Chapter 29

Why Every Knee Will Bow Willingly—Evangelism, Mission, and the Goodness of the Good News

Introduction

I want to tell you about a conversation that changed the way I think about sharing my faith. A few years ago, a friend of mine—a sincere, passionate Christian who had spent over a decade doing missionary work in Southeast Asia—sat across from me at a coffee shop and said something I will never forget. “If I believed what you believe,” he said, leaning forward, his voice tight, “I’d never preach again. Why would I? If everyone gets saved in the end, what’s the point?”

I understood why he said it. I really did. For years, I had thought the same thing. The engine that drove my evangelism was a sense of terrified urgency: people are dying, hell is real, and every moment I waste is a moment someone might slip into eternal ruin. If you remove the threat of permanent destruction from the equation, doesn’t the whole machine grind to a halt?

That afternoon, I told my friend what I’m going to tell you in this chapter. By the time we were done, he was quiet for a long time. Then he said, “I think you might actually have better reasons to preach than I do.”

This chapter has two goals. First, I want to complete the argument we’ve been building across the last three chapters. In Chapter 27, we saw that God pursues His lost children beyond the boundary of death, reaching into Hades itself with the proclamation of the gospel. In Chapter 28, we explored the mechanism of that pursuit—how God’s purifying, relentless love burns away the bondage of sin and restores genuine freedom. Now, in Chapter 29, we arrive at the climax: God prevails. Every knee bows. Every tongue confesses. And that confession is not the forced submission of a conquered enemy—it is the willing, joyful, Spirit-empowered praise of a child who has finally come home.

Second, I want to tackle head-on the most common practical objection to universal restoration: that it undermines evangelism and mission. I want to show you that the opposite is true. The hope of universal restoration doesn’t weaken the gospel message—it makes it genuinely, completely, unreservedly good news.

The Culmination: God Pursues, God Purifies, God Prevails

We need to step back and see where we are in the argument. Think of Chapters 27 through 29 as a single movement with three beats, like the three acts of a great story.

In the first act (Chapter 27), we established the biblical case for postmortem salvation. Christ descended into Hades. He preached to the spirits in prison (1 Pet. 3:18–20). The gospel was proclaimed even to the dead, “so that, though they had been judged in the flesh as everyone is judged, they might live in the spirit as God does” (1 Pet. 4:6). God’s saving reach extends beyond the grave. There is nowhere in all creation—not even in Sheol—where a person can flee from His presence (Ps. 139:7–8). This is common ground for us. You already believe in the postmortem opportunity. You already believe that death does not shut the door on God’s grace.

In the second act (Chapter 28), we explored how that postmortem encounter works. It is not a casual “second chance” in some cheap sense. It is the moment when a person stands face-to-face with the God who made them, who loved them before they were born, who died for them, and who has been pursuing them across every moment of their existence. The fire of God’s love burns away the bondage of sin—not by overriding freedom, but by restoring it. Just as an alcoholic freed from addiction is not less free but more free, so the soul liberated from sin’s chains is finally able to choose what it has always, in its deepest created nature, wanted to choose: the God who is its home.¹

Now we arrive at the third act. What is the result of God’s relentless pursuit and purifying love? Paul gives us the answer in one of the most breathtaking passages in all of Scripture.

Every Knee Will Bow: The Promise of Philippians 2

“Therefore God exalted him to the highest place and gave him the name that is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father” (Phil. 2:9–11).

We explored this passage in detail in Chapter 19, where we examined its connection to Colossians 1:15–20 and its role in Paul’s theology of cosmic reconciliation. I won’t repeat that full exegesis here. But in this chapter I want to press on a specific question that is absolutely critical for the argument we’re building: Is this confession willing or forced?

The traditional reading—held by many commentators across the centuries—says that yes, every knee will bow, but not every knee will bow willingly. The saved will bow in joyful worship. The damned will bow in grudging defeat, forced to acknowledge Christ’s lordship before being sent to their final punishment. On this view, the universal confession of Philippians 2 is like the surrender of a defeated army—compelled, bitter, and meaningless.²

I want to show you why this reading cannot be right.

The Isaiah 45 Connection

The first thing to notice is that Paul is quoting the Old Testament. Philippians 2:10–11 is a direct allusion to Isaiah 45:23: “By myself I have sworn, my mouth has uttered in all integrity a word that will not be revoked: Before me every knee will bow; by me every tongue will swear.” Paul takes this divine oath from Isaiah and applies it to Jesus. Every knee that was going to bow before Yahweh will now bow before Christ.³

Here’s what matters: look at the context in Isaiah. Just one verse earlier, God says, “Turn to me and be saved, all the ends of the earth!” (Isa. 45:22). This is not a threat. It is an invitation. It is a salvation text. God is calling the nations to Himself, and the knee-bowing that follows is the response to that invitation—the response of nations who have turned and been saved.⁴

And look at what follows in Isaiah 45:24: “They will say of me, ‘Only in the LORD are righteousness and strength.’” Those are not the words of a defeated enemy being dragged before a conqueror. Those are words of willing confession. Words of praise. Words of people who have come to recognize that everything they ever needed was in God all along.⁵

