WHY I AM A UNIVERSALIST: A DOGMATIC SKETCH

In the interest of making the series accessible to those who have perhaps only read bits and pieces, I have
brought together all the posts thus far. This index will be available in the sidebar as well, and I will continue to
update it as I add more posts to the series.

 §1: Prolegomena
 §2: The Doctrine of God, Part 1: Introduction
 §3: The Doctrine of God, Part 2: Deus pro nobis
 §4: The Doctrine of God, Part 3: The Attributes of God
o Section I: God’s complexity and simplicity as the “one who loves in freedom”
o Section II: Grace
 §5: The Doctrine of God, Part 4: The Doctrine of Election
o Section I: A summary of Barth's doctrine of election
o Section II: Jesus Christ, electing and elected
o Section III: Jesus Christ, divine election, and predestination
o Section IV: The election of the individual
 §6: Jesus Christ, the Judge Judged in Our Place
 §7: The Doctrine of Justification
o Section I: Introduction to the doctrine of justification
o Section II: Solus Christus
o Section III: Sola gratia
o Section IV: Solo verbo
o Section V: Sola fide
 §8: The Doctrine of the Atonement
o Section I: Introduction to the doctrine of the atonement
o Section II: Models of the atonement
o Section III: Foundations for a doctrine of the atonement
o Section IV: Parameters for a doctrine of the atonement
 Section IV.1: Triune
 Section IV.2: Concretely Christocentric
 Section IV.3: Substitutionary
 Section IV.4: Actualized
 Section IV.5: Ontological
 Section IV.6: Eschatological
o Section V: The logical argument for universalism (coming soon)
 §9: Eschatology and the Last Judgment (coming soon)
 §10: Ecclesiology, or, What Is the Point of the Church for a Universalist? (coming soon)
 § 11: A Universalist Sacramentology: The Eucharist as the Feast for the World (coming soon)
 WHY I AM A UNIVERSALIST, § 1: PROLEGOMENA
 The definition of universalism that I am working with states that all will live in communion with God
for eternity. No one will be annihilated or eternally damned. We will indeed be made new, perhaps
even purged, and will be raised with new bodies like Jesus Christ who came before us. I do not deny
the possibility of a hell, just the eternality of divine punishment.

The question of universalism has been a perennial one since the dawn of the church, it seems.
Passages in the NT seem to point in that direction: “we are convinced that one has died for all;
therefore all have died” (2 Cor. 5.14); “if anyone hears my words and does not keep them, I do not
judge him; for I did not come to judge the world but to save the world” (John 12.47); “all Israel will
be saved” (Rom. 11.26); “. . . the mystery of [God’s] will, according to his purpose, which he set forth
in Christ as a plan for the fullness of time, to unite all things in him, things in heaven and things on
earth” (Eph. 1:9-10); “for in [Christ] all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him to
reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross”
(Col. 1:19-20). A number of passages from the New Testament make the eschatological purposes of
God explicit: in the Day of the Lord, “God will be all in all” (1 Cor. 15:28). Many other passages
could be marshaled to make a biblical case for universalism, but ultimately the position does not
derive from proof texts, and should not despite the protests from fundamentalist Christians.

To begin, universalism is like a doctrine of the atonement: nowhere in the Bible is any “doctrine” to
be found, because Scripture is not a collection of propositional truths. Scripture is the authoritative
witness to the event of God’s self-revelation in Jesus Christ, and this witness authorizes the rational
(though not rationalistic) exposition of the faith based on the narrative of God’s being-in-act in the
kerygma. Doctrines and dogmas are explications of what is testified to in the Scriptures, and these
doctrines allow for the further interpretation of the biblical text. Some doctrines function as
hermeneutical keys or categories which provide a rule for reading the biblical text in a way that
coheres with the proclamation of the gospel in the communion of saints. Universalism is thus accepted
or denied based on a complex framework of hermeneutical principles which are situated in the church
as the people of God.

