Chapter 10

Gregory of Nyssa — McClymond’s Misreadings

If you want to know whether universal restoration is compatible with Christian orthodoxy, there is one name you cannot ignore. Gregory of Nyssa. He was one of the three Cappadocian Fathers—the small group of brilliant fourth-century theologians who shaped the doctrine of the Trinity that every orthodox Christian confesses today. He helped write the theology enshrined in the Nicene Creed. He was honored at ecumenical councils. And he was an unambiguous, outspoken, lifelong universalist.

That fact alone should give every critic of universal restoration serious pause. If universalism is the dangerous heresy Michael McClymond says it is—rooted in gnosticism, incompatible with orthodoxy, corrosive to Christian faith—then how do we explain Gregory? How do we explain that one of the most important theologians in the history of Christianity held this view, taught it publicly, wrote entire treatises defending it, and was never condemned for it? How do we explain that the early church honored him as a pillar of the faith while he taught that God’s purifying love would ultimately restore every creature?

McClymond’s answer is simple: drive a wedge. In The Devil’s Redemption, he works hard to separate Gregory from Origen, arguing that Gregory “deviated from Origen in basic ways,” rejected Origen’s teaching on preexistent souls, and “offered a teaching on apokatastasis no longer consonant with Origen’s.”¹ The strategy is clear. If Gregory can be portrayed as breaking with Origen’s universalism rather than continuing it, then the universalist tradition looks fragmented rather than unified. It looks like a series of disconnected opinions rather than a coherent theological stream flowing from Scripture through the greatest minds of the early church.

But McClymond’s strategy fails. As we will see in this chapter, the evidence shows the opposite of what he claims. Gregory’s universalism was not a departure from Origen—it was a creative continuation and deepening of Origen’s core insights. The differences between them are real but relatively minor, and they do not touch the fundamental conviction they shared: that God’s love and power are sufficient to restore every creature, and that this restoration is the ultimate goal of the entire cosmic drama.

A. McClymond’s Argument

The Wedge Strategy

McClymond devotes significant attention to Gregory of Nyssa in The Devil’s Redemption, covering pages 278 through 320 of the first volume. His treatment of Gregory is, in places, genuinely good. He gives a solid summary of what Ilaria Ramelli calls Gregory’s “theology of freedom”—the idea that human beings are genuinely free agents who choose virtue or vice, and that this freedom is essential to their dignity as image-bearers of God.² He acknowledges Gregory’s emphasis on postmortem purification. He recognizes that Gregory taught the eventual restoration of all things. Credit where it is due: McClymond does not pretend Gregory was not a universalist.

What McClymond does instead is more subtle. He argues that Gregory’s universalism was fundamentally different from Origen’s—so different, in fact, that it should not be seen as part of the same tradition. The core of his argument rests on three claims.

First, McClymond argues that Gregory rejected Origen’s doctrine of preexistent souls. He points to Gregory’s On the Making of Man 28.3, where Gregory criticizes those who wrote about “principles” and the “fabulous pre-existence” of souls, and he reads this as a direct attack on Origen.³ McClymond treats this as evidence that Gregory was consciously breaking with Origen’s theological framework.

Second, McClymond argues that Gregory rejected “the idea of the eschaton as the restoration of a primal condition of stasis.”⁴ In other words, while Origen supposedly envisioned the end as a return to a static, original state, Gregory taught that the final state involves continuous change and development—what scholars call epektasis, an eternal stretching forward into God. McClymond sees this as a fundamental contradiction between the two thinkers.

Third, McClymond uses Gregory’s differences from Origen to undermine the unity of the patristic universalist tradition as a whole. If Gregory’s universalism was “no longer consonant with Origen’s,” then there is no single, coherent tradition of Christian universalism running through the early centuries. There are just scattered individuals with incompatible ideas.

McClymond also raises questions about whether Gregory was really a universalist at all, noting that “there is no scholarly consensus on this issue.”⁵ He cites scholars like Jean Daniélou and Mario Baghos who question the universalist reading. Baghos, for instance, argues that Gregory framed apokatastasis within the person of Christ and the Church, requiring active participation through free choice, and therefore “did not affirm the inevitability of universal salvation.”⁶

Finally, McClymond challenges the philosophical foundations of Gregory’s universalism. He argues that Gregory’s metaphysical claim—that evil is ontologically deficient and must eventually cease to exist—is “an intriguing speculation” but not one supported by Scripture or ordinary human experience. Evil, McClymond observes, sometimes becomes “deeply entrenched” in the real world rather than wearing itself out.⁷ He points to the hardening of Pharaoh’s heart in Exodus as a biblical counterexample: hearts sometimes get harder over time, not softer.

In summary, McClymond’s argument amounts to this: Gregory’s universalism was philosophically unsupported, possibly overstated by modern scholars, and fundamentally different from Origen’s. The patristic universalist tradition is not the unified, powerful witness that universalists claim it is.

B. Identifying Weaknesses

The Preexistence Problem: McClymond Gets Origen Wrong

The single biggest problem with McClymond’s wedge strategy is that it depends on getting Origen wrong. He assumes that Origen taught the preexistence of disembodied souls—naked minds floating in a primordial spiritual realm before being shoved into bodies as punishment for their cosmic fall. This is the standard caricature of Origen that has circulated since the Origenist controversies of the fifth and sixth centuries. And Ramelli has shown, with painstaking detail, that it is almost certainly false.⁸

Here is why this matters so much for McClymond’s argument. He says Gregory rejected Origen’s teaching on preexistent souls. That much is true—Gregory clearly rejected the idea of disembodied souls preexisting their bodies. But so did Origen. Origen explicitly rejected metensomatosis—the transmigration of souls into different bodies—in multiple writings.⁹ He argued against gnostics who taught that bare, bodiless souls were stuffed into material bodies as punishment. What Origen actually taught was that the ideas or logoi (paradigmatic models) of all creatures preexisted eternally in God’s Wisdom—a very different claim from saying that individual disembodied souls floated around before the creation of the material world.