Paul was a trained rabbi. He knew Isaiah inside and out. When he quoted Isaiah 45:23, he did not strip it from its context and give it a meaning that Isaiah never intended. He carried the full salvific weight of the original passage into his new application. The knee-bowing in Philippians 2 carries the same meaning it had in Isaiah 45: willing confession, willing praise, willing salvation.⁶

The Scope Is Universal

Paul also does something remarkable with the Isaiah text. In Isaiah, the scope was the living nations—those who survived the coming judgment would bow. But Paul expands the scope in a way that should take our breath away. He says every knee will bow “in heaven and on earth and under the earth.” Robin Parry points out that this three-part phrase is Paul’s way of saying “absolutely everyone and everything.” It is ancient cosmological language for the totality of existence—the heavenly realm, the earthly realm, and the realm of the dead.⁷

This goes far beyond what Isaiah envisioned. In Isaiah, the dead were dead. Here, even those “under the earth”—the dead—will bow and confess. As John Chrysostom recognized centuries ago, this phrase means “the whole world, and angels, and men, and demons.”⁸ No one is excluded. Every single person who has ever drawn breath will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord.

The question, then, is not whether every knee will bow. On that point, there is virtually no disagreement among commentators. The question is what kind of bowing this is.

The Meaning of “Confess”

This is where the Greek gets important, and I promise to keep it accessible. The word Paul uses for “confess” in Philippians 2:11 is exomologeo. This is a word with a rich history, and its meaning matters enormously for our question.

Marvin Vincent, the great Greek scholar, notes that exomologeo carries the idea of “frank, open confession” and adds that there is “no objection to adding the idea with thanksgiving.” When the same word appears in Romans 14:11—where Paul quotes the very same Isaiah passage—Vincent comments that it means “primarily to acknowledge, confess, or profess from the heart. To make a confession to one’s honor; thence to praise.”⁹

Think about that for a moment. Professing “from the heart.” Making a confession “to one’s honor.” Giving “praise.” Can you imagine someone doing any of that under compulsion? Can you imagine being forced to profess something from the heart?

J. B. Lightfoot, one of the most respected New Testament scholars in history, argued that in the Septuagint—the Greek Old Testament that Paul knew intimately—the secondary sense of exomologeo, meaning “to offer praise or thanksgiving,” had almost entirely taken over from the primary meaning of “to declare openly.” James Dunn, another towering New Testament scholar, agrees with Lightfoot’s reading. Dunn says that in Romans 14:11, exomologeo “almost certainly is intended in its usual LXX sense: acknowledge, confess, praise.”¹⁰

Thomas Talbott drives the point home powerfully. He writes that Paul “chose a verb that throughout the Septuagint implies not only confession, but the offer of praise and thanksgiving as well.” And then Talbott makes the crucial distinction: “A ruling monarch may indeed force a subject to bow against that subject’s will, may even force the subject to utter certain words; but praise and thanksgiving can come only from the heart.”¹¹

That is exactly right. You can force someone to kneel. You can force someone to say words. But you cannot force someone to praise. Praise, by its very nature, is voluntary. It comes from the inside out. And that is precisely the word Paul chose to describe what every tongue will do at the name of Jesus.

Thomas Johnson brings the linguistic evidence to a sharp point when he observes that every use of exomologeo in the New Testament connotes a voluntary confession. He writes: “Inherent in the nature of confession is willing and, sometimes, joyful acknowledgment. It will not do to suppose that the humble confession of Phil. 2:11 is a reluctant and forced confession from Jesus’ conquered enemies.”¹²

The 1 Corinthians 12:3 Argument

Now we come to what I believe is one of the single strongest arguments in the entire universalist case. It is an argument so simple, so clean, and so devastating that once you see it, you cannot unsee it.

In 1 Corinthians 12:3, Paul writes: “No one can say ‘Jesus is Lord’ except by the Holy Spirit.”

In Philippians 2:11, Paul writes that every tongue will “confess that Jesus Christ is Lord.”

Put those two statements together. Every tongue will confess that Jesus is Lord. And no one can make that confession except by the Holy Spirit. The conclusion follows with airtight logic: every person who confesses will do so by the power of the Holy Spirit.¹³

Now, is a confession that is empowered by the Holy Spirit a forced confession? Is a Spirit-empowered confession grudging? Reluctant? Meaningless? Of course not. A confession that the Holy Spirit produces is, by definition, genuine. It is the very thing Paul tells the Romans leads to salvation: “If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved” (Rom. 10:9).¹⁴

Parry makes this point with characteristic clarity. He observes that elsewhere in Paul’s letters, when he speaks of confessing Jesus as Lord, it is always in a context of salvation. There are no exceptions. There are no examples in Paul of an involuntary confession of Christ’s Lordship. The word exomologeomai, Parry writes, “is a word almost always meaning ‘praise.’ Throughout the LXX version of the Psalms it is used of the joyful and voluntary praise of God, and that is how it is used in the LXX source text of Isaiah 45:23. There is no good linguistic reason to think Paul was using it in any other way here.”¹⁵

I want you to feel the weight of this. We are not making a speculative argument. We are not reading between the lines. We are taking two explicit statements from the same apostle, placing them side by side, and following the logic wherever it leads. Paul says every tongue will confess Jesus as Lord. Paul says no one can make that confession except by the Holy Spirit. Therefore, every person will be brought to a genuine, Spirit-empowered confession of Christ’s Lordship. And if that confession is genuine and Spirit-empowered, then it is salvific—because that is exactly what Paul says genuine confession of Jesus as Lord is (Rom. 10:9).¹⁶

The Absurdity of Forced Worship

The traditional reading—that some will bow willingly while others bow under compulsion—has a problem that goes even deeper than the Greek. It has a problem with God.

