Chapter 20

McClymond on the Pauline Vision of Universal Reconciliation

If you want to understand what Paul really believed about the future of every human being, you have to be willing to sit with his letters for a long time. You have to read them slowly, watch how his arguments build, and pay close attention to the words he chose. You cannot cherry-pick a verse here or there and declare the case closed. You have to wrestle with the whole picture.

That is exactly what we are going to do in this chapter.

In Chapters 14 and 19, we examined the great “all” texts of Romans 5, 1 Corinthians 15, and Colossians 1, as well as the Johannine witness to God’s universal saving intent. But Paul’s vision of universal reconciliation does not rest on three or four proof-texts. It runs like a river through his entire body of work. In this chapter, we turn to a fresh set of Pauline passages—Romans 11:32, Philippians 2:10–11, 1 Timothy 2:4, 1 Timothy 4:10, Titus 2:11, and Ephesians 1:9–10—and we will see that these texts, taken together, form a breathtaking and consistent testimony to Paul’s conviction that God will, in the end, reconcile all things to Himself through Christ.¹

McClymond disagrees. He believes universalists misread these texts, that we leap from God’s love to universal salvation without doing the hard work of exegesis. He thinks our reading is too simple, too neat, too convenient.

So let’s test that claim. Let’s look at what Paul actually wrote, what the words actually mean, and whether McClymond’s counter-reading can survive serious examination.

A. McClymond’s Argument

McClymond’s treatment of Paul’s universal-sounding language can be found across both volumes of The Devil’s Redemption, but two passages capture his core complaint. First, he argues that universalists jump from God’s love to universal salvation “while omitting the messy part in between”—the incarnation, the call to faith, the atoning death of Christ, and the need for evangelism.² In other words, McClymond believes we skip straight from “God is love” to “everybody gets saved,” as if the cross and the call to repentance are mere details. Second, he claims that Thomas Talbott, perhaps the most careful universalist exegete of the Pauline letters, “has difficulty in showing the compatibility of universalism with the text of the New Testament.”³

McClymond’s specific strategy for handling the Pauline universal texts follows a recognizable pattern. When Paul says “all,” McClymond insists we must ask: all of whom? He draws on the standard restrictive readings that have been common in Reformed scholarship since Augustine and Calvin. In this framework, “all people” in passages like 1 Timothy 2:4 means “all kinds of people”—that is, some from every nation, tribe, and class, but not every individual without exception.⁴ Similarly, when Paul writes in Romans 11:32 that God has “bound everyone over to disobedience so that he may have mercy on them all,” McClymond’s framework reads this as a reference to Jews and Gentiles as corporate groups, not a promise that every individual person will eventually receive mercy.⁵

Regarding Philippians 2:10–11, where Paul says that at the name of Jesus every knee shall bow and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, McClymond argues that this refers to the forced subjugation of hostile powers, not to the joyful, willing confession of redeemed hearts. He insists that references to those “under the earth” likely point to demonic powers, and that “every indication we have in the Pauline Letters is that these powers are coerced into submission and not persuaded to abandon their hostility to God.”⁶ He goes so far as to say, flatly: “Demons do not become angels—or at least not in the Old and New Testaments.”⁷

McClymond also enlists I. Howard Marshall to bolster his reading. Marshall responds to Talbott’s argument that God’s victory is incomplete so long as anyone clings to hatred of God. Marshall counters that “the New Testament plainly uses the language of judgement and destruction to describe what God will do,” and that the vocabulary of “destruction and subjugation” in 1 Corinthians 15:24–28 proves that the willing subordination of Christ to the Father is “different from the destruction of hostile powers.”⁸

The cumulative picture from McClymond is this: Paul’s language is universal in scope but limited in application. “All” means all categories of people, not all individuals. “Every knee shall bow” means forced capitulation, not redemption. God desires the salvation of all, but that desire is overridden by other divine purposes. And the universalist reading, according to McClymond, is little more than wishful thinking dressed up in exegetical clothing.

That is his case. Now let’s examine it carefully and see whether it holds up under scrutiny.

B. Identifying Weaknesses

McClymond’s treatment of the Pauline universal texts suffers from several serious weaknesses, and they deserve to be named plainly.

The “All Kinds” Strategy Has Limits

The most common move McClymond and his allies make is the “all without distinction, not all without exception” strategy. When Paul says God desires “all people” to be saved (1 Tim. 2:4), McClymond’s framework reads this as “all kinds of people.” When Paul says God has mercy on “all” (Rom. 11:32), the restrictive reading says this means Jews and Gentiles as groups. This strategy has a long pedigree, going back to Augustine, who argued that “all humans” in 1 Timothy 2:4 means “some from all groups of people.”⁹

But this strategy, applied consistently, creates absurd results. As Talbott has pointed out, the text of 1 Timothy 2 begins with an exhortation to offer prayers “for everyone” (v. 1). It then singles out one group for a special reason—kings and those in authority—so that we may live quiet and peaceable lives (v. 2). Finally, it explains why it is fitting to pray for all: because God “desires everyone to be saved” (v. 4). The logic flows in one direction. We should pray for all because God desires to save all.¹⁰ Even Augustine himself did not apply the “all kinds” reading to verse 1. He agreed that we should pray for all people, since we do not know who is elect. But if the “all humans” in verse 1 means every individual, then how can the same phrase in verse 4—just three verses later, in the same sentence of reasoning—suddenly mean only “some from all groups”? As Talbott observes, unless we suppose “an incredibly sloppy shift of reference in an incompetently written text,” the “all” whose salvation God desires is the same “all” for whom we are told to pray.¹¹

The same problem arises with Romans 11:32. McClymond leans on N. T. Wright and Thomas Schreiner, who argue that “all” in this verse refers to Jews and Gentiles as corporate groups and should not be read as “all men individually.”¹² But Beilby rightly asks whether this reading is actually driven by the text itself or by theological commitments brought to the text from outside.¹³ We will look at Romans 11:32 in detail shortly, but for now, the weakness is clear: the “all kinds” reading is not an exegesis of these texts. It is a strategy for avoiding the implications of what the texts actually say.