When Gregory, in On the Making of Man 28.3, criticizes “those before us who have written about principles” and their “fabulous pre-existence” of souls, McClymond reads this as “an obvious reference to Origen.”¹⁰ But Ramelli provides at least three strong reasons why Gregory’s target was almost certainly not Origen.

First, in that very passage and in On the Soul and the Resurrection, Gregory attacks the preexistence of disembodied souls together with metensomatosis. But Origen explicitly rejected metensomatosis. Gregory’s target, then, could not have been Origen.¹¹

Second, several Middle Platonists and Neoplatonists wrote works entitled Peri archon (“On Principles”), including Porphyry, whom Gregory knew well. These pagan philosophers did teach the preexistence of disembodied souls and metensomatosis. They are a far more natural target for Gregory’s critique.¹²

Third, Gregory does not say “one of us” (meaning a fellow Christian), but rather “one of those before us” (tis ton pro hemon)—a formula he regularly uses to designate non-Christians, such as Philo of Alexandria.¹³

This is a devastating blow to McClymond’s wedge strategy. If Gregory was not attacking Origen in this passage, then the supposed “break” between the two theologians on the question of preexistent souls simply vanishes. They agreed. Neither taught the preexistence of disembodied souls. The perceived difference is based on a centuries-old misunderstanding of Origen’s actual position.

The Epektasis Problem: A False Dichotomy

McClymond’s second line of attack—that Gregory rejected Origen’s “static” eschatology in favor of an ever-progressing epektasis—also rests on shaky ground. The claim that Origen envisioned a “static afterlife” is itself debatable. Ramelli has argued extensively that it was precisely in Origen that Gregory found the inspiration for his doctrine of epektasis—the idea of an eternal, dynamic stretching forward into the inexhaustible depths of God. Far from contradicting Origen, Gregory was developing one of Origen’s own insights.¹⁴

Both Origen’s and Gregory’s eschatological ideas eventually made their way into Maximus the Confessor’s concept of aeikinetos stasis—“ever-moving rest.” That phrase is a beautiful paradox: a state of rest that is simultaneously a state of endless movement toward God. This concept did not spring from nowhere. It grew out of the shared theological soil of Origen and Gregory.¹⁵

McClymond presents us with a false choice: either the final state is static (Origen) or dynamic (Gregory). The truth is that both thinkers were working out how creaturely life in God could be simultaneously fulfilled and ever-deepening. The difference between them on this point is one of emphasis and development, not fundamental disagreement.

The “Scholarly Consensus” Problem

McClymond notes that some scholars question whether Gregory was really a universalist. This is technically true. Daniélou, Baghos, and Daley have raised questions. But McClymond understates the weight of the evidence on the other side. Hans Urs von Balthasar, Morwenna Ludlow, and Ilaria Ramelli—three of the most careful modern interpreters of Gregory—all affirm that he was a genuine universalist.¹⁶ Ramelli’s The Christian Doctrine of Apokatastasis devotes roughly seventy pages (372–440) to a detailed analysis of Gregory’s universalism, and her case is comprehensive and formidable.

The passages that Baghos cites as evidence against Gregory’s universalism—texts where Gregory uses the language of unending punishment without qualification—were already known to Gregory’s nineteenth-century translators, who observed that such passages exist but concluded they do not overturn the clear universalist trajectory of his thought.¹⁷ Gregory, like any careful pastor, sometimes used the sharp language of Scripture when addressing his congregation. But his systematic theological works—On the Soul and the Resurrection, the Great Catechism, In Illud: Tunc et Ipse Filius—lay out a consistent, developed, unmistakable theology of universal restoration.

The Pharaoh Objection: Missing the Point

McClymond’s argument about Pharaoh’s hardening heart is clever but misses the point. He observes that in Exodus, Pharaoh’s heart gets harder over time, not softer, and uses this as evidence against Gregory’s claim that evil naturally decays.¹⁸ But Gregory (and Origen before him) never denied that hearts can harden within the span of earthly life. The claim is about ultimate outcomes, not short-term patterns. Origen himself discussed Pharaoh’s hardening heart at great length in On First Principles 3.1.7–17, precisely because it seemed to challenge his universalism. His answer was that God’s patience extends beyond the limits of this life, and that even the most hardened sinner can eventually be reached by God’s persistent love.¹⁹

Think of it this way. A doctor might observe that a particular infection gets worse before it gets better. That does not mean the doctor believes the infection cannot be cured. It means the cure takes time, and there may be setbacks along the way. Gregory and Origen are making a claim about the ultimate power of God’s healing love, not a naïve claim that everyone gets nicer every day.

C. The Universalist Response

Gregory: The Man and His Credentials

Before we dig into Gregory’s theology, we need to understand who he was and why his voice carries so much weight. Gregory of Nyssa (c. 335–395 AD) was the younger brother of Basil of Caesarea, one of the three Cappadocian Fathers who defined Trinitarian orthodoxy for the entire Christian church. Gregory, Basil, and their friend Gregory of Nazianzus worked together to defeat Arianism—the heresy that denied the full divinity of the Son—and to establish the theological framework that produced the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed of 381 AD.

