Chapter 6

The Universalism-to-Unitarianism Pipeline

A. McClymond’s Argument: The Slippery Slope from Universal Salvation to Unitarianism

Of all the arguments Michael McClymond levels against universalism, the one we examine in this chapter may be the most emotionally persuasive. It goes like this: Universalism leads to Unitarianism. It has happened before. It will happen again. And if you embrace the hope that God saves everyone, you are stepping onto a conveyor belt that ends with the abandonment of Christ, the Trinity, and historic Christianity itself.

McClymond puts it sharply. He argues that the Unitarian view is “conceptually simpler since it requires no mediator nor the mediation of salvation. God exists, and human souls exist. The initial assumption—that God loves everyone—more or less entails the outcome that everyone is saved.”¹ He calls this the “abbreviated John 3:16”—a version of the gospel that skips the incarnation, the cross, the resurrection, and the Great Commission and simply announces: “For God so loved the world that he gave eternal life to all.”² If God loves everyone and everyone is saved, McClymond reasons, then the unique mediatorial role of Jesus Christ becomes optional. And once the mediator is optional, the Trinity soon follows.

McClymond does not present this as mere speculation. He backs it up with history. He documents, in considerable detail, the trajectory of the Universalist Church in the United States. The early American Universalists were broadly evangelical and Scripture-focused. They believed in Christ, they believed in the atonement, and they believed in life after death. But within a few generations, the movement shifted. Hosea Ballou’s influential A Treatise on Atonement (1805) rejected the traditional doctrine of vicarious atonement. Ballou argued that God was never offended by human sin in the first place, so Christ’s death was not needed to satisfy divine justice.³ In Ballou’s system, God’s love for humanity was not essentially tied to Christ’s coming. God simply is love, and Christ became—in McClymond’s words—“theologically dispensable.”⁴

The results were predictable. Ballou had already rejected the doctrine of the Trinity in 1795, a decade before publishing his book on the atonement. John Murray, one of the other great early American Universalist preachers, was horrified. Murray called Ballou “a Socinian, Deistical, Sadducean Universalist.”⁵ But Ballou’s influence won out. The movement drifted steadily away from evangelical orthodoxy. By the 1930s, a significant number of American Universalists had embraced the religious humanism of the Humanist Manifesto (1933).⁶ By 1961, the Universalist Church formally merged with the Unitarians to form the Unitarian Universalist Association. A movement that began with a passionate belief in the salvation of all souls ended with many of its members no longer believing in souls at all.

McClymond shows that this was not an isolated American phenomenon. In Britain, the pattern played out even faster. British universalist groups that emerged in the 1790s—partly due to the influence of American Universalist missionary Elhanan Winchester—had nearly all embraced Unitarianism by the mid-1800s. McClymond notes that by 1825, English and Scottish universalists had been so thoroughly absorbed into Unitarianism that the name “universalist” largely vanished.⁷ He describes a “two-way movement” in which universalism led into Unitarianism and vice versa.⁸ Charles Howe, the historian of British Universalism, summarized the trajectory bluntly: for many people and congregations, universalism served as a bridge between orthodoxy and Unitarianism.⁹

McClymond draws a sweeping conclusion from this history. The slide from universalism to Unitarianism, he argues, is not accidental. It reflects the internal logic of the position. Once you affirm that everyone will be saved, you no longer need a historically particular mediator, a historically particular basis for salvation, a particular message, or a particular condition of salvation. The whole apparatus of orthodox soteriology becomes unnecessary. The universalist, in McClymond’s telling, has no stable place to stand. The ground inevitably gives way beneath the doctrine of Christ, then beneath the Trinity, then beneath Christianity itself.¹⁰

He reinforces this argument at several points throughout The Devil’s Redemption. In his analysis of contemporary universalists, he notes that Robin Parry “generally ignores the historical overlap between universalism and unitarianism.”¹¹ He compares the doctrine of universal salvation to a chess move: it may look appealing at first, but it sets off a chain reaction that eventually topples the king. The American Universalists, he writes, “first gave up the notion of Christ’s atonement and then ultimately set aside Jesus’s divinity and became Unitarians.”¹²

McClymond adds another layer to the British story. He notes that Joseph Priestley, a leading figure of English Unitarianism, embraced universalist beliefs in his later years. Priestley preached from Winchester’s old pulpit at the Universalist Church of Philadelphia in 1796, announcing his agreement with the universalist teaching. There was, as McClymond documents, a “two-way movement” in which universalism and Unitarianism fed into each other.⁴⁹ British universalist groups that traced their origins to the 1790s had almost all embraced Unitarianism by the mid-1800s. McClymond describes a pattern in which the reliance on rational argumentation about what God can and cannot do—leading Christians first to reject the doctrine of hell—often led them in time to reject the Trinity, the incarnation, and Christ’s atoning death as well.⁵⁰

McClymond also extends this argument to the contemporary scene. He notes that many current universalists express what he calls “dissatisfaction with historic Christianity,” and he argues that their arguments sometimes overlap with the arguments of secular critics of religion. He suggests that the recent turn toward universalism may be connected to an apologetic interest in making Christianity more palatable to an increasingly secular world.⁵¹ The implication is clear: universalism is a compromise with the culture, and compromise always leads to surrender.

This is a real argument. It is backed by real historical evidence. And for many readers, it will feel decisive. If the pipeline from universalism to Unitarianism has been demonstrated repeatedly across different centuries and different countries, why would anyone step onto that pipeline again?

I want to treat this argument with the seriousness it deserves. McClymond has done genuine historical work here, and the pattern he identifies is not imaginary. But the conclusion he draws from that pattern is wrong. Deeply wrong. And the error is one that, once you see it, changes everything about how you evaluate this argument.