The “Forced Subjugation” Reading of Philippians 2 Is Incoherent

McClymond’s reading of Philippians 2:10–11 as describing the forced subjugation of hostile powers has a serious logical problem. Talbott puts it crisply: you cannot truly subjugate a will against itself. If a person or power is forced to bow externally while their will remains rebellious, then their will is precisely not in subjection to Christ. As Talbott writes, there is only one way for God to defeat a rebellious will and bring it into subjection: He must so transform the will that it voluntarily places itself in subjection to Christ. So long as a single will remains in rebellion, at least one power in the universe remains unsubjugated.¹⁴

McClymond’s reading also ignores a crucial detail in the text itself. Paul says every tongue will confess—in Greek, exomologesetai—that Jesus Christ is Lord. As we will see below, this is not a word that describes grudging acknowledgment. Throughout the Septuagint and the New Testament, it carries overtones of praise, thanksgiving, and willing declaration. McClymond never adequately addresses this linguistic evidence.

McClymond Underestimates the Cumulative Weight

Perhaps the greatest weakness in McClymond’s approach is that he treats each text individually and never reckons seriously with their cumulative force. It is one thing to argue that “all” in a single verse might mean “all kinds.” It is quite another to maintain that claim across Romans 5:18, Romans 11:32, 1 Corinthians 15:22, Colossians 1:20, Philippians 2:10–11, 1 Timothy 2:4, 1 Timothy 4:10, Titus 2:11, and Ephesians 1:9–10—all of which, independently and convergently, point to the same sweeping conclusion. At some point, the “all kinds” strategy stops being a plausible reading and starts being an escape hatch. McClymond never shows that he has felt the weight of this convergence. His treatments are, as I noted in Chapter 14, “cursory relative to the detailed exegesis that universalist scholars have provided.”¹⁵

He also never engages seriously with a simple but devastating observation: if Paul really believed that most human beings would be eternally lost, it is very strange that he wrote so many passages that sound so unmistakably like he believed the opposite. Writers who believe in a limited atonement do not normally write sentences like “God our Savior, who is the Savior of all people” (1 Tim. 4:10) or “the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation for all people” (Titus 2:11). The sheer volume of Paul’s universalist-sounding language demands a better explanation than “he didn’t really mean it that way.”

C. The Universalist Response

We turn now to the texts themselves. I want to walk through each of the six passages owned by this chapter and show that, when we let Paul speak in his own words, the universalist reading is not only plausible—it is the most natural, exegetically careful, and theologically coherent reading available.

Romans 11:32 — “God Has Bound All in Disobedience, That He May Have Mercy on All”

This verse is the climax of one of the most carefully constructed arguments in all of Paul’s letters. Romans 9–11 is Paul’s great meditation on the mystery of Israel’s unbelief and God’s purposes behind it. He wrestles with the hardest questions: Has God rejected His people? Has His word failed? And why did Israel stumble?

Paul’s answer is stunning. Israel’s stumbling was not a permanent fall but a divinely orchestrated detour. Their disobedience opened the door for the Gentiles. And the Gentiles’ inclusion will eventually provoke Israel to jealousy, leading to Israel’s own restoration. Paul states this explicitly: “Did they stumble so as to fall? By no means!” (Rom. 11:11). Their failure brought riches to the Gentiles—“how much more will their full inclusion mean!” (11:12).¹⁶

Paul then reveals what he calls a “mystery”: “a partial hardening has come upon Israel until the fullness of the Gentiles has come in, and in this way all Israel will be saved” (11:25–26). Then he reaches the crescendo of the whole argument in verse 32: “For God has bound all [tous pantas] in disobedience so that he may have mercy on all [tous pantas].”¹⁷

Now, the restrictive reading says this “all” refers to Jews and Gentiles as groups—God has mercy on both groups, but not necessarily on every individual within them. Schreiner, Wright, and Dunn all take this position to varying degrees.¹⁸ And it is true that the immediate context is about Jews and Gentiles as peoples. But Ramelli makes a crucial observation here: the “totality” (plērōma) of the Gentiles added to the “whole” (pas) of Israel equals all humanity. The word plērōma in many places in the Septuagint means “totality”—in Psalm 24:1, for instance, it parallels “all people” (pantes).¹⁹

Think about Paul’s logic for a moment. If the fullness of the Gentiles will come in, and all Israel will be saved, then who is left out? Paul seems to have designed his argument so that the two groups together cover the entire human race. Every Gentile. Every Israelite. All.

