Chapter 29

McClymond vs. Hart — The Moral Argument for Universal Salvation

A. McClymond’s Argument

David Bentley Hart is, by almost any measure, one of the most formidable theological voices of our generation. A scholar of breathtaking range and rhetorical power, Hart has made the case for universal salvation with a force and philosophical sophistication that few thinkers in any era have matched. And Michael McClymond knows it. You can feel it in the pages of The Devil’s Redemption—Hart is the opponent McClymond takes the most seriously, and the one he works the hardest to refute.

At the heart of Hart’s case stands what we might call the moral argument from creation. Hart argues that the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo—the belief that God created the world freely, from nothing, and out of sheer love—carries inescapable moral implications for how we think about the final destiny of creatures. If God was under no compulsion to create, if creation is a pure and gratuitous act of self-giving love, then God is wholly responsible for the existence of every creature He brings into being. And if God is wholly responsible, then God must also be wholly committed to the final good of every creature. A God who freely creates rational beings, knowing in advance that some of them will suffer eternal ruin, is not a God whose goodness we can coherently affirm. Hart put the matter directly in his 2015 lecture at the University of Notre Dame: universal salvation follows necessarily from God’s moral character when combined with the doctrine of divine creation.¹

McClymond is fully aware of this argument, and he devotes significant attention to it in volume two of The Devil’s Redemption. His response takes several forms.

First, McClymond charges that Hart’s argument demands too much coherence from reality. He frames the universalist vision as an essentially modernist impulse—a desire for closure, consistency, and intellectual totality that reality itself may not provide. McClymond suggests that universalism would like to smooth everything out and silence the conflicting voices, producing something more unified than the messy biblical text actually warrants. He calls the universalist position “more totalizing and thus more Hegelian” than the text of the book of Revelation itself.²

Second, McClymond invokes a memorable image. He asks whether reality might not be “smoothly shaped” but rather more like “a jagged shard of glass.” In other words, McClymond is saying that Hart’s desire for a final cosmic reconciliation may be beautiful, but reality is rougher and more resistant than Hart allows. Not everything gets resolved. Some stories don’t end well. Some shards stay jagged.³

Third, McClymond draws on Søren Kierkegaard to buttress his case. He quotes Kierkegaard’s famous observation that God’s creation of beings who are genuinely free over against Himself is “the cross which philosophy could not bear but upon which it has remained hanging.”⁴ The point is clear: real freedom means the possibility of real, permanent refusal. Philosophy—and, by extension, Hart’s philosophical theology—cannot tolerate this, but reality demands it.

Fourth, McClymond argues that Hart’s moral argument from creatio ex nihilo proves too much. If God is directly responsible for the existence of every creature, and therefore responsible for bringing every creature to a good end, then God must also be held responsible for every evil act every creature has ever committed. McClymond puts it this way: even if all intelligent creatures were finally saved, a God who is directly responsible for all sinful acts of all creatures can hardly be regarded as blameless. On Hart’s premises, God must be faulted for every wrong ever done.⁵

Fifth, McClymond frames universalist hope as something closer to mere wishfulness than to genuine Christian hope. Christian hope, he insists, is grounded in God’s specific promises, not in abstract reasoning from God’s character. Because universalism fails to identify a clear divine promise on which it may rest, it drifts away from confident expectation and toward wishful thinking.⁶

Sixth, McClymond links Hart’s position to a broader pattern he identifies throughout The Devil’s Redemption—the tendency of universalist thinkers to rely on what he calls “abstract rationality.” The formula, as McClymond presents it, is simple: “God is love, therefore all will be saved.” McClymond compares this reasoning to a person who thinks, “God is love, therefore I will get the new job I just applied for.” The parallel is meant to expose the logical flimsiness of moving from a general theological premise to a specific eschatological conclusion.⁴¹

Seventh, McClymond frames the entire debate in terms of modernism versus biblical fidelity. He argues that the desire for final cosmic reconciliation is itself a product of the Enlightenment project—a hunger for closure, coherence, and explanatory totality that is foreign to the biblical world. The Bible, McClymond suggests, is comfortable with loose ends, unresolved tensions, and unanswered questions in ways that modern thinkers, including Hart, are not.⁴²

These are not trivial arguments. McClymond is raising real philosophical and theological questions, and Hart’s position does need to answer them. But as we will see, the answers are there—and they are devastating to McClymond’s case.

B. Identifying the Weaknesses

McClymond’s critique of Hart suffers from several serious problems that, taken together, undermine the force of his response almost entirely.

The “Jagged Shard” Proves Too Much

Start with the image of the jagged shard of glass. It’s vivid. It’s memorable. And it completely backfires. McClymond uses this image to suggest that Hart is demanding too much order and resolution from reality. But think about what McClymond is actually saying. He is arguing that the final state of affairs in God’s creation may include unresolved tragedy—that some creatures, made by God and loved by God, may remain in permanent ruin, and that we should accept this as simply part of how things are. Jagged. Broken. Unredeemed.

But this is the very thing that the gospel promises to overcome! The God who declares “Behold, I am making all things new” (Rev. 21:5) is not the God of the jagged shard. The God who promises to wipe every tear from every eye (Rev. 21:4) is not a God who leaves His creation permanently fractured. The entire biblical narrative moves from creation to fall to redemption to restoration. That arc is not a modernist invention. It is the story Scripture tells from Genesis to Revelation.⁷

McClymond’s metaphor actually works against him. If reality is a jagged shard of glass, then either God is unable to heal it (which denies His omnipotence), or God is unwilling to heal it (which denies His perfect love), or God intends to heal it in the fullness of time (which is the universalist hope). The jagged shard is not an argument against universal restoration. It is the condition that universal restoration addresses.

