recall telling a UU classmate that I am a “Trinitarian Universalist.”

That might well be a fancy way to say “Episcopalian,” although I doubt it. Our shared beliefs don’t usually get that specific.

But I am a universalist.

I believe, along with some of the ancient Church Fathers it turns out, that God will not only salvage some of God’s creatures from the wreckage; but God will actually restore all creation, fix the wreckage so that the damage is no longer there. Everyone and everything will be saved.

This is because it is God’s creation, and God loves it. And if anything can thwart the love of God, then Christianity is patently worthless.

I like putting it this way better than in terms of will: that God wills all to be saved, and no creature can thwart God’s will. I’m still not entirely sure where I stand on his whole system, but I am convinced by Thomas Oord’s assertion that God is “amipotent,” rather than “omnipotent,” that love is never coercive. It works by persuasion and cooperation. And it never stops its work. The love of God calls us to join God’s work in reconciling and restoring all things. We join that work by turning our own hearts, and doing what we can to turn the hearts of others, toward God. Toward Love.

Universalism is often derided as some kind of copout, like it betrays a belief that sin doesn’t matter.¹ We universalists are told that we don’t take evil actions seriously enough, or that we deny human freedom by not allowing people to choose eternity without God. As if anyone wants to be damned.

But universalism isn’t easy at all.

A Christian has to believe that God is judge and will condemn, and destroy, evil and sin. A Christian has to believe that our actions and commitments matter. I think we can all agree that they matter in the sense that we affect the world through our actions and commitments; but our tradition also teaches that—contrary to what our senses and experience report—in the end, it does not profit to “gain the whole world and lose [your] soul.”

We tend to understand that in terms of some final, permanent reckoning, where good people are rewarded and bad people are punished. Except that we’ve long been taught that we’re all bad, and would be damned, except Christ offers forgiveness to those who believe that he died for their sins,² so really the final judgment boils down to: believers are rewarded, and everyone else is damned. I’m not sure why this is thought to better satisfy anyone’s sense of justice than universalism can. If your reward or punishment really doesn’t have anything to do with your actions and (other) commitments in this world, but is based solely on your having believed something about Jesus (and churches differ on what that means or when that belief had to happen³)—then you’re actually sort of halfway to universalism anyway.

If you believe, as Christians do, that eternal life is a free gift from God that we can’t obtain on our own, then the difference between universalists and other Christians is how liberally we believe God gives that gift out. (Is God, say, like a farmer who hurls seed willy-nilly on all kinds of soil just in case it might take root?) Maybe there’s also a question of whether it really is free, or to whom it really is free. But I’ll never understand the Christian who thinks there’s no justice in universalism, but affirms that a good, self-giving non-Christian must be damned while the most hateful, murderous person only has to believe in Jesus a split second before death and is immediately ushered off to paradise.⁴

How could we truly worship a God who consigns everyone to damnation (whatever form that takes) unless they hold that God will forgive them their existential guilt only if they believe the right thing? Essentially, that would be a God who says, “Love me or else.” Given that choice, can you truly love such a God?

I’m not trying to prove universalism here. But I’m trying to at least gesture toward the fact that this isn’t just a lazy “anything goes” opinion I hold for whatever my feel-good reasons might be.

But I’m struggling right now.

I’m looking at real evil tightening its grip through the actions of individuals, some who have been plotting this for decades, and others who have just been along for the ride. I’m looking at real evil sweeping up masses of people as it moves to harm the most vulnerable just for the sport of it. As a result, there really is a part of me that wants to start believing in hell, and wants to believe some people might populate it.

And yet I can’t believe that.

I can’t believe it, not because I don’t want to see justice done, but because I believe justice looks different than what we usually want when we say the word.

I can’t believe in hell and damnation because I am, in fact, thoroughly convinced that they are manifestations of imperfect human longings projected onto God. As projections often do, they obscure our ability to see that God has better answers to our longings. Where we posit retribution, God offers restoration.

And that’s hard.

But what is it that we really want? Do we really want to see evildoers brought down because we want to gawk at violence meted out in a different direction? Or do we want them brought down because we want their evildoing to stop? Don’t we really want the oppressed to go free, the hurt to be healed, and losses restored? Can we really believe when Jesus said to love and forgive our enemies, that maybe, just maybe, it’s actually a thing that is possible to do (with God’s help)?

For victims’ rights to be affirmed rather than violated does not require that someone go to hell. I think it might help to imagine a perpetrator of great violence being set aside while their victims are attended to: that perpetrator in that moment would probably rather be the star of their own destruction rather than be relegated to obscurity and rendered powerless for however long that is needed.

For victims’ pain to be healed does not require that whoever hurt them must suffer too—apart from and in addition to whatever pains their process of conversion might entail.

For all the world to see that evil is decisively condemned does not require the total and permanent destruction of the perpetrators. One evil is not corrected by another.⁵

But to accomplish that healing and corrected vision without resorting to destruction and damnation is really, really hard.

That’s why it’s God’s business.

I’m not sure exactly what all this means right now, or how it will play out. I do know I’m not going to get it right all the time—maybe not even most of the time.

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1. My take on sin is a matter for another post some time. ↩︎
2. That’s a topic for another time as well. ↩︎
3. Ibid. ↩︎
4. There’s a lot to unpack here. I will try to do that at another time! ↩︎
5. I am a broken record down here in the footnotes. ↩︎