And then Paul erupts into worship: “Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways! . . . For from him and through him and to him are all things” (11:33, 36). As George Hurd has observed, this doxology is not a generic hymn of praise. It is Paul’s response to the breathtaking scope of what he has just described—a plan in which all who are “from” God, and who exist “through” God, will ultimately be restored “to” God.²⁰

Talbott adds another layer. In Romans 11:7, Paul mentions three groups: Israel as a corporate whole, the faithful remnant (“the elect”), and “the rest” who were hardened. The “they” who stumbled in 11:11 cannot be the faithful remnant—they are the hardened ones. And Paul’s whole point is that even their hardening serves God’s plan and will ultimately lead to their own restoration. John Piper tried to avoid this conclusion by arguing that “Israel” in 11:11 refers to the nation as a corporate entity that endures across generations—so different individuals may constitute the saved “Israel” at different times. But as Talbott shows, this does not work. Paul is specifically talking about the hardened individuals who stumbled, and he is specifically saying that their stumbling is not permanent.²¹

There is another detail that deserves attention. Paul says God “bound” or “shut up” (synekleisen) all in disobedience. This is not an accident. God did not merely observe that people were disobedient. He orchestrated the whole process. He allowed Israel to stumble so the Gentiles could come in. He allowed the Gentiles to be disobedient so that Israel might eventually be provoked to jealousy. The entire history of human disobedience, as Paul reads it, is a divinely managed process—and the goal of that process is stated in the clearest possible terms: “that he may have mercy on all.”

This is a breathtaking claim. Paul is saying that the entire messy, painful story of human rebellion has a purpose, and that purpose is mercy. Not punishment for its own sake. Not destruction. Mercy. And that mercy extends to the same “all” who were bound in disobedience. If you believe every person has been bound in disobedience (and Romans 3:23 says they have), then you must believe that mercy is intended for every person as well.

What makes Romans 11:32 so powerful is that it is not a stray statement. It is the conclusion of a carefully built three-chapter argument. Paul has thought this through. He is not being careless with his words. And his conclusion is that God has a purpose in disobedience itself: the purpose is mercy. Mercy for all.

Philippians 2:10–11 — “Every Knee Shall Bow, Every Tongue Confess”

This is one of the most debated texts in all of eschatology, and it deserves careful attention. Paul writes that God has exalted Christ and given Him the name above every name, “so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father” (Phil. 2:10–11).

Paul is quoting Isaiah 45:23, which in its original context is part of a salvation oracle: “Turn to me and be saved, all you ends of the earth; for I am God, and there is no other. By myself I have sworn, my mouth has uttered in all integrity a word that will not be revoked: Before me every knee will bow; by me every tongue will swear” (Isa. 45:22–23). Notice the context. God is calling the nations to turn and be saved. The bowing and swearing happen in the context of salvation, not mere subjugation.²²

McClymond’s reading, as we saw, insists that this describes the forced subjugation of hostile powers who bow grudgingly, not the joyful worship of the redeemed. But this reading runs into multiple problems.

First, the word Paul chose. The Greek word translated “confess” in Philippians 2:11 is exomologēsētai (from exomologeō). This word carries a very specific range of meaning. As J. B. Lightfoot demonstrated long ago, its secondary sense—“to offer praise or thanksgiving”—had “almost entirely supplanted its primary meaning” in the Septuagint. Lightfoot noted that these implications of praise exist “in the very passage of Isaiah which St. Paul adapts.”²³ James Dunn concurs, arguing that Paul intended the word in its usual Septuagintal sense of “acknowledge, confess, praise.”²⁴

Think about what this means. Paul did not say every tongue will submit. He did not say every tongue will be silenced. He said every tongue will confess—using a word that throughout the Greek Old Testament implies willing praise. You can force someone to bow. You can force someone to say words. But you cannot force praise and thanksgiving. Those can come only from the heart.²⁵

Second, there is the argument from 1 Corinthians 12:3, which states: “No one can say ‘Jesus is Lord’ except by the Holy Spirit.” Now look at what Paul says will happen in Philippians 2:11: “every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord.” If no one can make this confession except by the Holy Spirit, and if every tongue will make this confession, then every person will at some point be moved by the Holy Spirit to genuinely confess Christ’s lordship. This is not forced capitulation. This is Spirit-empowered, heartfelt recognition.²⁶

Talbott makes this point with devastating clarity. He asks: those who bow before Jesus Christ and declare openly that He is Lord either do so sincerely and by their own choice, or they do not. If they do it sincerely, there can be only one explanation—they have been reconciled to God. And if they do not do it sincerely, if they are forced to make obeisance against their will, then their actions are “merely fraudulent and bring no glory to God.” A Hitler may take pleasure in forcing his defeated enemies to grovel. But a God who honors truth could not participate in such a fraud.²⁷

Third, consider the scope. Paul says every knee will bow “in heaven and on earth and under the earth.” As Beilby notes, John Chrysostom understood this to mean “the whole world, and angels, and men, and demons.” The threefold description covers all three levels of ancient cosmology. It does not imply mere representatives from each level, but the totality of beings.²⁸

Fourth, Paul uses this same language in Romans 14:11, where he writes: “As I live, says the Lord, every knee shall bow to me, and every tongue shall give praise to God.” The RSV, NRSV, and NASB all translate the verb here as “give praise to.” Again, this is not the language of grudging submission. It is the language of worship.²⁹

McClymond’s reading of Philippians 2 requires us to believe that Paul chose a word associated throughout the Greek Bible with praise and thanksgiving—and then used it to describe something that is neither praise nor thanksgiving. It requires us to believe that the confession is made “to the glory of God the Father” even though insincere confession glorifies no one. And it requires us to ignore the Isaiah 45 context, where the bowing happens in the framework of God calling the nations to turn and be saved. That is a lot of evidence to ignore.

