Chapter 16
There is a question that opponents of universal restoration love to ask. It comes up in almost every debate, every blog comment thread, every seminary classroom where this topic is raised. The question is simple, and it carries real weight: “What do you do with Jesus’s warnings about hell?”
It is a fair question. Honest. Direct. And it deserves an equally honest and direct answer.
Jesus did warn people about Gehenna. He warned them in strong, vivid, terrifying language. He spoke of fire. He spoke of worms. He spoke of a narrow gate and a wide road leading to destruction. He told people they should fear the One who could destroy both soul and body in Gehenna. These are not soft words. They are not metaphors you brush aside with a wave of your hand.
Michael McClymond knows this, and he presses the point hard. Throughout The Devil’s Redemption, he points to Jesus’s warnings as among the strongest evidence against universalism. His argument is straightforward: if universal restoration is true, then Jesus’s warnings were misleading at best and dishonest at worst. A Jesus who warned people about a fate that would never ultimately befall anyone—that, McClymond suggests, is not a Jesus worthy of trust.1
I want to take this argument seriously. I want to give it the respect it deserves. Because here is what I believe with my whole heart: universalists do not need to run from Jesus’s warnings. We do not need to soften them, explain them away, or pretend they say something other than what they say. We can look at every single Gehenna text, every warning about fire and destruction and the narrow way, and we can take them with complete, unflinching seriousness—and still hold to the hope of universal restoration.
In fact, I want to argue something stronger. I believe the universalist reading of these texts actually takes them more seriously than the traditional reading does. The traditional reading empties these warnings of their purpose. The universalist reading gives them their full weight.
That is a bold claim. So let me make the case.
McClymond’s treatment of Jesus’s Gehenna warnings runs throughout The Devil’s Redemption rather than being confined to a single chapter. His argument weaves through his critique of every major universalist thinker, appearing whenever he wants to press the exegetical case against universal restoration. The core of his position can be summarized like this: Jesus’s words about Gehenna, the narrow way, and the destruction of soul and body constitute clear evidence that the final state of humanity involves two permanent destinies—one of blessing and one of judgment.2
McClymond frames the issue in terms of what he calls the “two ways” tradition in Scripture. Drawing on a long line of Jewish and Christian thought, he notes that the language of two paths—one leading to life and one leading to death—runs through the Old Testament (Deuteronomy 30:15; Jeremiah 21:8) and reaches its climax in Jesus’s own teaching.3 The parable of the wheat and weeds, the parable of the net, the wise and foolish virgins, the sheep and the goats—all of these, McClymond insists, assume two ultimate eschatological destinies, not one.4
When McClymond turns to the Gehenna texts specifically, he highlights several key passages. In Mark 9:42–48, Jesus warns that it is better to enter life maimed than to be thrown into Gehenna, “where their worm does not die and the fire is not quenched.” McClymond notes that this language—borrowed from Isaiah 66:24—appears to describe something ongoing and unending.5 In Matthew 7:13–14, Jesus speaks of a wide gate and a broad road that leads to destruction (apōleia), and McClymond takes this as evidence that the majority of humanity is heading toward a final, catastrophic end.6 In Matthew 10:28, Jesus tells his disciples not to fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul, but rather to fear the One who can “destroy both soul and body in Gehenna”—and McClymond sees this as unmistakable evidence of a permanent fate.7
McClymond also draws on the Grisez-Ryan argument, which he cites approvingly: Jesus would have been dishonest if he had tried to motivate people by warnings that were not truthful descriptions of their actual prospects.8 In other words, if universalism is true, Jesus was either lying or manipulating people with false threats. That is the crux of McClymond’s challenge. He presses it against Robin Parry in particular, noting Parry’s candid admission that he is “not trying to show that Jesus taught universalism nor that he taught that those in Gehenna could or would be saved, for he did neither.”9 McClymond treats this as a devastating concession. If Jesus himself did not teach what universalists teach, then on what basis can they claim their position is biblical?
McClymond further notes that Parry’s handling of Mark 9:48—the “unquenchable fire”—involves what he considers an inversion of Jesus’s plain meaning. When Parry argues that an unquenchable fire need not burn forever, McClymond finds this unconvincing, even evasive.10 He also cites N. T. Wright, who wrote that Jesus “went along with the normal first-century Jewish perception” that “there really are some who finally reject God and, as it were, have that rejection ratified.”11
The cumulative force of McClymond’s argument is this: Jesus warned people with urgent, vivid language about a terrible fate. Those warnings assume a real, permanent, twofold outcome. Universalism, by denying that permanent twofold outcome, effectively empties Jesus’s words of their meaning.
McClymond’s argument has real force. I am not going to pretend otherwise. The Gehenna texts are among the most challenging passages for any universalist to engage. But force is not the same thing as soundness. When you look closely at McClymond’s reasoning, several serious problems emerge.
The most fundamental problem in McClymond’s argument is a logical leap that he never justifies: the assumption that a warning about a consequence automatically describes a permanent, irreversible final state. Think about this for a moment. When a parent warns a child, “If you touch that stove, you will get burned,” the warning is completely truthful. The burn is real. The pain is real. But the warning does not mean the burn will last forever. It does not mean the child will never heal. The truth of the warning is in the reality of the consequence, not in its permanence.12
Jesus’s warnings about Gehenna work exactly the same way. When Jesus says, “It is better for you to enter life maimed than with two hands to go to Gehenna,” the warning is urgent. The danger is real. The suffering is real. But nothing in the warning itself tells us that Gehenna is the final stop on the journey. Nothing tells us that the person thrown into Gehenna stays there without end. McClymond reads permanence into the text, but Jesus never states it.13
McClymond treats “Gehenna” as if it were a transparent synonym for “eternal hell.” But this is precisely the kind of assumption that careful exegesis should expose. Gehenna was a real place—the Valley of Hinnom, just south of Jerusalem. It had a specific, well-known history. And McClymond’s failure to engage that history in any serious way is a significant weakness in his argument.14
The word Gehenna appears twelve times in the New Testament—eleven in the Gospels and once in James.15 Every time Jesus used it, his Jewish audience would have heard a specific reference to a real valley with a dark past, not an abstract doctrine about the afterlife. McClymond glosses over this fact, treating Gehenna as though its meaning is self-evident. It is not.
The claim that Jesus would have been “dishonest” if universalism were true rests on a misunderstanding of how warnings function. Consider a doctor who tells a patient, “If you don’t change your diet, you will die of a heart attack.” If the patient eventually does change their diet—perhaps even after suffering a heart attack that nearly kills them—was the doctor dishonest? Of course not. The warning was completely true. The consequence was completely real. The fact that the patient eventually recovered does not make the warning a lie.16
In the same way, Jesus’s warnings about Gehenna are entirely truthful even if the people who experience Gehenna eventually come through it. The fire is real. The suffering is real. The danger is real. The universalist does not say the warnings are empty. The universalist says the warnings describe a real, terrible, purifying consequence—and that God’s love is powerful enough to bring people through it, not leave them in it forever.