The “Hegelian” Charge Is a Category Error

McClymond’s label of “Hegelian” for the universalist position is a sophisticated-sounding charge that falls apart on examination. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel developed a philosophical system in which contradictions are resolved through a dialectical process of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. McClymond is suggesting that Hart’s expectation of a final cosmic resolution mirrors this Hegelian pattern.

But the hope for the restoration of all things is not Hegelian. It is biblical. When Paul writes that God will be “all in all” (1 Cor. 15:28), he is not channeling Hegel. When the author of Colossians proclaims that God was pleased “through him to reconcile to himself all things” (Col. 1:20), he is not performing a dialectical synthesis. When Peter declares the coming “restoration of all things, which God spoke by the mouth of all his holy prophets since the world began” (Acts 3:21), he is not making a philosophical point about the resolution of alienation. He is announcing the fulfillment of prophetic hope.⁸

McClymond confuses the source of the hope. Hart is not arguing from Hegel. He is arguing from Scripture and the Greek church fathers. The charge of Hegelianism is a version of the genetic fallacy—the same fallacy that runs throughout The Devil’s Redemption. McClymond would rather label an argument than refute it.

The “Proves Too Much” Objection Proves Too Little

McClymond argues that Hart’s moral argument from creatio ex nihilo proves too much because, if God is responsible for creation and therefore for saving all creatures, then God must also be responsible for evil itself. If God is the Creator of all that exists, then why does evil exist at all?⁹

But this objection applies to every theology that affirms creatio ex nihilo—not just to universalism. The problem of evil is a problem for Calvinists, for Arminians, for proponents of eternal conscious torment, for conditionalists, and for universalists alike. Every Christian who believes that an omnipotent and perfectly good God created the world has to wrestle with why that world contains evil. This is not a uniquely universalist problem. It is the ancient problem of theodicy, and universalism actually provides the most satisfying answer to it.

Here is why. Under eternal conscious torment, evil wins permanently in the lives of the damned. God creates, evil corrupts, and for billions of creatures that corruption is never undone. Under conditional immortality, the damage is less grotesque—the lost are destroyed rather than tormented—but evil still achieves a kind of permanent victory by permanently removing creatures from the goodness God intended for them. Only under universal restoration does evil have no final victory at all. God creates. Evil corrupts. God restores. Every creature is brought home. Every tear is wiped away. Evil is completely, comprehensively, and permanently defeated.¹⁰

So McClymond’s objection does not prove too much at all. It proves too little. Hart’s argument from creation is not undermined by the existence of evil; it is strengthened by the promise that God will overcome all evil.

The Kierkegaard Quote Cuts Both Ways

The Kierkegaard quotation about God creating beings free over against Himself is often used to suggest that genuine freedom requires the possibility of permanent rejection. But Kierkegaard’s point is about the radical nature of creaturely freedom—not about the eternal duration of rebellion. The cross that philosophy cannot bear is the mystery of how an infinite God can create genuinely free beings at all. That is a real mystery. But the universalist does not deny the reality of creaturely freedom. What the universalist denies is that freedom, properly understood, can result in a permanent, fully informed, fully voluntary rejection of the infinite Good.

As both Talbott and Hart have argued, persistent rejection of God is a sign of bondage, not freedom. Jesus Himself taught this: “Everyone who commits sin is a slave to sin” (John 8:34). A person trapped in sin is not exercising freedom but suffering under its absence. The truly free choice, made with full knowledge and an unbound will, always tends toward the Good—because the Good is what all rational beings are made for.¹¹ We addressed this in detail in Chapter 25.

Wishfulness or Biblical Hope?

McClymond’s distinction between wishfulness and genuine hope is clever, but it is built on a false premise. He claims that universalism cannot identify a divine promise on which to rest. But the entire New Testament is saturated with such promises. God “desires all people to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth” (1 Tim. 2:4). God is “not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance” (2 Pet. 3:9). Christ is “the Savior of all people, especially of those who believe” (1 Tim. 4:10). God has purposed in the fullness of time “to unite all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth” (Eph. 1:10). Christ is the “ransom for all” (1 Tim. 2:6), the one who “tasted death for everyone” (Heb. 2:9), the Lamb who “takes away the sin of the world” (John 1:29).¹²

These are not wishes. They are declarations. They are the stated intentions and accomplished works of God. The universalist hope is not built on abstract reasoning from the word “love.” It is built on specific texts, specific promises, and the specific character of God as revealed in Scripture. McClymond’s charge of “wishfulness” simply does not survive contact with the biblical evidence. We treated these texts in full detail in Chapters 14, 19, and 20.