B. Identifying the Weaknesses: Correlation Is Not Causation

McClymond’s argument sounds airtight until you ask one simple question: Is it actually universalism that caused the slide into Unitarianism? Or was it something else entirely?

Think about this carefully. McClymond has shown that certain universalist groups in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries eventually became Unitarian. That is the historical fact. But he then takes that fact and wraps it in a logical claim: universalism logically leads to Unitarianism. The doctrine itself, by its internal structure, pushes you away from Christ and toward an empty, humanistic religion.

This is the classic error of confusing correlation with causation. Just because two things happen in sequence does not mean the first one caused the second. Sometimes there is a common cause behind both. Sometimes the sequence is driven by outside factors that have nothing to do with the first event. And sometimes the correlation holds only within a very specific historical context and breaks down completely when you look at a broader range of evidence.

All three of these problems apply to McClymond’s argument.

The Common Cause: Enlightenment Rationalism

The universalist-to-Unitarian pipeline that McClymond documents did not happen in a vacuum. It happened during one of the most dramatic intellectual upheavals in Western history: the Enlightenment. The same cultural forces that pushed some universalists toward Unitarianism were pushing every branch of Christianity in the same direction. Calvinism produced liberal Presbyterianism. Anglicanism produced liberal Anglicanism. Lutheranism produced liberal Lutheranism. In every single case, the Enlightenment emphasis on human reason, the rejection of revealed authority, and the suspicion of supernatural claims eroded traditional doctrines—regardless of what eschatological view the group held.

McClymond himself provides the key to understanding what happened with Hosea Ballou. He notes that Ballou was decisively influenced by deistic authors, especially Ethan Allen.¹³ Ballou placed enormous stress on the use of human reason in interpreting Scripture—not the kind of careful exegetical reasoning that works within the framework of biblical authority, but the kind of Enlightenment rationalism that made human reason the judge of what God can and cannot do.¹⁴ It was this rationalistic method—not universalism—that led Ballou to reject the atonement, then the Trinity, then virtually everything distinctive about historic Christianity.

Here is the critical point: Ballou rejected the Trinity in 1795, a full ten years before he published his famous book on the atonement in 1805.¹⁵ The timeline matters. His Unitarianism preceded his full-blown theological system. His rejection of the Trinity was not caused by his universalism working its internal logic. It was caused by his adoption of Enlightenment rationalism. Universalism and Unitarianism were both consequences of the same root cause: a rationalistic method that placed human reason above biblical revelation.

McClymond’s Specific Context Is Not Universal

McClymond’s evidence is drawn almost entirely from Anglo-American Protestantism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This is a very specific historical context: post-Enlightenment, heavily rationalistic, deeply shaped by the culture of democratic individualism and religious voluntarism. The universalist groups he studies were, for the most part, popular movements rather than scholarly theological traditions. They were lay-driven, often poorly educated theologically, and operating in a culture where doctrinal boundaries were porous and denominational identities were fluid.

If McClymond’s argument were correct—if universalism inherently leads to Unitarianism—then we would expect to find this pattern everywhere universalism has appeared. But we do not find it. Not even close.

The patristic universalists—the ones who held this belief for the first several centuries of Christian history—were among the most robustly Trinitarian theologians the church has ever produced. Origen was one of the first Christian thinkers to develop a sophisticated theology of the eternal generation of the Son. Gregory of Nyssa was one of the three Cappadocian Fathers, the theologians who gave us the classic formulation of Trinitarian doctrine that the church still confesses today. Maximus the Confessor, another universalist, was one of the most important Christological thinkers in the history of the Eastern church.¹⁶ These men did not merely tolerate Trinitarian theology alongside their universalism. They championed it. They fought for it. They suffered for it.

Gregory of Nyssa is especially important here. He was an unambiguous, outspoken universalist who believed in the final restoration of all rational creatures. He was also one of the pillars of Nicene orthodoxy. The Council of Constantinople (381 AD) honored his theological contributions, and the church has revered him as a saint for nearly two millennia. He was never condemned for his universalism. He was never censured. He was never even gently corrected. He went to his grave a universalist and a champion of the Trinity, and the church said: “This man got it right.”¹⁷

If universalism logically leads to Unitarianism, someone forgot to tell Gregory of Nyssa. And Origen. And Maximus. And Clement of Alexandria. And every other patristic universalist who was simultaneously a passionate defender of the Trinity and the divinity of Christ.

The “Pipeline” Works Both Directions

There is another problem with McClymond’s argument that is so obvious it is surprising he does not address it. If we can discredit universalism by pointing to groups that started out universalist and ended up Unitarian, then by the same logic we can discredit every theological tradition by pointing to groups that started out orthodox and ended up liberal.

Calvinism produced liberal Presbyterianism. The tradition of John Calvin and the Westminster Confession gave rise, over time, to denominations where many leaders deny the virgin birth, the bodily resurrection, and the authority of Scripture. Does this mean Calvinism logically leads to liberalism? Of course not. No one argues this way—and yet the historical pattern is just as clear as the one McClymond traces for universalism.