Perhaps the most telling weakness in McClymond’s treatment of the Gehenna texts is what he leaves out. In Mark 9, immediately after the fearsome warning about the worm and the fire, Jesus adds a verse that most commentators on the traditional side simply skip over: “For everyone will be salted with fire” (Mark 9:49). This is an extraordinary statement. As Ilaria Ramelli has shown, this verse characterizes the fire of Gehenna as purifying—like salt that preserves and cleanses—and insists that everyone will pass through it.17 McClymond does not give this verse the attention it deserves. He focuses on the worm and the fire but ignores the salt. That is like reading half a sentence and drawing your conclusion before you finish.
McClymond insists that Jesus’s warnings should be read at face value. But he applies this principle selectively. When Jesus says “cut off your hand” and “tear out your eye” (Matt. 5:29–30), no one reads this literally. Everyone recognizes the hyperbolic, rhetorical nature of Jesus’s language in these warnings. Yet when Jesus speaks of Gehenna in the very same passage, McClymond suddenly switches to a literalist hermeneutic. You cannot have it both ways. If the hand-cutting is hyperbolic, then the Gehenna language is at least potentially hyperbolic too.18 I am not saying it is all metaphor. I am saying that McClymond’s insistence on reading Gehenna as a literal, permanent state while reading the self-mutilation as figurative is inconsistent.
Now we come to the heart of this chapter. I want to walk through the key Gehenna passages that belong to this chapter’s discussion—Matthew 5:22, 29–30; Matthew 7:13–14; Mark 9:42–48; and Matthew 10:28—and show how the conservative biblical universalist reads them. My aim is not to soften these texts. My aim is to let them speak with their full force while placing them in their proper context.
We have to start here, because everything depends on understanding what Jesus’s audience actually heard when he said the word Gehenna.
Gehenna is the Greek form of the Hebrew Ge-Hinnom—the Valley of Hinnom. This was a real valley, running along the south and southwest sides of Jerusalem. In the Old Testament, it had a terrible reputation. It was the place where the kings Ahaz and Manasseh had practiced child sacrifice, burning their children in the fire as offerings to the pagan god Molech (2 Chron. 28:3; 33:6; Jer. 7:31–32; 32:35). The prophet Jeremiah pronounced God’s judgment on this valley, declaring that it would become a place of slaughter and desolation (Jer. 7:32–33; 19:6–7).19
By the time of Jesus, the Valley of Hinnom had become Jerusalem’s garbage dump. Refuse, dead animals, and even the bodies of executed criminals were thrown there and burned. The fires smoldered constantly because they were continually fed with new fuel. This is the image behind the “unquenchable fire”—a fire that does not go out because there is always something to burn.20
Here is the critical point: those fires are not burning today. The “unquenchable” fires of the Valley of Hinnom went out centuries ago. The word “unquenchable” (asbestos in Greek) does not mean “burns forever.” It means “cannot be put out”—that is, no human effort can extinguish it. It burns until its work is done. The same word is used in the Septuagint (the Greek translation of the Old Testament) for fires that have long since burned out. When Jeremiah 17:27 says God will kindle an “unquenchable fire” in the gates of Jerusalem, that fire has obviously not been burning for twenty-six centuries. It burned until it accomplished its purpose, and then it stopped.21
When Jesus used the word Gehenna, his listeners did not hear an abstract theological concept about the afterlife. They heard a reference to a real place with a real history—a place of judgment, yes, but a place on earth, a place with a beginning and an end. Brad Jersak has shown in Her Gates Will Never Be Shut that the most natural reading of Jesus’s Gehenna language connects it to the coming destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70, when the Valley of Hinnom became quite literally a place of burning corpses and national catastrophe.22
None of this means Gehenna is only a reference to the AD 70 destruction. Jesus clearly uses Gehenna as an image for divine judgment that extends beyond this life. But the image comes from a real place, and that real place tells us something essential about the nature of the judgment: it is real, it is terrible, and it is temporary. The fires of the Valley of Hinnom are not burning today.
I want to press this point because it matters enormously. The English word “hell” carries centuries of baggage—images from Dante’s Inferno, medieval paintings of demons with pitchforks, an underground cavern of eternal flame. None of that comes from Jesus. All of it was imported later, first through the Latin Vulgate’s translation choices and then through centuries of Western European cultural development. When we strip away the accumulated imagery and go back to what Jesus actually said, we find a reference to a garbage dump outside Jerusalem. That is not a minor detail. That is the foundation on which the entire discussion must be built.62
We should also note something that is often missed in these discussions: the word Gehenna does not appear anywhere in the Old Testament as a reference to the afterlife. It appears as a geographic location—a valley. The prophets used it as a symbol of God’s judgment on sin, particularly the sin of child sacrifice. But the idea of Gehenna as an afterlife destination developed in the intertestamental period, between the Old and New Testaments. By Jesus’s time, Jewish opinion on Gehenna was far from unanimous. Some rabbis taught that Gehenna was a temporary place of purification, lasting no more than twelve months for most people. Others taught that it was permanent for the wicked. The point is that there was genuine diversity in Jewish thought about Gehenna’s duration, and Jesus’s use of the term does not automatically settle the question in favor of permanence.63
In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus uses Gehenna twice. First, in Matthew 5:22, he warns that anyone who says “You fool!” to a brother or sister “will be liable to the Gehenna of fire.” Then, in verses 29–30, he tells his hearers that if their right eye causes them to sin, they should tear it out, because “it is better that you lose one of your members than that your whole body be thrown into Gehenna.”
Notice several things about these warnings.
First, the context is a series of escalating consequences for sin. In verse 22, Jesus moves from “judgment” to “the council” to “the Gehenna of fire.” The progression is from a local court to the Sanhedrin to Gehenna. As the Universalism: Fact or Fiction study observes, Jesus is speaking to Jewish listeners about their own legal system. The “judgment” he references is the kind of judgment the Law of Moses prescribed for murderers—temporal, physical, and this-worldly. Jesus extends the principle to anger and contempt, warning that these sins carry consequences just as real as those the Law prescribed for murder.23
Second, the language about cutting off hands and tearing out eyes is universally recognized as hyperbole. No responsible Christian teacher has ever taught that Jesus literally commands self-mutilation. The point is the seriousness of sin and the urgency of dealing with it. If the remedy is hyperbolic, then the punishment language is at least open to a non-literal reading as well. I am not saying the warning is empty. I am saying that Jesus is using extreme, vivid language to make his audience feel the gravity of sin.24
Third—and this is crucial—nothing in Matthew 5:22 or 29–30 says anything about duration. Jesus says the danger is Gehenna. He does not say the person stays in Gehenna forever. He does not say there is no way out. He does not say God’s love ceases to operate there. The traditional reading imports all of those ideas into the text. They are not in the text.
“Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it.”
This is one of the passages that McClymond and others cite most frequently against universalism. If “many” enter through the wide gate that leads to destruction, and only “a few” find the narrow road to life, then how can the universalist claim that all will eventually be saved?
Several responses are in order.
First, consider what the word “destruction” (apōleia) actually means. In Greek, apōleia refers to ruin, loss, or waste—not necessarily annihilation or permanent torment. The same word family (apollymi) is used in Luke 15 when Jesus describes the “lost” sheep, the “lost” coin, and the “lost” son. In every case, what was “lost” (apollymi) was found and restored. The shepherd found the sheep. The woman found the coin. The father received the prodigal back with open arms. If apollymi can describe a state from which restoration is not only possible but actual, then apōleia does not automatically mean permanent, irreversible ruin.25
Second, consider the audience and the context. Jesus is speaking to a crowd in Galilee, urging them to follow him now. His warning is about the urgency of the present moment, not a comprehensive map of everyone’s eternal destiny. As James Beilby has shown, the “few will be saved” language in Jesus’s teaching does not necessarily describe the final tally of the redeemed across all of history. It describes the reality that, in this life, the path of discipleship is difficult and most people do not choose it.26 The universalist agrees completely. Most people, in this life, do not walk the narrow road. But this does not mean God stops pursuing them after death.
Third, notice what Jesus does not say. He does not say, “Many will enter the wide gate and remain in destruction forever.” He does not say, “The few who find the narrow road are the only ones who will ever be saved.” He does not say, “God has no plan for those on the wide road.” These conclusions are read into the text. The text itself describes a present reality and a present danger—not a final, permanent outcome for every human being who ever lives.
Beilby makes an important observation here. The assumption behind the anti-universalist reading is that “if people are given a Postmortem Opportunity to hear and respond to the gospel, many, most, or even all of those people will be saved—which contradicts these passages.” But as Beilby points out, this assumption is faulty. Even if a postmortem opportunity exists, Jesus’s warning about the difficulty of the narrow way remains true in this life. The warning functions as a warning—it urges present repentance. It does not foreclose on what God may do beyond death.27
This is the passage that most people think of when they think of Jesus’s strongest “hell” language. It is also the passage where McClymond presses his case hardest. So let us look at it carefully.
Jesus says:
“If your hand causes you to stumble, cut it off. It is better for you to enter life maimed than with two hands to go to Gehenna, to the unquenchable fire. And if your foot causes you to stumble, cut it off. It is better for you to enter life lame than with two feet to be thrown into Gehenna. And if your eye causes you to stumble, tear it out. It is better for you to enter the kingdom of God with one eye than with two eyes to be thrown into Gehenna, where their worm does not die and the fire is not quenched.” (Mark 9:43–48)
The phrase “where their worm does not die and the fire is not quenched” is a direct quotation from Isaiah 66:24, the very last verse of the book of Isaiah. In its original context, Isaiah describes the corpses of those who have rebelled against God lying in the Valley of Hinnom. The worms feeding on the corpses do not die, and the fire consuming them is not quenched. This is a scene of aftermath—a scene of judgment that has already fallen.28
Notice what the image actually is. It is not a picture of living people being tormented forever. It is a picture of dead bodies being consumed by worms and fire. The worms do not die because there is plenty of carrion to feed on. The fire is not quenched because no one puts it out. But worms and fire both consume. They do their work and, when the work is done, they stop. As Parry has argued in a direct exchange with McClymond, “an unquenchable fire is not the same thing as a never-ending fire. It is simply a fire that cannot be put out. Like other unquenchable fires in the Bible, it need not last forever.”29
McClymond finds this unconvincing. He thinks Parry is inverting the plain sense of Jesus’s words. But consider the evidence. The word “unquenchable” (asbestos) appears in the Septuagint for fires that have demonstrably gone out. Jeremiah 17:27 prophesies an “unquenchable fire” in Jerusalem’s gates. That fire burned when Nebuchadnezzar sacked the city in 586 BC. It is not burning now. Ezekiel 20:47–48 speaks of an “unquenchable” forest fire in the Negev. That fire burned and stopped. In every Old Testament case, “unquenchable” means the fire cannot be stopped by human effort before it finishes its work—not that it burns literally forever.30
But here is where it gets really interesting. Look at what comes immediately after the worm-and-fire warning. In Mark 9:49, Jesus says: “For everyone will be salted with fire.”
This verse is one of the most overlooked statements in the entire Gehenna discussion. Ramelli has drawn attention to its significance: the fire of Gehenna is described here as having a salting function. Salt preserves. Salt purifies. Salt was used in temple sacrifices. The fire of Gehenna, in Jesus’s own words, is not just destructive—it is purifying. And it applies to everyone.17
Think about that. Jesus has just delivered one of the most terrifying warnings in all of Scripture. And then, in the very next breath, he reframes the fire as purifying salt that everyone will pass through. If we take Jesus’s words seriously—all of them, not just the frightening ones—then we cannot avoid the conclusion that the fire of Gehenna has a purpose beyond mere punishment. It purifies. It refines. It does its work, and when the work is done, it stops.
“Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in Gehenna.”
McClymond and others read this as one of the clearest statements about permanent ruin. God can destroy both soul and body in Gehenna—surely this means total, permanent destruction. But does it?
The word “destroy” here is apollymi—the same word used throughout Luke 15 for what is “lost.” The lost sheep was apollymi. The lost coin was apollymi. The prodigal son was apollymi. And all three were found and restored. Apollymi has a wide range of meaning in the New Testament: to lose, to ruin, to bring to nothing, to render useless. It does not automatically mean “annihilate” or “torment forever.”32
What Jesus is saying is this: human enemies can only hurt your body. God alone has power over your entire being—body and soul. Therefore, God is the one you should take seriously. This is a statement about God’s authority and power, not a detailed description of what God will actually do with that power. Thomas Talbott has pointed out that God’s power to destroy does not tell us God’s intention. A surgeon can kill a patient. That does not mean the surgeon intends to kill. God has the power to destroy both soul and body—and God also has the power to restore both soul and body. The question is what God’s character tells us he will actually do.33
Note also what is not said. Jesus does not say God will destroy every sinner’s soul and body in Gehenna. He says God can. The statement is about capacity and authority, not about a guaranteed outcome for every individual. As Beilby has pointed out, Jesus’s purpose here is to redirect his disciples’ fear from human persecutors to God. The point is the seriousness of God’s judgment, not a comprehensive eschatological roadmap.34
I want to note something else about Matthew 10:28 that is often overlooked in this debate. The fact that God can destroy both soul and body in Gehenna actually affirms the substance dualism that this book has defended throughout. The soul and the body are distinguished here. The soul survives physical death—human enemies can kill the body but not the soul. This means the soul continues to exist after death, which is exactly the anthropology that supports the possibility of postmortem repentance and restoration. We will discuss this in much greater detail in Chapter 31.35
Here is where the whole argument comes together. McClymond insists that Jesus’s warnings describe the final state of the lost. But what if they serve a different function? What if Jesus’s warnings are designed to motivate present action, not to provide a comprehensive map of every person’s ultimate destiny?
