Chapter 8

Universalism Before Origen

A. McClymond’s Argument: The “No Universalism Before Origen” Claim

If you’ve been reading this book from the beginning, you’ve already seen the pattern. Michael McClymond wants you to believe that Christian universalism—the hope that God will eventually reconcile every human being to himself—is a foreign import. Not something that grew naturally from the soil of Scripture and early Christian faith, but a weed transplanted from gnostic gardens. And in his telling, the transplanting began with one man: Origen of Alexandria.

McClymond states his position bluntly in The Devil’s Redemption: “there are no unambiguous cases of universalist teaching prior to Origen,” and the first identifiable teachers of universal salvation were “second-century Christian gnostics associated with Alexandria, Egypt—for example, Basilides, the school of Valentinus, and the Carpocratians.”¹ He claims that Origen did not invent universalism but rather took an existing gnostic idea and dressed it up in biblical clothing—creating, as McClymond puts it, a “sanitized and more biblicized form” of a gnostic theory.²

This is not a small claim. It is, in fact, the linchpin of McClymond’s entire historical argument. If universalism really did begin with the gnostics, and if Origen really did just borrow it from them, then the whole tradition of Christian universal hope is tainted at its roots. It would be like discovering that the foundation of your house was poured on contaminated soil. Even if the house looks fine, the foundation is compromised.

McClymond doubles down on this point by noting that proponents of universalism have tried to construct a theological genealogy that connects the New Testament directly to Origen without passing through gnostic territory. But he dismisses these efforts. He writes that if you remove the second-century gnostics from the picture, “the connecting links are not there to span the roughly two centuries from the New Testament until the time of Origen’s Peri archōn.”³ According to McClymond, there is nothing resembling a doctrine of universal salvation in the Apostolic Fathers, the letters of Ignatius, or the writings of Cyprian, Irenaeus, or Tertullian. The chain is broken. The only links that fill the gap are gnostic ones.

He also appeals to Brian Daley’s widely respected study The Hope of the Early Church to support his case. Daley catalogs a large number of early Christian authors and texts that affirmed everlasting punishment, and McClymond uses this catalog as proof that the early church was overwhelmingly particularist—that the idea of universal salvation was, at best, a fringe opinion held by a handful of eccentric thinkers.⁴

So here is the core of McClymond’s argument in this area: (1) There is no clear universalism before Origen. (2) The only pre-Origen candidates are gnostics. (3) Therefore, Origen borrowed his universalism from gnosticism. (4) Therefore, universalism is gnostic in origin, not biblical.

It sounds impressive. It sounds like a closed case. But it isn’t. Not even close.

B. Identifying Weaknesses: What McClymond Gets Wrong

The first thing to notice is what McClymond leaves out.

When he says “there are no unambiguous cases of universalist teaching prior to Origen,” he is making a claim that requires him to have engaged thoroughly with the evidence that points in the other direction. He hasn’t. Or if he has, he has dismissed it without adequate justification. Ilaria Ramelli, the foremost living patristic scholar on this topic, has demonstrated in exhaustive detail that there are multiple pre-Origen Christian witnesses to the hope of universal salvation—witnesses that have nothing to do with gnosticism.⁵

Ramelli’s work in The Christian Doctrine of Apokatastasis and A Larger Hope, Volume 1 identifies universalist teaching or strong universalist hints in Bardaisan of Edessa, Clement of Alexandria, the Apocalypse of Peter (especially its Greek Rainer Fragment), portions of the Sibylline Oracles, the Epistula Apostolorum, various Jewish-Christian “apocryphal” texts, and—most significantly—in the New Testament itself, especially in the letters of Paul.⁶ McClymond is aware of Ramelli’s work. He dismisses it as “a notable yet unsuccessful effort to provide a non-gnostic genealogy for early Christian universalism prior to Origen.”⁷ But a dismissal is not a refutation. McClymond never engages with the actual texts Ramelli cites in the detail they require.

Second, McClymond’s argument depends on an extremely narrow definition of “universalist teaching.” He requires “unambiguous” cases—meaning fully developed, systematic statements of universal salvation comparable to what Origen would later produce. But this is an unreasonable standard. We do not require “unambiguous” Trinitarian theology before Nicaea in order to affirm that Trinitarian faith existed in the early church. We do not demand a fully articulated doctrine of the two natures before Chalcedon in order to recognize that the early Christians believed in both Christ’s divinity and humanity. Doctrines develop. Seeds precede flowers. If we find clear threads of universalist hope woven into the earliest Christian writings—threads that a thinker like Origen later wove into a systematic tapestry—then McClymond’s “no universalism before Origen” claim fails.

Third, and this is crucial: McClymond’s claim that gnostic universalism fills the gap between the New Testament and Origen is itself deeply misleading. As Ramelli has shown in detail, most gnostic systems were not universalist in any meaningful sense. The Valentinians, for example, divided humanity into three fixed classes—pneumatikoi (spiritual people), psychikoi (soul-people), and sarkikoi or hylikoi (material people)—and taught that only the first class was guaranteed salvation. The psychikoi might be saved under certain conditions. The sarkikoi were beyond redemption entirely.⁸ That is not universalism. It is the opposite. It is a system of permanent spiritual elitism based on one’s predetermined nature—precisely the kind of deterministic soteriology that Origen and Clement of Alexandria spent their careers opposing.

Fourth, McClymond’s use of Daley requires a correction. Daley himself lists the Apocalypse of Peter, the Sibylline Oracles (in one passage), and Clement of Alexandria among texts and figures that are “difficult to interpret on the question of universalism.”⁹ Daley does not place them firmly in the anti-universalist camp. McClymond treats the ambiguity as evidence against universalism when it is, at minimum, evidence for a spectrum of views—a spectrum that included genuine universalist hope before Origen ever put pen to papyrus.