Anglicanism produced some of the most liberal theology in the modern world. Methodism gave rise to denominations that have abandoned historic sexual ethics and basic Christological commitments. Roman Catholicism has produced liberal Catholic theologians who deny the bodily resurrection and treat the sacraments as mere symbols. Baptist churches that once thundered about the inerrancy of Scripture have produced seminaries where professors question the historicity of the Exodus and the virgin birth. Does any of this discredit Calvinism, Anglicanism, Methodism, Roman Catholicism, or the Baptist tradition as such? Obviously not. It discredits the liberal departures from those traditions. It tells us something about what happens when any tradition abandons its theological foundations and accommodates itself to the spirit of the age.¹⁸

McClymond’s argument, then, proves too much. If we accept his logic, we must reject every theological tradition in the history of Christianity, because every one of them has produced liberal offshoots. The argument is not specific to universalism. It is a general feature of how theological traditions interact with cultural change. Every theological tradition is vulnerable to erosion when it encounters a culture that privileges human autonomy over divine revelation. The question is never “Has this tradition ever produced a liberal offshoot?”—because every tradition has. The question is: “Does this tradition, when held faithfully and with intellectual rigor, require the abandonment of orthodox Christianity?” And the answer, for conservative biblical universalism, is emphatically no. The fact that McClymond applies the slippery-slope standard only to universalism, while ignoring the identical pattern in traditions he approves of, reveals a significant double standard in his reasoning.

C. The Universalist Response: Conservative Biblical Universalism Requires Christ and the Trinity

We have seen that McClymond’s historical argument does not prove what he thinks it proves. The universalism-to-Unitarianism pipeline was driven by Enlightenment rationalism, not by the internal logic of universalism. The patristic universalists were fiercely Trinitarian. And the same slippery-slope pattern can be found in every theological tradition.

But I do not want to stop at a defensive argument. The positive case is even stronger. Conservative biblical universalism does not merely tolerate Trinitarian orthodoxy and a high Christology. It requires them. The universalist needs Christ more, not less, than the particularist does. And I want to show you why.

Christ Is the Mechanism of Universal Salvation

Here is the fundamental mistake in McClymond’s reasoning. He argues that if everyone is saved, then the mediator becomes unnecessary. But this is exactly backwards. In conservative biblical universalism, Christ is not unnecessary—He is the reason everyone is saved. Without Christ, no one is saved. With Christ, everyone will be.

Think about what the New Testament actually says. Paul writes that “as in Adam all die, so in Christ all will be made alive” (1 Cor. 15:22). The “all” who are made alive are made alive in Christ—not apart from Him, not without Him, not despite Him. Christ is the mechanism of restoration. He is the channel through whom God reconciles the world to Himself.¹⁹

Colossians 1:19–20 says that God was pleased to have all His fullness dwell in Christ, and through Christ to reconcile all things to Himself, “whether things on earth or things in heaven, making peace through his blood, shed on the cross.” Notice: the reconciliation of all things happens through the blood of the cross. It is not a vague, feel-good hope that God loves everyone. It is a Christological claim rooted in the specific, historical, bloody event of the crucifixion. Take away the cross, and you lose the reconciliation. Take away Christ, and you lose everything.²⁰

First Timothy 2:5–6 declares that “there is one God and one mediator between God and mankind, the man Christ Jesus, who gave himself as a ransom for all people.” The conservative universalist reads that text and says: “Yes! Exactly! Christ is the one mediator. And His ransom is effective for all people.” The universalist does not minimize Christ. The universalist maximizes Him. The universalist takes the scope of Christ’s saving work as seriously as the New Testament presents it.

Hebrews 2:9 says that Jesus “tasted death for everyone.” Not just for some. For everyone. The conservative universalist simply takes that statement at face value and asks: Will Christ’s death accomplish what it was intended to accomplish? Will His sacrifice be effective? Will the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world actually succeed in taking it away?

Salvation Through Faith in Christ—Not Apart from It

One of McClymond’s most persistent misunderstandings is the idea that conservative universalists believe people can be saved without faith in Christ. This would indeed undermine the need for a mediator. But it is not what conservative biblical universalism teaches.

Every major conservative universalist scholar affirms the absolute necessity of personal faith in Christ for salvation. Thomas Talbott, Robin Parry, David Bentley Hart, Ilaria Ramelli—all of them insist that salvation comes through Christ alone and through genuine, personal trust in Him.²¹ What the universalist adds is not a different path to salvation, but a longer timeline for God’s saving work. The universalist affirms that God is patient enough and powerful enough to bring every person to genuine, willing faith in Christ—whether in this life or in the age to come.

This is where the postmortem opportunity becomes essential. As we discussed in Chapter 2 and will develop further in Chapters 21 and 28, the conservative universalist believes that those who die without having had an adequate opportunity to respond to Christ will encounter Him after death.²² This is not a second chance—for many, it will be their first genuine encounter with the living Christ. And the universalist trusts that when every veil of ignorance, deception, and sin is stripped away, and when the risen Christ is encountered face to face, every knee will bow and every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord—not under compulsion, but in genuine, heartfelt recognition of who He truly is (Phil. 2:10–11).²³

Do you see how radically different this is from what McClymond describes? McClymond’s “abbreviated John 3:16”—his picture of a universalism that skips the incarnation, the cross, the resurrection, and the need for faith—is a description of liberal universalism. It is a fair description of what Hosea Ballou taught. But it has nothing to do with the conservative biblical universalism of Talbott, Parry, Hart, or Ramelli. Conservative universalism does not abbreviate John 3:16. It insists on the full text: God so loved the world that He gave His only Son, so that everyone who believes in Him shall not perish but have eternal life. The universalist simply adds: and God will ensure that everyone, eventually, does believe.

The Trinity Is Essential to Universal Restoration

McClymond suggests that universalism makes the Trinity unnecessary. But consider the actual theological structure of conservative biblical universalism. The case for universal restoration is built entirely on Trinitarian theology.

