A Larger Hope 2 Read online

  First Timothy 2 continues: “for there is one God, and one Mediator between God and Man, the Man Christ Jesus, who gave himself a Ransom for all, a Testimony, for its proper time.” White thus proceeds to make a case for universal extent of redemption from (a) the unity of God (b) the unity of the mediator, Jesus, and (c) the extent of the ransom.

  (a) God is one. There may seem to be contraries in God and in his works, but underlying this seeming tension, there is unity. So justice and mercy or election and reprobation, say, appear on the surface to represent a division in God’s purposes and being, but not so. For running through all God’s works is his goodness and love—all God’s ways are aimed at the ultimate good of creation. Wrath and reprobation are not the end, but only part of the difficult and winding way toward the end. Both the elect and the reprobate have the same God and Father, for there is only one God. For “as he is Alpha and Omega; if his Love were the First, certain it shall be Last also: For who shall get the upper hand of that Love which is God himself?” (31).

  (b) According to our text, we have “one Mediator between God and Man; not between God and the Elect, but between God and Men” (33). In the incarnation Christ took on human nature and so stands in place of all humanity. (c) And in his death he is a propitiation for the sins, not of the elect only, but of the whole world (1 John 2:2). For White it is inconceivable that any, let alone the majority, of those for whom Christ atoned will find themselves forever lost. Rather, Christ “shall see the travail of his soul, and be satisfied” (Isa 53:11). Although the global extent of Christ’s atoning work is not yet evident, as the text says, it will be testified to in its proper season.

  Now White does make a distinction between believers and unbelievers, the elect and the reprobate. God is the savior of all people, but especially of those who believe (1 Tim 4:10). In this text, White perceives an important distinction that allows him to see God as the universal savior while still maintaining that currently not all experience that salvation. It also opens a space for him to allow that many will indeed be cast into hell, which he paints in stark and terrible colors.87 However, he warns, we should not over-interpret the vivid rhetoric of hell. Such language needs to be read with care. As an example: “the Lord threatens, That his Fury shall burn upon Jerusalem, and shall not be quenched. Jer. vii. 20. Yet what sweet Promises were made to Jerusalem, and to that People afterwards; and after this long Rejection they are under the Promise of a glorious Return still, therefore these Terms [i.e., unquenchable fire] are to be understood in a limited or qualified sense” (44). So the day will come when hell will be empty and all will participate in the redemption paid for by Jesus. For “their Punishment, be it how long soever, how grievous soever, cannot extinguish the Right and Claim of Christ’s Blood for their Deliverance, be it after Ages and Generations ever so many, Christ’s Blood loseth not its Virtue, its Value, nor can be satisfied, but Cries till all for whom it was shed be delivered” (77).88 White continues to build his case by exegeting various other texts (1 Pet 3:18–20; Rom 9–11; Eph 1:10; Col 1:20; Rom 8:19–23; 5:12–21, etc.) but we shall not consider them here.

  Like Sterry, White takes the Calvinist line on human freedom and divine sovereignty. Humans do make free choices, but they are all under the oversight and rule of God. Ultimate power lies with God, not the human will, so the Arminians, he says, are mistaken to suppose that humans are able to ultimately thwart God’s intentions for them. Sterry and White’s determinism is alien to the patristic universalist tradition. However, exactly like Origen, and the Cambridge Platonists too, both Sterry and White identified freedom with the freedom to do good—whoever does evil is not free.

  It is here, in the claim that God achieves all his purposes, that mainstream Calvinism runs into problems—for predestining some people to eternal life and others to eternal damnation is exceedingly hard to square with God’s love. But White does not have this problem, for the doctrine of universal grace and the final deliverance of all takes the sting out of it. Universalism thus allows White to remove “all those false, barbarous and monstrous Representations of a God . . . which have hitherto hindered so many Minds” (8).