Think about this: the traditional view tells us that God respects human free will so profoundly that He will allow people to reject Him all the way to permanent destruction. God would rather lose His children forever than override their freedom. That is the entire foundation of the free-will defense against universalism. And yet, the same tradition tells us that at the very end, God will override their freedom—not to save them, but to humiliate them. He will force them to kneel, force them to mouth the words “Jesus is Lord,” and then send them away to their doom.¹⁷

Do you see the contradiction? God won’t override freedom to save anyone, but He will override freedom to humiliate them? He respects their autonomy too much to rescue them, but not too much to force them into a meaningless ritual of submission? As the author of Patristic Universalism puts it: the traditional view “asks us to believe that God will grant us all the freedom in the world even to our own eternal damnation while we’re alive on earth and will only force His will on us after we’re dead and it’s too late. Wouldn’t it have been more compassionate for God to force His people to love Him before they died so that they would end up in heaven instead?”¹⁸

And there is a further question: would God even accept forced worship? We know from Scripture that God rejects worship that comes from impure hearts. Through Isaiah, God told His own people: “Bring your worthless offerings no longer. Incense is an abomination to Me. New moon and sabbath, the calling of assemblies—I cannot endure iniquity and the solemn assembly” (Isa. 1:13). If God rejected the willing but hollow worship of His own covenant people, why would He accept the coerced worship of conquered souls? A Hitler might take pleasure in forcing defeated enemies to kneel, but the God of truth and love has no interest in fraudulent worship.¹⁹

Talbott makes this point with devastating clarity. If those who bow before Jesus Christ and declare His Lordship do so sincerely and by their own choice, then there is only one explanation: they have been reconciled to God. But if they do not do so sincerely—if they are instead forced to make obeisance against their will—“then their actions are merely fraudulent and bring no glory to God.” Talbott concludes: “A Hitler may take pleasure in forcing his defeated enemies to make obeisance against their will, but a God who honors the truth could not possibly participate in such a fraud.”²⁰

This is the God we’re talking about. The God who is truth. The God who is love. And this God has announced, through the pen of His apostle, that every tongue will confess Jesus Christ as Lord “to the glory of God the Father.” If that confession is forced, it brings no glory. If it brings no glory, then God’s stated purpose for the confession fails. But God’s purposes do not fail. The confession is genuine. It brings real glory. And that means every person who makes it has been brought, by the Holy Spirit, to genuine, saving faith.²¹

The Bible Knowledge Commentary Contradiction

I want to highlight one more detail that shows how difficult it is to maintain the “forced confession” reading. The Bible Knowledge Commentary—a standard reference work used by many conservative evangelicals—interprets the knee-bowing in Romans 14:11 as consisting only of believers. On that reading, the confession is obviously willing and uncoerced. But the same commentary interprets the knee-bowing in Philippians 2:10–11 as including both the saved and the unsaved, and therefore concludes that the confession is partly willing and partly forced.²²

But wait. Paul is quoting the same passage from Isaiah in both places. How can the same apostle, quoting the same Old Testament text, mean two completely different things? How can the confession in Romans 14:11 be voluntary and genuine while the confession in Philippians 2:11—using the same Greek word, the same source text, the same theological framework—be coerced and meaningless? The answer is: it can’t. The commentary is trying to have it both ways, and the seams are showing.²³

The simpler and more consistent reading is the one the universalist offers: in both Romans 14 and Philippians 2, Paul quotes Isaiah 45 to describe a genuine, willing, salvific confession that encompasses every person who has ever lived. The scope is universal. The confession is real. The result is salvation.

But What About Evangelism?

Now we come to the question my missionary friend asked me in that coffee shop. If every person will eventually be saved, why preach? Why share the gospel? Why risk your life to bring good news to unreached people groups if God is going to get them all in the end anyway?

I have a lot to say about this, so let me take it piece by piece.

You Already Have This “Problem”

The first thing I want to point out is that this objection is one you’ve already faced and already answered—you just may not have noticed.

You believe in the postmortem opportunity. You believe that people who never heard the gospel in this life will have a genuine opportunity to respond to Christ after death. You believe that God is just enough and loving enough to ensure that no one is condemned for failing to respond to a message they never received. And yet, you still believe in evangelism. You still believe the Great Commission matters. You still believe that sharing the gospel is urgent and important.²⁴

So here’s my question: if the postmortem opportunity doesn’t undermine evangelism for you, why would universal restoration undermine it? The logic is exactly the same. In both cases, there is a “safety net” beyond death. In both cases, God continues to offer grace after the grave. The only difference is that the universalist believes God’s postmortem offer is ultimately successful for everyone, while the conditionalist believes it succeeds only for some. But the existence of the safety net itself is identical.²⁵