Fifth, McClymond never reckons with the most obvious pre-Origen source for universalist hope: the New Testament itself. Paul’s letters contain some of the most sweeping universalist language in all of Scripture. Romans 5:18 declares that just as condemnation came to all through Adam, so justification and life come to all through Christ. First Corinthians 15:22 says that as all die in Adam, so all will be made alive in Christ. Colossians 1:20 says that God was pleased to reconcile all things to himself through Christ—not destroy, not subdue, but reconcile. If McClymond is looking for the source of Origen’s universalism, he does not need to look to the gnostics. He needs to look at Paul’s mail.¹⁰

We will develop all of these points in the next section. But the bottom line is this: McClymond’s “no universalism before Origen” claim rests on ignoring or minimizing a substantial body of evidence. Once that evidence is placed on the table, his claim collapses.

C. The Universalist Response: The Roots Run Deep

Starting with the Source: The New Testament Itself

I want to begin where McClymond least expects: with the Bible. Because the most powerful evidence for pre-Origen universalism is not found in obscure second-century documents or debatable patristic fragments. It is found in the canonical Scriptures that every Christian—McClymond included—regards as authoritative.

McClymond structures his genealogical argument as if the question were: “Can we find any non-gnostic thinkers between the apostles and Origen who taught universal salvation?” But the real question is different. The real question is: “Does the New Testament itself contain the seeds of universalist hope?” If it does—and I am going to show you that it does—then McClymond’s entire framework falls apart. We do not need to trace a genealogy from the apostles through some hypothetical chain of non-gnostic thinkers to Origen. We just need to show that Origen was reading his Bible. The genealogy is simple: it goes from Paul to Origen. The connecting link is not Valentinus. It is Scripture.

I am not going to provide the full exegesis of these texts here; that’s the work of Chapters 14 and 20, where we will walk through them in careful detail. But I need to lay the foundation now, because McClymond’s entire argument depends on the assumption that universalist hope was imported into Christianity from outside. If the hope is already present in the New Testament, his argument is dead on arrival.

Consider Paul. In Romans 5:18–19, he writes that because of one man’s trespass, condemnation came to all people, and because of one man’s act of righteousness, justification and life come to all people. The “all” condemned through Adam and the “all” justified through Christ are the same group. Paul does not narrow the scope in the second half of the sentence. He widens it. He says that as many as were made sinners by Adam’s disobedience, “so also the many will be made righteous” through Christ’s obedience.¹¹

In 1 Corinthians 15:22–28, Paul states that “as in Adam all die, so in Christ all will be made alive.” He then describes a process: Christ reigns until every enemy is placed under his feet. The last enemy destroyed is death itself. And when everything has been subjected to Christ, then Christ himself will hand the kingdom to the Father, so that “God may be all in all.” Origen and Gregory of Nyssa both recognized this passage as the clearest Pauline expression of eventual universal restoration. God will be “all in all”—not “all in some,” not “all in what’s left.”¹²

In Romans 11:32, Paul declares that “God has imprisoned all in disobedience so that he may be merciful to all.” In Philippians 2:10–11, he says that at the name of Jesus every knee will bow—in heaven, on earth, and under the earth—and every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord. The Greek word for “confess” (exomologeō) consistently carries the sense of voluntary praise and thanksgiving in the Septuagint and the New Testament. This is not forced submission. It is willing worship.¹³

And then there is Acts 3:21, where Peter speaks of Christ remaining in heaven “until the time of the restoration of all things, which God announced long ago through his holy prophets.” The Greek word here is apokatastasis—the very word that Origen would later make famous. Peter uses it. Luke records it. And it appears in the earliest preaching of the church, not in a gnostic text.¹⁴

Paul says it again in 1 Timothy 2:3–4: “This is good and acceptable in the sight of God our Savior, who desires all people to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth.” And in 1 Timothy 4:10: “We have our hope set on the living God, who is the Savior of all people, especially of those who believe.” Notice: not “only” of those who believe, but “especially”—implying that God’s saving work extends to all, with believers receiving it in a particular way. Titus 2:11 adds: “The grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation to all people.” And Ephesians 1:9–10 announces God’s plan “to unite all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth.”⁵⁷

The sheer volume of these statements is staggering. Paul does not say it once and move on. He says it over and over, in letter after letter, using different words and images each time, but always arriving at the same destination: God’s saving work in Christ reaches to all people and will ultimately succeed. This is not a single proof text pulled out of context. It is a sustained theme running through the entire Pauline corpus. Thomas Talbott has rightly called this “a massive, consistent Pauline witness” to universal reconciliation, and he argues that it takes more exegetical gymnastics to explain these texts away than to simply take them at face value.⁵⁸

Now, I want to be careful here. I am not claiming that Paul or Peter articulated a fully developed doctrine of universal salvation in the way that Origen later would. That’s not how doctrine works. What I am claiming is that the raw materials—the building blocks, the seeds—of universalist hope are right there in the New Testament. Any Christian who read these texts and concluded that God intended to save all people was not borrowing from gnosticism. They were reading their Bible.

Origen himself was explicit about this. When he spoke of the “so-called apokatastasis,” his choice of words indicated that he was referring to an already existing tradition—not one he invented.¹⁵ And the tradition he drew from was not gnostic cosmology but the biblical witness: Acts 3:21, 1 Corinthians 15:24–28, Romans 5:18–19, and 1 Timothy 2:4 (“God desires all people to be saved”). The Bible is the source. Everything else flows from it.