I want to linger on the Isaiah 45 context for a moment, because it matters more than most commentators realize. In Isaiah 45, God is speaking through Cyrus and declaring Himself the only God. He says: “Turn to me and be saved, all you ends of the earth; for I am God, and there is no other” (Isa. 45:22). Then comes the oath: “By myself I have sworn, my mouth has uttered in all integrity a word that will not be revoked: Before me every knee will bow; by me every tongue will swear” (Isa. 45:23). God calls the nations to salvation. He swears an oath that cannot be revoked. And then He declares that every knee will bow and every tongue will swear allegiance. The whole passage is framed as an invitation and a promise of salvation, not as a threat of forced subjugation. When Paul quotes this text in Philippians 2, he brings all of that redemptive context with him.

And consider this: Paul uses the same Isaiah 45 quotation again in Romans 14:11, where he writes, “As I live, says the Lord, every knee shall bow to me, and every tongue shall give praise to God.” In Romans 14, the context is the judgment seat of Christ before which every person will stand. But Paul’s point is not that people will be crushed and silenced. His point is that everyone will give an account to God—and he frames this giving of account with the language of praise. This is Paul interpreting Isaiah 45 consistently across his letters: the universal bowing and confessing is an act of worship, not of coerced surrender.

1 Timothy 2:4 — “God Desires All People to Be Saved”

We come now to what may be the single most debated text in the entire universalism discussion. Paul writes (or, if you follow some scholars, a Pauline disciple writes in Paul’s tradition): “This is good, and it is pleasing in the sight of God our Savior, who desires all people to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth. For there is one God, and there is one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus, who gave himself as a ransom for all” (1 Tim. 2:3–6).

The text could hardly be clearer. God desires all people to be saved. Christ gave Himself as a ransom for all. The two statements reinforce each other: God’s desire is matched by Christ’s work, and both are universal in scope.

Yet from Augustine onward, restrictivists have tried to limit this “all.” Augustine argued that “all humans” means “some from all groups”—kings and subjects, nobility and commoners, the learned and the unlearned, and so on.³⁰ Calvin followed Augustine, arguing that God “has not closed the door to any order of men” but that this does not mean every individual will be saved.³¹

We have already seen the grammatical problem with this reading: the “all humans” of verse 4 refers to the same “everyone” of verse 1, for whom prayers are requested. Talbott’s argument on this point is powerful and, in my view, unanswerable.³² But there is an even deeper problem.

The Greek word translated “desires” in 1 Timothy 2:4 is thelō. The author of Universalism: Fact or Fiction makes an important observation here. The word thelō appears 210 times in the King James Version and is overwhelmingly translated as “will” or “would”—177 times. Greek scholar Gottlob Schrenk, writing in the Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, notes that God’s thelō “is always characterized by absolute definiteness, sovereign self-assurance and efficacy. It is resolute and completely willing.”³³ This is not a word that describes a helpless wish. When the Bible says God wills something, it carries the weight of divine purpose and intention.

Now, some will say: even if God truly desires all people to be saved, His desires can be frustrated by human free will. That is the standard Arminian answer, and it is not without some force. But notice what happens when we combine this text with others. God desires all to be saved (1 Tim. 2:4). Christ gave Himself as a ransom for all (1 Tim. 2:6). God is the Savior of all people (1 Tim. 4:10). The grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation for all people (Titus 2:11). At some point, the sheer consistency of these declarations begins to overwhelm the idea that they are merely expressing frustrated wishes. As Beilby puts it, if God intends the scope of the atonement to be universal, “there is nothing to stop his intending the atonement to apply to all.”³⁴

Beilby also points out the difficulty for Calvinists. John Piper’s “two wills of God” argument concedes that God does genuinely want all to be saved, but claims that this desire is overridden by a competing desire to display His justice and wrath against sin. As Beilby observes, this argument only works if you have already accepted the Calvinist framework of unconditional election and limited atonement. If you have not, the plain reading of 1 Timothy 2:4 is exactly what it appears to be: God wants all people to be saved.³⁵

Beilby also notes something important about the early church. Nobody before Augustine in 396 read anything other than universal salvific will in these passages. For nearly four centuries, the church took these texts at face value.³⁶ That should give us pause before accepting the Augustinian restriction as the “obvious” reading.

There is one more point worth making about 1 Timothy 2:4–6. Paul does not stop at God’s desire. He immediately grounds that desire in the work of Christ: “For there is one God, and there is one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus, who gave himself as a ransom for all, which is the testimony given at the proper time” (vv. 5–6). Notice the structure. God desires all to be saved—and then, as if to prevent anyone from reducing this to a mere wish, Paul adds that Christ has already given Himself as a ransom for all. The desire and the accomplishment are matched. God does not merely wish for universal salvation from a distance. He has acted decisively through Christ to make it happen. The ransom has been paid. It has been paid for all. And this ransom “is the testimony given at the proper time”—the right time, God’s time. The universalist hears in this phrase a confidence that God’s timing will bring every person to the place where that ransom becomes effective in their experience, whether in this age or the age to come.

1 Timothy 4:10 — “The Savior of All People, Especially of Those Who Believe”

Here is a text that does not get nearly enough attention. Paul writes: “For to this end we toil and strive, because we have put our hope in the living God, who is the Savior of all people, and especially of those who believe” (1 Tim. 4:10).