Gregory was not some fringe figure. He was not a maverick. He was not a lonely voice crying in the wilderness. He was appointed to the important episcopal see of Nyssa by his brother Basil. He played a major role at the Council of Constantinople in 381—the council that produced the creed that billions of Christians still recite today. He was asked by the imperial court to deliver the funeral orations for members of the royal family. His theological writings were circulated widely and studied carefully. Later generations honored him as a pillar of orthodoxy. The Eastern church calls him one of the “Fathers of the Fathers.”

It is worth lingering on what this means. The Cappadocian Fathers—Gregory, Basil, and Gregory of Nazianzus—are to Trinitarian theology what the apostles are to the church. Without them, we would not have the precise language that distinguishes one ousia (essence) from three hypostaseis (persons) in the Godhead. Without them, the Arian heresy might have won. Without them, the Nicene Creed might never have achieved its final, settled form. These were the men who saved orthodoxy in the fourth century. And one of them—the one who arguably did the most detailed theological work of the three—taught universal restoration as a central conviction of his theology.

Gregory’s sister Macrina also deserves mention. She was a brilliant theologian in her own right, and Gregory’s On the Soul and the Resurrection—one of his most important universalist works—is structured as a dialogue with Macrina on her deathbed. Ramelli has noted that Macrina’s Christianity was deeply philosophical in character, and she transmitted this philosophical faith to Gregory. The universalism that runs through the dialogue is presented as the shared conviction of both siblings, grounded in Scripture and Christian reason.

And he was a universalist. Not privately, not ambiguously, not in passing. He wrote entire treatises in which universal restoration is a central theme. His Great Catechism (Oratio Catechetica), his On the Soul and the Resurrection, and his treatise on 1 Corinthians 15:28 (In Illud: Tunc et Ipse Filius) all teach that God’s purifying love will eventually restore every creature.²⁰

Let me say this as plainly as I can. If universalism is a heresy incompatible with orthodox Christianity, then one of the architects of Trinitarian orthodoxy was a heretic. That is an absurd position. And it is one that McClymond never squarely faces.

Gregory’s Theology of Freedom

One of the most beautiful aspects of Gregory’s thought is his understanding of human freedom. For Gregory, human beings are made in the image of God, and that image includes the power of free choice. In On the Making of Man, he writes that the soul “owns no lord, and is self-governed, swayed autocratically by its own will.”²¹ Human beings are “free from necessity, and not in bondage to any natural power, but have decision in our own power as we please; for virtue is a voluntary thing, subject to no dominion: that which is the result of compulsion and force cannot be virtue.”²²

This is crucial for understanding Gregory’s universalism. He does not believe that God will force anyone into salvation against their will. He explicitly rejects that idea. When he imagines an objector asking whether God might have “forcibly drawn those who were not inclined to yield, to accept the Gospel,” he responds: “Where then would have been their free will?”²³ For Gregory, it belongs only to inanimate or irrational creatures to be compelled by another’s will. Rational, free beings must come to God willingly.

But—and this is the key—Gregory is completely confident that they will come willingly. Not because God overrides their freedom, but because God’s love is the deepest truth about reality, and freedom only reaches its true fulfillment when it turns toward the Good. Evil is a choice against reality. It is a turning toward non-being. And no one can sustain a choice for non-being forever, because non-being has no staying power. Eventually, the truth of God’s love breaks through every barrier of self-deception and resistance.

As Ramelli explains, Gregory’s theology of freedom depends entirely on Origen’s. Both theologians embraced what scholars call “ethical intellectualism”—the idea that when a person fully understands the Good, they will freely choose it. Sin is always rooted in ignorance and deception. When the deception is finally stripped away—through purifying suffering, through the relentless light of God’s love—the will naturally and freely turns toward God.²⁴

The Ontology of Evil: Why Evil Cannot Win

Gregory’s argument for universal restoration rests on a profound philosophical and biblical insight: evil has no independent existence. Evil is not a thing. It is an absence—a privation of good, a turning away from Being toward nothingness. Only God, the supreme Good, truly is. Evil is parasitic on the good. It exists only insofar as creatures choose to turn away from God, who is the source of all being and all goodness.

This might sound abstract, but the implications are massive. If evil has no independent existence—if it is ontologically empty, a kind of shadow with no substance of its own—then it cannot outlast the Good. It cannot endure forever. It is, by its very nature, temporary and self-defeating. Gregory puts it with characteristic clarity in On the Soul and the Resurrection: “In any and every case evil must be removed out of existence, so that the absolutely non-existent should cease to be at all. Since it is not in its nature that evil should exist outside the will, does it not follow that when every will rests in God, evil will be reduced to complete annihilation, owing to no receptacle being left for it?”²⁵

Think about that argument for a moment. Evil does not exist apart from creaturely wills that choose it. When every creaturely will finally rests in God—which is what 1 Corinthians 15:28 promises, when God will be “all in all”—then evil has literally no place left to hide. It ceases to exist. Not because God destroys it with force, but because it was never a real thing to begin with. It was always a shadow, and when the light fully shines, shadows disappear.

