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How are we to give proper weight to each o f thes e pri nciples? First,

God is love,

and this love of His is generous, inexhaustible, infinitely patient. Surely , then, He will never stop loving any of the rational creatures whom He has made; He will continue to watch over them in His tender mercy until eventually, perhaps after countless ages, all of them freely and willingly turn back to Him. But in that case what happens to our second principle,

human beings are free?

If the triumph of divine love is inevitable, what place is there for liberty of choice? How can we be genuinely free if in the last resort there is nothing for us to choose between? Let us res tate the i ssue in a slightly different way . On the first page of the Bib le it is written, “God saw everything that He had made, and behold, it was altogether good and beautiful” (Gen 1:31,

lxx

). In the beginning, that is t o say , there was unity; all created t hings participated ful ly in the goodness, tru th and beauty of the Creator. Are we, then, to assert that at the end there will be not unity but duality? Is there to be a continuing oppositi on between good and evil, between heaven and hell, between joy and torment, that remains forever unresolved? If we start by affirming that God created a world which was wholly good, and if we then maintain that a significant part of His rational creation will end up in intolerable anguish, separated from Him for all eternity , surely this implies that God has failed in His creative work and has been defeated by the forces of evil. Are we t

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rest satisfied with such a conclusion? Or dare we look, however tentatively, beyond this duali ty to an ultimate restorati on of unity when “

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ll shall be well”? Rejecting t he possib ility of universal salvation, C. S. Lewis has stated: “Some will not be redeemed. Th ere is no doctrine which I would more willingly remove from Christianity than this, if it lay in my power. But it has the full support of Scripture and specially of Our Lord’s own words; it has always been held by Christendom; and it has the support of reason.’ ’

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Is Lewis right? Does universalism in fact contradict Scripture, tradition, and reason in such a stark and clear-cut way?

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Two strands of Scripture

It is not difficult to find texts in the New Tes tament that warn us, in what seem to be unambiguous terms, of the prospect of never-ending torment in hell. Let us take but three examples, each consisting of words attributed directly to Jesus.

Mark 943, 47-48.

“If your hand causes you to stumble, cut it off; it is better for you to enter life maimed than to have tw

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hands and to go to hell, to the unquenchable fire... And if your eye causes you to stumble, tear it out; it is better for you to enter the Kingdom of God with one eye than to have tw

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eyes and to be thrown into hell, where their worm does not die, and the fire is not quenched” (cf. Mt 18:8-9; Is 66:24).

Matthew 25:41

(from the story of the sheep and the goats). “Then He will say to those at His left hand, `Y ou that are accursed, depart from Me into the eternal fire.’”

Luke 16:26

(the words of Abraham to the rich man in hell). “Between you and us a great chasm has been fixed, so that those who might want to pass fro m here to you cannot do so, and no one can cross from there to us. It is difficult, if not impossible, to speak about th e life after death except throu gh the use of metaphors an d symbols. Not surprisingly , then, these three passages employ a metaphorical “picture language”: they speak in terms of “fire,” the “worm,” and a “great chasm.” The metaphors doubtless are not to be taken literally , but they have implications that are hard to avoid: the fire is said to be “unquenchable” and “eternal”; the worm “does not die”; the gulf is impassable. If “eternal”

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ionios,

Mt 25:41) in fact means no more than “age- long”—lasting, that is, throughout this present aeon but not necessarily continuing into the Age to come—and if the gulf is only temporarily impassable, then why is this not made clear in the New Testament? Y et these and other “hell-fire” texts need to be in terpreted in the light of different , less frequen tly cited passages from the New T estament, which point rat her in a “universalist” di rection. There is a series of

Pauline texts

which affirm a parallel between the universality of sin on the one hand and the universality of redemption on the other. The most obvious example is

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Corinthians 15:22,

where Paul is working out the analogy between the first and the second Adam: “As all die in Adam, so all will be made alive in Christ.” Surely the word “all” bears the same sense in both halves of this sentence. There are similar passages in Romans: “Jus t as one man’ s trespass led to condemnat ion for all, so one man’ s act of righteousness leads to justification and life for all” (5:18); “God has imprisoned all in disobedience, that He

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The Problem of Pain