The Petrine Tradition and Postmortem Proclamation

Before we move to the specific early Christian writers who anticipated Origen, we need to notice something about the broader Petrine tradition in the New Testament. It is surprisingly rich in universalist themes.

First Peter 3:18–20 tells us that Christ, after being put to death in the flesh but made alive in the spirit, “went and proclaimed to the spirits in prison, who in former times did not obey.” First Peter 4:6 adds: “For this is the reason the gospel was proclaimed even to the dead, so that they might live in the spirit as God does.” We will explore these texts in full in Chapter 21, but their significance for our present discussion is enormous. They show that the earliest Christian tradition included the idea that Christ’s saving work extends beyond the boundary of physical death. The gospel is proclaimed to the dead. The spirits in prison hear Christ’s voice.¹⁶

This is not gnosticism. This is the Petrine tradition, embedded in the canonical New Testament. And it provides exactly the kind of theological foundation on which a doctrine of universal restoration could be built—and was built.

James Beilby, in his thorough study Postmortem Opportunity, traces the development of this tradition through the early centuries. He shows that the idea of postmortem proclamation and even postmortem salvation was not an Origenian invention but had deep roots in Jewish-Christian apocalyptic thought and in the Petrine literature of the New Testament era.¹⁷

The significance of this cannot be overstated. If Christ proclaimed the gospel to the dead—to those who had already died without hearing it—then the boundary between life and death is not the boundary of God’s grace. God’s saving work continues beyond the grave. And if it continues beyond the grave, then the universalist question naturally arises: Will that work ever fail? Will any person, given enough time and enough exposure to God’s relentless love, ultimately refuse to come home? The earliest Christians, reading 1 Peter, already had the raw materials to answer: No. God’s love will eventually prevail. And that answer did not come from gnosticism. It came from Peter.

Second Peter 3:9 reinforces this trajectory: “The Lord is not slow to fulfill his promise as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance.” God does not wish that any should perish. He wants all to repent. If God’s patience is infinite and his desire is universal, then the universalist conclusion is not a leap—it is a logical step.

The Apocalypse of Peter: A Stunning Early Witness

This brings us to one of the most important—and most overlooked—pieces of evidence for pre-Origen universalism: the Apocalypse of Peter.

The Apocalypse of Peter is a Jewish-Christian work from the first half of the second century. Richard Bauckham, a widely respected New Testament scholar who is no universalist, dates it to the period of the Bar Kokhba war (132–135 AD). This text was not some obscure document gathering dust in a cave. It was hugely popular in the early church. Bauckham describes it as “a very popular work in the church as a whole, from the second to the fourth centuries,” noting that it was “widely read in east and west.” It was even included in some early canonical lists and came very close to being included in the New Testament itself.¹⁸

Clement of Alexandria considered it divinely inspired and wrote a commentary on it alongside the biblical books. Eusebius reports that Clement commented on all the New Testament books “without omitting the so-called Apocalypse of Peter.”¹⁹ This is significant. Clement did not treat this text as a curiosity. He treated it as Scripture.

Now here is where it gets really interesting. The Apocalypse of Peter survives in two versions: an Ethiopian translation and Greek fragments, the most important of which is the Rainer Fragment (dated to the third or fourth century). Both versions describe a vision in which Peter is shown the judgment of sinners. But the Greek Rainer Fragment contains a passage that the Ethiopian version has been altered to obscure. In the Greek, Christ tells Peter:

“I will grant to my called and elect all those they will ask me to draw out of the punishment. And I will give them a noble baptism in salvation in the Acherusian Lake… a share in justice and justification with my saints.”²⁰

The righteous pray for those being punished, and Christ grants their prayers. The punished are drawn out of their suffering and given salvation. This is not gnostic cosmology. This is Christian hope for the salvation of the damned through the intercession of the righteous and the mercy of Christ.

Scholars have noted that the Ethiopian version of this same passage shows signs of deliberate revision to eliminate the reference to the salvation of the punished.²¹ Someone, at some point, was uncomfortable with the universalist implications and tried to edit them out. But the original text is clear. And it predates Origen by decades.

Earlier in the text, when Peter expresses worry about the destiny of sinners, Jesus reassures him: “There is no being that perishes for God; there is nothing that is impossible for God.” This echoes Matthew 19:26, Mark 10:27, and Luke 18:27, where Jesus tells his disciples that what is impossible for humans is possible for God. Origen himself would later use precisely this logic in support of universal salvation: “Nothing is impossible for the Omnipotent; no being is incurable for the One who created it.”²²

Beilby provides an important summary of this text. He notes that even though the angel Tartarouchos tells the sinners that it is too late for repentance, Christ himself overrides that pronouncement just a few verses later by granting salvation to those for whom the righteous have interceded. The angel’s statement is not the last word. Christ’s mercy is.²³

The Sibylline Oracles and Other “Apocryphal” Texts

The Apocalypse of Peter was not alone. The same universalist theme appears in other early texts that circulated widely in the second and third centuries.