If the postmortem opportunity can coexist with passionate evangelism—and it does, in your own life—then universal restoration can too. The objection that universalism kills evangelism applies equally to the postmortem opportunity itself. Since you’ve already resolved it for yourself in one context, the same resolution works in the other.²⁶

The Calvinist Parallel

There is another parallel that makes the same point from a different angle. Parry observes that J. I. Packer—one of the great Anglican evangelicals and a five-point Calvinist—has argued that universalism “undermines the decisiveness of decisions made in this life, and the urgency of evangelism here in this life.” Packer sees this as a devastating critique.²⁷

But here’s the irony. As a Calvinist, Packer believes that God has already chosen the elect before the foundation of the world. The elect will be saved. Nothing can prevent it. So the Calvinist faces an exactly analogous objection: if God will save the elect anyway, why bother proclaiming the gospel to them? They will be saved one way or another.²⁸

Packer’s response—and it is a good one—is that the way God saves the elect is through the proclamation of the gospel. God has ordained the means as well as the end. The preaching of the gospel is the instrument through which God brings His elect to faith. Parry’s reply is wonderfully pointed: “If that response saves Calvinism, it will save universalism also; and if the criticism damns universalism it damns Calvinism too.”²⁹

The universalist makes the same move. The way God brings all people to faith is through the proclamation of the gospel—in this life and, where necessary, beyond it. We are God’s ambassadors of reconciliation (2 Cor. 5:18–20). We are the instruments He has chosen to use. The fact that He will ultimately succeed does not make our role unnecessary any more than the certainty of the harvest makes the farmer’s plowing unnecessary. God works through us. The guarantee of the outcome does not eliminate the importance of the process.

People Are Suffering Now

Here is the point that changed everything for me. The reason I share the gospel is not primarily about what happens after death. It is about what is happening right now.

Think about it. Every day that someone lives without Christ is a day of unnecessary suffering. A day of broken relationships, unforgiven guilt, corroding shame, spiritual emptiness, bondage to destructive habits, and alienation from the God who made them. Sin isn’t just a legal problem that gets you in trouble at the final judgment. Sin is a present slavery that robs people of the life God created them to enjoy.³⁰

If a doctor knew that every one of her patients would eventually recover from a disease, would she stop treating them? Would she walk past a patient writhing in agony and say, “Well, you’ll get better eventually”? Of course not. The point of medical care is to end suffering now, not merely to prevent death. You treat the patient in front of you because they are hurting today, regardless of what you believe about their long-term prognosis.³¹

The same is true of the gospel. We preach Christ because people need Him now. The addict chained to substance abuse needs liberation now. The woman drowning in guilt needs forgiveness now. The man consumed by rage needs the peace of God now. The teenager who feels worthless needs to know they are loved by their Creator now. Salvation is not just a ticket to paradise after you die. It is the transforming power of God breaking into your life today. As Jesus said to Zacchaeus: “Today salvation has come to this house” (Luke 19:9). Not someday. Today.³²

Sharon Baker captures this brilliantly. She points out that when Christians think of evangelism primarily as “fire insurance”—getting people saved so they avoid hell—they miss the entire point. “The reason for my salvation was not to keep me out of hell,” she writes, “but for me to work with God and others to bring about the good news, the kingdom of God right here on earth, by transforming lives with the gospel. If the kingdom of God is now, then salvation is now too—not merely for some eternal existence, but for this existence.”³³

Obedience to Christ’s Command

There is an even more basic reason we evangelize, and it has nothing to do with our theology of final outcomes. Jesus told us to do it.

“Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you” (Matt. 28:19–20). This is the Great Commission. It is a direct command from our risen Lord. Whatever we believe about the final destiny of the unevangelized, the command stands. As John Sanders rightly puts it: “If the explicit instructions of our Lord are not motivation enough for evangelicals to engage in missions, then perhaps they are not as committed to the authority of Jesus as they claim.”³⁴

James Beilby makes this point with a memorable analogy. Imagine a father asks his son to mow the lawn. The son responds, “Well, Dad, I know that you care how the lawn looks, and if I don’t do it, you’ll mow it yourself before the grass gets too long. And you’d do a better job than I would anyway.” Even if the son is perfectly right about all of that, Beilby observes, his response is “a spectacular exercise in missing the point.” The question is not whether the lawn will get mowed eventually. The question is whether the father has a right to make the request and expect to be obeyed.³⁵

Beilby adds that obeying Christ’s commission should not feel like drudgery. Citing Lesslie Newbigin, he suggests that “the deepest motive for mission is simply the desire to be with Jesus where he is, on the frontier between the reign of God and the usurped dominion of the devil.” Fulfilling the Great Commission is not the spiritual equivalent of a teenager being forced to push-mow a lawn on a hot day. It is more like a four-year-old being told to open presents on Christmas morning. It is invitation into joy.³⁶

The Love of Christ Compels Us

Paul did not evangelize primarily out of fear for the lost. He evangelized because he could not help himself. “The love of Christ compels us,” he wrote (2 Cor. 5:14). He was a man who had been seized by a love so overwhelming that he could not keep it to himself. He was willing to become “all things to all people” for the sake of the gospel (1 Cor. 9:22). He told the Romans he was “bound both to Greeks and non-Greeks, both to the wise and the foolish” (Rom. 1:14). That sense of indebtedness—of having received something so astonishing that he simply had to pass it on—was the engine of Paul’s mission.³⁷

