Dare We Hope for the Salvation of All?

Benjamin Winter

9 years ago

1 Timothy 2:1–4: “I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings should be made for everyone, for kings and all who are in high positions, so that we may lead a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and dignity. This is right and is acceptable in the sight of God our Saviour, who desires everyone to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth.”

2 Peter 3:8–9: “But do not ignore this one fact, beloved, that with the Lord one day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like one day. The Lord is not slow about his promise, as some think of slowness, but is patient with you, not wanting any to perish, but all to come to repentance.”

These two beautiful passages ground my thoughts in this article, the purpose of which is to argue (from a Catholic perspective¹) that Christians can, and indeed should, hope for the salvation of all humanity.² I will begin by discussing one of Christ’s sayings that evokes eternal damnation. Then, I will provide my exegesis of the two passages quoted above. Finally, I will make some general comments on hell and the teaching of the Catholic Church.

Example of Christ’s Words

Hans Urs Von Balthasar’s book Dare We Hope that All Men be Saved continues to guide my thinking on this matter in general, and particularly on the subject of hell as depicted in the Bible. Balthasar proposes that Biblical descriptions of hell should be read primarily as personal warnings against the potential consequences of unrepentant sin. In Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus reminds his followers that when we help the hungry and thirsty, the strangers, and those needing care, we do these things to Him.³ Those who fail to act in this way are commanded to “depart from [Christ] into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.”⁴ Reflecting on this central passage, Balthasar comes to understand that its purpose is to bring about a change of mind (metanoia) in the reader. In this change of mind that is also a change of heart, “my seemingly small omissions take on such weight that I no longer have any time at all for glancing left and right in order to see how others are faring.”⁵ When a person falls at the feet of Christ in broken repentance, he can no longer “contrive his own escape from damnation through a purely individualistic conception of salvation … [and] abandon everyone else to the grinding wheels of hell.”⁶ Only by listening to Christ’s warnings with humility can believers become convinced that the love we so desperately need is, in fact, so much greater than our sin. This love—by its very nature—must extend to fill the entire universe!⁷ As Balthasar resoundingly affirms, “The conviction that ‘I am the least of all’ leads to the sudden awareness of my own precarious existential condition: the threat of eternal perdition is addressed, indeed, to me!”⁸ In another text, Love Alone is Credible, Balthasar clearly summarizes the Christology behind his views on the personal character of hell. Emphasizing the importance of Holy Saturday, he states that in “the God-forsakenness of the Crucified One,” human beings “see what we have been redeemed and saved from: the definitive loss of God, a loss we could never have spared ourselves [of] through any of our own efforts outside of grace.”⁹ Hence, Scripture passages talking about eternal torment are misused when applied to people other than ourselves, or when taken as primarily ontological (rather than primarily moral or exhortative) statements.

Exegesis

In the 1 Timothy passage (above), the historical leaders in “high positions” were hardly ever amenable to Christianity. In fact, most of them advocated emperor worship. These people were clearly not “on track for heaven.” And yet, Jesus commands us to love our enemies—to pray for those that hate us. If we are to pray for “everyone,” it follows that we should pray for those who have passed out of this world and into the next.¹⁰ Hence the Catholic Catechism #1058 states: “The Church prays that no one should be lost: ‘Lord, let me never be parted from you.’ If it is true that no one can save himself, it is also true that God ‘desires all men to be saved’ (1 Tim 2:4), and that for him ‘all things are possible.’ (Mt 19:26)”

Consider the following line of reasoning in light of both Scripture passages quoted above: If God desires something, then that something must be good. If God desires something good, it seems very hard for me, as a human, to say that God can’t have what God wants! God isn’t like a child (or even an adult human), who often wants something that is not truly good. What God wants (or what God “wills”) is only thwarted by the freedom God has granted to rational creatures.¹¹ For example, we know from the Scriptures of an angelic fall, in which some creatures used their freedom to turn against God. Because these beings are outside of time, their choice was single and final. The good angels, then, did not turn away from God. They used their freedom correctly.¹² But as humans, we live in time (unlike angels) and we make mistakes continually. The way we desire things cannot really be compared to the “wants” or “wills” of God, or even of angels. What is stopping God from fulfilling God’s desire that all be saved is human interference, human “headbutting” against God’s will.¹³ If we are too insistent about the power of this disobedience, it would seem as if we are placing the human will to rebel on par with God’s loving will to curb or redirect that rebellion. The situation wherein a person is continually rebelling forever and ever against God’s desire is theoretically possible (again, given human freedom), but highly implausible. Hence my stance on the issue is that we are in no position to go about saying that God can’t get what God wants. In fact, it makes more sense to align our “wants” to God’s “wants,” and pray that all be saved.

The Catholic Church Today

In his General Audience of 28 July 1999, Saint John Paul II stressed that hell is “the state of those who definitively reject the Father’s mercy, even at the last moment of their life.” Likewise, CCC 1033 teaches that “to die in mortal sin without repenting and accepting God’s merciful love means remaining separated from him for ever by our own free choice. This state of definitive self-exclusion from communion with God and the blessed is called hell.” Rather than a place, hell is simply what is experienced by those who condemn themselves, by rejecting God, to separation from God. See footnote 11, below, for arguments against a dualistic universe with heaven on one side and hell on another. Yet despite this line of reasoning (“state not a place”), the Catholic Catechism nonetheless also teaches the following:

The Church affirms the existence of hell and its eternity. Immediately after death the souls of those who die in a state of mortal sin descend into hell, where they suffer the punishments of hell, ‘eternal fire.’ The chief punishment of hell is eternal separation from God, in whom alone man can possess the life and happiness for which he was created and for which he longs.¹⁴

If a person dies in a state of mortal sin (i.e. rejecting God, sinning against the Holy Spirit), condemnation to hell follows. Furthermore, Christians traditionally did not pray for the souls of those dead who denied Christ. These facts, however, should not stop us from praying that 1) before death that person repented¹⁵, and that 2) God’s mercy will prevail, in a general sense.