Book 2 of the Sibylline Oracles, which draws material from the Apocalypse of Peter, contains a striking prediction. It says that the immortal and omnipotent God will grant to the pious another gift: when they ask him, God will save people from the violent fire and the eternal gnashing of teeth. God will draw them out of the unquenchable flame and remove them, destining them for the love of his own to another life in the world to come.²⁴ Clement of Alexandria greatly appreciated the Oracles and even claimed that Paul himself had recommended them for their eschatological predictions.²⁵

Similarly, the second-century Epistula Apostolorum preserves a conversation in which the disciples ask Jesus about the fate of sinners in the afterlife. Jesus responds: “You do well to be worried, because the just will be worried about sinners; they pray for them and implore God.” The disciples ask whether that prayer will be heard, and Jesus answers: “Yes, I will listen to the prayer of the just, which they elevate for sinners.”²⁶

The Coptic Apocalypse of Elijah (third century) similarly describes the blessed successfully interceding for sinners: “The just will contemplate sinners in their punishments… Then sinners, in turn, will contemplate the place where the just will dwell, and will participate in Grace.”²⁷

Even in some Jewish-Christian pseudepigraphical texts, we find universalist currents. A Latin manuscript of the Life of Adam and Eve, close to the original Greek, has God telling Michael: “Put Adam in paradise, in the third heaven, until the day of the salvific economy, when I shall have mercy upon all through my most loved Son.”²⁸ The Testament of Simeon 7:2 declares that the Lord will raise up someone from Levi and Judah who “will save all nations and the house of Israel.” The Testament of Joseph 19:11 similarly speaks of the Lamb of God who “by grace will save all the nations and Israel.”²⁹

Now, not all of these texts present a fully developed doctrine of universal salvation. Some offer hints and suggestions rather than systematic teaching. But taken together, they paint a picture of a broad current of Christian and Jewish-Christian thought that expected God to save all people—a current that existed long before Origen and had nothing to do with gnostic cosmology.

Bardaisan of Edessa: A Non-Gnostic Universalist

One of the most important pre-Origen universalists was Bardaisan of Edessa (154–222 AD). Bardaisan was a Syriac Christian philosopher and theologian who has been inaccurately accused of “Gnosticism” by ancient heresiologists—accusations that modern scholarship has largely corrected. Ramelli’s extensive research has rehabilitated Bardaisan as a serious Christian thinker whose views on free will, providence, and universal restoration are deeply rooted in Scripture and Christian theology, not in gnostic speculation.³⁰

In the final section of the Book of the Laws of Countries—essentially Bardaisan’s treatise Against Fate, in which he defended human free will against determinism (as Origen would later do)—Bardaisan proclaims an eventual universal restoration. He writes that God is kind and gentle, and allows all natures to remain in the state in which they are and to govern themselves by their own will. But at the same time they are conditioned by things that have been done and plans that have been conceived by God to help them. And there will come a time, Bardaisan says, when even the capacity for harm that remains in created natures “will be brought to an end by the instruction that will obtain in a different arrangement of things.”³¹

Read that again carefully. Bardaisan is saying that God respects human free will. He does not override it. But God has a plan—a providential arrangement—that will ultimately bring all harmful capacities to an end through instruction. Not through coercion. Not through destruction. Through teaching, correction, and the patient working of God’s purposes. This is remarkably similar to what Origen would later develop into a full systematic theology of restoration.

And notice the context: Bardaisan is defending human free will against determinism. That is the exact opposite of gnostic soteriology, which taught that people were saved or damned by their fixed natures, not by their free choices. Bardaisan, like Origen after him, was combating gnostic determinism while simultaneously affirming God’s ultimate victory over evil. These two convictions—human freedom and divine triumph—are the twin foundations of conservative biblical universalism.

It is significant that Eusebius, in his Preparation for the Gospel, cites Origen together with Bardaisan when discussing arguments against determinism and in defense of free will. He clearly noticed that they were arguing on the same line. And it is no accident that Didymus the Blind, another faithful Origenian and supporter of universal salvation, appreciated Bardaisan and spoke of him favorably. The most positive testimonies about Bardaisan come from authors who also appreciated Origen: Africanus, Didymus, Eusebius, and the early Jerome.³²

There is something else worth noticing about Bardaisan. He lived and worked in Edessa, in the Syriac-speaking world—not in Alexandria. This matters because McClymond’s entire genealogical argument tries to trace universalism to a single geographic and intellectual source: Alexandrian gnosticism. But Bardaisan had nothing to do with Alexandria. He was a Syriac thinker, working in an entirely different cultural context, drawing on different sources. The fact that universalist hope appeared independently in both Syria (Bardaisan) and Egypt (Clement) suggests that the idea was not dependent on any single local tradition. It was a widespread response to the universal scope of the New Testament’s promises about Christ’s saving work. The seeds were in the Bible. Different communities in different parts of the world saw them growing at roughly the same time. That is what happens with ideas that are genuinely biblical: they keep sprouting up wherever people read the text carefully.

Clement of Alexandria: Origen’s Forerunner

Clement of Alexandria (c. 150–c. 215) was an educated convert to Christianity from a pagan background. He served as a theologian at the famous catechetical school in Alexandria and was a pioneering Christian Platonist. He was also an older contemporary of Origen, and his work was certainly known to Origen. If we are looking for the bridge between the New Testament and Origen on the question of universal salvation, Clement is perhaps the most important figure.

McClymond acknowledges Clement but treats him as an ambiguous case—perhaps leaning toward universalism but not clearly teaching it. Daley similarly lists Clement as “difficult to interpret.”³³ But Ramelli has argued convincingly that Clement’s ambiguity is more a matter of caution than confusion. Clement entertained a notion of apokatastasis that was open to universal salvation, and he consistently taught that God’s punishments are therapeutic and educative rather than retributive.³⁴

Here is what Clement actually says. In Stromateis 7:16:102, he explicitly applies the distinction between timōria (retributive punishment) and kolasis (therapeutic punishment). He states that God kolazei—applies therapeutic, educative correction—but never timōreitai—never inflicts retributive punishment. In his own words: “God never punishes [timōreitai]—because punishment is a retribution of evil with evil—but chastises [kolazei] to help those who are chastised.”³⁵

Think about what that means. If all of God’s punishments are corrective—designed to heal and restore rather than to inflict permanent suffering—then eternal conscious torment is ruled out by definition. Correction that never ends and never succeeds would be a contradiction: it would be a punishment that perpetually fails at its own purpose. Clement does not draw that final conclusion explicitly, but the logic points in one direction.