There is also a deep irony in McClymond’s charge. He claims that universalist hope is really just wishful thinking dressed up in theological language. But what about the hope that undergirds his own position? If McClymond holds to ECT, then his “hope” is that God will torture the majority of the human race for all eternity while saving only a remnant. If McClymond holds to some form of conditionalism, then his “hope” is that God will annihilate billions of His own creatures. Are these genuinely hopeful positions? Are they grounded in the specific promises of God in the way McClymond demands? The Bible never promises ECT in the way it promises universal reconciliation. The phrase “eternal torment” appears nowhere in the New Testament. The words that are used—aionios kolasis, apollymi, olethros—are far more ambiguous than the ECT tradition has recognized. Meanwhile, the texts that point toward universal restoration are explicit, abundant, and grounded in God’s own stated will.⁵¹

So who is really engaged in wishful thinking here? The universalist, who believes that God will accomplish what He has declared He desires (1 Tim. 2:4)? Or the proponent of eternal torment, who must explain why an omnipotent God of love is unable or unwilling to fulfill His own stated desire?

C. The Universalist Response: Hart’s Arguments at Full Strength

The Moral Argument from Creation

At the center of Hart’s case is an argument so simple and so powerful that it has never been adequately answered by the opponents of universal restoration. It goes like this.

God was not compelled to create. The Christian doctrine of creatio ex nihilo teaches that the world exists solely because God freely willed it into being. There was no pre-existing material that forced God’s hand. There was no deficiency in God that creation was needed to fill. There was no external pressure, no cosmic necessity. God simply chose, out of the infinite abundance of His love, to bring creatures into existence.¹³

Now, if that is true—and every orthodox Christian affirms that it is—then the moral implications are staggering. A God who creates freely is a God who takes full responsibility for what He creates. He is not an indifferent manufacturer turning out products for which He bears no further obligation. He is a Father who brings children into being and who is, by virtue of His own free decision to create, morally bound to seek their ultimate good.

Hart published his argument in the journal Radical Orthodoxy in 2015 under the title “God, Creation, and Evil: The Moral Meaning of Creatio Ex Nihilo.”¹⁴ The argument proceeds with rigorous logic. If creation is truly free and truly motivated by love, then the Creator cannot be absolved of responsibility for the fate of His creatures. If any creature ends in permanent ruin, then the act of creation was not purely good. A God who creates knowing that some of His creatures will suffer eternal torment or permanent annihilation—and who could have refrained from creating them at all—is a God whose goodness is fatally compromised.

This is not, as McClymond suggests, mere philosophical speculation imported from outside the Christian tradition. It is the implication of a doctrine that the entire Church has always affirmed. Creatio ex nihilo is not a neutral, merely technical claim about how the world began. It is a deeply moral claim about the character of the One who brought it into being. If God is love, and God created freely, then creation is an act of love—and an act of love that produces permanent misery for any of its objects is not worthy of the name.

The Eriugenian tradition in the West saw this connection clearly. John Scotus Eriugena, the last great patristic Platonist in the Western Church, explicitly linked creatio ex nihilo with creatio ex Deo—creation from God’s own superabundant goodness. For Eriugena, as for Origen before him, the movement of creation necessarily implied a return to the Creator. The exitus-reditus pattern—going out from God and returning to God—was not an optional appendage to Christian theology. It was its fundamental structure. And that return, for Eriugena, encompassed all of creation without exception.⁵⁴

The Argument from Divine Goodness

Hart’s second major line of argument concerns the nature of divine goodness itself. If God is good—perfectly, infinitely, essentially good—then His goodness must mean something. It cannot be a word we use while secretly meaning something entirely different from what we mean when we call a human person good.

This is a point that goes back to John Stuart Mill, whom Thomas Talbott also cites.¹⁵ If God’s “goodness” is compatible with the eternal torment of billions of His own creatures, then the word “goodness” has been emptied of all meaningful content. We might as well call God “blue” or “triangular”—the word would communicate just as much. Hart insists that divine goodness must bear some real, analogical relationship to what we recognize as goodness. A good parent does not abandon a child to permanent ruin if it is within the parent’s power to rescue that child. A good king does not sentence a rebellious subject to unending agony if restoration is possible. A good God does not create beings for eternal misery.¹⁶

McClymond might respond that we cannot apply human moral categories directly to God. But if we abandon the idea that divine goodness is meaningfully related to goodness as we know it, then we cannot make any moral claims about God at all—including the claim that God is good. The moment we say “God is good,” we are saying that the word “good” means something recognizable. Hart is simply taking that commitment seriously.

The Argument from the Defeat of Evil

A third strand of Hart’s argument concerns the final status of evil in God’s creation. If even one rational creature remains permanently lost—whether in eternal torment or in annihilation—then evil has achieved a final victory in that creature’s case. God’s original purpose in creating that person has been permanently frustrated. The love that called that person into existence has been permanently defeated.

Hart frames this in terms of the promise of 1 Corinthians 15:28—that God will be “all in all.” If God is truly “all in all,” then there can be no corner of creation where God’s purposes remain unfulfilled. There can be no soul where God’s love has been permanently thwarted. There can be no remnant of the old creation that God has failed to renew. As I’ve said throughout this book, “all in all” does not mean “all in what’s left.”¹⁷

Gregory of Nyssa made precisely this argument in the fourth century, long before Hart. Gregory insisted that evil has no true substance—it is a parasitic corruption of the good, not a self-existing reality. And because evil has no ultimate ontological grounding, it cannot endure forever in the face of God’s infinite goodness. In his commentary on 1 Corinthians 15:28, Gregory argues that the final submission of all things to Christ means the salvation of all, because Christ’s submission to the Father is the submission and restoration of all rational creatures who are “the body of Christ.”¹⁸ The Good, Gregory wrote, will in the end reach even “the extreme limit of evil,” and “nothing will remain opposed to the Good.” All will be united to God. All humanity, all rational creatures, and the whole of creation will become “one body.”¹⁹

This is not Hegel. This is not modernism. This is fourth-century patristic theology, rooted in the apostle Paul, articulated by one of the greatest fathers of the Church.