Think about how warnings work in everyday life. A sign that says “DANGER: CLIFF EDGE” is completely true. If you walk off that cliff, you will fall and be hurt badly. The sign is not lying. The danger is real. But the sign does not tell you whether there is a rescue team at the bottom of the cliff. It does not tell you whether someone will come find you if you fall. Its purpose is to keep you from falling in the first place. It is not a comprehensive description of what happens after you fall.36
Jesus’s Gehenna warnings function the same way. They are designed to produce urgency. They are designed to make people take sin seriously. They are designed to drive people toward repentance now, in this life, while there is still time to avoid the suffering altogether. And they are completely truthful. If you persist in sin, you will face Gehenna. The fire is real. The suffering is real. The consequences are terrible.
But the warnings do not tell us what happens after Gehenna. They do not tell us whether God’s love reaches into that fire. They do not tell us whether God’s purifying work continues even there. For that information, we have to look at other texts—texts about God’s character, God’s purposes, and God’s unrelenting love. And when we look at those texts, the picture becomes very different from what McClymond assumes.
McClymond sometimes gives the impression that the universalist reading of Gehenna is a modern invention. It is not. The earliest and greatest Greek-speaking theologians of the church read the fire of judgment as purifying, not as permanently punitive.
Gregory of Nazianzus, one of the three great Cappadocian Fathers and a pillar of Trinitarian orthodoxy, wrote explicitly about the purifying nature of divine fire. He distinguished between a fire that purifies and a fire that punishes, and he insisted that even the punishing fire is applied “for the love of human beings” and in a way that is “worthy of the One who punishes.” Any reading that makes the fire merely retributive, Gregory said, is “unworthy of God.”37
Gregory of Nyssa, widely recognized as one of the most brilliant theological minds of the first five centuries, read the “worm that does not die” and the “unquenchable fire” as describing otherworldly punishment that is severe and real but not eternal. As Ramelli has demonstrated, Gregory consistently used the word aionios for punishment (meaning “pertaining to the age to come”) but reserved the stronger word aidios (meaning “eternal” in the strict sense) exclusively for life and beatitude.38 The worm and the fire, for Gregory, do their purifying work over “long aeons” until the work is complete. After that, “no being will remain outside the number of the saved.”39
Origen, the greatest biblical scholar of the first three centuries, taught that the fire of divine judgment is the fire of God’s own presence, which purifies everything that is contrary to God’s nature. Origen grounded this reading in Scripture, not in philosophical speculation, and he explicitly stated that “nothing is impossible for the Omnipotent; no being is incurable for the One who created it.”40
Isaac of Nineveh, the great seventh-century Syriac mystic, wrote one of the most beautiful statements on this subject in all of Christian literature. He argued that Gehenna itself is “full of love and mixed with compassion,” and that to think otherwise would be “an opinion tainted with blasphemy.” Among all God’s actions, Isaac declared, “there is none that is not entirely dictated by mercy, love, and compassion: this is the beginning and the end of God’s attitude toward us.”41
John of Dalyatha, an eighth-century Syriac monk influenced by Origen, Evagrius, Gregory of Nyssa, and Isaac of Nineveh, described Christ himself as “God’s purifying fire, in which the Creator has purified the creation.” Christ is “the fire that cannot be quenched”—the very fire of Gehenna—which “kills to give better life.”42 This is a stunning claim: the unquenchable fire of Mark 9 is Christ himself, doing his purifying, restoring, life-giving work.
These are not fringe figures. These are some of the greatest minds in the history of Christianity. They read the Gehenna texts with complete seriousness, and they concluded that the fire is purifying, not permanent. McClymond’s treatment of the Gehenna warnings acts as if this reading did not exist. But it does, and it has deep roots in the Christian tradition.
One of McClymond’s strongest rhetorical points is that universalism makes Jesus’s warnings pointless. If everyone ends up saved, why bother warning anyone? Why the urgency? Why the terror?
But this objection misunderstands what the universalist is saying. The universalist does not say Gehenna is nothing. The universalist says Gehenna is real, terrible, and purifying. The fire is real. The suffering is agonizing. The duration may be long—very long. No sane person would choose to go through it.
Think of it this way. Suppose I tell you, “If you drive drunk tonight, you will get into a terrible car crash. You will be in a coma for months. You will undergo agonizing surgeries. You will lose the use of your legs for years. Eventually, after enormous suffering, you will recover. But the pain and the loss and the devastation will be beyond anything you can imagine.”
Is that warning less urgent because I told you that recovery is possible? Of course not. The warning is every bit as powerful, every bit as terrifying, every bit as motivating. In fact, it may be more motivating, because the suffering I described is realistic and concrete. A warning that says “you will be tortured literally forever by a God who supposedly loves you” is so extreme, so incomprehensible, that many people simply cannot process it. It pushes them away from God rather than drawing them closer.43
The universalist warning says: take this seriously. Gehenna is real. It is terrible beyond description. It is the experience of God’s purifying, refining love as unbearable fire—not because God is cruel, but because you have spent your life running from the very thing that makes existence good. The fire burns away everything false, everything selfish, everything broken in you. And the process is agonizing. Do not choose that path. Repent now. Come to Christ now. Accept God’s love now, willingly, while you can receive it as warmth and light instead of as consuming fire.
That is a warning with teeth. That is a warning that makes you sit up and pay attention. And it does not require God to be a torturer. It does not require the fire to be purposeless. It does not require the suffering to have no end.