McClymond dismisses this as “an intriguing speculation” that does not match real-world experience.²⁶ But Gregory is not making a claim about what happens within the bounds of ordinary human history. He is making a theological claim about God’s ultimate purpose for creation. And his claim is grounded in Scripture. Paul tells us that the last enemy to be destroyed is death (1 Cor. 15:26). He tells us that God will be “all in all” (1 Cor. 15:28). He tells us that where sin increased, grace increased “how much more” (Rom. 5:15–17, 20). The consistent witness of the New Testament is that grace is more powerful than sin, life is more powerful than death, and God’s love is more powerful than human resistance.

Consider what Paul is actually saying in Romans 5. He sets up a comparison between Adam and Christ. Through Adam’s transgression, condemnation came to all people. Through Christ’s righteous act, justification came to all people. But Paul does not leave it as a simple parallel. He insists, three times in rapid succession, that the gift is “much more” than the trespass. Grace does not merely match the damage done by sin. Grace surpasses it. If sin brought death to all, then grace brings life to all—and more abundantly. Gregory’s claim that evil cannot outlast God’s goodness is simply the ontological expression of Paul’s “how much more” logic.

And think about what it would mean if McClymond were right—if evil could endure forever alongside God. That would mean that evil is co-eternal with God. It would mean that the creature’s “no” is ultimately as powerful as the Creator’s “yes.” It would mean that God’s purpose in creation is permanently frustrated, that the enemy’s work is never fully undone, that God is left reigning over a fractured kingdom in which pockets of rebellious misery persist for all eternity. Is that really the picture Scripture gives us? Is God “all in all” if some of his creatures are forever locked in agonized opposition to him? Gregory did not think so. Neither did Origen. Neither do I.

Origen taught the same thing. He argued that since God is Being itself, and evil is non-being, evil cannot coexist with God forever. When God is finally “all in all,” evil will be found in no creature any longer.²⁷ Gregory took this argument and sharpened it. But the core insight is the same: the ontological non-subsistence of evil means that evil’s defeat is not merely hoped for but metaphysically certain.

The Gold Refiner’s Fire

One of Gregory’s most powerful images is the gold refiner. He compared God’s purifying work in the afterlife to the process of smelting gold. When impurities are mixed with gold, the refiner applies intense heat. The impurities burn away. The gold remains, restored to its natural beauty. Gregory writes that “when some worthless material has been mixed up with gold and the gold-refiners burn up the foreign and refuse part in the consuming fire,” they “restore the more precious substance to its natural lustre.” This “melting away of the actual thing that was embedded in it to the injury of its beauty is a kind of healing of the gold.”²⁸

This image captures everything that is distinctive about the universalist understanding of divine judgment. The fire is real. It is painful. Gregory never minimized the severity of postmortem purification. He insisted that “it is impossible for one who has not thoroughly cleansed himself from all the stains arising from evil to be admitted amongst the heavenly company.”²⁹ The person with greater sin faces a longer, more painful process of purification. Gregory was quite explicit: “According to the amount of the ingrained wickedness of each will be computed the duration of his cure.”³⁰

But the fire is not pointless. It is not vindictive. It is not a permanent state. It is remedial. Its purpose is healing, not destruction. The gold is not destroyed in the furnace. It is purified. And this is exactly how Gregory understood the biblical language of fire and judgment. God is the refiner. Sin is the dross. The human soul is the gold. The refiner does not hate the gold. He loves it. And his fire, though painful, is the very instrument of the gold’s restoration.

This image has deep biblical roots. Malachi 3:2–3 describes the Lord as a “refiner’s fire” who will “purify the sons of Levi and refine them like gold and silver.” Isaiah 48:10 has God saying, “I have refined you, but not as silver is refined. Rather, I have refined you in the furnace of suffering.” Zechariah 13:9 promises, “I will refine them as one refines silver, and test them as gold is tested.” In every case, the image of fire is an image of purification and restoration, not permanent destruction.

Gregory on 1 Corinthians 15:28: God Will Be All in All

One of Gregory’s most important universalist texts is his short treatise on 1 Corinthians 15:28—In Illud: Tunc et Ipse Filius (“On the Text: Then the Son Himself Will Be Subjected”). As Ramelli has demonstrated, this treatise depends entirely on Origen’s exegesis of the same passage and links the argument against Arian subordinationism directly to the argument for apokatastasis.³¹

Gregory’s argument runs like this. Paul says that when all things are subjected to Christ, then Christ himself will be subjected to the Father, “that God may be all in all.” Gregory reads the “subjection” of all things to Christ not as a forced conquest but as salvific union. When all humanity—which is the body of Christ—submits to God, this submission is their salvation. Gregory writes that by “uniting us to himself, Christ is our unity; and having become one body with us through all things, he looks after us all. Subjection to God is our chief good when all creation resounds as one voice, when everything in heaven, on earth and under the earth bends the knee to him, and when every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord.”³²

Notice what Gregory has done. He has connected Philippians 2:10–11 (every knee bowing, every tongue confessing) with 1 Corinthians 15:28 (God being all in all). Both texts point to the same reality: the universal submission of all creatures to God, which is not a defeat but a victory—not coercion but salvation. Every creature, from the highest angel to the lowest sinner, will finally bend the knee and confess Christ as Lord. And this confession, as Paul says in 1 Corinthians 12:3, can only be made by the Holy Spirit. It is not the forced confession of defeated enemies. It is the genuine, Spirit-empowered confession of restored children.

This is the same argument that Origen made. It is the same exegetical framework. The continuity between the two thinkers on this point is overwhelming, and it directly contradicts McClymond’s claim that Gregory’s universalism was “no longer consonant with Origen’s.”