  It is particularly interesting to see White’s account of the doctrine of election, which is central to Calvinist theology. He considers election and reprobation to be “a clear Truth of the Gospel” (87). In his view:

  this Decree of Election is definite, certain, and irrevocable; so that they are known by Name and have great and certain privileges and Immunities; as not only certain and everlasting Salvation, presently begun at their calling and perfected at Death, and at the Resurrection of the Dead; but also certain preservation from all Damnable Errors of Seducing Spirits, and the contagious or deadly touch, or contagion of the Evil one, and the Sin unto Death.” (88)

  So far so Calvinist. However, he develops the notion of the elect as the firstfruits of creation, the first part of the harvest to be gathered and offered up to God as an anticipation of the rest of the harvest being gathered in at the right time (Jas 1:18; Rev 14:4; Rom 11:16; 8:19–23). The elect are “the First-Fruits of his Creatures, and the pledge and assurance of their [i.e., all creatures’] Sanctification and Salvation” (88). For “the Harvest and the full Crop of it awaits Christ’s next coming” (141). Thus, in White’s hands election becomes not a doctrine by which people are forever divided into saints and sinners, but one that functions as a promise of universal salvation.

  Another interesting argument used by White concerns human nature. Human beings, he maintains, are a microcosm of the whole created order: “For first in his Body he contains all Vegetative and Sensitive Nature, and in his Soul, or Spirit all Rational and Intellectual Nature, with all the Virtues, Excellencies, and Perfections of both” (145).89 A human being—body and soul—forms a unity in which plants, animals, and rational beings converge in a point. In this way we dimly image God, the unified Creator of all things, from whom all things come and to whom all things are orientated. Each human person “is an entire World . . . worth more than the whole World of Inferior beings” (146), and so it makes no sense to suppose that God would eternally abandon such a precious creature made in his own image. Indeed, because of the unity of creation, when anyone suffers, the whole creation suffers in them:

  If so many millions of these intellectual Substances be never look’d upon, or visited with Redemption, not one Saint is completely Saved, for if each Spirit be an entire world, all Spirits are in each Spirit; as the Soul is in every part of the Body. And therefore it is said of the Body, through the one Spirit in all its members, that whether one Member suffer, all the Members suffer with it . . . : So it is with the Mystical Body, which is in Union . . . with all Spirits, and the whole Nature of things, and therefore those which have the First-fruits of the Spirit [i.e., the elect], do with the Creation groan within themselves, waiting for the Adoption, not Redemption of their own particular Bodies only, but the Redemption of the Universal Body [Rom 8:18–27]. (147)

  In other words, given the metaphysical unity of creation, if all are not saved then none are fully saved: “the Saints are not fully glorified without the rest of Mankind” (148).

  The Calvinistic universalism of Sterry and White had little impact on the Reformed tradition. Indeed, those universalists that followed in the Reformed tradition seem to have been unaware of their predecessors’ work.90 Yet the fact that this Calvinian tradition has continued to manifest a potential for periodically generating universalists—witness, for instance, Rev. James Huntington’s Calvinisim Improved (1796)—is a matter that warrants further reflection. When combined with a view that God is love in God’s being (and that divine wrath is a manifestation of divine love), Calvinism seems to find itself drawn in by the gravity of universal salvation, even if some struggle to stop it moving beyond the event horizon.

  Sterry and White represent the intellectual end of the larger hope in the seventeenth-century Reformed world, but the universalist w
hose thought was to prove most influential on the wider world was neither an intellectual nor even a man, but an old woman in London by the name of Jane Lead, a devotee of the esoteric mystic, Jakob Böhme. The next chapter seeks to give her work some of the attention it merits.

  38. Sarah Hutton, quoted in McClymond, Devil’s Redemption, 405.

  39. Crouzel, Une controverse; Schär, Das Nachleben des Origenes.

  40. The group did not acquire this name until the nineteenth century.

  41. The most important were Henry More (1614–87) and Ralph Cudworth (1617–89), both fellows at Christ’s College. Others were Benjamin Whichcote (1609–83); Peter Sterry (1613–72), who expounded universalistic tenets, including the restoration of the demons, in a manuscript that was not published; John Smith (1618–52); Nathaniel Culverwell (1619–51); and John Worthington (1618–71), all fellows at the Emmanuel College. Among the youngest are John Norris (1657–1711), George Rust, and Anne Conway, to whom we shall return. Cf. Cragg, Cambridge Platonists; Jones, Cambridge Platonists.