Hermeneutics aside, the issue of revelation is central to our discussion. Traditionally, the Bible has
been viewed as God’s special revelation to humanity as words divinely inspired to teach us the truths
of the faith. This is still common teaching in most conservative, evangelical institutions. However, a
 revolution in theology occurred in the mid-nineteenth century when revelation was identified not with
Scripture itself but with Jesus Christ. Karl Barth is the paradigmatic theologian in this case, because
he was the first to think through the ramifications of such a christocentrism. Revelation is thus always
and only God’s self-revelation in Jesus Christ. The importance of this move is that Scripture is not, in
the end, the final authority—only Jesus is. Of course, Jesus is only witnessed to in the Holy Scriptures,
and so in another sense, these biblical texts are the authority. But Scripture is not wholly uniform or
consistent or even non-contradictory, despite what ardent inerrantists wish us to believe. Thus,
christology is where one must begin. We cannot start with an abstract idea of God’s will apart from
what God revealed about God’s own purposes in Jesus Christ’s incarnation, life, death, and
resurrection. We cannot conceive of God as Judge apart from the judgment enacted upon Christ on the
cross. So on and so forth. These remarks set the framework for what will be discussed in later
sections.
 WHY I AM A UNIVERSALIST, § 2: THE DOCTRINE
OF GOD, PART I: INTRODUCTION
 In some ways, this paragraph is simply an extension of the prolegomena. Nevertheless, these
comments are offered as a transition toward discussing the doctrine of God. I will allow Barth to
speak for himself in the next paragraph, since he captures the relation between the doctrine of God and
reconciliation with beauty and profundity.

The doctrine of atonement rests on the doctrine of God, and, as part of this, on christology. In this
section, I will touch in the doctrine of God just briefly. One of the major revolutions in modern
theology was the realization that God is what God does, or, God’s being is a being-in-act. The point of
this theological revolution is that we know who God is by what God does in the history of God’s
dealings with men and women. To put this in trinitarian terms, the economic Trinity—the acts of God
ad extra—is identical with the immanent Trinity—the life of God ad intra. There is no other God
apart from the God revealed to us in the act of self-revelation in Jesus Christ. The point is this: we
cannot come to God with any preconceived notions about what divinity means or entails. God is self-
determinative of what the word “God” signifies. When we speak of “God,” we can only speak-after
the reality of what God has done for us and for our salvation. The kind of God we worship is defined
by God alone. We know who God is in-and-for-Godself based on what God has done. Metaphysics, as
the acceptance of presupposed concepts of divinity and humanity, is rejected outright from the
beginning. If any metaphysical concepts are retained, it is because revelation itself confirms them.

It should be immediately obvious that this theological starting-point is rooted in christology, and for
the moment I need to tease out what follows from this point of origin in terms of a christological
 hermeneutics. Scripture presents a gloriously rich picture of who God is and what God does in history.
This is something to revel in, not to simplify or distort or ignore. God is at once infinitely complex and
infinitely simple—that is, God is rich and full of complex depth in ways that extend infinitely beyond
what we perceive as richness here in the world of creation, but God is simultaneously simple and
uniform in that God is one God who does not contradict Godself. The locus of our knowledge of
God’s complexity and simplicity is the person of Jesus Christ. God’s being-in-act takes concrete form
in the incarnation of God in Jesus of Nazareth. The rich picture narrated by Scripture is a witness to
God’s being-in-act, but this witness is subordinate to the concrete reality of God’s being in Jesus
Christ. The reality of Christ’s history is the hermeneutical category through which we read the rest of
the biblical text—not in the allegorical way of reading Christ into every passage, but in the
christological way of allowing God’s self-revelation to determine our interpretation of the biblical
text. Knowledge of God can indeed come through “natural” or “human” sources—science,
philosophy, art—but no such knowledge can be affirmed as true knowledge of God unless it is in
conformity with what God has revealed of Godself in Jesus Christ, according to the witness of Holy
Scripture.
 WHY I AM A UNIVERSALIST, § 3: THE DOCTRINE
OF GOD, PART 2: DEUS PRO NOBIS
 I realize this is a long post, but Karl Barth says almost everything that needs to be said in this one
lengthy passage. I urge people to take the time to read this carefully.