God the Father is the one who wills the salvation of all (1 Tim. 2:4; 2 Pet. 3:9). He is the loving Father who will not rest until every prodigal comes home. His will is not a mere wish or a passive preference. It is the active, sovereign, effectual will of the Almighty God who does whatever He pleases (Ps. 115:3; Isa. 46:10).²⁴

God the Son is the one who accomplishes the salvation of all. He is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world (John 1:29). He is the one mediator who gave Himself as a ransom for all (1 Tim. 2:5–6). He is the one through whom all things are reconciled (Col. 1:20). He is the one who tasted death for everyone (Heb. 2:9). He is the one who, when lifted up from the earth, draws all people to Himself (John 12:32). Without the incarnate, crucified, risen, and exalted Son, there is no mechanism for universal salvation. Christ is not an afterthought in universalism. He is the center of it.²⁵

God the Holy Spirit is the one who applies the salvation of Christ to every human heart. It is the Spirit who convicts of sin, who opens blind eyes, who regenerates dead souls, who seals believers for the day of redemption. The universalist trusts that the Spirit’s work is persistent, patient, and ultimately irresistible—not in the coercive sense, but in the sense that God’s love is so overwhelming, so beautiful, so perfectly suited to the deepest longings of the human heart, that no one will resist it forever.²⁶

Remove any person of the Trinity, and the case for universal restoration collapses. Remove the Father, and you lose the sovereign will that initiates and sustains the whole saving project. Remove the Son, and you lose the mediator through whom reconciliation is accomplished. Remove the Spirit, and you lose the agent who actually brings each individual to faith. Conservative biblical universalism is not merely compatible with Trinitarian theology. It depends on it. It presupposes it. It cannot function without it.

The Patristic Evidence: Universalists Who Built Trinitarian Orthodoxy

McClymond’s historical case focuses on Anglo-American Protestantism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. But if you widen the lens even slightly, the picture changes completely. The most important universalists in the history of the church were not eighteenth-century American preachers influenced by deism. They were the Greek-speaking theological giants of the first five centuries who created the Trinitarian and Christological framework that the whole church still confesses.

Consider the lineup. Origen of Alexandria (c. 185–c. 253) was among the first Christian thinkers to develop a rigorous doctrine of the eternal generation of the Son. Long before the Council of Nicaea, Origen was insisting that the Son is co-eternal with the Father, begotten before all worlds, and fully divine. He dedicated his career to refuting the Gnostics, the Marcionites, and anyone who would drive a wedge between the Creator God of the Old Testament and the Father of Jesus Christ. He was also an explicit universalist who believed in the final restoration of all rational creatures. His universalism did not undermine his Christology. The two beliefs reinforced each other: it is precisely because the Son is fully divine that His saving work is powerful enough to reach every creature.²⁷

Gregory of Nyssa (c. 335–c. 395) is an even more dramatic example. Gregory was one of the three Cappadocian Fathers—along with his brother Basil of Caesarea and their friend Gregory of Nazianzus—who gave the church its classic formulation of the doctrine of the Trinity: one ousia (essence), three hypostaseis (persons). Gregory played a major role at the Council of Constantinople in 381. He was honored as a pillar of orthodoxy. He was one of the most important theologians in the entire history of the Eastern church.²⁸

And he was a universalist. Not a cautious, hedging, “maybe-I-hope-so” universalist. He was outspoken and unambiguous. In his short commentary on 1 Corinthians 15:28, Gregory declared that the final submission of all things to Christ is nothing less than the salvation of all rational creatures—including, he explicitly stated, the devil himself.²⁹ In his dialogue On the Soul and the Resurrection, he has his sister Macrina argue at length for universal restoration. In work after work, throughout his entire career, Gregory articulated a theology of universal salvation rooted in the goodness of God, the non-subsistence of evil, and the saving work of Christ.³⁰

As Ilaria Ramelli has shown, Gregory’s universalism was not a separate compartment of his theology, disconnected from his Trinitarian commitments. It was grounded in his Trinitarianism. Gregory explicitly connected the doctrine of the final submission of all humanity to Christ (1 Cor. 15:28) with the anti-subordinationist argument that the Son is fully equal to the Father. For Gregory, the argument for universal salvation and the argument against Arianism were the same argument.³¹ To abandon universalism, for Gregory, would have been to weaken his case for the full divinity of the Son.

Maximus the Confessor (c. 580–662) is another towering figure. Maximus is one of the most important Christological thinkers in Christian history. He championed the doctrine of Christ’s two wills (divine and human) at a time when this was politically dangerous, and he was tortured and exiled for his convictions. Maximus had deep universalist sympathies, and his theology of the final cosmic transformation points strongly toward universal restoration.³²

Even Athanasius of Alexandria—the great champion of Nicene orthodoxy who stood against the whole world in defense of the full divinity of Christ—stood firmly in Origen’s defense and should be seen, as Ramelli argues, as one of the theologians upon whose thought Nicene orthodoxy was built.³³

What makes this evidence even more striking is the direct lineage of universalist thought within the Trinitarian tradition. Ramelli has carefully traced the transmission of universalist teaching from Origen, through his disciple Gregory the Wonderworker, to the Cappadocian Fathers. Gregory the Wonderworker brought Christianity to Neocaesarea—and it was specifically Origen’s Christianity that he brought. Macrina the Elder, the grandmother of Basil and Gregory of Nyssa, was a disciple of the Wonderworker. Through her and her granddaughter Macrina the Younger, Origen’s theology—including his universalism—entered the family that would produce two of the three Cappadocian Fathers.⁵² In other words, the same theological lineage that gave us the doctrine of universal restoration also gave us the doctrine of the Trinity. These were not separate traditions that happened to coexist. They were the same tradition, carried by the same teachers, in the same families, to the same students.