Millard Erickson, a well-known evangelical theologian, has called this the strongest verse in favor of unlimited atonement.³⁷ And it is easy to see why. The verse makes two claims. First: God is the Savior of all people. Second: He is especially the Savior of those who believe. The word translated “especially” is the Greek malista.

Some try to argue that the second clause limits the first: God is the Savior of all people only in the sense that He preserves them providentially, but He is the real Savior (the saving-from-sin Savior) only of believers. But as Beilby rightly notes, “you cannot limit Christ’s atoning work to only ‘those who believe’ without explicitly denying that Christ is ‘the Savior of all people.’”³⁸ The word “especially” implies a subset within a larger group. If I say, “I love all my children, especially my youngest,” I have not denied love for my other children. I have said that my youngest receives a particular or present expression of that love. Similarly, God is the Savior of all—and believers experience the firstfruits of that salvation now.

Hurd makes the same point. Believers are the firstfruits, the elect chosen “for the benefit of the rest—not to the exclusion of the rest.”³⁹ This is precisely the universalist reading: salvation comes to believers first, and through them, eventually, to all.

Titus 2:11 — “The Grace of God Has Appeared, Bringing Salvation for All People”

This verse is short but explosive. “For the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation for all people” (Titus 2:11). Not offering salvation. Not making salvation hypothetically available. Bringing salvation. The Greek is even stronger than some translations suggest. The grace of God that brings salvation has appeared to all people.⁴⁰

Restrictivists typically argue that this means the grace of God has appeared “for all kinds of people”—once again, the familiar “all without distinction” move. But as Hurd observes, when you line this verse up with 1 Timothy 2:4, 1 Timothy 4:10, and the rest, the pattern becomes overwhelming. Paul (or the Pauline tradition) simply cannot stop talking about the universality of God’s saving work. At some point, you have to take the writer at his word.⁴¹

Here is what I find striking. If you are a Calvinist who believes that Christ died only for the elect, you have to explain why the Pastoral Epistles keep saying things like “ransom for all,” “Savior of all people,” and “salvation for all people.” If you are an Arminian who believes Christ died for all but that many will be lost anyway, you have to explain why these texts sound so confident, so settled, so victorious—as if the outcome is not in doubt. The universalist reading, by contrast, takes these texts exactly as they stand. It does not need to add qualifiers the text does not contain. It does not need to insert the word “kinds” where Paul did not put it. It simply reads the text and believes what it says: the grace of God has appeared, and it brings salvation. For all people. Period.

Ephesians 1:9–10 — “A Plan for the Fullness of Time, to Unite All Things in Him”

Paul writes: “He made known to us the mystery of his will, according to his purpose, which he set forth in Christ as a plan for the fullness of time, to unite all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth” (Eph. 1:9–10).

The Greek word translated “to unite” is anakephalaiosasthai, from which we get the theological concept of recapitulatio—the “summing up” or “heading up” of all things in Christ. Irenaeus, one of the greatest anti-gnostic theologians of the second century, made this concept central to his theology: Christ recapitulates or sums up all of creation in Himself.⁴²

Notice the scope. God’s plan is to unite all things in Christ. Things in heaven and things on earth. This is not a plan to save some things and destroy the rest. It is a plan to bring everything under Christ’s headship, to reconcile and restore everything that God made.

This fits perfectly with Colossians 1:20, which says God was pleased to “reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace through the blood of his cross.” And it fits with 1 Corinthians 15:28, where Paul looks forward to the day when God will be “all in all.” Paul is describing the same eschatological vision from different angles. Everything that exists, everything that God created, will ultimately be brought into a restored relationship with God through Christ.

McClymond never gives this text the attention it deserves. He focuses his energy on the judgment texts and the subjugation language, but he does not wrestle with the breathtaking scope of the anakephalaiosasthai. What does it mean for all things to be “united” or “summed up” in Christ? Can billions of souls in eternal torment or reduced to ashes be meaningfully described as “united” in Christ? The universalist answer is obvious: no. Only if all things are genuinely reconciled—made right, made whole, made new—can this text be fulfilled.

There is also a deeply personal dimension to this text that often gets overlooked. Paul says God “made known to us the mystery of his will.” This is not abstract theology. Paul treats the uniting of all things in Christ as the hidden purpose of God’s entire plan—the secret that has been revealed. The word “mystery” (mystērion) in Paul always refers to something that was once hidden but has now been disclosed through Christ. And what has been disclosed? That God’s plan, set in motion before the ages, is to bring every single thing into a restored relationship with Himself through His Son. This is not a footnote in Pauline theology. This is the grand reveal. This is what God has been doing all along.

Paul makes the same point from a different angle in Ephesians 4:10. After describing Christ’s descent and ascension, he writes that Christ “ascended far above all the heavens, that he might fill all things.” The word “fill” (plēroō) here does not mean merely to occupy space. It means to bring to completion, to permeate, to make full. Christ ascended so that He might fill—complete, restore, permeate—everything that exists. A universe with an unredeemed remainder is a universe that Christ has not fully filled. The logic of Ephesians pushes us toward the same conclusion we find in Colossians and 1 Corinthians: the end goal of God’s plan is total restoration, total reconciliation, total filling of all things with the presence and life of Christ.