Gregory on the Incarnation and Universal Restoration

Gregory’s universalism is not just philosophical. It is deeply Christological. In his Great Catechism, Gregory argues that the incarnation itself carries universalist implications. When the eternal Son of God took on human nature, he joined himself to all of humanity. The benefits of this union extend to every creature—even, Gregory says, to “the introducer of evil himself,” meaning Satan.³³

Gregory understands the resurrection in the same way. Resurrection is “the re-constitution of our nature in its original form.”³⁴ But the “original form” Gregory has in mind is not the condition of the fleshly Adam in the garden. It is what scholars call the human pleroma—the complete fullness of humanity as God intended it from the beginning.³⁵ If the resurrection restores humanity to its God-intended fullness, then every human being who has ever lived must be included. You cannot have a complete humanity with pieces missing.

McClymond sees a problem here. He suggests that this corporate understanding of salvation makes Gregory’s universalism look uncomfortably close to the gnostic idea that one’s nature determines one’s destiny: “If we follow the logic of the restoration idea, then to be human is to be saved.”³⁶ But this objection misunderstands Gregory. The gnostics taught that different classes of people had different natures and therefore different destinies—some were spiritual and saved, others were material and lost. Gregory teaches the opposite: there is one human nature, created by God, taken up by Christ in the incarnation, and destined for restoration. That is not gnosticism. That is the logic of Nicene Christology.

If Christ assumed human nature in the incarnation, and if all human beings share in that nature, then Christ’s work of redemption extends to all human beings. This is not a bug in Gregory’s theology. It is the whole point. Gregory of Nazianzus made the same argument in a different context: “That which He has not assumed He has not healed.”³⁷ Christ assumed human nature—not just the nature of believers, not just the nature of the elect, but human nature as such. And what Christ assumed, he healed.

Gregory’s Purifying Fire and the Postmortem Opportunity

Gregory taught that no one enters heaven unprepared. Some are prepared through the sufferings and spiritual disciplines of this life. Others must be prepared through a process of postmortem purification. But everyone faces some form of cleansing before entering into the fullness of God’s presence.³⁸

In his Great Catechism, Gregory develops a striking theology of baptism and fire. Those who are baptized with water in this life have their sins cleansed through the sacrament. But those who were not baptized must be purified by fire in the next life. As Gregory writes: “Since, then, there is a cleansing virtue in fire and water, they who by the mystic water have washed away the defilement of sin have no further need of the other form of purification, while they who have not been admitted to that form of purgation must needs be purified by fire.”³⁹

This is not the Roman Catholic doctrine of purgatory. Gregory’s purifying fire is not for baptized Christians who need a little extra cleansing. It is for everyone who has not been cleansed in this life. And its purpose is not retribution but restoration—to prepare every soul for entrance into God’s presence. The Orthodox representatives at the Council of Ferrara-Florence in 1438–45 recognized this clearly. When the Latin delegates cited Gregory of Nyssa in defense of purgatory, the Orthodox responded that Gregory taught not a temporary purgatorial fire for some Christians but a purifying fire that leads to universal restoration.⁴⁰

This theology of postmortem purification is the bridge between Gregory’s philosophy and his eschatology. His philosophical conviction that evil cannot endure forever is grounded in his pastoral and theological conviction that God’s love pursues every creature beyond death. The fire of God’s presence is painful for those who have rejected God—but it is the pain of healing, not the pain of abandonment.

The Broader Cappadocian Witness

Gregory of Nyssa was not the only Cappadocian with universalist sympathies. His brother Basil of Caesarea also showed leanings in this direction, though more cautiously. Ramelli has documented that Basil’s linguistic usage is telling: he reserves the word aidios (“eternal” in the strict, timeless sense) exclusively for life in the age to come, while punishment, fire, and death are described only as aionia—pertaining to an age, but not necessarily unending.⁵⁸ This is the same linguistic distinction that Origen and Gregory of Nyssa maintained. It is a small but significant detail: the greatest Cappadocian theologians chose their words carefully, and they consistently avoided calling punishment “eternal” in the strongest possible sense.

Even more striking is a report from Paulus Orosius, a friend of Augustine who had no sympathy whatsoever for universalism. In his Warning about the Error of the Priscillianists and the Origenists (c. 414 AD), Orosius reports that Basil taught certain Origenian doctrines “in the most holy way,” including doctrines that Orosius considered problematic—among which was universal restoration.⁵⁹ Now, Orosius may have been misreading Basil, or overstating his case. But the testimony is significant precisely because Orosius was a hostile witness. He had no motive to attribute universalist sympathies to Basil unless the evidence pointed in that direction.

And Gregory of Nazianzus, the third Cappadocian, also showed a penchant for apokatastasis, as Ramelli has documented. In his Oration 39, Nazianzus speaks of a “wise fire” that discriminates between good and evil—the same concept of discriminating, purifying fire found in Origen and Gregory of Nyssa.⁶⁰ While Nazianzus is more cautious than his friend Gregory of Nyssa, the trajectory of his thought points in the same direction.

This means that all three Cappadocian Fathers—the men who defined Trinitarian orthodoxy for the Christian church—had some measure of sympathy for universal restoration. McClymond focuses on Gregory of Nyssa because he was the most explicit universalist of the three. But the broader pattern is just as damaging to McClymond’s thesis. If universalism were the dangerous, heterodox, gnostic-tinged heresy that McClymond portrays it as, why did all three of the Cappadocians show sympathy for it? Why did the architects of orthodox Trinitarianism lean toward a doctrine that McClymond says is incompatible with orthodoxy? The simplest answer is that universalism is not incompatible with orthodoxy at all. The Cappadocians saw no conflict, because there is no conflict.