Basil of Caesarea himself collected many passages from Origen’s works in his Philocalia, together with Gregory of Nazianzus. He praised Gregory the Wonderworker, Origen’s direct disciple, as a champion of orthodoxy. Even Basil’s tract On the Holy Spirit, one of the most important pneumatological works in Christian history, is full of Origenian themes. And Basil’s brother Gregory of Nyssa—the explicit universalist—devoted his great dialogue On the Soul and the Resurrection, which argues at length for apokatastasis, to the memory of his venerated brother Basil.⁵³

The picture that emerges from this evidence is the opposite of McClymond’s narrative. Universalism and Trinitarian orthodoxy did not merely coexist in the early church. They grew together. They were cultivated in the same theological soil, by the same teachers, within the same families and schools. The men who gave us the classic Trinitarian formulation were nourished on Origen’s theology, including his universalism. To say that universalism inherently leads to Unitarianism is not just historically inaccurate. It is the opposite of the historical reality. In the actual history of the church, universalism was one of the roots that produced Trinitarian orthodoxy.

This is not a minor historical footnote. It is a devastating counter-example to McClymond’s thesis. The men who built Trinitarian orthodoxy—who formulated the creeds, who fought the heresies, who defined what it means to confess that Jesus Christ is Lord—were universalists. If universalism logically leads to the abandonment of the Trinity, these men were walking contradictions. But they were not contradictions. They were supremely coherent. Their universalism and their Trinitarianism were integrated, mutually reinforcing aspects of a single, powerful theological vision.

What Actually Drives the Slide into Liberalism

If universalism does not cause the slide into Unitarianism, what does? The answer is clear from the historical evidence, and McClymond himself provides it without seeming to realize its significance.

The slide is caused by a methodological shift: the move from Scripture-centered theology to reason-centered theology. When human reason becomes the ultimate standard by which all doctrines are measured, the supernatural elements of Christianity inevitably begin to fall away. The virgin birth seems unreasonable. The bodily resurrection seems unreasonable. The Trinity seems unreasonable. The incarnation seems unreasonable. One by one, the doctrines go, because none of them can survive the acid bath of unassisted human reason.

This is exactly what happened to Hosea Ballou. McClymond notes that Ballou was decisively influenced by deistic thought, especially Ethan Allen. Ballou’s method was to apply unaided reason to every doctrine and reject anything that could not pass muster. He rejected the atonement because it seemed unreasonable that a finite creature could offend an infinite God. He rejected the Trinity because it seemed unreasonable that God could be three-in-one. He rejected postmortem punishment because it seemed unreasonable that a loving God would punish anyone beyond the grave.³⁴

Notice: Ballou’s universalism was one result of his rationalistic method, not the cause of his Unitarianism. He did not start with universalism and reason his way to Unitarianism. He started with Enlightenment rationalism and used it to demolish multiple Christian doctrines simultaneously. His universalism and his Unitarianism were siblings, born of the same parent: a rationalistic method that was hostile to revealed theology.

Compare this with the method of conservative biblical universalism. Thomas Talbott builds his case from careful exegesis of Romans 5, 1 Corinthians 15, and Colossians 1. Robin Parry constructs a biblical-theological reading of the entire canon, from Genesis to Revelation, showing how the narrative of Scripture points toward universal restoration. David Bentley Hart argues from the Greek church fathers and from the philosophical implications of creatio ex nihilo. Ilaria Ramelli builds her case from patristic evidence so detailed and extensive that it fills an 800-page monograph.³⁵

None of these scholars starts with human reason and works backward to Scripture. They start with Scripture and the church’s theological tradition and work forward to the conclusion of universal restoration. Their method is the exact opposite of Ballou’s. And their conclusions are correspondingly different: they affirm the Trinity, the incarnation, the atonement, the necessity of faith, the reality of judgment, and the sovereignty of God. They affirm all of these things, and they affirm universalism alongside them, because they believe Scripture teaches all of them together.

I want to underscore this with a concrete example. Consider Robin Parry’s The Evangelical Universalist. McClymond acknowledges that Parry uses multiple lines of argument—philosophical reasoning, biblical exegesis, and historical tradition.⁵⁴ Parry’s method is to take the biblical text seriously, wrestle with the difficult passages, and build a careful argument that accounts for both the universalist texts (Rom. 5:18; 1 Cor. 15:22; Col. 1:20) and the judgment texts (Matt. 25:46; Rev. 20:15). He does not dismiss the judgment passages. He does not wave them away with rationalistic arguments about what a loving God “would” do. He exegetes them, asks what they mean in their literary and historical context, and integrates them into a comprehensive biblical-theological vision.⁵⁵ This is the opposite of what Ballou did. Ballou did not exegete; he rationalized. Parry exegetes. And his exegetical method keeps him anchored in Scripture in a way that Ballou never was.

Or consider Talbott’s trilemma. Talbott does not start with a philosophical axiom and deduce universal salvation from it. He starts with three biblical propositions: God wills the salvation of all (1 Tim. 2:4; 2 Pet. 3:9); God is able to accomplish His will (Ps. 115:3; Isa. 46:10); some will not be saved (the apparent implication of certain judgment texts). He then shows that any two of these propositions imply the denial of the third, and he argues that the most faithful reading of the whole biblical witness points toward the denial of the third proposition.⁵⁶ This is a biblical argument, not a rationalistic one. It takes all three sets of texts seriously and asks which combination best accounts for the full biblical witness. Whether or not one agrees with Talbott’s conclusion, one cannot accuse him of ignoring Scripture or replacing revelation with reason. His method is rigorous, careful, and deeply respectful of the biblical text.