Hart’s Arguments Are Patristic, Not Modernist

One of McClymond’s most persistent claims throughout The Devil’s Redemption is that universalism is a product of modern, post-Enlightenment thinking. He applies this charge to Hart specifically, framing Hart’s arguments as if they were born in a philosophy seminar rather than in the living tradition of the Church.

This is simply wrong. Hart’s arguments are deeply and explicitly rooted in the Greek patristic tradition—especially in Gregory of Nyssa, Maximus the Confessor, and the broader Origenian tradition that shaped the theology of the Christian East for centuries.

Gregory of Nyssa (c. 335–395) is perhaps the most important patristic universalist. He was no marginal figure. He was one of the three Cappadocian Fathers who shaped the Trinitarian theology that became the orthodoxy of the entire Church. He was the brother of Basil the Great. He played a decisive role at the Council of Constantinople in 381. And he was a thoroughgoing universalist who taught the doctrine of apokatastasis—the restoration of all things—throughout his career, in work after work, from his dialogue On the Soul and the Resurrection to his commentary on 1 Corinthians 15:28 to his Great Catechism.²⁰

Gregory’s universalism was not an afterthought or a peripheral speculation. It was woven into the fabric of his theology. His argument for universal restoration was built on the non-subsistence of evil (evil has no real being and therefore cannot endure eternally), the all-sufficiency of Christ’s redemption, and the conviction that God’s purposes in creation cannot be permanently frustrated. These are the same arguments Hart makes.

Consider the depth of Gregory’s commitment. In his dialogue On the Soul and the Resurrection, written in the voice of his sister Macrina the Younger—herself a renowned Christian philosopher and ascetic—Gregory presents the case for universal resurrection and salvation with careful philosophical precision. The dialogue addresses the nature of the soul, the purpose of death, and the final destiny of all rational creatures, arriving at the firm conclusion that God’s restorative purpose extends to the entire creation.⁴³

In his Great Catechism, Gregory develops the famous metaphor of Christ as the divine fisherman who conceals the hook of His divinity within the bait of His humanity. The devil, deceived by Christ’s apparent weakness, swallows the bait and is thereby conquered from within. But notice what Gregory does with this metaphor: it is not only humanity that is freed by Christ’s victory, but ultimately even the devil himself. Gregory dares to suggest that the adversary, having been conquered by Christ, will eventually be converted to the Good.⁴⁴ This is how seriously the early church’s greatest Trinitarian theologian took the promise that God will be “all in all.”

Gregory Nazianzen, another of the Cappadocian Fathers and the one known as “the Theologian” by the Eastern Church, also showed strong universalist sympathies. In his orations, Nazianzen interprets Christ’s incarnation, death, descent to Hades, resurrection, and ascension in universalist terms. He declares that Christ “offered his blood to God and purified the whole cosmos.” In one of his poems, he raises the question of whether all will eventually partake of God—he does not reject the possibility but simply defers further consideration of it. In another oration, he proclaims that Christ by his sacrifice “loosed all those who groaned under the chains of Tartarus.”⁴⁵ While Nazianzen does not declare universalism with the same clarity as his friend Gregory of Nyssa, the direction of his thought is unmistakable.

Maximus the Confessor (c. 580–662) presents a more complicated picture. McClymond would likely appeal to Maximus as an opponent of Origenism. And Maximus did criticize certain doctrines associated with Origenism—particularly the pre-existence of souls and the idea that bodies were a punishment for pre-cosmic sin. But as Ilaria Ramelli has demonstrated in painstaking detail, the specific doctrines Maximus rejected were not actually Origen’s own views but rather later distortions associated with the post-Evagrian tradition.²¹ On the key question of universal salvation, Maximus was far more sympathetic than McClymond lets on. Hans Urs von Balthasar argued that Maximus did adhere to the doctrine of universal salvation, albeit prudently and without professing it openly. More recently, Torstein Tollefsen has made a similar case.²²

The point is crucial. Hart is not inventing arguments from thin air. He is standing in a tradition that stretches back through Maximus and Gregory of Nyssa and Origen to the New Testament itself. When McClymond calls this “Hegelian,” he is either unaware of the patristic roots of these arguments or is deliberately obscuring them.

The Argument That Evil Cannot Be Freely Chosen as Evil

One of Hart’s most controversial claims—and one that McClymond targets—is the idea that no one can freely will evil as evil. This sounds counterintuitive at first. Don’t people choose evil every day? Isn’t that what sin is?

Hart’s point is more precise than it first appears. When a person sins, they do not choose evil because it is evil. They choose it because it appears to them, in the moment, as some kind of good—a pleasure, a convenience, a short-term advantage, a relief from pain. Sin always involves a distortion of perception. The addict does not choose the drug because it destroys him; he chooses it because it promises relief. The thief does not steal because theft is wrong; he steals because the stolen goods appear desirable. Evil always masquerades as something good. That is what makes it tempting.²³

This insight is ancient. It goes back at least to Plato, who argued that no one does wrong willingly, and it was taken up by the church fathers. Origen taught that evil has no true substance—it is a deficiency, a privation, a turning away from the Good. Gregory of Nyssa followed Origen in this. Augustine, despite his break with Origen on other matters, agreed that evil is a privation of the good rather than a positive substance.