The Unity of the Patristic Universalist Tradition

McClymond wants to fragment the patristic universalist tradition—to portray it as a series of disconnected, incompatible opinions rather than a coherent theological stream. But the evidence points in the other direction. The line from Origen to Gregory to Evagrius to Maximus to Eriugena is not a series of breaks and departures. It is a living tradition of creative development.

Gregory’s theology of freedom? It depends entirely on Origen.⁴¹ Gregory’s ontological argument about the non-subsistence of evil? Origen made the same argument in his Commentary on John (2:13), where he taught that only God, the supreme Good, truly is, and that evil is a turning toward non-being.⁴² Gregory’s exegesis of 1 Corinthians 15:28? It follows Origen’s exegesis closely.⁴³ Gregory’s insistence on postmortem purification? Origen taught the same thing.⁴⁴ Gregory’s use of the gold-refining metaphor? Origen used it too.⁴⁵

Ramelli summarizes the situation concisely. The supposed differences between Origen and Gregory are “between Origen’s alleged thought—a misconstruction ultimately stemming from the Origenistic controversies—and Nyssen’s, not between Origen’s actual thought (as it emerges from his authentic texts) and Nyssen’s.”⁴⁶ When you compare what Origen actually wrote with what Gregory actually wrote, the continuity is profound. Gregory was not departing from Origen. He was building on Origen’s foundation with originality and depth.

And the tradition did not stop with Gregory. Evagrius Ponticus, who was deeply influenced not only by Basil and Gregory of Nazianzus but also by Gregory of Nyssa, continued the universalist tradition.⁴⁷ Like Origen and Gregory, Evagrius insisted that evil has no ontological substance and that providence will lead every rational creature through purification until all reach the Holy Trinity.⁴⁸ Maximus the Confessor transformed and developed Origen’s and Gregory’s ideas further, producing his concept of “ever-moving rest.”⁴⁹ And Eriugena further elaborated the vision of universal restoration that he received from this patristic tradition.⁵⁰

This is not a fragmented tradition. This is a river. It has tributaries and meanderings, but it flows in one clear direction: toward the universal restoration of all things in Christ. McClymond’s attempt to dam this river by separating Gregory from Origen simply does not work.

Gregory Was Never Condemned

There is one more fact that McClymond must deal with, and it may be the most important of all. Gregory of Nyssa was never condemned. Not at the Fifth Ecumenical Council in 553. Not at any council, ever. His universalism was publicly known. He wrote about it in treatises that circulated widely. And yet the early church chose to honor him as a pillar of orthodoxy rather than censure him as a heretic.

McClymond tries to explain this away. He suggests that Gregory “did much to deflect criticism” by giving up the “speculative and disputed teaching on preexistent souls.”⁵¹ He notes that Gregory was specially honored for his role in developing Trinitarian doctrine and for being Basil’s brother. He cites the Orthodox theologian Androutsos, who took the view that Gregory’s teaching on apokatastasis had been condemned even though Gregory himself had escaped condemnation.⁵²

But this explanation does not hold up. If universalism itself was condemned at the Fifth Council, then Gregory of Nyssa should have been condemned along with it—just as Origen, Didymus, and Evagrius were. The fact that Gregory was not condemned strongly suggests that universalism itself was not the target of the condemnation. What was condemned was a specific set of speculative metaphysical ideas—preexistence of souls, apokatastasis of demons in the specific form attributed to the Origenists—not the broader hope of universal restoration that Gregory and others taught. As Ramelli puts it, Justinian “certainly did not condemn the real thought of Origen, least of all that of Gregory of Nyssa.”⁵³

What Gregory’s Universalism Tells Us

Gregory of Nyssa gives us something that McClymond’s entire project tries to deny: a universalism that is fully orthodox, deeply biblical, robustly Trinitarian, pastorally serious, and philosophically sophisticated. Gregory did not come to his universalism through gnostic influence or esoteric mysticism or sentimental wishful thinking. He came to it through careful engagement with Scripture, through the logic of the incarnation, through his understanding of evil and goodness, through his reading of Paul, and through his conviction that the God revealed in Jesus Christ is a God whose love will not rest until every creature is restored.

Gregory shows us that a person can affirm universal restoration and simultaneously affirm the full deity and humanity of Christ (Gregory helped define it). He can affirm universal restoration and simultaneously defend Trinitarian orthodoxy against the Arians (Gregory spent his career doing this). He can affirm universal restoration and simultaneously take human freedom with complete seriousness (Gregory insisted on it more than almost any other father). He can affirm universal restoration and simultaneously acknowledge the reality, severity, and painfulness of divine judgment (Gregory never flinched from this).

I want to highlight something that often gets lost in these scholarly debates. Gregory was not playing intellectual games. He was a pastor. He buried parishioners. He sat with people who were dying. He preached to congregations full of people struggling with grief and loss and the fear of death. His universalism was not an abstract theory. It was a pastoral conviction born from the intersection of Scripture, theology, and lived experience. He looked at the death and suffering of the people he loved, and he asked: Is God’s love powerful enough to reach them? Is Christ’s victory complete enough to save them? His answer, after decades of prayer and study and pastoral care, was yes. Unreservedly, joyfully, confidently yes.