[From Church Dogmatics IV.1 (Doctrine of Reconciliation), pp. 212-14.]

 God reveals and increases His own glory in the world by this event [of reconciliation], by
hastening to the help of the world as its loyal Creator, by taking up its cause. In doing what
He does for His own sake, He does it, in fact, propter nos homines et propter nostram
salutem [for us humans and for our salvation]. For Himself He did not need that He and His
glory should be revealed and confessed in the world and by us. He might have been content
with His own knowledge of Himself, just as He might have been content earlier with His
being as God in glory, not needing the being of the creature and its co-existence with Him,
not being under any necessity to be its Creator. But the world had radical need of His work
as Creator, to which it owes no less than its very being. And, again, it has radical need that
He should take up its cause in the work of atonement. Not by divine creation, but by the sin
of man, it is the world which is thrown back on the faithfulness of God, a world which is lost
apart from the fact that He Himself hastens to its help and takes up its cause. It has
perverted the being which He lent it. It has fallen, i.e., it is rushing headlong into nothingness,
into eternal death. Of itself it is not capable of any counter-movement to arrest this fall. In
itself it has no power, no effective will, no sufficient basis, for any such counter-movement.
On the contrary, of its own will and ability it makes only such movements as serve to repeat
the origin of its fall, which is sin, and to accelerate its headlong course to the abyss.

But God reveals and increases His own glory in the world in the incarnation of His Son by
taking to Himself the radical neediness of the world, i.e., by undertaking to do Himself what
the world cannot do, arresting and reversing its course to the abyss. He owes this neither to
the world nor to Himself. Not to the world, because the sin of man as the origin of its fatal
movement to eternal death is directed against Himself, is always presented and
characterised as enmity against Himself. Not to the world because the world has no claim
that He should exercise in its favour the omnipotence of His free love, and in the perfect form
of Himself accepting unity and solidarity with sinful man. And not to Himself, because nothing
would be lacking in His inward being as God in glory, as the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, as
the One who loves in freedom, if He did not show Himself to the world, if He allowed it to
complete its course to nothingness: just as nothing would be lacking to His glory if He had
refrained from giving it being when He created it out of nothingness.

That He does, in fact, will to reconcile it with Himself, and to save it, and therefore to magnify
His glory in it and to it, is from every standpoint the sovereign will of His mercy. We cannot
deduce it or count on it from any side. We cannot establish in principle from any side that it
must be so, that God had to link the revelation and increase of His glory with the maintaining
and carrying through to victory of our cause, that He had to cause it to take place as an
event in which salvation is given to us. How can it be necessary in principle that He should
take to Himself—and conjoin and unite with what He does to His own glory—the cause which
we had so hopelessly lost, turning it in His own person to good, to the best of all? If we can
speak of a necessity of any kind here, it can only be the necessity of the decision which God
did in fact make and execute, the necessity of the fact that the being of God, the
omnipotence of His free love, has this concrete determination and is effective and revealed
in this determination and no other, that God wills to magnify and does in fact magnify His
own glory in this way and not in any other, and therefore to the inclusion of the redemption
and salvation of the world. This fact we have to recognise to be divinely necessary because
it derives from and is posited by God. This fact we have to perceive and reverence and
receive and glorify as the mystery of the atonement, the incarnation of the eternal Word. And
we have to do it with a thankfulness which cannot be limited by any supposed necessity of
this free gift.
 Cur Deus homo? Because the salvation of the world and of men, we ourselves and our
salvation, are in fact included in the self-purposiveness of this divine action. Because the
great and self-sufficient God wills to be also the Saviour of the world. Because what He does
for Himself takes place with the intention and is complete in the fact that in its purpose and
result we will not perish but have everlasting life. This, then, is why the Lord became a
servant. This is why concretely the Son of God rendered that obedience, the obedience of
self-humiliation. This is why in free compliance with the freely disposing will of the Father He
entered on the strange way into the far country and followed it to the bitter end.