The moral implications are enormous. If evil can only be chosen under the illusion that it is good, then a person who has been fully freed from that illusion—who sees reality as it truly is, who stands face to face with the infinite beauty and goodness of God—will not choose evil. The will, when fully healed and fully informed, naturally moves toward God because God is what every rational soul was made for. This does not violate freedom. It fulfills freedom. A person who is finally free from all deception and bondage is not less free; they are more free than they have ever been.²⁴

Talbott makes the same argument in philosophical terms. He points out that persistent rejection of God is itself evidence of bondage. Jesus said, “Everyone who commits sin is a slave to sin” (John 8:34). The person who clings to hatred of God is not exercising the noblest expression of their freedom. They are enslaved. And a God who restores that person to genuine freedom—who heals the distortion, who removes the blindness—is not violating their will. He is liberating it.²⁵

The Moral Status of the Creator

I want to linger on the creatio ex nihilo argument because it is the one that McClymond works hardest to resist, and it is the one he ultimately fails to answer.

Think of it this way. Imagine a scientist who has the ability to create fully conscious, sentient beings in a laboratory. Before creating them, the scientist knows with certainty that some of these beings will, if created, end up in permanent, inescapable suffering. The scientist is not compelled to create them. There is no outside force demanding their existence. The scientist simply decides, freely, to bring them into being anyway.

Would we call that scientist good? Would we praise the scientist for the wonderful things that some of the beings experience, while accepting the permanent agony of the others as an unfortunate but acceptable side effect of the scientist’s creative freedom? I don’t think anyone would. We would call the scientist’s decision monstrous. We would say that a truly good scientist—one who had the power to ensure the flourishing of every being he created—would either refrain from creating the ones destined for ruin, or would ensure that every being reached a good end.²⁶

Now, God is infinitely more powerful, infinitely more knowing, and infinitely more loving than any human scientist. If we hold a hypothetical scientist to this moral standard, how much more must we hold God to it? Hart’s argument is that the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo places the entire moral weight of creation on God’s shoulders. He freely chose to create. He knew what He was doing. He is infinitely powerful. And if any creature ends in permanent ruin, then God’s creative act was not purely good.

McClymond has no answer to this that does not either compromise God’s omnipotence, compromise God’s goodness, or retreat into mystery. And retreating into mystery is fine as far as it goes—but you cannot retreat into mystery and simultaneously claim that the universalist is wrong. If the matter is mysterious, then McClymond cannot be confident that Hart is mistaken.

Let me press this further. McClymond’s position requires him to affirm something truly extraordinary: that God, in His infinite foreknowledge, created billions of human beings knowing—with absolute certainty, before they drew their first breath—that they would spend eternity in conscious torment (if McClymond holds to ECT) or would be permanently annihilated (if he leans toward conditionalism). God was not surprised by their rebellion. He was not caught off guard. He knew, before He spoke the first word of creation, exactly how the story would end for every soul. And He created them anyway.

Now, a Calvinist might respond that this glorifies God’s sovereignty—that God has the right to create vessels of wrath as well as vessels of mercy (Rom. 9:22). But McClymond is not a Calvinist in the strictest sense, and even Calvinists typically struggle with the moral implications of double predestination. An Arminian might respond that God created people with genuine freedom and that the possibility of permanent rejection is the price of genuine love. But Hart’s point stands: a God who brings beings into existence knowing that freedom will lead to their permanent ruin, and who could have refrained from creating them entirely, has made a morally questionable decision. The only way to fully vindicate the goodness of creation is to affirm that creation’s story ends well for every creature God has made.⁴⁶

Robin Parry makes this point beautifully in The Evangelical Universalist. God’s project in creation is not a partial success. It is not a mixed result where some creatures are saved and others are lost. It is the full, complete, triumphant accomplishment of everything God intended when He said, “Let there be light.” Anything less than this is a diminishment of God’s creative purpose.⁴⁷

Isaac of Nineveh and the Tradition of Divine Love

Hart’s arguments also find deep resonance in the tradition of Isaac of Nineveh (also known as Isaac the Syrian), the seventh-century mystic and theologian whose writings have profoundly shaped Eastern Christian spirituality. Isaac taught that God’s love is experienced differently by the righteous and the wicked—as joy by the former and as suffering by the latter—but that this suffering is not eternal. It will, Isaac wrote, “manifest some wonderful outcome.”²⁷

Isaac’s vision is remarkably similar to Hart’s. God’s love is like fire. For those who welcome it, the fire is warmth and light. For those who resist it, the same fire is agony. But the fire is not vindictive. It is purifying. It does not destroy the creature; it destroys the sin. And when the sin has been burned away, what remains is the creature, restored and healed, standing at last in the presence of the God who never stopped loving them.

Ramelli notes that Isaac’s thought is deeply connected to Origen’s. Origen too taught that God will be light for the righteous but purifying fire for sinners. God’s love does not change. What changes is the condition of the soul that encounters it. Isaac drew explicitly on this Origenian tradition, insisting that God does not avenge evil but rather makes evil right—a concept of diorthōsis, the setting-right of evil, that Origen and the entire Origenian tradition upheld.²⁸

This matters because it shows that Hart is not an isolated modern voice. He stands at the end of a long line of Christian thinkers who have reasoned from God’s love and God’s creative purpose to the conclusion that all things will be restored.