Why Conservative UR Actually Strengthens Christology

I want to press this point a step further, because I think it is one of the most important insights in this entire book. Not only does conservative biblical universalism not undermine Christology—it actually gives you a higher Christology than either eternal conscious torment (ECT) or conditional immortality (CI).

Here is why. According to ECT, Christ died for all people (or at least for the elect), but many people will spend eternity in conscious suffering. Christ’s atoning work, then, does not actually accomplish the reconciliation of all things. It accomplishes the reconciliation of some things. According to CI, Christ died for all people (or the elect), but many people will be permanently destroyed. Again, Christ’s work does not actually succeed in reconciling all things. It reconciles some things and gives up on the rest.

Now consider what conservative universalism says. Christ died for all people. His blood was shed for the reconciliation of all things. His ransom was paid for every human being. And His work actually accomplishes what it was designed to accomplish. Every single person for whom Christ died will, in the end, be brought to genuine, willing faith. The sacrifice of Christ is fully effective. Not a single drop of His blood is wasted. Not a single soul for whom He died is ultimately lost.³⁶

Which of these three views gives Christ the highest place? Which one takes His saving work most seriously? Which one says that the cross actually accomplished what God intended it to accomplish?

The answer, I would submit, is obvious. Universalism does not diminish Christ. It glorifies Him. It says that the Good Shepherd will not rest until He has found every last lost sheep. It says that the atoning sacrifice of the Son of God is powerful enough to reach every human being ever created. It says that when God set out to reconcile the world to Himself through Christ, He meant it—and He will succeed.

There is a beautiful passage in Talbott where he points out that the universalist vision of Christ’s saving work is actually more Christocentric than the particularist one. If Christ is the one through whom all things were created and the one through whom all things are reconciled (Col. 1:15–20), then the scope of His creative work and the scope of His redemptive work are identical. Everything He made, He redeems. Everyone He created, He saves. The universalist has no need to shrink the scope of Christ’s accomplishment. We take the New Testament at its word: through Christ, God reconciles all things to Himself.³⁷

This is exactly the logic that the patristic universalists used. Gregory of Nyssa argued from the metaphysical premise that evil has no positive existence—it is a lack of the Good, which is God. Because evil is a privation, it is inherently finite and unstable. It cannot endure forever, because only God, who is the Good, is infinite. Evil’s eventual destruction is therefore guaranteed by the very nature of reality. And what destroys evil? Christ. Through His incarnation, death, and resurrection, Christ makes humanity connatural with the Good. All evil is destined to disappear, and all rational creatures are destined to be united with God.⁵⁷ For Gregory, Christ is not merely the savior of some. He is the cosmic healer, the one who restores the entire creation to its intended wholeness.

Notice how this works. Gregory’s universalism did not lead him to minimize Christ. It led him to magnify Christ. The greater the scope of salvation, the greater the Savior must be. If Christ saves only some, He is a limited Savior. If Christ saves all, He is the infinite, all-powerful, all-conquering Lord of the cosmos. The universalist vision of Christ is not smaller than the particularist vision. It is immeasurably larger. And that is exactly why the patristic universalists were also the church’s greatest Christological and Trinitarian thinkers. Their universalism demanded a cosmic Christ, and a cosmic Christ is precisely what the creeds confess.

The Confessional Stability of Conservative Biblical Universalism

McClymond’s concern is ultimately about doctrinal stability. He worries that universalism is the first step on a slippery slope that ends with the abandonment of everything Christians hold dear. I share his concern about doctrinal stability. I have no interest in a theology that dissolves into vague, sentimental humanism. Neither does any other conservative universalist I know.

So let me be crystal clear about what conservative biblical universalism affirms. We affirm the Apostles’ Creed without qualification. We affirm the Nicene Creed without qualification. We affirm the Chalcedonian Definition without qualification. We confess that there is one God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, three persons in one essence. We confess that Jesus Christ is fully God and fully man, born of the Virgin Mary, crucified under Pontius Pilate, risen from the dead on the third day, ascended to the right hand of the Father, and coming again to judge the living and the dead. We confess that salvation is through Christ alone, by grace alone, through faith alone. We confess the authority of Scripture. We confess the reality of sin, judgment, and hell.³⁸

What we add—and this is all we add—is the conviction that God’s saving work in Christ will ultimately prove effective for every human being. Not because we minimize sin or deny judgment, but because we believe God is more powerful than human rebellion, more patient than human stubbornness, and more loving than we can possibly imagine. We believe that the fire of God’s judgment is real and painful, but that it is purifying, not pointless. We believe that the gates of the New Jerusalem are never shut (Rev. 21:25) and that God will ultimately be “all in all” (1 Cor. 15:28).³⁹

None of the early creeds affirm ECT, CI, or UR as dogma. They are silent on the scope of final salvation. This means that the universalist, the conditionalist, and the ECT advocate all occupy the same creedal space. All three positions are compatible with the historic confessions of the church. The universalist does not need to cross out a single line of the Nicene Creed to hold the hope of universal restoration.⁴⁰

George Hurd and the Calvinist-Arminian Impasse

It is worth briefly noting that some contemporary conservative universalists have come to their position not by abandoning orthodox theology but by pressing it to its logical conclusion. George Hurd, in The Universal Solution, argues that the centuries-old debate between Calvinism and Arminianism reaches a permanent impasse because both sides have “pillar” proof-texts that the other side cannot adequately explain. Calvinism rightly affirms the sovereignty of God but struggles with the clear biblical teaching that God desires the salvation of all. Arminianism rightly affirms human freedom but cannot explain why God’s sincere desire for all to be saved is ultimately frustrated.⁴¹