  42. Laudianism was a reform movement within the early seventeenth-century Church of England. It affirmed the freewill of humans and the potential for all people to accept salvation, thereby rejecting Calvinistic predestination. Most of the Cambridge Platonists rejected Calvinistic views of freedom and predestination, though, as we shall see, Peter Sterry and Jeremiah White held on to the Puritan view, albeit with a universalist twist.

  43. Respectively An Antidote against Atheism: or, An Appeal to the Natural Faculties of the Mind of Man, Whether There Be Not a God (1653; second edition with appendix 1655) and The Immortality of the Soule, So Farre Forth as It Is Demonstrable from the Knowledge of Nature and the Light of Reason (1659).

  44. Both she and More shared many philosophical interests, including the publications of the Teutonic mystic, Jakob Böhme.

  45. More expressed this doctrine in some poems, such as A Platonick Song of the Soul, treating of the Life of the Soul, her Immortalitie, Sleep, Unitie, and Memorie after Death (1647): “I would sing the Prae-existency / Of humane souls, and live once o’er again / By recollection and quick memory / All that is past since first we all began. / But all too shallow be my wits to scan / So deep a point and mind too dull to clear / So dark a matter. . . . Tell what we mortals are, tell what of old we were. / A spark or ray of the Divinity / Clouded in earthly fogs . . . / A precious drop sunk from Aeternitie, / Spilt on the ground, or rather slunk away.”

  46. See Ramelli, Preexistence of Souls?

  47. Frustratingly, what is lacking in the book is any indication of where in Origen’s corpus the author is getting his information. He has clearly read Origen and numerous other fathers, but for the most part he prefers to paraphrase what he takes their teachings to be, rather than to quote from them. (He does not have the same reticence about quoting from Scripture.)

  48. The following in-text citations in this section on Rust are from the Letter of Resolution, unless otherwise stated. The objections considered are that Origen’s thought is proto-Arian (96–100), criticisms of the preexistence thesis (100–108), six objections to the spiritual nature of the resurrection body (108–30), and complaints about the salvation of demons and curative punishments (130–34). (He notes in 134–35 that Origen’s thesis about new creation is not objected to.)

  49. By the scholastic sense of eternal, Rust intends to distinguish the meaning of the Hebrew ‘olām and the Greek aiōn, both meaning an indefinite period of time, from the notion of eternal. They do not mean eternal in the scholastic sense “unless the nature of the thing then expressed require such an interminable duration” (132). The pur aiōnion, he argues, is not eternal in the scholastic sense (130–33).

  50. Cf. Hutton, Anne Conway; Hutton, “Lady Anne Conway.”

  51. As a woman, Anne could not attend the University of Cambridge. However, More agreed to instruct her informally. Henry More also corresponded with her on Descartes’s philosophy and considered her to be his intellectual equal. See Nicolson and Hutton, Conway Letters. She also influenced the philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, and actually anticipated his own work with her metaphysical theory of the monad. (Leibniz, incidentally, was impressed by the universalist theology of Johann Petersen and had read works by Jane Lead, both of whom we shall discuss later in this book.)

  52. Francis van Helmont (fl. 1670–79), a friend of Henry More, supported universal salvation on the grounds that punishments decided by God are therapeutic and not retributive. In order to avoid encouraging immoral behavior, he insisted on the long duration and harshness of this suffering.

  53. On Böhme, see the appendix.

  54. However, she seems not to have considered that innocent suffering in a Christian perspective can also be a vicarious suffering, a participation in the cross of Christ, which is the vicarious suffering par excellence: the suffering of an innocent for the salvation of other sinful souls.