The Barsanuphius Testimony

There is an ironic piece of evidence that actually strengthens the universalist case, even though McClymond appeals to it against universalism. In the sixth century, an ascetic named Barsanuphius from the desert of Gaza received a question from a monk who wanted to know why the doctrines of Origen, especially apokatastasis, were supported by orthodox authors and even saints—specifically the Cappadocian Fathers. Barsanuphius did not deny that the Cappadocians supported universal restoration. He simply observed that even saints can have a limited understanding of the mysteries of God.²⁹

Think about what this tells us. As late as the sixth century, it was common knowledge that the Cappadocians—among the most revered theologians in all of Christianity—supported apokatastasis. This was not disputed. The question was not whether they held the view but whether they were right to hold it. This demolishes the claim that universalism was always a marginal, heterodox position. It was the position of the theological elite of the Greek-speaking church for centuries.

Revelation and the Open Gates

Hart’s argument also draws strength from the closing chapters of Revelation—the very book McClymond appeals to in support of his “jagged shard” imagery. McClymond reads Revelation as a text that preserves discordant voices and resists resolution. And there is genuine complexity in Revelation. But McClymond ignores the resolution that the text itself provides.

Revelation 21:25 says of the New Jerusalem that “its gates will never be shut by day—and there will be no night there.” The gates are always open. Revelation 22:2 tells us that the tree of life is “for the healing of the nations”—the very nations that were deceived and judged in the preceding chapters. Why are the gates open if no one is expected to enter? Why is healing available for the nations if the nations have been permanently consigned to the lake of fire?³⁰

We addressed the Revelation texts in full detail in Chapter 18. The point here is that McClymond cannot appeal to Revelation in support of permanent alienation without reckoning with the same book’s testimony to open gates and the healing of the nations. The text is not as “jagged” as he claims. It points, in its own dramatic and visionary way, toward the restoration of all things.

Responding to McClymond’s “Abstract Rationality” Charge

McClymond characterizes the universalist argument as abstract reasoning from the premise “God is love” to the conclusion “all will be saved.” He compares this to someone reasoning, “God is love, therefore I will get the new job I applied for.”³¹

This comparison is absurd. The difference between “God is love, therefore all will be saved” and “God is love, therefore I will get a new job” is the difference between a claim grounded in dozens of specific biblical texts and a claim grounded in personal wishful thinking. Nobody argues from Scripture that God has promised everyone a new job. But dozens of texts declare that God desires all to be saved, that Christ died for all, that God will reconcile all things, that every knee will bow and every tongue confess, and that God will be all in all. The universalist case is not “God is love, therefore...” with a blank to be filled in by human imagination. It is “God is love, and here are sixty-seven specific texts that tell us what that love accomplishes.”³²

Hart’s philosophical arguments are powerful, but they do not exist in a vacuum. They stand alongside the massive exegetical case that Talbott, Parry, Ramelli, and others have built. McClymond’s characterization of universalism as mere abstract reasoning is itself a straw man—a failure to engage with the actual evidence.

Consider the sheer volume of biblical texts that support the universalist case. Paul declares that “as one trespass led to condemnation for all, so one act of righteousness leads to justification and life for all” (Rom. 5:18). Paul writes that “as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive” (1 Cor. 15:22). Paul announces that God was pleased through Christ “to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross” (Col. 1:20). Paul proclaims 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” (Phil. 2:10–11). These are not isolated proof-texts. They represent a coherent and pervasive strand of Pauline theology that points unmistakably toward the reconciliation of all things in Christ.⁵²

Talbott, in The Inescapable Love of God, devotes multiple chapters to careful exegesis of these and other Pauline texts. He shows that the “all” in these passages is genuinely universal in scope—it refers to the same “all” who fell in Adam. The parallelism is precise and deliberate. If “all” means “every human being” on the condemnation side, then it must mean “every human being” on the salvation side. To read it otherwise is to break the argument Paul is making.⁵³

This is not abstract reasoning. This is exegesis. And it is precisely the kind of exegesis that McClymond too often fails to engage with when he critiques Hart and the other universalist scholars.

The Character of God: Scripture’s Own Testimony

When Hart argues from God’s moral character, he is doing exactly what Scripture invites us to do. The Bible is relentless in its portrayal of God as a God of steadfast love, mercy, and covenant faithfulness.

“The Lord is merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love. He will not always chide, nor will he keep his anger forever” (Ps. 103:8–9). Notice: He will not keep His anger forever. Not just for a long time. Forever.

“For the Lord will not cast off forever, but, though he cause grief, he will have compassion according to the abundance of his steadfast love; for he does not afflict from his heart or grieve the children of men” (Lam. 3:31–33). God causes grief—but not permanently, and not from His heart. His true nature is compassion, not wrath.

“How can I give you up, O Ephraim? How can I hand you over, O Israel?... My heart recoils within me; my compassion grows warm and tender” (Hos. 11:8). This is God’s own voice, agonizing over the thought of giving up on His people.