Here, then, we have our general answer to the question confronting us. We cannot deduce it
from any principle, from any idea of God or of man and the world. We can read it only from
the fact in which the omnipotent mercy of God is exercised and effective and revealed, in
which His own glory and our salvation meet, in which that which God does for Himself is also
done for us. Our answer can only be a repetition of the answer which God Himself has given
in this fact, in which He Himself has pronounced concerning the end and scope and meaning
of His activity. Deus pro nobis is something which He did not have to be or become, but
which, according to this fact, He was and is and will be—the God who acts as our God, who
did not regard it as too mean a thing, but gave Himself fully and seriously to self-
determination as the God of the needy and rebellious people of Israel, to be born a son of
this people, to let its wickedness fall on Him, to be rejected by it, but in its place and for the
forgiveness of its sins to let Himself be put to death by the Gentiles—and by virtue of the
decisive co-operation of the Gentiles in His rejection and humiliation to let Himself be put to
death in their place, too, and for the forgiveness of their sins. The end and scope and
meaning of this downward way, the reconciliation of the world with Himself, is God Himself
as the God of this mean and wicked people for the men of this people, and at the end of its
history God Himself in the midst of this people and all peoples for the men of this people and
all peoples, God in this direct relationship to men and man, God the one man for many. In all
that follows we can only hear and intelligently repeat the answer which God Himself has
already given to our question.

 What must we learn from Barth based on this passage? The following are six major points:

1. Divine freedom must be preserved. Humanity is lost in the abyss, but God freely and graciously
enters the abyss in order to arrest our fall and give us new being that may live in obedience to God.
God is the ‘one who loves in freedom,’ who has the fullness of glory regardless of whether humankind
 is brought back into relation with its Creator. God is thus ‘more than necessary,’ to borrow a phrase
from Eberhard Jüngel.

2. God is sovereign and self-determining. Humankind cannot say what God must do, but if God has
done something, then we are free to speak of that act as necessary. God self-determines who God is
and what God will do; humanity is simply at the mercy of God.

3. God’s economic self-determination is revelation. We thus have no right to speak about what God
will do in eternity apart from what God has already determined, accomplished, and revealed in the
incarnation of the Logos in Jesus Christ.

4. God accomplishes what the world cannot accomplish. God’s grace is sovereign and effective.
God does what humankind wishes it could for itself through its good works and good intentions, but
the incarnation of Jesus Christ proclaims that God alone is capable of rescuing us from our otherwise
eternal estrangement from God. Not only is God capable of this sovereign grace, but God has
accomplished this in Jesus Christ on our behalf, pro nobis.

5. All creation is included in the divine self-determination of the incarnation. What God does for
Godself involves and includes all of humanity and the entire cosmos. We do not make this the case; it
is already the case because of Jesus Christ.

6. God is not some distant God who is abstractly ‘over us’ or ‘above us,’ but rather God is
always and eternally ‘among us,’ ‘with us,’ and most importantly, ‘for us.’

A few statements by Barth need to be highlighted:

 Cur Deus homo? Because the salvation of the world and of men, we ourselves and our
salvation, are in fact included in the self-purposiveness of this divine action. Because the
great and self-sufficient God wills to be also the Saviour of the world. Because what He does
for Himself takes place with the intention and is complete in the fact that in its purpose and
result we will not perish but have everlasting life.

Deus pro nobis is something which He did not have to be or become, but which, according to
this fact, He was and is and will be . . . God Himself as the God of this mean and wicked
people for the men of this people, and at the end of its history God Himself in the midst of
 this people and all peoples for the men of this people and all peoples, God in this direct
relationship to men and man, God the one man for many.