  55. Her philosophical arguments for reincarnation can be found in Conway, Principles, ch. 6.

  56. Origen was wrongly accused of having taught the transmigration of souls. However, his rejection of it is clear and unambiguous. See Cels. 3:75; 4:7.17; 5:29; 8:30; Comm. Rom. 5:1:392–406; 5:9:171–76; 6:8, 118–31; Comm. Matt. 13:1–2; Comm. ser. Matt. 38; Comm. Jo. 6:11:71 and 13:78. See also Pamphilus, Apol. 10.

  57. The only literary work of her own was written in English between 1671 and 1675, but published posthumously in Latin in 1690, then in English in 1692 as a retranslation of the Latin version, since the original had been lost. See Conway, Principia philosophiae antiquissimae; see also Conway, Principles.

  58. Conway, Principles, ch. 6, §8 (Bennett).

  59. Conway, Principles, ch. 6, §10 (Bennett).

  60. See Ramelli, “Good/Beauty.”

  61. Conway, Principles, ch. 7, §1 (Lopston).

  62. Conway, Principles, ch. 6, §9 (Bennett).

  63. While Anne Conway was influenced by Jewish esotericism, one could not accuse her theology of pantheism or even panentheism (contra McClymond, Devil’s Redemption, 416). In her ontology, the Creator/creation distinction is absolute—indeed, so absolute that Christ, the God-man, is needed to stand between them, ontologically speaking. (Under the influence of Kabbala, she sees Christ’s humanity as a celestial humanity, eternally united to God, that precedes not only his incarnation in flesh, but also the creation of the cosmos itself.) See Conway, Principles, chs. 1–2, 4–5. Ann saw this view of Christ’s ontological mediation as the basis for a kind of theological inclusivism. Those “Jews and Turks and other infidel nations” who recognize the necessity for “a medium” between God and human beings “can be said truly to believe in Jesus Christ even if they don’t know that is what they believe in and haven’t accepted that he has already come in the flesh” (ch. 6, §5; Bennett).

  64. Conway, Principles, chs. 5 and 6.

  65. Almond, Heaven and Hell, 18. For a brief summary of van Helmont’s complex universalist system see, 18–20.

  66. [Van Helmont], Two Hundred Queries, 114. Van Helmont also sponsored the English translation of an anonymous Latin work published in 1693, Seder Olam: or, The Order of Ages: A Few Questions by Way of Exposition, on Each Chapter of the Revelation of St John (ET 1694). This work takes a Christian theological and apocalyptic framework and reshapes it in light of kabbalistic and Neoplatonic themes, in ways that Conway and van Helmont themselves did. Seder Olam, like Conway and van Helmont, also taught a universal salvation. See Almond, Heaven and Hell, 19–21.

  67. In this nineteenth-century window, Sterry is shown holding a scroll inscribed with “Ut Sit Deus Omnia in Omnibus,” or “that God may be all in all” (1 Cor 15:28). In the background are depicted seventeenth-century Whitehall a
nd St. Margaret’s Church, Westminster.

  68. Pinto, Peter Sterry, 20.

  69. Apart from a few sermons, all Sterry’s publications were posthumous: A Discourse on the Freedom of the Will (1675), much admired by Richard Baxter (1615–91), who was otherwise no fan of Sterry’s theological method; The Rise, Race, and Royalty of the Kingdom of God in the Soul of Man (1683), edited and with an introduction by Jeremiah White, and The Appearance of God to Man in the Gospel and the Gospel Change (1710).

  70. Quoted in Pinto, Peter Sterry, 90.

  71. Sterry, Discourse, 41.

  72. Sterry’s Discourse makes a philosophical-theological case against what we would call libertarian notions of freedom. To him, non-determined freedom boiled down to random action, which has no moral value. Freedom was, rather, the freedom to act as we choose (even though what we choose is determined by our desires).

  73. Sterry, Discourse, 40.

  74. Sterry, Discourse, preface.