“Who is a God like you, pardoning iniquity and passing over transgression for the remnant of his inheritance? He does not retain his anger forever, because he delights in steadfast love” (Mic. 7:18). God delights in mercy. Judgment is His strange work. Love is His nature.³³

Hart is not importing philosophical abstractions into the Bible. He is reading the Bible with the same eyes that Gregory of Nyssa, Isaac of Nineveh, and the great universalist tradition have read it for centuries. The moral argument for universal salvation is, at its deepest level, simply the argument that God is who He says He is.

D. Counter-Objections

“Hart’s Argument Makes God Responsible for Evil”

McClymond might respond that if God is morally responsible for bringing every creature to a good end, then God must also be morally responsible for every evil those creatures commit. This is, as we noted, the “proves too much” objection. But it fails for the reason already given: the problem of evil is not unique to universalism. Every theology that affirms creatio ex nihilo must grapple with why God permits evil. The question is not whether God allows evil (He clearly does) but what God intends to do about it in the end.

Here the universalist has the strongest answer. God permits evil because creaturely freedom makes evil possible, and God will not create unfree beings. But God’s permission of evil is not permanent acquiescence. It is the patience of a Father who allows His children to learn, to stumble, to suffer the consequences of their choices—but who will not rest until every child is brought home. The parable of the lost sheep (Luke 15:4–7) does not describe a shepherd who searches for a while and then gives up. It describes a shepherd who searches until he finds. Every single one.³⁴

“If Universalism Is True, Why Doesn’t Scripture Say So More Clearly?”

Someone might object that if Hart’s moral argument is so compelling, then Scripture should teach universal salvation explicitly and without ambiguity. But this objection assumes that Scripture teaches eternal conscious torment clearly, which is itself a disputed claim. As we showed in Chapters 15 through 18, the key “hell” texts are far more ambiguous than traditional readings suggest. The word aionios does not necessarily mean “eternal.” Gehenna is not a description of the afterlife in Jesus’s usage. The lake of fire in Revelation operates within a highly symbolic vision. Meanwhile, the universalist texts are remarkably clear and numerous: Romans 5:18, 1 Corinthians 15:22–28, Colossians 1:19–20, Philippians 2:10–11, 1 Timothy 2:4–6, 1 Timothy 4:10, Ephesians 1:9–10, and many more.³⁵

The real question is not why Scripture doesn’t teach universalism more clearly. The question is why so many readers have missed what it plainly says.

“The Greek Fathers Were Wrong—Universalism Was Condemned”

McClymond and others may appeal to the Fifth Ecumenical Council (553) as evidence that the Church officially condemned universalism. But as Ramelli has demonstrated, the situation is far more complicated than this simple narrative suggests. What was condemned at Constantinople II was a specific set of propositions associated with later Origenism—particularly the pre-existence of souls and certain speculative cosmological claims. The doctrine of apokatastasis itself was not among the officially condemned propositions in the Council’s canons. Moreover, the anathemas against Origen were driven in significant part by the political machinations of Emperor Justinian, not by genuine theological consensus.³⁶ Henri Crouzel, the great Catholic Origen scholar, argued that Origen was never officially condemned by the Church and expressed the hope that the Church could rehabilitate him.³⁷

More importantly, even if a council had explicitly condemned universal restoration, that would not settle the question of whether it is true. Councils have been wrong before. The question is always: what does Scripture actually teach? And what does the character of God, as revealed in Scripture, require?

“Hart Is Too Confident—We Should Hold This as a Hope, Not a Certainty”

Some readers may feel that Hart’s argument is too strong—that he claims more certainty than the evidence warrants. Hans Urs von Balthasar famously framed universalism not as a doctrine to be affirmed but as a hope to be entertained. Balthasar asked: dare we hope that all will be saved?³⁸

Hart goes further than Balthasar. He argues that universalism is not merely a permissible hope but a theological necessity—that the alternative (permanent loss of any creature) is incompatible with the Christian doctrine of God. And while this book is sympathetic to Balthasar’s approach as a starting point, I think Hart is closer to the truth. The biblical evidence, the patristic tradition, and the logic of creation all point in the same direction. Universal restoration is not a luxury hope. It is the hope that makes sense of everything else Christianity teaches about God.

That said, the difference between Balthasar and Hart is a difference of confidence, not of direction. Both are pointing the same way. The universalist does not need to choose between “daring to hope” and “daring to believe.” What matters is the direction of the evidence, and the evidence points overwhelmingly toward the God who saves all.

“Even If Hart’s Logic Is Correct, Real People Still Reject God”

A final objection: even if Hart’s arguments are philosophically compelling, we live in a world where people really do reject God. Isn’t it arrogant to claim that their rejection will eventually be overcome? Doesn’t this disrespect their freedom?

No. It respects their freedom more than the alternatives do. The universalist does not deny that people reject God. The universalist affirms it. What the universalist also affirms is that this rejection is never the full, final, truly free expression of a person’s deepest self. It is always the product of ignorance, deception, pain, fear, or bondage. And a God who is both perfectly loving and infinitely patient will not leave His children in that condition.

Think of a parent whose teenager runs away from home. The teenager may be angry. The teenager may be confused. The teenager may genuinely believe, in the moment, that leaving is the right thing to do. But the parent knows that the child’s rebellion is not the deepest truth about who that child is. The parent waits. The parent searches. The parent leaves the door open. And the parent never, ever gives up. That is the heart of God as revealed in Scripture. That is the God whom Hart is defending. And that is the God whom McClymond’s “jagged shard” theology ultimately denies.³⁹

“Hart’s God Is a Puppet-Master Who Overrides Human Agency”

A related objection holds that if God ensures every creature reaches salvation, then God is effectively overriding the will of those who resist Him. Isn’t this just Calvinism with a universalist ending?