Michael Green, the historian of early Christian mission, makes this observation about the earliest believers: “Believers do not evangelize because they have carefully calculated the probabilities of universalism, annihilation, or unending torment. They go because they have fallen in love with the great Lover. They go because they have been set free by the great Liberator. They love him and they want that love to reach others. It is far too good to keep to themselves.”³⁸

That is exactly how the universalist feels. In fact, the universalist has an additional motivation that the conditionalist lacks. Parry points this out with characteristic insight. The conditionalist believes that the people who are condemned to hell at the final judgment will simply cease to exist. The universalist believes they will endure a real, painful, terrifying purification before being restored. That means the universalist has a reason to evangelize that the conditionalist does not: to spare people from the coming suffering of purifying judgment. Every person who comes to faith in Christ in this life is a person who is spared the agonizing fire of postmortem purification.³⁹

Premortem Conversion Matters

This is a point that deserves special emphasis, because it is often overlooked. The universalist is not saying that it doesn’t matter when you come to faith. It matters enormously.

Beilby makes a strong case that premortem conversion has unique value. A person who comes to faith in this life gets to enjoy fellowship with God, the community of the church, the guidance of the Holy Spirit, and the transforming power of the gospel for the rest of their earthly existence. They get to participate in God’s mission. They get to experience the abundant life Jesus promised (John 10:10). They get to grow in holiness, bear fruit, and store up treasures in heaven. All of that is lost for the person who only comes to faith after death.⁴⁰

Think of it this way. Imagine two people who both eventually graduate from college. One enrolls at eighteen and enjoys four years of learning, friendship, growth, and preparation. The other drops out at eighteen, spends twenty miserable years in dead-end jobs, and finally enrolls at thirty-eight. Both graduate. But their experiences are radically different. The first got to enjoy the blessing of education for decades longer than the second. The fact that both eventually reach the same destination does not mean the journey was irrelevant.

The person who knows Christ in this life is not just “saved eventually”—they are transformed now. They experience the firstfruits of resurrection life now. They become agents of reconciliation in a broken world now. And they avoid the painful purification that awaits those who enter eternity still bound by sin. The urgency of evangelism is not diminished by universal restoration. If anything, it is intensified.

The Goodness of the Good News

Now I want to make an argument that goes beyond mere defense. I don’t just want to show that universalism is compatible with evangelism. I want to show that universalism gives us a better gospel to preach.

What Kind of “Good News” Are We Sharing?

The word “gospel” means “good news.” That’s what the Greek word euangelion literally means. When the angels appeared to the shepherds at Jesus’ birth, they announced “good tidings of great joy which will be to all people” (Luke 2:10). Not good tidings for some. Not good tidings with a devastating asterisk at the bottom. Good tidings of great joy for all people.

Now here is a question I want you to sit with: is the gospel you’re preaching genuinely good news for all people?

On the conditionalist view, the message goes something like this: “God loves you and sent His Son to die for you. If you accept Him, you will live forever in paradise. If you reject Him—or if you never hear about Him, or if you hear a distorted version, or if you live in a time and place where the gospel never reaches you—you might have a postmortem opportunity, but if you still don’t respond, God will destroy you permanently.” That is good news with a significant caveat. It is a conditional offer, and the condition might not be met.

On the universalist view, the message is this: “God loves you. Christ died for you. Nothing in all creation can separate you from that love. God will never stop pursuing you, never stop loving you, and never give up on you. The final chapter of your story is not destruction—it is restoration. Come to Him now and experience the joy of knowing Him today, or come to Him later through the painful fire of purification—but either way, you will come home. Every prodigal comes home.”

Which of those messages is genuinely, completely, unreservedly good news?⁴¹

The author of The Triumph of Mercy makes this point with a powerful illustration. He imagines what a truly unadulterated gospel proclamation would sound like from a missionary who believes in universal restoration. The message would be something like: “We were all created in the image of God to enjoy communion with Him. Our first parents disobeyed God and all of us since that time have lived in disobedience. Separated from our Creator, we have brought upon ourselves suffering and death. But the good news is that God did not leave us in our lost condition. In the fullness of time God sent His Son to live as one of us. He lived a life of perfect obedience but offered himself to die in our place, taking the guilt for all our disobedience. God raised Him from the dead. Even as in Adam all stood condemned, now in Christ all are justified through faith in Him. God reconciled all of fallen, sinful creation to Himself through the blood of His cross and He entreats you through us to become reconciled to Him in your hearts. Now is the best time to bow the knee to Him in loving surrender.”⁴²

Compare that message to the one that many traditional missionaries have carried. The author of The Triumph of Mercy recounts the story of a group of indigenous people who, upon hearing the traditional gospel for the first time, responded: “We would have all gone to heaven if you just hadn’t come here. Now many of us will probably go to this never-ending hell!” When the “good news” makes people wish the missionary had never arrived, something has gone terribly wrong with our message.⁴³