The Cumulative Case from Paul

Step back now and look at the whole landscape. We are not dealing with one or two ambiguous proof-texts. We are looking at a massive, consistent body of evidence from Paul’s letters:

God has bound all in disobedience so that He may have mercy on all (Rom. 11:32). Every knee shall bow and every tongue shall confess that Jesus Christ is Lord (Phil. 2:10–11). God desires all people to be saved (1 Tim. 2:4). Christ gave Himself as a ransom for all (1 Tim. 2:6). God is the Savior of all people (1 Tim. 4:10). The grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation for all people (Titus 2:11). God’s plan is to unite all things in Christ (Eph. 1:10).⁴³

Add to this the texts we covered in Chapter 14: in Adam all die, so in Christ all will be made alive (1 Cor. 15:22). Through one righteous act, justification and life came to all (Rom. 5:18). God was pleased to reconcile to Himself all things (Col. 1:20). God will be all in all (1 Cor. 15:28).⁴⁴

Talbott has called universal reconciliation “a central and pervasive theme in Paul.”⁴⁵ I think that is exactly right. This is not a marginal inference drawn from a few disputed passages. It is the beating heart of Pauline theology. The God who creates all things, who sustains all things, who reconciles all things through the blood of Christ’s cross, will one day be all in all. Not all in some. Not all in what’s left. All in all.

Addressing McClymond’s “Messy Part in Between”

Let me come back to McClymond’s core accusation: that universalists skip from God’s love to universal salvation while ignoring the incarnation, faith, atonement, and evangelism.⁴⁶ This charge is worth taking seriously, because it would be a devastating critique if it were true.

But it is not true. Not even close.

Conservative biblical universalists do not skip the “messy part.” We affirm every element McClymond accuses us of omitting. We affirm the incarnation—that God took on human flesh in the person of Jesus Christ. We affirm the necessity of atonement—that Christ gave Himself as a ransom for all (1 Tim. 2:6), bore the sins of many (Heb. 9:28), and tasted death for everyone (Heb. 2:9). We affirm the necessity of faith—that every person must come to genuine, willing trust in Christ. We affirm the urgency of evangelism—that the gospel is the power of God for salvation (Rom. 1:16) and that we are called to proclaim it to every creature.

What we also affirm—and what McClymond resists—is that God is powerful enough and patient enough to bring every person to that genuine faith, whether in this life or beyond it. The postmortem opportunity, which we discussed at length in Chapter 21, is the mechanism by which God’s saving work extends to those who did not have a genuine opportunity in this life. But the point here is that the universalist does not skip the cross, the call to faith, or the work of the Spirit. We take all of those seriously. We just take the scope of Christ’s saving work seriously too.⁴⁷

As Talbott has argued, the question is not whether faith in Christ is necessary. Of course it is. The question is whether God is limited to working in this brief earthly life to bring people to that faith. If He is not—and 1 Peter 3:18–20 and 4:6 suggest He is not—then the universalist vision follows naturally from the very texts McClymond claims we are ignoring.⁴⁸

The “All Without Distinction” Argument Turned on Its Head

There is a beautiful irony embedded in the “all without distinction” argument that rarely gets noticed. The restrictivists use this phrase to limit the scope of “all” in salvation texts: when Paul says “all,” he means all kinds of people, not all individuals. Fair enough—let us test that reading.

But notice what happens when the same restrictivists read the sin texts. “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Rom. 3:23). Does “all” here mean “all kinds of people have sinned”? No. Everyone agrees that “all” in Romans 3:23 means every individual human being without exception.

“In Adam all die” (1 Cor. 15:22a). Does “all” here mean “all kinds of people die”? Of course not. It means every single person dies because of Adam’s sin.

So why does “all” mean every individual when it comes to condemnation but suddenly shrink to “all kinds” when it comes to salvation? As Hurd puts it, “How can we possibly say that Christ’s victory was much greater than Adam’s defeat if in Adam all without exception are lost but in Christ only ‘all without distinction’ are saved?”⁴⁹ Paul’s whole argument in Romans 5 depends on the symmetry: the scope of Christ’s saving work is at least as wide as the scope of Adam’s condemnation. Indeed, Paul insists it is wider—“how much more” (5:15, 17). If the condemnation is truly universal, the grace must be even more so.

Hurd illustrates this with a memorable analogy. Imagine an embassy with 3,000 people is taken by terrorists, and all 3,000 are held hostage. Special forces storm the building. If only 30 of the 3,000 are rescued, we would not call the mission a triumph. We would call it a catastrophe with a few bright spots. But if we apply the “all without distinction” logic to salvation, that is exactly what we get: Christ’s work rescues a tiny fraction of those He came to save, while the vast majority are permanently lost. Is that a victory? Is that the triumph of grace over sin?⁵⁰

Paul did not think so. He wrote: “Where sin increased, grace abounded all the more” (Rom. 5:20). Not “where sin increased, grace abounded somewhat” or “grace abounded for a lucky few.” Grace abounded all the more. That is Paul’s gospel. That is the heart of his message.