In fact, I would go further. The traditional doctrine of eternal conscious torment actually undermines the seriousness of Jesus’s warnings in a way that few people notice. If Gehenna is a place of infinite, purposeless torment from which there is absolutely no escape, then the warning is not really a warning at all. It is a description of a fixed, unalterable fate. A warning, by definition, implies that the hearer can do something about the situation. “Watch out for that car!” implies that you can get out of the way. “Don’t touch the stove!” implies that you still have a choice. But on the ECT reading, many of the people Jesus is addressing have already missed their chance, or will inevitably miss it, and no amount of warning will change that. The warning becomes a formality—or worse, a cruel tease.64
On the universalist reading, by contrast, the warning retains its full force. You can avoid Gehenna. You can choose the narrow way now. And if you do not—if you persist in sin and face the fire—even then, God has not given up on you. The fire is still purposeful. The suffering is still meaningful. There is still hope, even on the other side of the worst possible consequence. But that hope does not make the suffering any less terrible. It does not make the warning any less urgent. It simply means that God’s love is bigger than the worst thing that can happen to you.
We come now to a deeper question, one that goes beyond individual texts and into the heart of Christian theology: what does God’s character tell us about the purpose of divine fire?
Scripture is clear that God is a consuming fire (Heb. 12:29). But the same book of Hebrews tells us that this consuming fire belongs to a Father who disciplines his children for their good, so that they may share in his holiness (Heb. 12:5–11). The fire of Hebrews 12:29 is set in the context of a Father’s corrective love, not in the context of a judge’s permanent sentence.44
The prophet Malachi describes God’s coming judgment in terms of a refiner’s fire and launderer’s soap (Mal. 3:2–3). A refiner’s fire has a specific purpose: to burn away impurities and leave behind pure gold. The refiner does not throw the gold into the fire to destroy it. The refiner uses the fire to save the gold. This is exactly what Isaac of Nineveh was talking about when he said that all of God’s actions are “entirely dictated by mercy, love, and compassion.”45
Alexandre Kalomiros, in his famous essay “The River of Fire,” made this point with devastating clarity. God’s love is like fire. For those who have embraced it, that fire is warmth, light, and joy. For those who have rejected it, that very same fire is agony—not because God creates a special punishing fire, but because his love is unbearable to those who have spent their lives running from it. The difference is not in the fire. The difference is in the person who encounters it.46
This understanding of divine fire resolves the tension that McClymond creates between God’s love and God’s judgment. On McClymond’s reading, God’s love and God’s judgment are ultimately at war with each other. Love wants to save everyone; judgment wants to punish some forever. The two impulses pull in opposite directions, and judgment wins for most of humanity.
On the universalist reading, there is no such tension. God’s love is the fire. Judgment is what love looks like when it meets resistance. The fire does not fight against love; the fire is love, doing its purifying work. And love never fails (1 Cor. 13:8). If God is love (1 John 4:8), and God’s love is the fire, then the fire will keep burning until it has done its work—until every last bit of resistance, rebellion, and sin has been burned away, and the person stands before God, refined and restored.47
McClymond’s strategy is to isolate the Gehenna texts and treat them as if they tell the whole story. But no responsible interpreter reads individual texts in isolation. The Gehenna texts must be read alongside the massive biblical witness to God’s universal restorative purposes.
Consider just a few counterbalancing texts (treated in full elsewhere in this book but summarized here to show the breadth of the evidence). Paul declares that “as in Adam all die, so in Christ all will be made alive” (1 Cor. 15:22). He says that God has “imprisoned all in disobedience so that he may be merciful to all” (Rom. 11:32). He insists that “every knee will bow and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord” (Phil. 2:10–11)—and since no one can say “Jesus is Lord” except by the Holy Spirit (1 Cor. 12:3), this confession must be genuine, not coerced. God “desires all people to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth” (1 Tim. 2:4). Christ is “the Savior of all people, especially of those who believe” (1 Tim. 4:10)—not the Savior of believers only, but of all, with believers receiving the benefits first.48
The question is not whether Jesus warned about Gehenna. He did. The question is whether those warnings, taken in the context of the entire biblical witness, require us to conclude that some people suffer forever without hope. When we read the Gehenna texts alongside Paul’s soaring declarations about God’s universal saving purposes, alongside John’s vision of a New Jerusalem with gates that are never shut (Rev. 21:25) and leaves for the healing of the nations (Rev. 22:2), alongside Peter’s teaching that Christ preached to the dead so that they might live (1 Pet. 4:6), alongside the prophetic vision that God “will not reject forever” and “does not want to afflict or hurt anybody” (Lam. 3:31–33)—when we read all of this together, the Gehenna warnings find their proper place. They are real. They are urgent. They are terrifying. And they describe a judgment that is purposeful, corrective, and ultimately restorative.49
I want to draw special attention to one text that is rarely discussed in connection with the Gehenna passages but should be. In Lamentations 3:22 and 31–33, the prophet writes: “The faithful love of the Lord never ceases, his acts of mercy never end. . . . The Lord will not reject forever. Even if he causes pain, he will have compassion, thanks to the abundance of his faithful love, because he does not want to afflict or hurt anybody.” That last phrase is staggering: God does not want to afflict or hurt anybody. If that is true—and the Bible says it is—then every act of divine judgment, including Gehenna, must have a purpose beyond mere affliction. Judgment that serves no restorative purpose would contradict God’s own character as revealed in Scripture.65
Similarly, the Wisdom of Solomon—a text widely read and respected in the early church—declares: “You have mercy upon all, because you can do everything; you do not look at the sins of humans, in view of their repentance. . . . You spare all beings because all are yours, O Lord, who love life” (Wis. 11:23, 26). This is the God we are dealing with: a God who has mercy on all, who spares all, who loves life. The Gehenna texts must be read in the light of this God, not in the light of a medieval caricature who delights in endless punishment.66
Someone might object: “If Jesus knew that Gehenna was temporary and purifying, why did he speak about it in such final, terrifying terms? Why didn’t he just say, ‘Don’t worry, God will sort it out in the end’?”
The answer is simple: because the danger is real, and because Jesus wanted people to avoid Gehenna altogether. A parent who says “If you play in the street, you will get hit by a car” is not lying if the child eventually recovers from the injury. The parent speaks in stark terms because the parent wants the child to not get hit. If the parent added, “But don’t worry, you’ll probably survive,” the warning would lose its force. Jesus wanted his listeners to repent now, turn to God now, enter the narrow gate now—not because Gehenna is the absolutely final word on their existence, but because Gehenna is so terrible that no one in their right mind would choose to go through it.50
Ramelli makes a fascinating observation about this. Several early Christian texts, including the Apocalypse of Peter and later the writings of Origen, express the idea that the truth of universal restoration should be kept somewhat hidden, “to avoid encouraging sin.” The logic is that if people know in advance that everyone will be saved, some will use that knowledge as an excuse not to repent. The warnings must carry their full weight precisely because the suffering they describe is real, even if it is not the final word.51
This objection focuses on the specific language of Mark 9:48 / Isaiah 66:24. If the worm “does not die” and the fire “is not quenched,” doesn’t that mean the punishment never ends?