Clement also taught that God’s mercy extends even to those who die without being corrected. He believed that purification and conversion remain possible after death—that God’s therapeutic work does not stop at the grave. Even heretics who die without repenting can still be corrected by God in the next life. Even the final Judgment delivers sinners to a purifying process. The idea that death irrevocably ends all opportunity for repentance was foreign to Clement’s theology.³⁶

A fragment from Clement’s Hypotyposeis declares that God “saves all”—a statement that McClymond himself acknowledges as evidence of Clement’s universalist leanings.³⁷ And Clement’s reading of the Apocalypse of Peter—which he treated as divinely inspired Scripture—would have reinforced these convictions. As Ramelli notes, Clement considered the Apocalypse of Peter an authoritative text and commented on it in his Hypotyposeis, alongside biblical books. Its vision of the righteous interceding for the damned and Christ granting their prayers fits perfectly with Clement’s broader theological framework.³⁸

Like Bardaisan, Clement was a strong defender of human free will against determinism. He explicitly criticized the followers of Basilides for teaching that some people would be saved “by nature” and others condemned “by nature” rather than on the basis of their free choices. He directed the same criticism at the Valentinians, who believed they would be saved “by nature” as gnostics.³⁹ Clement’s universalism, such as it was, was explicitly anti-gnostic. It was grounded in the conviction that God’s love is corrective, patient, and ultimately irresistible—not because it overrides human freedom, but because it is stronger than human stubbornness.

Clement also advocated, like Origen after him, a distinction between sinners and their sins. The sin must be hated, but the sinner—who is God’s creature—must be loved. Origen and Gregory of Nyssa would later develop this idea further, arguing that every person bears the image of God, an image that sin can obscure and cover but never completely destroy. This distinction is foundational to the universalist case. If the image of God in a person can never be annihilated, then there is always something left for God to work with—always a spark that God’s love can fan back into flame.⁵⁹

Clement even applied the principle of moral responsibility to the devil, arguing that Satan was not compelled by his nature to do evil but was free to choose or reject it. If even the devil’s evil is a matter of choice rather than fixed nature, then there is at least a theoretical possibility that even the devil could choose differently. Clement does not draw this conclusion explicitly, but Origen would.⁶⁰

What we see in Clement, then, is a remarkably developed theological framework that points toward universal restoration. He teaches that all punishment is corrective. He teaches that purification continues after death. He teaches that God saves all. He opposes the gnostic idea that people are saved or damned by their fixed natures. He treats the Apocalypse of Peter—with its vision of the saved interceding for the damned—as inspired Scripture. The only thing missing is the final, explicit statement: “Therefore, all will eventually be saved.” But the logic of his theology moves irresistibly in that direction. And Origen, who studied at the same catechetical school in Alexandria and who certainly knew Clement’s work, simply followed the logic to its conclusion.

Irenaeus and the Theology of Recapitulation

Irenaeus of Lyon (c. 130–c. 202) is usually listed among the anti-universalist fathers, and McClymond follows this convention. Irenaeus did not teach universal salvation in any explicit way. But his theology of recapitulatio—the idea that Christ “recapitulates” or sums up all humanity in himself in order to redeem it—contains seeds that point directly toward universal restoration.

Irenaeus writes in Against Heresies 5:21 that Christ, in his work of recapitulation, “has united all beings together, waging war against our enemy, and entirely defeating the devil, who at the beginning had imprisoned us.” In 3:18:1, he says that just as all were made sinners through Adam’s disobedience, so through Christ’s obedience “all be justified and receive grace.” God “recapitulated in himself the original whole of humanity” in order to “kill sin, deprive death of its power, and vivify humanity.”⁴⁰

The question that Irenaeus’s own theology raises is this: If Christ truly recapitulates all humanity in himself, what happens to those who are eternally damned? How can they be said to be recapitulated in Christ if they are permanently lost? The universalist answer—that recapitulation is ultimately universal—is a more natural reading of Irenaeus’s own language than the particularist one.

Reinhard Hübner has proposed that we can trace Gregory of Nyssa’s Christ-centered doctrine of universal salvation back not only to Origen but also to Irenaeus in the second century.⁴¹ Irenaeus himself even uses the very terminology of restoration (apokatastēsei, apokatastēsetai) in connection with Christ’s eschatological work. In fragments from Book 5 of Against Heresies, Irenaeus describes God restoring humanity through the resurrection: “dissolved in the earth, it will be restored anew… God in his will shall restore those who once existed, for the life donated by him.”⁴²

Ramelli notes that Irenaeus’s concept of recapitulation is remarkably similar to apokatastasis as conceived by Origen and Gregory of Nyssa, especially since Irenaeus states that Christ assumes the whole original human condition (katastasis) in order to restore it—an apo-katastasis in the most literal sense.⁴³

Irenaeus also writes, in Against Heresies 20:2, that God’s plan is that humanity, passing through every tribulation and acquiring the knowledge of moral discipline, will then be granted the resurrection from the dead and learn by experience what is the source of its liberation, and will “eternally live in gratitude toward the Lord, having been granted the gift of incorruptibility, that it might love God even more.” As Ramelli observes, gratitude, liberation, and love clearly do not apply to people eternally damned in hell.⁴⁴

Did Irenaeus teach universal salvation? No, not explicitly. He may have believed in annihilation of the wicked rather than eternal torment—a position that would actually fit his recapitulation theology better than ECT. But his theology of recapitulation provided powerful conceptual resources for the universalist tradition that followed. Both Origen and Gregory of Nyssa loved Irenaeus, read him carefully, and interpreted his recapitulation theology through a universalistic lens. That reading was not a distortion. It was, in many ways, the most natural development of Irenaeus’s own deepest insights.⁴⁵

Other Early Hints: Ignatius, Theophilus, and the Broader Landscape

There are still other early Christian voices worth noting, even if they fall short of clear universalist teaching.