In John 12:32, Jesus says that his sacrifice on the cross will “draw all people to himself.” The cross was a universe-changing event. Because of Christ’s all-sufficient sacrifice, because of God’s overflowing love that provides the offer of salvation to all, it is possible to pray that all will be saved. Indeed, it is an exercise in loving even our worst of enemies to pray for their salvation.

Concluding Remarks

Christ’s command, “do not judge, or you too will be judged” (Matt 7:1) applies, methinks, to us when we are tempted to use those passages in Scripture about eternal punishment against other people. Returning to Von Balthasar, we should really be looking to ourselves. We are the ones who need to repent! So in humility, let us turn to the Lord. In humility, let us consider others better than ourselves. In humility, let us dare to hope that God will save all people—not naively, in the sense of a “blanket” of universal salvation thrown over the recalcitrant—but in the sense that all will eventually come to their senses and stop placing obstacles in the way of God’s love.

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[1] But a perspective heavily formed by the East—from the Greek (and Syriac) Fathers to modern teachers of Orthodoxy like David Bentley Hart, who spoke to me about God getting what God wants (see paragraph 2, below). [2] Note that I am not saying we are in a position to know with certainty whether this will happen, and that I am not addressing the separate (but related) question of whether all created things—including the devil—will eventually return to God. [3] Matt 25:31-46. [4] Matt 25:41. [5] Balthasar, Dare We Hope, 90. [6] Hans Urs Von Balthasar, Love Alone is Credible, trans. D. C. Schindler (San Francisco: Ignatius, 2004), 97. [7] See Romans 8:31-32, 38-39: “What then are we to say about these things? If God is for us, who is against us?He who did not withhold his own Son, but gave him up for all of us, will he not with him also give us everything else? … For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” [8] Balthasar, A Short Discourse on Hell, 248-49. [9] Balthasar, Love Alone is Credible, 93. [10] The modern view of what happens directly after death is very different from views held in the past. In the early and medieval periods, practices like prayer to the saints and prayer for the dead arose because of attitudes people held concerning what happens after death. This is a very difficult subject to talk about today, since reflections on what happens to the soul (the part of us that is not tied to the body, the part that “survives” our death here in this world) has really faded away in most Protestant circles. For example, when I was trying to explain to a relative why Catholics ask saints to pray for us, she looked at me and said: “Ben, those people can’t pray for you…they’re dead.” I replied, “No, they are alive in Christ!” Life does not end at death, and a person does not cease to be who they are when they die. Here it may be helpful to recall that the Catholic Church, drawing from both tradition and Scripture, distinguishes between a particular judgment (which happens to each soul at the moment of death) and the final judgment (which happens to all people when Christ returns). Without this separation between the two judgments, which was held in common throughout the early and medieval periods, there would never be practices such as prayer to saints or even prayer for the souls of the dead. Protestants tend to conflate the particular and the final judgment, typically using Hebrews 9:26–28 (“once to die and then the judgment,” but here the context speaks of Christ primarily—clearly the author is not writing to describe what happens after death. Even if he were, the passage could easily describe the particular judgment) and 1 Corinthians 15:52 (“blink of an eye,” but this describes the final judgment, since it speaks of the dead being raised from the earth, and of other final judgment events like us regaining our bodies). I think it is possible to argue from Scripture for a separation between particular and final judgments. A great example that cannot be explained in the Protestant paradigm is the story of Lazarus the beggar (Lk 16:19–31). For more on this topic, see the Catholic Catechism. I may write a separate article at some point about these doctrines, but for now I merely give this info to expand on my point about prayer “in this world and the next.” [11] It makes no sense to say that God’s sovereignty, God’s “supreme power or authority,” can somehow contradict what God wants. God is not a sadist. God does not WANT to damn people. It always happens because humans turn away from God. And this is evidenced throughout the Bible (except perhaps in the difficult case of Saul, the only truly tragic hero in Scripture). We all do it to some extent, but we are wrong to imagine a bifurcated universe with God on one end and hell on the other—the dualistic universe this image seems to suggest. In reality, God is all that there is. If unconvinced, read Pseudo-Dionysius, Divine Names, Chapter 4. [12] As the book of James reminds us, God’s law is a “law of liberty” (Jas 2:12). [13] Unless you want to create a third variable (such as “nature” or “circumstances”) somehow not under God’s control which separately influences man; or, unless you want to say that God can will some not to be saved, which directly contradicts the two passages that begin this article. “To think that my choice can go up against God’s choice in a mano a mano way is to shrink God down to a creature. If I have to choose between me and God, then I haven’t understood God rightly. Judas is the focal point for this mystery: freedom and responsibility are part and parcel to what it means to be a human being. This image is helpful: God is like a lure beckoning us into the future, and we’re walking toward God, and God is walking backward, laying out possibilities for us. We make a choice, then God says ‘OK, let me lay out these choices for you here.’ Those possibilities are offered, in a sense, as gifts. There are many choices, and it’s not equivalent to a person being ‘stringed along.’ Those who seek ultimate human autonomy would say ‘This is not real freedom, because the possibilities are limited.’ But this is just a way to imagine what it would look like from our perspective, in time. God is eternal—everything is now for God.” [14] CCC 1035 [15] Which is always possible, especially since biological death is tricky to define, and no one really knows what journeys we may go on during those last few seconds of brain activity…