That answer did not make him soft on sin. Read his works. He is brutally honest about the severity of God’s purifying fire. He does not sugarcoat the consequences of evil. But he refuses to believe that those consequences are the last word. And his refusal was not based on wishful thinking. It was based on the character of God as revealed in Jesus Christ, on the logic of the incarnation, on the witness of Paul, and on the philosophical recognition that evil—being nothing more than a turning away from God—cannot endure forever in the face of infinite, eternal, relentless Good.

In short, Gregory demolishes the myth that universalism is theologically irresponsible. He is living proof that the hope of universal restoration belongs at the very heart of Christian orthodoxy, not at its margins.

D. Counter-Objections

“Even if Gregory’s Universalism Was Continuous with Origen’s, Both Could Still Be Wrong”

Someone might object: “Fine, so Gregory followed Origen. That just means they were both wrong. The continuity of a tradition does not make it true.”

That is a fair point in the abstract. Continuity alone does not prove truth. But the point of this chapter is more specific. McClymond’s strategy is to undermine universalism by fragmenting the tradition—making it look like a series of disconnected opinions rather than a coherent theological position held by some of the greatest minds in church history. Demonstrating the continuity between Origen and Gregory defeats that strategy. Whether the tradition is ultimately true depends on its biblical and theological merits, which we address throughout this book (especially in Chapters 14–22). But McClymond cannot dismiss universalism as a fringe position when two of the most important theologians in the first millennium held it as part of the same coherent tradition.

“Gregory’s Ontological Argument About Evil Is Philosophical, Not Biblical”

McClymond might respond that Gregory’s argument about the non-subsistence of evil is a philosophical import from Platonism, not a genuinely biblical idea. After all, the Bible does not explicitly state that “evil is ontologically deficient.”

This objection confuses vocabulary with substance. The Bible may not use the language of ontology, but it clearly teaches that God is the creator of all things, that everything God made was good, and that evil is a corruption of what God made—not an independent, self-sustaining force. Genesis 1 declares everything God made “very good.” Evil enters through the creature’s choice, not through God’s creation. When Paul says that God will be “all in all” (1 Cor. 15:28), he envisions a state in which there is no room left for evil. That is exactly what Gregory’s ontological argument says in philosophical language.

Furthermore, Gregory was not the only early Christian to think in these terms. The idea that evil is a privation of good has an impressive pedigree in Christian thought. It was held by Origen, by Gregory of Nazianzus, by Pseudo-Dionysius, and was later adopted even by Augustine (who rejected universalism but accepted the philosophical framework). If Gregory was importing an alien philosophy, then so was virtually every major theologian in the first five centuries of Christianity.⁵⁴

“Some of Gregory’s Texts Speak of Unending Punishment, So He Wasn’t Really a Universalist”

Baghos and others have pointed to passages in Gregory’s writings where the language of unending punishment is used without qualification.⁵⁵ Does this mean Gregory was not really a universalist?

No. It means Gregory was a pastor and a preacher as well as a theologian. When preaching to his congregation, he used the vivid, sobering language of Scripture about judgment and punishment—because that language serves a genuine pastoral purpose. It warns. It motivates repentance. It reminds hearers that sin has terrible consequences. A universalist who also takes judgment seriously will naturally sound like this in certain contexts.

But when we look at Gregory’s systematic theological works—the places where he carefully lays out his considered convictions—the universalist trajectory is unmistakable. In On the Soul and the Resurrection, in the Great Catechism, in In Illud: Tunc et Ipse Filius, and even in his late Homilies on the Song of Songs, Gregory teaches clearly and repeatedly that God’s purifying love will ultimately restore every creature. As Ramelli documents, Gregory remained committed to this view “right until the end of his life,” writing in his homilies on the Song of Songs that the divine will to save all humans “shall be fulfilled.”⁵⁶

The existence of some pastoral passages using harsh judgment language does not overturn this systematic commitment any more than Jesus’s sharp warnings about Gehenna overturn the broader biblical vision of universal reconciliation. Good pastors use warning language. That does not make them ECT proponents.

“Universalism Makes the Incarnation and the Cross Unnecessary”

McClymond might argue that if everyone is saved anyway, then Christ’s incarnation, death, and resurrection lose their urgency. Why did Christ need to die if God was going to save everyone regardless?

Gregory’s answer is simple: Christ’s incarnation and death are not unnecessary. They are the means by which universal salvation is accomplished. God does not save people “regardless” of Christ. He saves people through Christ. The incarnation is the event in which God joined himself to human nature. The cross is the event in which the power of death and evil was defeated. The resurrection is the event in which new, transformed life was made available to all. None of this is unnecessary. All of it is essential.

For Gregory, the universalism follows from the incarnation, not in spite of it. Because the Son of God took on human nature, the benefits of the incarnation extend to everyone who shares that nature. Because Christ defeated death and evil on the cross, that defeat extends to every creature trapped in death and evil. Universalism does not diminish the incarnation. It takes the incarnation more seriously than any particularist theology does. If Christ only saves some human beings, then his assumption of human nature was incomplete. If Christ saves all human beings, then the incarnation accomplished exactly what it was meant to accomplish.