In the corpus of letters attributed to Ignatius of Antioch (martyred between 98 and 117 AD), the Epistle to the Smyrnaeans 2 states that “the Logos, when its flesh was lifted up like the brazen serpent in the desert, dragged all human beings to itself for their eternal salvation.” This echoes John 12:32 and presents Christ’s work as effective for all humanity.⁴⁶

Theophilus of Antioch, a second-century Christian apologist, hints at universal restoration when he writes about God’s plan for creation. Ramelli notes that Theophilus suggests apokatastasis as universal salvation for both humans and animals.⁴⁷

Melito of Sardis (died c. 180), in his Homily on the Passion of Christ, states that Christ, “through whom the Father created everything, has the authority to judge and save all beings.” This falls short of a clear assertion of universal salvation, but it is at least suggestive—the authority to “save all beings” is attributed to Christ without restriction.⁴⁸

None of these individual witnesses proves that the pre-Origen church taught universal salvation as a settled doctrine. But that is not the claim I am making. The claim is that the seeds of universalist hope were present in early Christianity from the very beginning—in the New Testament itself, in the Petrine tradition, in early “apocryphal” texts that were widely read and even treated as Scripture, in the theology of figures like Bardaisan and Clement, and in the conceptual resources provided by Irenaeus’s doctrine of recapitulation. Origen did not create something out of nothing. He did not import a foreign idea. He gathered threads that were already present in the Christian tradition and wove them into a systematic tapestry.

The Old Testament Roots

We should also note that the hope of universal restoration has roots even deeper than the New Testament. It reaches back into the Old Testament itself—into the very texts that Jesus and the apostles knew and read.

The word apokatastasis does not appear as a noun in the Old Testament, but the related verb—meaning “to restore”—appears frequently, and its subject is always God. In Leviticus 13:16, the meaning is therapeutic: God restores the skin of a leper to health. In Job 5:18, God is said to wound but then to heal and restore. Origen later interpreted this passage as a reference to the eventual universal restoration—the end of purifying sufferings for sinners. In Psalm 34:17, God restores the life of a person in anguish. In Jeremiah 15:19, God will restore Israel if Israel repents. In Ezekiel 16:55, God promises to restore Sodom and Gomorrah to their original condition before their destruction—a text that patristic exegetes understood as pointing to the mystery of universal restoration.⁶⁴

Think about that last reference for a moment. Sodom. The Bible’s most notorious example of divine judgment. And yet Ezekiel says God will restore it. If even Sodom is not beyond God’s restorative power, what is? Origen and the other patristic universalists read texts like this and saw them as windows into God’s ultimate intention: not merely to judge, but to restore. Not merely to punish, but to heal. Not merely to destroy, but to rebuild.

The prophetic tradition is saturated with this vision. Isaiah 25:7–8 promises that God will destroy the covering that is cast over all peoples, will swallow up death forever, and will wipe away tears from all faces. Habakkuk 2:14 looks forward to the day when the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord as the waters cover the sea. And the Psalms repeatedly declare that all the ends of the earth will turn to the Lord, that all the families of the nations will worship before him (Ps. 22:27; 86:9).⁶⁵

McClymond’s genealogical argument asks us to believe that the hope of universal salvation was imported into Christianity from outside. But the evidence shows the opposite. The hope was already there—in the Old Testament, in the teaching of Jesus, in the letters of Paul, in the preaching of Peter. The early Christians who expressed this hope were not borrowing from gnostics. They were inheriting a promise that goes all the way back to Abraham: “In you all the families of the earth shall be blessed” (Gen. 12:3). All. Not some. All.

The Contrast with Gnostic “Universalism”

And this brings me back to the sharpest contrast of all—the contrast between what we find in these early Christian sources and what we find in the gnostic texts McClymond appeals to.

Gnostic “universalism,” where it existed at all, was fundamentally different from Christian universalism in at least three ways.

First, gnostic soteriology was deterministic. The Valentinians taught that people were saved or lost based on their fixed spiritual nature—pneumatikoi, psychikoi, or hylikoi. Salvation had nothing to do with faith, repentance, or moral transformation. It was determined by what you were, not by what you chose. Christian universalism, by contrast—as seen in Bardaisan, Clement, and especially Origen—was built on the foundation of human free will. Every person is capable of repentance. Every person can choose God. God’s love works through that freedom, not against it.⁴⁹

Second, gnostic cosmology generally excluded the resurrection of the body. Gnostic salvation was about the escape of the divine spark from the prison of matter. The body was not redeemed; it was discarded. Patristic universalism, by contrast—from Origen through Gregory of Nyssa—emphatically included the resurrection of the body. Salvation was holistic: body and soul restored together.⁵⁰

Third, gnostic systems typically posited an evil demiurge who created the material world, severing justice from goodness and the Old Testament God from the New Testament God. Christian universalists like Origen spent their careers refuting exactly these claims. Origen insisted on the unity of God, the goodness of creation, and the identity of the God of Israel with the Father of Jesus Christ.⁵¹

McClymond is aware of these differences, but he treats them as surface variations on a deeper shared pattern. He sees the gnostic schema of unity–diversity–unity (primal spiritual unity, fall into diversity, return to unity) mirrored in Origen’s theology and concludes that Origen borrowed it. But this logic proves too much. The pattern of creation–fall–redemption–restoration is not uniquely gnostic. It is the basic narrative of the Bible. Genesis to Revelation tells a story of a good creation, a catastrophic fall, God’s patient redemptive work, and a final restoration when God makes all things new. If sharing that narrative pattern makes Origen a gnostic, then every Christian who believes the Bible is also a gnostic.⁵²