Ramelli and the Patristic Reading of These Texts

Ilaria Ramelli’s scholarship is crucial here because it shows that the universalist reading of these Pauline texts is not a modern invention. The earliest and most significant Greek-speaking theologians—Origen, Gregory of Nyssa, Evagrius, and others—read Paul exactly this way.⁵¹

Ramelli notes that Paul’s language in Philippians 2:10–11 was a favorite proof-text for the patristic universalists. Origen and Gregory of Nyssa both interpreted the universal submission announced by Paul as coinciding with universal salvation, not forced subjugation. As Ramelli observes, Paul proclaims that “in the name of Christ every knee will bend, in heaven, on earth, and in the underworld, and every tongue will proclaim that Jesus Christ is the Lord.” The verb “proclaim” (exomologeō), she notes, “in the Septuagint and the New Testament always implies a voluntary recognition, praise, and thanksgiving.”⁵²

Similarly, Ramelli points out that the church fathers read Romans 14:11—where Paul quotes Isaiah 45:23 and says that every knee will bow and every tongue will praise God—as evidence of eventual universal salvation. “Enemies who are forced to submit and are crushed do not praise their oppressor,” she writes. “But if all will submit spontaneously and willingly, all will praise God and be saved.”⁵³

As for 1 Timothy 2:4–6 and Titus 2:11, Ramelli observes that these Pastoral Epistle texts “develop the universalistic thread in Paul’s thought” and were heavily relied upon by Origen and other fathers in building the case for apokatastasis. She notes the conceptual parallel between 1 Timothy 2:4 (“God wants all human beings to be saved”) and 2 Peter 3:9 (“God wants nobody to perish, but all to reach conversion”)—and she points out that 1 Timothy 4:10, with its declaration that God is “the Savior of all humans, especially of those who believe,” is most naturally read as distinguishing between present believers and the wider humanity for whom God’s saving work is also intended.⁵⁴

This patristic evidence matters because McClymond claims the universalist reading of Paul is a modern aberration. It is not. It is the reading of the earliest and most sophisticated Greek-speaking theologians of the church—theologians who read Paul in his own language and whose theological acumen helped shape the Nicene and Chalcedonian creeds.

D. Counter-Objections

McClymond and others will push back on the universalist reading of these texts. Let us address the strongest counter-objections directly.

“Paul Also Wrote About Judgment, Destruction, and Wrath. You Cannot Ignore Those Texts.”

This is the most common objection, and it is entirely fair. Paul does write about God’s wrath (Rom. 1:18), about the destruction of the wicked (2 Thess. 1:9), and about judgment for those who do evil (Rom. 2:5–9). McClymond highlights these texts and argues that they contradict the universalist reading.⁵⁵

But the universalist does not deny these texts. We affirm them. We take them with total seriousness. What we deny is that they describe a permanent state from which no escape is possible. As we argued in Chapters 15–17, the language of judgment, wrath, and destruction in the New Testament describes real, severe, painful consequences for sin—but consequences that are age-long (aionios), not necessarily everlasting, and that serve a restorative purpose (kolasis, corrective punishment, not timoria, retributive punishment).⁵⁶

Beilby makes an important methodological point here. There is a tendency in conservative Christianity to interpret the “God will save all” passages in light of the “hell will be eternally populated” passages. But it is equally possible to read the “eternal hell” passages in light of the “God will save all” passages. The question is which set of passages should interpret the other.⁵⁷ The universalist argues that the clearest, most explicit, and most numerous passages about the scope of God’s saving work should provide the interpretive framework for the smaller number of ambiguous judgment texts—not the other way around.

“The Philippians 2 Confession Could Be Forced or Grudging.”

We have addressed this above, but let us drive the point home. McClymond and Marshall argue that the “every knee will bow” language describes coerced subjugation, not willing worship. The key rebuttal has three parts.

First, the verb exomologeō carries overtones of praise throughout the Greek Bible, as both Lightfoot and Dunn have demonstrated.⁵⁸ Second, 1 Corinthians 12:3 says no one can confess Jesus as Lord except by the Holy Spirit—and Philippians 2:11 says every tongue will make that confession.⁵⁹ Third, the confession is made “to the glory of God the Father,” and as Talbott argues, forced or insincere confession brings no glory to God. A God who honors truth would not participate in a charade of coerced worship.⁶⁰

Marshall claims that the language of “destruction” in 1 Corinthians 15:24–28 proves that the subjugation is not willing. But look at what is being destroyed in that passage: “every rule and every authority and power” (v. 24)—and “the last enemy to be destroyed is death” (v. 26). The things being destroyed are hostile powers and death itself, not persons. The destruction of evil powers is fully compatible with the redemption of the persons who were held captive by them. In fact, that is exactly the pattern of the gospel: Christ destroys the power of sin and death in order to set captives free.⁶¹

“The ‘All’ in 1 Timothy 2:4 May Express a Mere Desire, Not a Guaranteed Outcome.”

This is Piper’s “two wills” argument. God genuinely desires all to be saved, but He has a competing desire—to demonstrate His justice—that overrides His desire to save all. Thus not all will actually be saved.

There are several problems with this. First, as Beilby observes, Piper’s argument is only convincing if you already accept Calvinist soteriology. It is a way of making Reformed theology compatible with 1 Timothy 2:4, but it is not what the text itself demands.⁶² Second, the universalist has no quarrel with the idea that God has multiple attributes. God is just. God is holy. God does judge sin. But as we have argued throughout this book, justice, holiness, and wrath are not alternatives to love—they are expressions of it. God’s justice serves His love. There is no competition between God’s desire to save all and His desire to be just, because genuine justice (mishpat/tsedaqah) aims at setting things right, not at permanent destruction.⁶³

Third, the Pastoral Epistles do not present God’s saving desire as a mere hope that may or may not come to pass. They present it alongside concrete accomplishments: Christ “gave himself as a ransom for all” (1 Tim. 2:6). God “is the Savior of all people” (1 Tim. 4:10). The grace of God “has appeared, bringing salvation for all people” (Titus 2:11). These are not subjunctive wishes. They are indicative declarations about what God has done and who God is.