No. As we have already seen, “unquenchable” in biblical usage means “cannot be extinguished by human effort”—not “burns literally forever.” The same is true of the worm. A worm that “does not die” is a worm that cannot be killed or stopped by human intervention. It does its consuming work until the work is complete. The point is not infinite duration but irresistible completeness. No one can put out the fire. No one can stop the worm. The judgment will run its full course. But “running its full course” is very different from “lasting forever.”52
Ramelli has shown that this is precisely how the major Greek-speaking church fathers understood these images. The worm and fire are “unlike those of this world, which die and can be extinguished. By contrast, the otherworldly fire and worm cannot be stopped from their work until it is completed.” The emphasis is on the inevitability and thoroughness of the judgment, not on its endlessness.53
We have already addressed this, but the objection is persistent enough to warrant a further word. The word “destroy” (apollymi) simply does not carry the meaning of “annihilate permanently.” Beilby has pointed out that even the concept of “destruction” in Scripture is more often functional than metaphysical. A person who is “destroyed” is not necessarily removed from existence. They are brought to ruin—unable to function as intended, cut off from the good life God designed for them. C. S. Lewis captured this with his image of a damned soul as “nearly nothing: it is shrunk, shut up in itself.” But even Lewis did not say the soul ceases to exist.54
The universalist adds one crucial step that Lewis himself did not take: if the soul continues to exist, and if God’s love never fails, and if the soul was created for relationship with God, then on what basis would we believe God simply gives up? If God can destroy soul and body in Gehenna, God can also restore soul and body from Gehenna. The question is always God’s character, not God’s power.
This is actually a point that works in the universalist’s favor, not against it. Paul is the most prolific theological writer in the New Testament. He wrote about sin, judgment, wrath, and the final destiny of humanity at great length. Yet he never once used the word Gehenna. He never warned anyone about “hell” in the way that the word is commonly understood. Instead, he wrote about judgment as purifying (1 Cor. 3:13–15), about God’s ultimate plan to be “all in all” (1 Cor. 15:28), about God imprisoning all in disobedience so that he might have mercy on all (Rom. 11:32).55
The absence of Gehenna language in Paul is striking. If eternal conscious torment in Gehenna were the central danger facing every unsaved person, you would expect the church’s greatest missionary and theologian to mention it. He does not. Not once. As the Universalism: Fact or Fiction study notes, neither Jesus in his Great Commission nor Paul in any of his letters ever instructed believers to “frighten people with the prospect of dying and going to hell.” The gospel that Paul proclaimed was good news—spectacularly, overwhelmingly, universally good news.56
McClymond cites Wright as support for his position. And it is true that Wright is skeptical of universalism. But Wright’s own exegetical conclusions do not settle the matter as neatly as McClymond suggests. Wright has also argued that much of Jesus’s judgment language refers to the national catastrophe of AD 70—the destruction of Jerusalem by Rome. This means that at least some of Jesus’s “hell” language is about historical judgment within time, not about individual souls in eternity. Wright’s own work, in other words, shows that the Gehenna texts are more complex than a simple “two permanent destinies” reading allows.57
Furthermore, Wright’s authority is not the final word on this question. Ramelli, Hart, Talbott, and Parry have all provided detailed responses to the kind of reading Wright offers, and their exegetical work is at least as rigorous as his. The debate is ongoing, and appeals to authority do not resolve it. What resolves it is the evidence—textual, linguistic, historical, and theological.
Derek Tidball, responding to Parry, argued that “there is no reason to believe that those who were impenitent on earth will become penitent in hell. This is pure supposition. Hell may, indeed, have the reverse effect and harden its residents against God.”58
This is an honest objection, and it deserves an honest answer. First, Tidball is simply wrong that there is “no reason to believe” in postmortem repentance. There is a strong scriptural basis for the postmortem opportunity—Christ preached to the dead (1 Pet. 3:18–20; 4:6), God is patient because he does not want anyone to perish (2 Pet. 3:9), and the Apostles’ Creed confesses that Christ “descended into hell.” We will address this evidence in detail in Chapter 21.59
Second, the claim that hell might “harden its residents against God” reflects a particular assumption about human nature and divine power. If sin is bondage (John 8:34) and not ultimate freedom, then the experience of its full consequences—the full, unmediated encounter with the reality of what one has chosen—does not harden a person further. It strips away the illusions that made sin attractive in the first place. Talbott has argued this point powerfully: a truly informed, truly free person will always choose the Good, because the Good is the only thing that actually satisfies. Sin persists because of deception and bondage, not because of genuine, fully informed freedom. Gehenna, on this view, is the place where every last deception is burned away—and what remains is a soul that can finally see clearly and choose freely.60
Third—and this is the deepest point—the question of whether God’s love can eventually reach even the most hardened sinner is ultimately a question about God, not about us. If God is who Scripture says he is—the God who leaves the ninety-nine to find the one, the God whose love never fails, the God for whom nothing is impossible—then the real “pure supposition” is the claim that God will eventually give up on some of the people he created and loves.61
We have covered a lot of ground in this chapter, so let me pull it all together.
McClymond argues that Jesus’s warnings about Gehenna, the narrow way, and the destruction of soul and body constitute decisive evidence against universal restoration. I have argued that this claim fails on multiple levels.
First, Gehenna was a real place with a specific history. Jesus’s audience heard a reference to the Valley of Hinnom, not an abstract doctrine about eternal damnation. The “unquenchable” fires of Gehenna are not burning today.
Second, Jesus’s warnings describe real consequences for real sin, but they do not describe a permanent, irreversible final state. The language of destruction (apōleia, apollymi) is the same language used for the “lost” things in Luke 15—all of which were found and restored.
Third, Jesus himself, in Mark 9:49, describes the fire of Gehenna as purifying: “Everyone will be salted with fire.” Salt purifies. Salt preserves. The fire is not just destructive. It has a purpose.
Fourth, the greatest Greek-speaking theologians of the first seven centuries—Origen, Gregory of Nyssa, Gregory of Nazianzus, Isaac of Nineveh, John of Dalyatha—read the Gehenna texts as describing purifying, age-long punishment, not eternal torment. This reading is not a modern invention. It is the oldest Christian reading of these texts.
Fifth, the Gehenna texts must be read in the context of the entire biblical witness, including Paul’s declarations about God’s universal saving purposes, John’s vision of open gates and healing leaves, Peter’s proclamation to the dead, and the prophetic promise that God “will not reject forever.”