There is also a deeper irony here that McClymond seems to miss. Origen’s entire theological project was built on refuting gnostic ideas. He rejected the gnostic separation between the God of the Old Testament and the God of the New Testament. He rejected the gnostic claim that the material world was created by an evil or ignorant demiurge. He rejected the gnostic doctrine of fixed spiritual natures that predetermined who could be saved. He rejected the gnostic denial of bodily resurrection. He rejected metensomatosis (the transmigration of souls). On every major point where gnostic theology diverged from Christian orthodoxy, Origen stood on the side of orthodoxy.⁶²

And his doctrine of apokatastasis was actually part of his anti-gnostic argument. The gnostics said that some people are inherently beyond redemption—the hylikoi, those made of matter, can never know the divine. Origen said no. Every rational creature bears the image of God. Every rational creature possesses free will. And God, who is infinitely patient and infinitely resourceful in his love, will ultimately bring every creature to willing restoration. Origen’s universalism was not borrowed from the gnostics. It was forged in the fire of his battle against them. He needed a doctrine of salvation that was comprehensive enough to defeat the gnostic claim that some people are permanently excluded from God’s love by their very nature. Universal restoration was that doctrine.⁶³

D. Counter-Objections: Anticipating the Pushback

“Even if there are hints of universalism before Origen, they don’t constitute clear universalist teaching.”

This is true in the sense that none of the pre-Origen sources present a fully systematic doctrine of universal salvation comparable to what Origen develops in On First Principles. But as I said earlier, that is not the right standard. Doctrines develop over time. The full doctrine of the Trinity was not articulated until Nicaea (325) and Constantinople (381), but no one claims the pre-Nicene church lacked Trinitarian faith. The doctrine of Christ’s two natures was not formalized until Chalcedon (451), but no one claims the pre-Chalcedonian church did not believe in both Christ’s divinity and humanity.

Consider an analogy. Imagine someone claimed that the doctrine of the substitutionary atonement was invented by Anselm of Canterbury in the eleventh century. You would point to Paul, to the early church fathers, to the Old Testament sacrificial system, and you would say: “The fully developed Anselmian theory was new, yes. But the idea—that Christ died in our place, that his death achieved something for us that we could not achieve for ourselves—is as old as Christianity itself. Anselm developed it. He did not invent it.” That is exactly what happened with Origen and universal salvation. Origen developed it into a sophisticated theological system. He did not invent it.

What we find before Origen is exactly what we should expect: seeds, hints, threads, fragments of a hope that would later be developed into a systematic theology. The question is not whether those seeds constitute a full-blown doctrine. The question is whether they are present and whether they are Christian rather than gnostic. The answer to both questions is yes.

“Paul’s universalist language doesn’t really mean what universalists think it means.”

McClymond and other particularists have ways of explaining Paul’s universalist texts that avoid the universalist conclusion. They argue that “all” in Romans 5:18 means “all kinds of people” or “all who believe.” They argue that the second “all” in 1 Corinthians 15:22 is restricted to those who are “in Christ” in a saving sense. They argue that Philippians 2:10–11 describes forced submission, not willing worship.

We will address all of these arguments in detail in Chapters 14 and 20. For now, I will simply make one observation. As Talbott has pointed out, if Paul was really that sloppy a writer—so sloppy that he would repeatedly shift the meaning of “all” within a single compound sentence of parallel structure—one wonders why anyone would trust him as a source of accurate theological information.⁶¹ In Romans 5:18, the “all” who are condemned through Adam and the “all” who receive justification through Christ are set in direct, symmetrical parallel. To restrict the second “all” while leaving the first unrestricted is to impose a reading on the text that the text itself resists. The burden of proof is on those who want to narrow Paul’s language, not on those who take it at face value.

And even if you could explain away one or two of these texts, you cannot explain away all of them. Romans 5:18. 1 Corinthians 15:22. Colossians 1:20. Romans 11:32. Philippians 2:10–11. 1 Timothy 2:4. 1 Timothy 4:10. Titus 2:11. Ephesians 1:9–10. At some point, the cumulative weight of the evidence becomes overwhelming. Paul was not accidentally stumbling into universalist language. He was expressing a conviction that ran through the heart of his theology: Christ’s work is as wide as Adam’s ruin, and wider.

“The weight of patristic evidence favors particularism, not universalism.”

McClymond leans heavily on this claim, and there is a grain of truth in it. Many early Christian writers did affirm some form of everlasting punishment. But counting noses is not the same as weighing arguments. Many of those writers were minor figures in the Latin-speaking West who had no access to the Greek texts and were writing in a culture increasingly dominated by Augustine’s theology. The theological weight of the universalist witnesses—Origen, the Cappadocians, Clement, Eusebius, Maximus, Evagrius, Eriugena—is enormous. These are not fringe figures. They are pillars of the Christian intellectual tradition. As Ramelli observes, compare the theological significance of Origen, Athanasius, Gregory of Nyssa, and Maximus the Confessor with the names on McClymond’s anti-universalist list—Victorinus of Pettau, Gaudentius of Brescia, Maximus of Turin, Evodius of Uzala, Orientius.⁵³ The comparison speaks for itself.

Furthermore, four of the six major theological schools of the first five centuries taught universalism. Only one—Rome—taught eternal punishment. And the shift to particularism in the West was driven primarily by Augustine’s influence and the Latin translation of the Greek word aionios as aeternus, a linguistic shift that permanently distorted Western eschatology.⁵⁴ We will explore that story in detail in Chapter 13.