An Unusual Sense of Urgency

The author of Patristic Universalism makes a fascinating observation about the early church’s approach to evangelism. If the traditional view is correct—that all people must accept Christ before they die or before Christ returns, with no opportunity afterward—then neither Jesus nor His disciples seemed to be in any great hurry to reach the lost. After receiving the Great Commission in Matthew 28, none of the disciples raised a concern about reaching everyone before Christ returned, even though they expected His return to happen within their lifetimes (1 Cor. 15:51; 1 Thess. 4:15–18).⁴⁴

The author uses a helpful analogy. Imagine two messages you need to deliver to two cities. The first message: a rich benefactor is going to pay off everyone’s mortgage in six months. The second message: a devastating hurricane will destroy the city in six months. In both cases, you would feel urgency. But the degree of urgency would be vastly different. For the first message, you would want to spread the good news quickly, but if you didn’t reach everyone in time, it’s not catastrophic—they’ll still benefit. For the second message, you would be running from house to house, knocking down doors, frantic to reach every single person before it’s too late.⁴⁵

The early disciples’ behavior looks much more like the first scenario than the second. They had urgency, yes—but it was the urgency of people sharing something wonderful, not the panic of people trying to save others from imminent, irreversible destruction. When Paul preached on Mars Hill (Acts 17:19–34) to a group of people who, on the traditional view, were heading straight for eternal ruin, he never once mentioned the name of Jesus. He spoke about the unknown God, about creation, about repentance. If the clock were really ticking toward permanent destruction with no postmortem remedy, would Paul have used his limited time this way?⁴⁶

The universalist sense of urgency matches what we actually see in the New Testament far better than the frantic, panicked urgency that the traditional view demands. We share the gospel because it is astonishingly good news and people need to hear it—not because a countdown timer is running on their eternal existence.

Fear Is a Poor Foundation

Someone might respond: “But fear of hell is a powerful motivator. It gets results. It has driven centuries of missionary effort and evangelistic zeal.”

I don’t deny that fear can motivate. It can. The question is whether it should, and whether the faith it produces is the kind of faith God desires.

Jesus said the greatest commandment is to love God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength (Mark 12:30). He did not say the greatest commandment is to be terrified of God. A faith that is built primarily on fear is a thin, anxious, fragile faith. It is the faith of a servant who obeys because he is afraid of being punished, not the faith of a child who obeys because she loves her Father and trusts His goodness.⁴⁷

Baker tells a story from her own experience. As a new Christian, she attended an “Evangelism Explosion” course at her Baptist church. The main question they were taught to ask people was: “If you were to die tonight, would you go to heaven? Why or why not?” She reflects: “This was a totally otherworldly focused marketing strategy for obtaining fire insurance.” It wasn’t until years later that she realized the gospel was not primarily about escaping hell. It was about being caught up into the transforming, world-changing, life-giving purposes of God—right now.⁴⁸

Parry adds an important observation. Even among those who believe in eternal conscious torment, the terror of hell is less and less effective as a motivator for mission in Western culture. The wider culture simply does not respond to threats of hellfire the way it once did. If the primary motivation for evangelism has always been fear of eternal punishment, and that motivation is losing its power, then we need better motivations—or we need to recognize that fear was never supposed to be the primary motivation in the first place. The universalist already has those better motivations. The gospel is good news. Sharing good news is a joy, not a burden.⁴⁹

Ambassadors of Reconciliation

Paul gives us one of the most beautiful descriptions of the Christian’s mission in 2 Corinthians 5:18–20: “All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation: that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting people’s sins against them. And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation. We are therefore Christ’s ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us. We implore you on Christ’s behalf: Be reconciled to God.”

Notice the language. God is reconciling the world to Himself. Not counting people’s sins against them. Making His appeal through us. We are ambassadors. This is a mission of reconciliation, not a mission of threat. We are not delivering an ultimatum. We are delivering an invitation from a God who has already done everything necessary to bring reconciliation about and now asks us to carry that message to the ends of the earth.⁵⁰

On the universalist view, the ambassador knows that the reconciliation will ultimately be complete. Every nation, every tribe, every tongue will be reconciled. The ambassador’s message is not “accept this or be destroyed” but “the reconciliation is real, the love is unfailing, the homecoming is certain—come home now and begin living in the joy of it today.” That is a message worth giving your life for.⁵¹

A Vision Worth Living For

The universalist evangelist looks at the person across the table—or the stranger on the street, or the unreached tribal group in a remote jungle—and sees something that the conditionalist and the traditional believer do not. The universalist sees someone whose story will end in restoration. Someone for whom Christ’s death will accomplish its intended purpose. Someone who will one day bow willingly before Jesus and confess His Lordship with genuine praise.

And the universalist evangelist says: “You don’t have to wait until after a painful purifying fire to discover how much God loves you. You can know it now. You can be transformed by it now. You can begin the life you were created for now. Why suffer a moment longer than you have to in the far country when the Father is already running toward you with open arms?”

That is a message so beautiful, so hopeful, so filled with the genuine goodness of God that I believe it is more compelling, not less, than the message of fear. It is the kind of good news that makes people say, “Tell me more,” rather than “I wish you had never come.”