Universalism, Hurd suggests, resolves the impasse. God is sovereign enough to accomplish His will (the Calvinist insight), and His will is genuinely for all to be saved (the Arminian insight). Put the two together, and you get universal restoration. This is not a liberal departure from orthodoxy. It is the point where two streams of orthodox theology converge.⁴²

Talbott makes a closely related argument with his famous trilemma. He observes that Christians generally affirm three propositions: (1) God sincerely wills the salvation of all; (2) God is sovereign and accomplishes His will; (3) Some people are not saved. Any two of these propositions imply the denial of the third. Calvinists deny proposition (1): God does not will the salvation of all. Arminians deny proposition (2): God’s will for universal salvation is frustrated by human freedom. The universalist denies proposition (3): all people are saved. Talbott argues that denying (3) is the most biblical and the most theologically coherent option.⁴³

Notice: this argument depends entirely on a robust doctrine of God’s sovereignty and a robust doctrine of God’s genuine desire for universal salvation. It is not a departure from orthodoxy. It is orthodoxy taken seriously.

D. Counter-Objections

“If the pattern has happened repeatedly, why think it won’t happen again?”

This is the most natural response to our argument. McClymond might say: “Fine, you can distinguish between liberal and conservative universalism in theory. But in practice, the pattern is clear. Universalist movements start conservative and end liberal. Why think your version will be any different?”

The answer is that the pattern is driven by liberal theology, not by universalism per se. And the evidence for this is overwhelming.

Consider: Has conservative Calvinism “slid” into liberal Presbyterianism? Not inherently. There are robust, confessional Calvinist churches today that are thriving. The fact that some Calvinist institutions went liberal does not mean Calvinism causes liberalism. It means that any theological tradition can be corrupted when it abandons its foundational commitments.

The same is true for universalism. The fact that Hosea Ballou’s version of universalism went liberal does not mean universalism causes liberalism. It means that Ballou’s version of universalism was already compromised by Enlightenment rationalism. A universalism that is grounded in Scripture, committed to the creeds, and centered on Christ has no more reason to slide into liberalism than any other orthodox theological position.⁴⁴

Moreover, the contemporary conservative universalist movement is specifically defined by its commitment to avoiding the errors that led to Ballou’s trajectory. Parry chose the title The Evangelical Universalist precisely to signal that his universalism is rooted in evangelical commitments: biblical authority, Christological orthodoxy, the necessity of personal faith, the reality of judgment. Talbott’s entire project is built on Pauline exegesis. Hart writes as a confessing Eastern Orthodox Christian who affirms the full Chalcedonian Christology. Ramelli is a Catholic scholar who explicitly vindicates apokatastasis as compatible with both Scripture and conciliar theology.⁴⁵

These scholars are aware of the historical dangers McClymond identifies. They have specifically constructed their theology to avoid those dangers. To ignore this and insist that they will inevitably repeat Ballou’s trajectory is not an argument. It is a prophecy, and it is a prophecy that ignores the available evidence.

“But doesn’t the pattern suggest something about universalism’s inner logic?”

McClymond would press further. He might say: “Even if Enlightenment rationalism was the driving force, doesn’t the fact that universalist groups were especially vulnerable to it suggest something? Maybe universalism, by its very nature, creates an opening for liberal theology that other doctrines do not.”

This is a more subtle version of the argument, but it still fails. Universalist groups in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were especially vulnerable to liberal theology for a very specific reason that has nothing to do with the inherent logic of universalism: they were already defined by their opposition to a mainstream doctrine. They were dissenters. And dissenting movements, by their very nature, tend to attract people who are comfortable challenging received orthodoxy. Once you have challenged one mainstream doctrine (eternal punishment), it becomes psychologically easier to challenge others (the atonement, the Trinity, the deity of Christ).

But this dynamic is not unique to universalism. It applies to any dissenting movement. The Anabaptists challenged mainstream views on baptism and church-state relations, and some of them ended up rejecting Trinitarianism (the early Socinians). Does this mean believer’s baptism logically leads to Unitarianism? Obviously not. It means that dissenting movements attract people with a propensity to dissent, and some of those people will dissent from everything.

The solution to this problem is not to avoid all doctrinal dissent. The solution is to ground your dissent in a robust theological framework that has clear boundaries. And this is precisely what conservative biblical universalism does. It dissents from the majority view on the duration and purpose of hell, but it grounds that dissent in Scripture, the creeds, and the patristic tradition. It affirms everything else. It draws sharp lines between itself and liberal universalism, between itself and pluralism, between itself and Unitarianism. These lines are not arbitrary. They are built into the theological structure of the position.⁴⁶

“What about McClymond’s argument that universalism makes evangelism unnecessary?”

This is related to the pipeline argument, so it is worth addressing briefly here, even though we will treat it more fully in Chapter 27. McClymond worries that if everyone will be saved, there is no urgency to share the gospel. Evangelism becomes optional. The church loses its mission.⁴⁷

This objection assumes that the only reason to share the gospel is to rescue people from permanent damnation. But that has never been the sole motivation for evangelism in the Christian tradition. We share the gospel because Christ commanded us to (Matt. 28:19–20). We share the gospel because knowing Christ transforms lives now—it brings joy, peace, purpose, freedom from the bondage of sin, and the abundant life Jesus promised (John 10:10). We share the gospel because every year a person spends apart from Christ is a year of unnecessary suffering, confusion, and spiritual death. The universalist does not believe that the unsaved “get off easy.” The universalist believes in real judgment, real purifying fire, real consequences for sin. The difference is that those consequences have a purpose: restoration, not mere retribution.⁴⁸

A parent who knows their child will eventually come home still wants them to come home now. A doctor who knows that a treatment will eventually work still wants the patient to start treatment today, because every day of delay is a day of unnecessary pain. The universalist shares the gospel with the same urgency as any other Christian, because the gospel is good news for today—not just for eternity.