“Even if gnostic universalism was different from Christian universalism, the shared patterns show influence.”

Shared patterns between two systems do not prove dependence. Christians and gnostics shared many patterns: a belief in a spiritual realm, a concern about the problem of evil, the use of Greek philosophical categories, and a narrative of redemption. None of these shared patterns means that Christianity borrowed from gnosticism (or vice versa). McClymond’s logic here, if applied consistently, would discredit many doctrines he himself holds. The doctrine of the Trinity uses non-biblical Greek philosophical terminology. Does that make it “Greek” rather than Christian? The substitutionary atonement was articulated using Anselm’s feudal categories. Does that make it “feudal” rather than biblical?⁵⁵

The creation–fall–restoration pattern is the biblical narrative itself. Gnostics adapted it. Christians proclaimed it. The fact that both groups used the same narrative structure proves nothing about who influenced whom—especially when, as we have seen, the content of gnostic soteriology (deterministic, elitist, anti-body, anti-creation) is diametrically opposed to the content of Christian universalism (free, inclusive, holistic, affirming the goodness of creation).

“Ramelli’s case has been refuted.”

McClymond describes Ramelli’s work as “a notable yet unsuccessful effort.” But a description is not a refutation. Where, exactly, does Ramelli fail? McClymond does not provide a detailed rebuttal of her analysis of Bardaisan, her examination of Clement’s Stromateis, her treatment of the Rainer Fragment, or her survey of the Sibylline Oracles. He simply waves them away. Ramelli’s work is based on decades of primary-source research in the original Greek, Syriac, and Latin texts. Her 900-page monograph The Christian Doctrine of Apokatastasis was published by Brill, one of the most prestigious academic publishers in the world, and has been endorsed by numerous scholars in the field.⁵⁶ It deserves engagement, not dismissal.

Ramelli herself has responded directly to McClymond’s critique in Theological Studies and in the appendix of A Larger Hope, Volume 1. Her response is thorough, measured, and devastating. She points out that a review of a patristic book should be informed by fresh, direct reading of the patristic theologians in the original languages and of recent research into their thought. It should not, she writes, limit itself to restating in 2015 the conclusions of another scholar’s 1991 book—a pointed reference to McClymond’s heavy reliance on Daley.⁶⁶ Ramelli is right. The field of patristic studies has advanced significantly since Daley’s important work was published. New texts have been discovered, existing texts have been re-evaluated, and our understanding of the relationships between early Christian writers has deepened. McClymond’s failure to engage with this more recent scholarship is a significant weakness in his argument.

I want to be fair to McClymond. He has produced an impressive work of research, and his book raises genuine questions that deserve serious answers. That is what this entire book is trying to provide. But on this particular point—the claim that there is no pre-Origen universalism outside of gnosticism—the evidence simply does not support him. And the person who has done the most to demonstrate this is Ilaria Ramelli, whose work McClymond acknowledges but does not adequately engage.

Conclusion

McClymond’s claim that there is no universalism before Origen does not survive careful scrutiny. The evidence tells a different story. Universalist hope was present in the New Testament itself, in Paul’s sweeping declarations about Christ’s redemptive work, in Peter’s preaching about the restoration of all things, in the Petrine tradition’s teaching about Christ’s proclamation to the dead. It was present in widely read second-century texts like the Apocalypse of Peter, which Clement of Alexandria treated as Scripture and which explicitly described the righteous interceding for the damned and Christ granting their salvation. It was present in Bardaisan’s defense of free will combined with his vision of God’s ultimate victory over evil. It was present in Clement’s theology of corrective punishment and postmortem purification. And it was implicit in Irenaeus’s doctrine of recapitulation, which taught that Christ sums up all humanity in himself in order to save it.

Think about the breadth of this evidence for a moment. We are not talking about one isolated text or one eccentric thinker. We are talking about a pattern that appears across multiple geographic regions (Palestine, Syria, Egypt, Gaul), multiple genres (canonical letters, apocalyptic literature, theological treatises, apologetic works), and multiple theological traditions (Pauline, Petrine, Johannine, Alexandrian, Syriac). The hope that God would eventually save all people was not a marginal oddity in the early church. It was a living current running through the broad stream of Christian thought.

Origen did not borrow universalism from the gnostics. He inherited it from his Bible, from his Christian predecessors, and from the broad tradition of Jewish-Christian apocalyptic hope. What he did—brilliantly—was to take these scattered threads and weave them into the most systematic and scripturally grounded theology of universal restoration the church had yet seen. He built on foundations that were already in place. And those foundations were not gnostic. They were Christian to the core.

This matters for more than historical accuracy. McClymond’s entire strategy in The Devil’s Redemption is to paint universalism as something alien to authentic Christianity—something that was smuggled in from the outside by gnostic heretics and kabbalistic mystics. If you accept that narrative, you can dismiss universalism without ever engaging its biblical and theological arguments on their merits. But the narrative is false. The hope of universal restoration did not originate outside Christianity. It originated inside it—in the apostolic writings, in the earliest Christian communities, in the Jewish-Christian apocalyptic tradition that shaped the church’s first eschatological convictions.

McClymond’s attempt to discredit universalism by tracing it to gnostic origins fails because the origins are not gnostic. They are biblical. They are apostolic. They are as old as the Christian faith itself. And they are far more deeply rooted than McClymond is willing to admit.

In the next chapter, we will look at Origen himself and show that he was not a gnostic disciple but the greatest anti-gnostic theologian of the ancient church—a man who spent his entire career fighting the very ideas McClymond accuses him of borrowing.