Parry puts it this way: the universalist Christian shares with other Christians many motivations for gospel proclamation—to obey Christ’s command, to save people from coming judgment, to bring them into living fellowship with the triune God and His church. But the universalist is “perhaps more likely to be additionally inspired by a more unusual reason—the vision that in proclaiming the gospel one is playing a part in God’s glorious purpose of reconciling the whole of creation (Col. 1:20) and summing all things up in Christ (Eph. 1:10). Working with the Spirit in bringing about this glorious destiny is a strong motive for evangelism and mission.”⁵²

Addressing Common Objections

We’ve built a positive case. Now let me address the strongest objections directly.

“If Everyone Is Eventually Saved, Why Bother Preaching?”

Someone might respond by saying that no matter how many additional motivations you pile up, the basic logic remains: if the outcome is guaranteed, the process is unnecessary.

But we’ve already seen that this objection proves too much. It applies equally to Calvinism (where the salvation of the elect is guaranteed) and to the postmortem opportunity (where God ensures every person gets a genuine chance after death). Neither Calvinists nor postmortem-opportunity advocates believe their theology undermines evangelism. The universalist is in the same boat.⁵³

More fundamentally, the objection assumes that the only reason to share the gospel is to change someone’s eternal destiny. But as we’ve seen, that has never been the only reason—or even the primary reason—for Christian mission. We share the gospel because Christ commanded it. Because people are suffering now and the gospel liberates them. Because knowing Christ transforms life in the present, not just the future. Because the love of Christ compels us. Because we are ambassadors of a reconciliation that God has already accomplished. Because we want to be where Jesus is, on the frontier of His kingdom.⁵⁴

Clark Pinnock, himself a conditionalist, once made a telling observation. He suspected that the motivation for missions has been “narrowed down to this one thing: deliverance from wrath.” He further argued that “we have made it the major reason for missions when it is not,” and objected to “the notion that missions is individually oriented, hellfire insurance.” He insisted that “sinners are not in the hands of an angry God. Our mission is not to urge them to turn to Jesus because God hates them and delights in sending them to hell.” The mission of the church, Pinnock said, is “to announce the wonderful news of the kingdom of God.”⁵⁵

I agree with Pinnock completely. And I would add: the universalist has the purest, most undiluted version of that wonderful news to announce.

“Fear of Hell Is a Powerful Motivator”

Someone might respond by saying that whatever we think about fear-based evangelism in theory, it works in practice. Historically, the belief that the lost will face permanent punishment has driven extraordinary missionary sacrifice. William Booth, founder of the Salvation Army, said that if his officers could spend one night in hell, the effectiveness of their mission would be greatly strengthened. Hudson Taylor’s passion for China was fueled by the thought of millions dying without the gospel.⁵⁶

I do not diminish the courage and sacrifice of these godly men and women. Their deeds were heroic, and the lives they touched were genuinely transformed. But I have to ask: does the pragmatic effectiveness of a belief prove its truth? Jonathan, the author of Grace beyond the Grave, makes the crucial point that “utility does not necessarily establish truth.” Even if a belief in restrictivism were shown to produce more fervent missionary zeal, that would not make restrictivism correct. And conversely, even if universalism were shown to produce less frantic urgency, that would not make it false. Truth is established by Scripture and sound reasoning, not by pragmatic effectiveness.⁵⁷

Parry adds that we should be honest about a difficult historical reality. Historically, the rise of certain kinds of universalism did coincide with an erosion of mission. But Parry is careful to distinguish the kind of universalism that caused this erosion. It was liberal, pluralistic universalism—the view that all religions are equally valid, that sin is not a serious problem, and that there is nothing distinctive about the Christian message. That kind of universalism absolutely undermines mission, because it removes any reason to share a specifically Christian gospel. But evangelical universalism is an entirely different animal. Evangelical universalism affirms the uniqueness of Christ, the reality of sin, the necessity of faith, and the urgency of the gospel. It simply adds the confidence that God’s love will ultimately bring every person to that faith.⁵⁸

Parry also observes that even among believers who hold firmly to eternal conscious torment, the terror of hellfire is playing a smaller and smaller role in motivating evangelism in the contemporary West. Cultural changes have blunted its psychological force. Yet Christians continue to evangelize. This suggests that fear was never the only—or even the primary—engine of mission. The evangelical universalist needs to “ensure that they are actively fostering a mission-focused spirituality and ever be on their guard against the very real dangers” of complacency, but these dangers are not unique to universalism. They are present wherever Christians take the gospel for granted.⁵⁹

“Paul Seemed to Think Some Would Be Lost”

Someone might respond by saying that Paul’s own sense of urgency in Romans 9–10 suggests he believed that people who did not hear and respond to the gospel in this life were permanently lost. After all, Paul writes with anguish about his kinsmen according to the flesh (Rom. 9:1–3) and asks, “How can they believe in the one of whom they have not heard? And how can they hear without someone preaching to them?” (Rom. 10:14).

This is worth taking seriously. Paul’s urgency is real. His passion for the lost is palpable. But his urgency does not require us to believe he thought the lost would be permanently destroyed. Paul’s urgent language reflects the reality that people are suffering now in bondage to sin. His anguish over Israel reflects a heart that cannot bear to see his people missing the Messiah in the present—missing the joy, the transformation, the liberation that knowing Christ brings. And let us not forget that this same Paul, in the very same letter, wrote that “God has consigned all to disobedience, that he may have mercy on all” (Rom. 11:32). This same Paul wrote that “as one trespass led to condemnation for all, so one act of righteousness leads to justification and life for all” (Rom. 5:18). This same Paul wrote that “as in Adam all die, so in Christ shall all be made alive” (1 Cor. 15:22). And this same Paul wrote that every knee will bow and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord (Phil. 2:10–11).⁶⁰

Paul’s urgency and Paul’s universalism are not in conflict. They are complementary. He is urgent because people are hurting now. He is confident because God’s love will prevail ultimately. Both are true at the same time.