“Didn’t Even the Early American Universalists Recognize the Slide?”

Yes—and this actually strengthens the conservative universalist case rather than undermining it. McClymond himself documents the “Restorationist Controversy” that erupted within American Universalism during the 1820s and 1830s.⁵⁸ This was an internal debate between those who believed in postmortem purifying punishment (the “Restorationists,” such as Elhanan Winchester) and those who followed Ballou in denying any afterlife consequences for sin. Winchester’s position was closer to the patristic universalists: salvation is universal, but it comes through genuine repentance and purifying judgment. Ballou’s position was the one that collapsed into Unitarianism.

This internal debate is enormously revealing. The early American universalists who held to the more orthodox version of universalism—the version that affirmed postmortem judgment, the necessity of genuine repentance, and the mediatorial role of Christ—were the ones who resisted the slide into Unitarianism. The slide was driven by Ballou’s specific theological innovations: his denial of postmortem punishment, his rejection of the atonement, his determinism, his embrace of deistic rationalism. In other words, the slide was driven by precisely those features of Ballou’s theology that conservative biblical universalists today reject.⁵⁹

The Restorationist Controversy shows that the universalism-to-Unitarianism pipeline was not a smooth, inevitable slide. It was a contested process, resisted by those within the movement who held a more robust theology. The fact that Ballou’s party won the internal debate does not mean his theology was right. It means his position was more culturally appealing in an age dominated by Enlightenment rationalism. And it is precisely his errors that contemporary conservative universalism has been specifically constructed to avoid.

“What About Ballou’s Denial of Postmortem Punishment? Doesn’t UR Also Reject Eternal Punishment?”

There is a crucial difference. Ballou denied any postmortem punishment whatsoever. He argued that death itself severs all connection between a person and the consequences of their sin, so that no one suffers anything after death.⁶⁰ This was a radical departure from historic Christianity that removed any moral seriousness from the afterlife and effectively rendered the Last Judgment meaningless.

Conservative biblical universalism does the opposite. It affirms the reality and severity of postmortem judgment. It affirms that those who have rejected God will face the purifying fire of His unmediated presence. It affirms that this process is real, painful, and terrifying. What it denies is only that this judgment is purposeless or permanent. The fire has a goal: the burning away of all resistance, all pride, all sin, until the person is finally willing to receive the grace of God in Christ. This is not a soft or sentimental view of judgment. It is a view that takes judgment even more seriously than ECT does, because it insists that judgment actually accomplishes something: the restoration of the sinner to fellowship with God.⁶¹

Ballou’s denial of postmortem punishment cut the nerve of moral seriousness. Conservative universalism preserves it. This is not a small difference. It is the difference between a theology that collapses under its own weight and a theology that holds together because it takes every aspect of the biblical witness seriously—the love of God and the judgment of God, the grace of Christ and the fire of purification.

Conclusion: The Pipeline Was Never About Universalism

McClymond has identified a real historical pattern. Certain universalist groups in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries did eventually become Unitarian. This is a fact, and I have not denied it. What I have argued is that McClymond has misidentified the cause. The cause was not universalism. The cause was Enlightenment rationalism—the same force that produced liberal outcomes in Calvinism, Anglicanism, Lutheranism, and every other branch of Christianity it touched.

The patristic evidence demolishes McClymond’s logical claim. For fifteen hundred years before Hosea Ballou, the greatest universalist thinkers in the church were also among its greatest defenders of Trinitarian orthodoxy and Christological precision. Origen, Gregory of Nyssa, Maximus the Confessor, and others held together universalism and the highest possible Christology without any sense of tension. They did so because they understood what McClymond apparently does not: that the scope of Christ’s saving work is the measure of His glory. A Christ who saves all is a greater Christ, not a lesser one.

Conservative biblical universalism today stands in this patristic tradition, not in Ballou’s tradition. It is built on Scripture, committed to the creeds, centered on Christ, and grounded in the conviction that the triune God—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—will bring His saving work to its intended completion. The pipeline McClymond fears is real, but it runs through Enlightenment rationalism, not through biblical universalism. And those of us who stand on the rock of Scripture and the creeds have no reason to fear the slide that swallowed Ballou and his followers.

I want to close with one more thought. McClymond’s pipeline argument is ultimately an argument from fear. It says: “Don’t believe this, because bad things might happen if you do.” But fear is not a sound basis for theology. We do not determine what is true by asking what is safe. We determine what is true by examining the evidence—the evidence of Scripture, the evidence of the church’s tradition, the evidence of careful theological reasoning. And when we examine that evidence, we find that universal restoration is not a gateway to liberalism. It is the fulfillment of the biblical promise that Christ’s atoning death will accomplish exactly what God intended it to accomplish: the reconciliation of all things, the restoration of all creation, and the final triumph of the love of the triune God over every power of sin, death, and rebellion.

McClymond is right about one thing: doctrinal seriousness matters. We agree on that completely. But doctrinal seriousness means following the evidence wherever it leads, even when it leads to conclusions that make us uncomfortable. It means taking the “all” texts of Scripture as seriously as we take the judgment texts. It means listening to the witness of the church fathers with the same care we bring to the witness of the Reformers. And it means trusting that the God who created all things in love is powerful enough, patient enough, and good enough to redeem all things through love.

We serve a God who is able to keep us from falling (Jude 24). And we trust that He is able to keep all His children from falling, too.