Sixth, the universalist reading does not undermine the urgency of Jesus’s warnings. It preserves it. Gehenna is real. The suffering is real. No sane person would choose it. The warning retains its full motivating force. What the universalist adds is that the suffering has a purpose—and that purpose is not punishment for its own sake, but purification, correction, and ultimately restoration.
McClymond is right that Jesus’s warnings are serious. He is right that we should not brush them aside. He is right that any view of the final state must reckon honestly with these texts. But he is wrong that these texts require a permanent, twofold outcome. They require something just as serious: a God whose love is a consuming fire, a fire that will not be quenched until it has done its work, a fire that burns away everything false and leaves behind only what is true, only what is good, only what is worthy of the God who is love.
The fire of Gehenna is real. But it is not the last word. The last word belongs to the God who says, “Behold, I am making all things new” (Rev. 21:5).
↑ 1. McClymond, The Devil’s Redemption, V 1, p. 2. McClymond treats Jesus’s warnings as among the most important evidence against universalism and returns to them repeatedly throughout both volumes.
↑ 2. McClymond, The Devil’s Redemption, V 1, p. 2; V 2, pp. 996–97. McClymond frames the “two ways” tradition as central to Jesus’s teaching and argues that universalism cannot be squared with this tradition.
↑ 3. Beilby, Postmortem Opportunity, p. 301. Beilby provides an extensive discussion of the “two ways” tradition in Scripture, noting its roots in Deuteronomy 30:15 and Jeremiah 21:8.
↑ 4. Beilby, Postmortem Opportunity, p. 301. Beilby lists the wheat and weeds (Matt. 13:24–29, 36–43), the net (Matt. 13:47–50), the wise and foolish virgins (Matt. 25:1–13), and the sheep and goats (Matt. 25:31–46) as examples of this eschatological two-ways framework.
↑ 5. McClymond, The Devil’s Redemption, V 2, p. 1144. McClymond argues that the “undying worm” and “unquenchable fire” of Mark 9:44, 46, 48 (echoing Isaiah 66:24) speak to the endlessness of divine punishment.
↑ 6. Beilby, Postmortem Opportunity, p. 334. Beilby notes that Jesus draws a contrast between the wide gate that leads to apōleia (destruction) and the narrow gate that leads to life.
↑ 7. Beilby, Postmortem Opportunity, p. 334. Beilby discusses Matthew 10:28 in the context of the broader biblical language of “destruction.”
↑ 8. McClymond, The Devil’s Redemption, V 2, pp. 996–97. McClymond quotes Grisez and Ryan approvingly on the dishonesty objection.
↑ 9. McClymond, The Devil’s Redemption, V 2, p. 962, citing Parry, The Evangelical Universalist, pp. 144–45.
↑ 10. McClymond, The Devil’s Redemption, V 2, p. 962. McClymond accuses Parry of “inverting the literal sense of Jesus’s words” on Mark 9:48.
↑ 11. N. T. Wright, Surprised by Hope (New York: HarperOne, 2008), 176–77. Wright argues that Jesus accepted the standard first-century Jewish expectation of a twofold outcome.
↑ 12. This analogy is my own, but the underlying logic is developed extensively in Talbott, The Inescapable Love of God, chap. 8, “The Nature of Divine Punishment.”
↑ 13. Parry, The Evangelical Universalist, chap. 5, where Parry argues that the Gehenna texts describe the reality of divine judgment without specifying its permanence.
↑ 14. Jersak, Her Gates Will Never Be Shut (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2009). Jersak provides an extensive treatment of the Valley of Hinnom and its role in Jesus’s teaching.
↑ 15. Universalism: Fact or Fiction, chap. 9, “Gehenna.” The study notes that Gehenna appears twelve times in the New Testament and traces its origins to the Valley of Hinnom.
↑ 16. This analogy follows the logic of Parry, The Evangelical Universalist, chap. 5, and Talbott, The Inescapable Love of God, chap. 8.
↑ 17. Ramelli, A Larger Hope, vol. 1, “The New Testament,” where she observes that Mark 9:49 characterizes the fire of Gehenna as purifying: “everyone will be salted with fire.”
↑ 18. Hart, That All Shall Be Saved (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019), chap. 1. Hart argues that literalist readings of the Gehenna texts are selectively applied.
↑ 19. See 2 Chronicles 28:3; 33:6; Jeremiah 7:31–32; 32:35; 19:6–7. The Valley of Hinnom’s association with child sacrifice made it a powerful symbol of divine judgment in the prophetic tradition.
↑ 20. Universalism: Fact or Fiction, chap. 9, “Gehenna.” The study explains the historical background of the Valley of Hinnom as Jerusalem’s garbage dump.
↑ 21. Universalism: Fact or Fiction, chap. 9. The study notes that the word unquenchable appears only three times in the New Testament and reflects the natural condition of the fires of Gehenna. See also Jeremiah 17:27 LXX for an “unquenchable fire” that obviously did not burn forever.
↑ 22. Jersak, Her Gates Will Never Be Shut. Jersak connects many of Jesus’s Gehenna warnings to the coming destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70.
↑ 23. Universalism: Fact or Fiction, chap. 10, “Judgment.” The study observes that in Matthew 5:21–22, Jesus is speaking to Jewish listeners about their own legal framework.
↑ 24. Parry, The Evangelical Universalist, chap. 5. Parry discusses the hyperbolic character of Jesus’s warnings in the Sermon on the Mount.
↑ 25. Talbott, The Inescapable Love of God, chap. 5, “The Pauline Theology of Universal Reconciliation.” Talbott notes that apollymi is used for the “lost” sheep, coin, and son in Luke 15—all of which were restored.
↑ 26. Beilby, Postmortem Opportunity, p. 125. Beilby argues that the “few will be saved” language describes a present reality about the difficulty of the path of discipleship, not a final tally of the redeemed.
↑ 27. Beilby, Postmortem Opportunity, p. 125. Beilby notes that the assumption that a postmortem opportunity automatically leads to universal salvation is faulty.
↑ 28. Isaiah 66:24 describes corpses in the Valley of Hinnom, not living people being tormented. The image is of consumption and aftermath, not of ongoing conscious punishment.
↑ 29. Parry, in an email to McClymond dated March 25, 2017, cited in McClymond, The Devil’s Redemption, V 2, p. 962, n. 92.
↑ 30. See Jeremiah 17:27 LXX; Ezekiel 20:47–48. In every Old Testament instance, “unquenchable fire” refers to fire that cannot be extinguished by human effort before it completes its work, not fire that burns forever.
↑ 31. Ramelli, A Larger Hope, vol. 1, “The New Testament.” See also footnote 17 above.
↑ 32. The semantic range of apollymi is discussed in Talbott, The Inescapable Love of God, chap. 5, and in Universalism: Fact or Fiction, chap. 9.