“The Philippians 2 Confession Could Still Be Grudging”

Someone might respond by saying that even if the Greek word exomologeo usually means willing praise, the context of Philippians 2 could override that usual meaning. Perhaps Paul is using the word in an unusual way to describe a forced acknowledgment.

But this faces multiple problems. First, as we’ve seen, the source text in Isaiah 45 is explicitly salvific—“Turn to me and be saved, all the ends of the earth!” Paul carries that salvific context forward. Second, 1 Corinthians 12:3 makes a forced confession impossible—no one can say “Jesus is Lord” except by the Holy Spirit. Third, Paul’s stated purpose for the confession is that it brings glory to God the Father, and forced worship brings God no glory. Fourth, every other use of exomologeo in the New Testament connotes voluntary confession. We would need overwhelming contextual evidence to override all of these converging lines of evidence, and the context provides no such evidence. The “grudging confession” reading is not exegetically driven; it is theologically driven by a prior commitment to the idea that some must be permanently lost.⁶¹

Beilby, who is careful and even-handed in his treatment of the evidence, acknowledges that if one is already convinced of universalism for other reasons, the willing-confession reading of Philippians 2 is clearly “preferable.” He also concedes that the universal scope of the passage (“in heaven and on earth and under the earth”) is difficult to limit to mere representatives of each group. It means every individual. And when every individual confesses Jesus as Lord with a confession empowered by the Holy Spirit, the universalist conclusion follows naturally.⁶²

Pastoral Considerations: The Ministry of Hope

Before we close, I want to step outside the world of exegesis and arguments for a moment and talk about what this means for the real, everyday life of the church.

Parry tells the story of a Christian mother at the funeral of a beloved son who had rejected his Christian upbringing and turned away from the Lord. What hope can Christian faith offer her? Traditional theology offers virtually nothing—her son is almost certainly condemned to eternal punishment, or on the conditionalist view, to permanent destruction. The best she can hope for is that perhaps in his final moments he turned to God, but that is a slender thread to cling to. When the rubber hits the road, she “knows” her son is lost forever.⁶³

Parry writes that those who think people believe the gospel because it provides them with a “comfort blanket” should consider scenarios like this one. In cases like these, traditional Christian belief is more a source of torment than comfort. And these situations are heartbreakingly common.

But universal restoration offers a genuine, biblically grounded hope. The minister at that funeral can tell the grieving mother that her son has not passed a point of no return. He is not beyond hope. He is not beyond God’s reach. God’s patient, relentless, purifying love is still at work. Her son will one day bow willingly before Jesus and confess His lordship with genuine, Spirit-filled joy. The gates of the New Jerusalem are never shut. Every prodigal comes home.⁶⁴

That is not soft theology. That is not wishful thinking. That is the confident hope of a faith built on the character of a God who is love, who never fails, and who will be “all in all” (1 Cor. 15:28)—not “all in what’s left.”

And a church that ministers out of that hope will be a church that shares the gospel with greater boldness, greater joy, and greater confidence than a church that ministers out of terror. We will evangelize not because we are afraid of what God might do to the lost, but because we are in love with what God will do for them. We will share the good news because it is genuinely, completely, radically good.

Conclusion

We have reached the climax of the postmortem argument. Across Chapters 27, 28, and 29, we have traced the arc of God’s saving work beyond the grave. God pursues His lost children into Hades itself. God’s purifying love burns away the chains of sin and restores genuine freedom. And the result is what Paul promised in Philippians 2:10–11: every knee bowing, every tongue confessing that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.

That confession is not forced. It is willing, heartfelt, Spirit-empowered, and salvific. The Greek word exomologeo demands it. The source text in Isaiah 45 demands it. The theological logic of 1 Corinthians 12:3 demands it. And the character of the God who refuses to accept fraudulent worship demands it. Every person who has ever lived will genuinely, freely, joyfully confess that Jesus is Lord. And that confession means salvation.

And far from undermining evangelism, this hope gives us the most powerful motivation imaginable for sharing the gospel. We preach because Christ commands it. We preach because people are suffering now and need liberation now. We preach because knowing Christ transforms present life, not just eternal destiny. We preach because the love of Christ compels us. We preach because we are ambassadors of a reconciliation that God has accomplished for the entire world. And we preach because our message is genuinely, completely, unreservedly good news—good tidings of great joy which shall be to all people.

My missionary friend was right. We do have better reasons to preach. The universalist evangelist carries the most beautiful message in the world: God loves you. Christ died for you. The Holy Spirit will bring you home. And nothing—absolutely nothing—can stop Him.

In the next chapter, we will turn to the philosophical case for universal restoration, examining how Talbott’s famous trilemma, the problem of evil, and the universalist understanding of freedom all converge to support the hope we have been building throughout this book.