Not at all. The universalist does not claim that God forces anyone into heaven against their will. God does not drag His children home kicking and screaming. What God does is far more loving and far more patient: He removes the obstacles that prevent people from seeing clearly. He heals the wounds that keep people trapped in cycles of sin. He strips away the lies that make evil appear attractive. And when all of that is done—when the person can finally see God as He truly is, without distortion, without fear, without the deceptions that sin imposes on the mind—the person freely, joyfully, willingly chooses God. Not because they have been programmed, but because the scales have fallen from their eyes.⁴⁸

This is exactly what happens in every genuine conversion, whether in this life or the next. Nobody comes to God through coercion. People come to God because God’s love has broken through their defenses, revealed itself as irresistibly beautiful, and drawn them home. The universalist simply trusts that what God does for some in this life, He will eventually do for all—because His love never fails (1 Cor. 13:8), and His patience never runs out (2 Pet. 3:9).

Isaac of Nineveh captures this beautifully. God’s love, Isaac says, does not change. It is always the same fire. What changes is the condition of the soul that encounters it. For the soul that is ready, the fire is warmth and light. For the soul that resists, the fire is agony. But the agony is not a punishment imposed from outside; it is the natural result of an unhealed soul encountering infinite holiness. And the agony has a purpose: to burn away everything in the soul that is incompatible with love. When that purifying work is complete, the soul that once writhed in the presence of God will rest in that same presence with joy beyond description.⁴⁹

McClymond’s critique of Hart assumes that love and sovereignty are in tension—that a God who is determined to save all must be overriding the freedom of those who resist. But the entire witness of Scripture suggests the opposite. Love does not override freedom. Love creates freedom. Love heals freedom. Love is what freedom was made for. And a God whose love is infinite has infinite resources for drawing every creature, freely and willingly, into His embrace.

Conclusion

McClymond takes Hart seriously, and rightly so. Hart’s arguments are among the most powerful ever made for universal restoration. They are rooted in the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo, in the nature of divine goodness, in the promise that evil will be defeated, and in the deep patristic tradition of Gregory of Nyssa, Maximus the Confessor, and Isaac of Nineveh.

McClymond’s responses—the charge of Hegelianism, the image of the jagged shard, the claim that Hart’s argument proves too much—fail to land. The Hegelian charge is a category error that confuses biblical hope with German philosophy. The jagged shard image actually strengthens the universalist case, because the gospel is precisely the promise that God will make all things new. And the “proves too much” objection is a version of the problem of evil that afflicts every theology, not just universalism.

What is perhaps most striking about McClymond’s engagement with Hart is what McClymond does not do. He does not engage in detail with Hart’s exegesis of specific biblical texts. He does not wrestle seriously with the patristic evidence that Hart’s arguments rest upon. He does not address the moral logic of Hart’s argument from creatio ex nihilo with the rigor it demands. Instead, McClymond reaches for philosophical labels (“Hegelian”), rhetorical images (“jagged shard”), and historical parallels (Kierkegaard) that sound impressive but do not actually engage the substance of Hart’s case.

This pattern repeats throughout The Devil’s Redemption. McClymond is better at characterizing the universalist position than at refuting it. He tells us what universalism looks like from the outside—he compares it to Hegelianism, to modernism, to gnosticism, to utopianism. But he rarely enters the argument on its own terms and shows where the logic actually breaks down. Hart’s moral argument from creation is a prime example. McClymond describes it. McClymond objects to it. But McClymond never answers it.

And that matters, because the argument is not merely academic. It touches the deepest questions a human being can ask. Is God good? Does God love me? Does God love my neighbor? Does God love the stranger, the enemy, the person who has never heard the gospel? And if God does love all of these—genuinely, actively, relentlessly—then what will that love finally accomplish? Hart’s answer is that love will accomplish everything it set out to accomplish. God will not fail. God will not give up. God will not lose a single creature He has made. That is the moral argument for universal salvation, and McClymond has not shown it to be wrong.

There is something else worth saying here, something personal. I have spent years wrestling with these questions. I have read McClymond’s arguments with the seriousness they deserve. I have felt the weight of the “jagged shard” image—the honest recognition that the world is full of suffering, cruelty, and seemingly irredeemable evil. I have asked myself whether the universalist hope is too beautiful to be true. And every time I come back to the same place. The hope of universal restoration is not too beautiful to be true. It is exactly beautiful enough to be true, because it is the hope that corresponds to the God revealed in Jesus Christ—the God who leaves the ninety-nine to find the one who is lost, the God who runs to meet the prodigal while the son is still a long way off, the God who cries out from the cross, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”⁵⁰

Hart’s moral argument from creation remains unanswered. If God created freely, if God created out of love, and if God is infinitely powerful, then the permanent loss of any creature is incompatible with God’s character. McClymond has not shown otherwise. And the patristic tradition, the biblical testimony, and the logic of the gospel all confirm what Hart has argued: that a God who creates in love will redeem in love, that a God who begins all things will complete all things, and that in the end, God will truly and completely be “all in all.”⁴⁰