Gregory developed this Christological logic with remarkable consistency. In On the Soul and the Resurrection, he argued that evil entered the world through the creature’s misuse of will, and that Christ entered the world to reverse that damage from within human nature itself. The incarnation was not merely an external rescue operation; it was an internal transformation of human nature. Christ took on the very nature that had been corrupted by sin, and by living, dying, and rising in that nature, he healed it from the inside out. Gregory described the adversary as having “mingled evilness to the human faculty of choice,” producing “an obfuscation and darkening of the capacity for reasoning well.”⁶¹ Christ’s work reverses that obfuscation. He is the light that dispels the darkness. And if the light is powerful enough to dispel all darkness—which is what 1 John 1:5 and John 1:5 promise—then the restoration must be universal.

Gregory even extended this logic to Satan himself. In the Great Catechism, he described how Christ deceived the devil by appearing as a common human while being God in disguise. This is a startling image, but Gregory drew a profound lesson from it: because Christ is God, he has the power to convert even the devil to the Good. The incarnation did not merely rescue some humans. It set in motion a process of restoration that will eventually encompass every creature who has gone astray—including, Gregory believed, the original source of evil itself.⁶²

“Gregory’s Corporate Understanding of Salvation Ignores Individuals”

McClymond and others have suggested that Gregory’s emphasis on the restoration of the human pleroma—the fullness of human nature—leaves no room for individual responsibility. If human nature as a whole is restored, what happens to individual sinners and their choices?

This objection misreads Gregory. As we saw above, Gregory insists that human beings are free agents who must choose virtue freely. He rejected coerced salvation. He taught that different individuals face different durations of purification depending on the depth of their sin.⁵⁷ His universalism is not a flattening of individual differences but a confidence that God’s love will reach every individual through whatever purification is necessary.

The corporate and individual dimensions of Gregory’s thought are not in tension. They work together. God restores the human pleroma precisely by reaching each individual person through purifying love. The fullness of humanity is not an abstraction floating above individual humans. It is the sum of every human being, each restored in their unique personhood to the relationship with God for which they were created.

We see this same dynamic in Paul. When Paul speaks of Christ reconciling “all things” to himself (Col. 1:20), he is speaking corporately—the entire cosmos. But when he speaks of God working “all things together for good” (Rom. 8:28), he is addressing individual believers. The cosmic and the personal are not opposites in biblical thought. They are two sides of the same coin. The restoration of all things is the restoration of every person. Gregory understood this. And it is why his universalism, far from being impersonal or abstract, is actually more deeply personal than any particularist eschatology. Under particularism, some persons are ultimately lost—their personhood crushed, destroyed, or permanently marred. Under universalism, every person is brought to the fullness of their God-given potential. Which view takes individual persons more seriously?

“Gregory Was a Product of His Philosophical Culture, Not a Faithful Reader of Scripture”

A final objection worth addressing is the idea that Gregory’s universalism was essentially Greek philosophy dressed up in Christian clothes. McClymond hints at this throughout his treatment, noting that Plato and Platonic authors were “arguably the most powerful philosophical influences on Gregory’s thought.”⁶³

There is a kernel of truth here. Gregory was philosophically sophisticated, and he drew on Platonic categories in his theology. But the same could be said of virtually every major theologian in the first five centuries of Christianity, including those who rejected universalism. Augustine was deeply influenced by Neoplatonism. So was Pseudo-Dionysius. So was Boethius. The use of philosophical categories does not make a theological position unbiblical. What matters is whether the philosophical tools are being used in service of biblical truth or in opposition to it.

In Gregory’s case, the philosophical framework serves the biblical vision beautifully. The claim that evil is a privation of good is not a Platonic invention imposed on Scripture. It is a philosophical articulation of what Genesis 1 already implies: God created everything good, and evil entered as a corruption, not as an independent creation. The claim that God’s goodness must ultimately prevail is not a Platonic wish. It is what 1 Corinthians 15:28 and Revelation 21:5 promise. Gregory was a Christian thinker who used the best philosophical tools available to him in service of a biblical vision. To dismiss his theology as “too philosophical” is to apply a standard that would disqualify nearly every great theologian in church history.

Conclusion

Gregory of Nyssa stands as one of the most devastating witnesses against McClymond’s thesis. McClymond wants to portray universalism as a fringe heresy incompatible with orthodox Christianity. Gregory was one of the founders of orthodox Christianity. McClymond wants to fragment the universalist tradition by driving a wedge between Origen and his successors. Gregory’s deep continuity with Origen demonstrates that the tradition is unified. McClymond wants to argue that universalism rests on gnostic rather than biblical foundations. Gregory built his universalism on 1 Corinthians 15:28, Philippians 2:10–11, the logic of the incarnation, and a theology of evil rooted in the biblical affirmation that God alone is truly good.

The question is not whether Gregory of Nyssa was a universalist. The evidence is overwhelming that he was. The question is what to do with that fact. McClymond’s answer is to minimize it, fragment it, and explain it away. Our answer is to take it seriously. When one of the greatest theologians in the history of Christianity—a Cappadocian Father, a defender of Nicene orthodoxy, a saint honored across the Christian world—teaches universal restoration as the logical outcome of Christ’s incarnation, death, and resurrection, that is not a problem for universalism. That is a problem for everyone who says universalism cannot be orthodox.

Gregory saw something that McClymond refuses to see: that the same God who created all things in love is powerful enough, patient enough, and good enough to restore all things through love. That the fire of God’s presence is a refiner’s fire, not a torturer’s fire. That evil, for all its terrible power in this age, has no ontological staying power against the God who is Being itself. And that when God finally becomes “all in all,” no creature will be left outside the circle of his love.

That is the legacy of Gregory of Nyssa. And no amount of creative misreading can take it away.