“If Universalism Is True, Why Did Paul Suffer and Struggle So Hard for the Gospel?”

This is a practical objection: if everyone ends up saved anyway, why would Paul endure beatings, shipwrecks, and imprisonment to preach the gospel? But this objection misunderstands the universalist position. We addressed it more fully in Chapter 27, but the short answer is this: Paul preached because people are suffering now. Sin enslaves people now. Separation from God causes agony now. The gospel is not merely a ticket out of future punishment. It is the power of God for present salvation—for transformation, healing, freedom, and joy in the present life.⁶⁴

Moreover, Paul understood that the timing of salvation matters. Believers in this life become part of God’s firstfruits—the firstborn of the new creation, the ambassadors of reconciliation (2 Cor. 5:18–20). They participate in God’s work of restoring the world. That is a calling worth suffering for, regardless of the final outcome for all humanity.

“Romans 11:32 Is Only About Jews and Gentiles, Not About Every Individual.”

We have partly addressed this already, but it deserves one more point. Even if we grant (for the sake of argument) that Paul’s immediate focus in Romans 9–11 is the relationship between Jews and Gentiles, notice what happens when you put the two groups together. The fullness of the Gentiles plus all Israel equals all humanity. There is no third group. If both groups receive mercy, then all people receive mercy. The attempt to limit Romans 11:32 to “group mercy” without individual application runs aground on the simple fact that every individual is either a Jew or a Gentile. If God has mercy on all Jews and all Gentiles, He has mercy on all people.⁶⁵

And Paul’s own language confirms this. He does not say “God has bound some from both groups in disobedience so that he may have mercy on some from both groups.” He says tous pantas—the all. Twice. The first “all” (those bound in disobedience) universally refers to every human being, since all have sinned (Rom. 3:23). The second “all” (those who receive mercy) is identical in form and should be read with the same scope.⁶⁶

“What About 2 Thessalonians 1:9? Paul Does Speak of ‘Eternal Destruction.’”

This is a fair challenge. In 2 Thessalonians 1:9, Paul (or a Pauline associate) writes that those who do not obey the gospel “will suffer the punishment of eternal destruction, away from the presence of the Lord.” McClymond highlights this text as a “problem text for universalists.”⁶⁹

Several things must be said. First, the word translated “eternal” is aionios, which we discussed at length in Chapter 15. As Ramelli and Konstan have shown, this word does not necessarily mean “everlasting” but can mean “pertaining to an age” or “age-long.”⁷⁰ Second, the word “destruction” (olethros) does not mean “annihilation.” Paul uses the same word in 1 Corinthians 5:5, where he hands a sinful man over to Satan “for the destruction of the flesh, so that his spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord.” In that context, olethros is clearly a remedial process that leads to eventual salvation. If Paul can use “destruction” in a redemptive sense in 1 Corinthians 5, there is no reason to insist it must be permanent and final in 2 Thessalonians 1.⁷¹

Third, the phrase “away from the presence of the Lord” describes a condition of separation, not a fixed eternal state. The universalist reads this as a description of the terrible experience of those who face God’s purifying judgment—real, painful, age-long—but not permanent and not without purpose. One difficult verse does not overturn the massive Pauline witness to universal reconciliation. It must be read in the context of that larger witness.

Conclusion

Here is where we stand. McClymond says universalists leap from God’s love to universal salvation while omitting the messy part. But the evidence of this chapter shows exactly the opposite. We are not leaping. We are reading—reading Paul carefully, reading him in Greek, reading him in context, and reading him alongside the earliest theologians who interpreted his letters.

Romans 11:32 says God has mercy on all. Philippians 2:10–11 says every tongue will confess Christ’s lordship in a Spirit-empowered act of praise. 1 Timothy 2:4 says God desires all to be saved. 1 Timothy 4:10 says God is the Savior of all people. Titus 2:11 says grace has appeared, bringing salvation for all people. Ephesians 1:9–10 says God’s plan is to unite all things in Christ.

These texts are not ambiguous. They are not isolated. They are not metaphors. They are clear, consistent, and cumulative declarations of the scope of God’s saving purpose. And when McClymond says that Talbott “has difficulty in showing the compatibility of universalism with the text of the New Testament,” one has to wonder whether he has actually read Talbott’s exegesis of these passages. Because the compatibility is not difficult to show. It is, in fact, the most natural reading of the Apostle Paul’s own words.⁶⁷

Paul was not a universalist despite the New Testament. He was a universalist because of it. He saw, more clearly perhaps than any other New Testament author, that the logic of the cross demands a universal outcome. If Christ died for all, and if God’s grace is greater than all sin, and if God’s plan is to unite all things in Christ, then the conclusion is inescapable. The cross was not a partial victory. It was not a well-intentioned attempt that falls short for most of humanity. It was the decisive act of God to reconcile all things to Himself. And God will, in the end, be all in all.⁶⁸

In the next chapter, we turn to the Petrine epistles and the powerful testimony of 1 Peter 3:18–20, 4:6, and 2 Peter 3:9—texts that open the door to postmortem salvation and strengthen the case for universal restoration even further.