↑ 33. Talbott, The Inescapable Love of God, chap. 8. Talbott distinguishes between God’s capacity to destroy and God’s intention in judgment.
↑ 34. Beilby, Postmortem Opportunity, p. 334. Beilby frames Matthew 10:28 as a statement about redirecting the disciples’ fear, not a comprehensive eschatological map.
↑ 35. The substance dualism implied in Matthew 10:28—the distinction between body and soul—is treated at length in Chapter 31 of this book.
↑ 36. This analogy reflects the broader argument of Parry, The Evangelical Universalist, chap. 5, on the rhetorical function of Jesus’s warnings.
↑ 37. Ramelli, A Larger Hope, vol. 1, “Gregory Nazianzen.” Ramelli cites Gregory’s Oration 40:36, where he describes fire as purifying and insists that even punishing fire is applied “for the love of human beings” and in a way “worthy of the One who punishes.”
↑ 38. Ramelli, A Larger Hope, vol. 1, “Gregory of Nyssa.” See also Ramelli and Konstan, Terms for Eternity: Aiônios and Aïdios in Classical and Christian Texts (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2013).
↑ 39. Gregory of Nyssa, In Illud 21 D., as cited in Ramelli, A Larger Hope, vol. 1, “Gregory of Nyssa.”
↑ 40. Ramelli, A Larger Hope, vol. 1, “Origen and the Fullness of Apokatastasis.” Ramelli traces Origen’s universalism to scriptural rather than gnostic sources.
↑ 41. Isaac of Nineveh, Second Part, 39:22, as cited in Ramelli, A Larger Hope, vol. 1, “Isaac of Nineveh.”
↑ 42. John of Dalyatha, Letter 4:6 and Letter 15:2, as cited in Ramelli, A Larger Hope, vol. 1, “John of Dalyatha.”
↑ 43. Hart, That All Shall Be Saved, chap. 2. Hart argues that the doctrine of eternal conscious torment, far from motivating repentance, drives many thoughtful people away from Christianity altogether.
↑ 44. Hebrews 12:5–11, 29. The “consuming fire” of 12:29 must be read in light of the disciplining Father described in 12:5–11. We address this in detail in Chapter 22.
↑ 45. Malachi 3:2–3. See also Isaac of Nineveh, Second Part, 39:22, cited above.
↑ 46. Alexandre Kalomiros, “The River of Fire” (1980). Kalomiros argues that God’s love is experienced differently depending on one’s spiritual state—as warmth by the receptive and as burning by the resistant. This tract has been widely influential in Eastern Orthodox discussions of eschatology.
↑ 47. 1 John 4:8; 1 Corinthians 13:8. The argument that God’s love is the substance of the fire is developed in Baker, Razing Hell (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2010), chap. 5, and in Hart, That All Shall Be Saved, chap. 3.
↑ 48. These texts are treated in full in Chapters 14 and 20 of this book. See also Talbott, The Inescapable Love of God, chaps. 5–6, and Parry, The Evangelical Universalist, chaps. 3–4.
↑ 49. See especially Chapters 14, 18, 19, 20, and 21 of this book for the full treatment of these texts.
↑ 50. Parry, The Evangelical Universalist, chap. 5. Parry argues that warnings function to motivate present action, not to provide a comprehensive description of the final state.
↑ 51. Ramelli, A Larger Hope, vol. 1, “Other Apocrypha.” Ramelli discusses the Apocalypse of Peter and the idea that the truth of universal salvation should remain hidden to avoid encouraging moral laxity. See also Origen, who shared this view.
↑ 52. Universalism: Fact or Fiction, chap. 9, “Gehenna.” See also Ramelli, A Larger Hope, vol. 1, “Gregory of Nyssa.”
↑ 53. Ramelli, A Larger Hope, vol. 1, “The New Testament.” Ramelli writes that the otherworldly fire and worm “cannot be stopped from their work until it is completed.”
↑ 54. Beilby, Postmortem Opportunity, p. 335. Beilby argues that “destruction” in Scripture is more often functional than metaphysical. He cites C. S. Lewis’s image of the damned soul as “nearly nothing”—shrunk, shut up in itself—but still existing.
↑ 55. The significance of Paul’s silence on Gehenna is noted in Universalism: Fact or Fiction, chap. 9. Paul uses the language of judgment and purification (1 Cor. 3:13–15) rather than Gehenna.
↑ 56. Universalism: Fact or Fiction, chap. 9, “Gehenna.” The study notes that Jesus never instructed his disciples to warn people about going to hell.
↑ 57. N. T. Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1996), especially chap. 8, where Wright connects much of Jesus’s judgment language to the coming destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70.
↑ 58. McClymond, The Devil’s Redemption, V 2, p. 997, citing Derek Tidball’s response to Parry.
↑ 59. See Chapter 21 of this book for the full treatment of the Petrine texts on Christ’s proclamation to the dead. See also Beilby, Postmortem Opportunity, pp. 100–200.
↑ 60. Talbott, The Inescapable Love of God, chaps. 7–8. Talbott argues that persistent rejection of God is a sign of bondage, not genuine freedom. A truly free and fully informed choice always tends toward the Good. See Chapter 25 of this book for a full treatment of free will and sin as bondage.
↑ 61. Matthew 18:12–14 (the shepherd leaves the ninety-nine to find the one); 1 Corinthians 13:8 (“love never fails”); Matthew 19:26 (“with God all things are possible”). See also Talbott, The Inescapable Love of God, chap. 1.
↑ 62. Universalism: Fact or Fiction, chap. 9, “Gehenna.” The study notes that the word hell entered the biblical text as a later interpretive choice, first appearing in the Latin Vulgate.
↑ 63. On the diversity of rabbinic opinion about Gehenna’s duration, see the Mishnah, Eduyot 2:10, where Rabbi Akiva states that the judgment of the wicked in Gehenna lasts twelve months. See also Jersak, Her Gates Will Never Be Shut, for a full discussion of Jewish eschatological diversity in Jesus’s era.
↑ 64. This point follows from Talbott’s argument about the nature of warnings in The Inescapable Love of God, chap. 8. If a warning is to be meaningful, the hearer must be able to respond to it. A warning about a fixed fate over which the hearer has no control is not a warning at all.
↑ 65. Lamentations 3:22, 31–33. Ramelli, A Larger Hope, vol. 1, “The Old Testament and Intertestamental Literature,” cites this text as foundational for the wider hope tradition.
↑ 66. Wisdom 11:23, 26; 15:1. Ramelli, A Larger Hope, vol. 1, “The Old Testament and Intertestamental Literature,” notes that these texts were influential on patristic supporters of apokatastasis.