 §4: The Doctrine of God, Part 3: The Attributes of God

o Section I: God’s complexity and simplicity as the “one who loves in freedom”
o Section II: Grace
 WHY I AM A UNIVERSALIST, § 4: THE DOCTRINE
OF GOD, PART 3: THE ATTRIBUTES OF GOD
(SECTION I)

Section I: God’s complexity and simplicity as the “one who loves in freedom”

 The attributes ascribed to God have no other function than to give expression as precisely
as possible to the God who is love. (E. Jüngel, “Theses,” thesis 5.4.2)
 The subject of God’s attributes, or perfections, will not receive the close attention that it would
otherwise deserve in an actual systematic theology. As a complementary addition to the quote from
Jüngel, I begin with Barth’s great thesis that “God is the one who loves in freedom.” Barth’s
definition of God’s being is significant in that it simultaneously affirms God’s sovereignty and
freedom—what Jüngel calls God’s non-necessity—and God’s personal being as Love. God is a
personal being who is free to act according to the divine self-positing will. God’s revelation is self-
revelation and God’s being is self-determined being. God is who God wills to be. God is thus complex
in “the inexhaustible riches of his attributes” (Jüngel), the plurality of facets of God’s being; but God
is simultaneously simple as the one God in whom all the perfections of God’s being cohere in a
mysterious unity.

 This unity and this distinction corresponds to the unity and distinction in God’s own being
between His love and His freedom. God loves us. And because we can trust His revelation
as the revelation of His own being He is in Himself the One who loves. As such He is
completely knowable to us. But He loves us in His freedom. And because here too we can
trust His revelation as a self-revelation, He is in Himself sovereignly free. He is therefore
completely unknowable to us. That He loves us and that He does so in His freedom are both
true in the grace of His revelation. If His revelation is His truth, He is truly both in unity and
difference: the One who loves in freedom. It is His very being to be both, not in separation
but in unity, yet not in the dissolution but in the distinctiveness of this duality. And this duality
as the being of the one God necessarily forms the content of the doctrine of His perfection.
(K. Barth, CD II.1, 343)
 This section functions as a prolegomena to the subject of two attributes which are important for the
subject of universalism: love and righteousness, or mercy and holiness. The liberal universalist
theologians of the nineteenth century up through today—including the general sentiment of
contemporary “religious” society—emphasize God as love at the expense of God’s holiness. That is,
they focus on God’s character as the loving creator and redeemer as if this overrules the “outdated”
portrayal of God as judge. (One could and should call this “contemporary Marcionism.”) Albrecht
Ritschl removed judicial language entirely from his famous account of justification and reconciliation,
and some contemporary theologians like John A. T. Robinson do the same. The great error is that
liberal theology operates, implicitly or explicitly, with a via eminentiae method of theological
knowledge, meaning that they begin with human experience and then move to speak of God in light
of what is “known” about human characteristics and actions. So when they speak about God’s nature
as love, they define this attribute based on what they know of human love. When they speak about
God as judge, they define this in terms of human justice. Such a method inevitably means that love
and justice, mercy and righteousness, will be seen as antithetical to each other, or mutually
exclusive. A person is merciful by withholding judgment. A person insists on righteousness at the
expense of love and affirmation.

As we have already seen, Karl Barth views God as self-determining, and that means God determines
what love, grace, holiness, righteousness, mercy, and justice mean for Godself. Humanity cannot
ever define these terms for God. The unity and simplicity of God means that God cannot be divided
up into different “gods”—such as the God of love and some other God of judgment. This was the
fatal error in Luther’s theology, between the revealed God (deus revelatus) of grace and the hidden
God (deus absconditus) of wrath. The moment we allow distinctions to become separations—which
are often variations of the distinction between the immanent Trinity and the economic Trinity—we
threaten to lose the one God attested to by Holy Scripture. This one God of the gospel happens to be
infinitely rich in perfections, but these perfections exist in a perichoretic unity in which grace and
judgment are not different sides of God but rather interanimating attributes of God’s ontological
repleteness and superabundance. If we are going to explicate what it means to speak of God as love
—which we must—then we will have to allow God’s being-in-act to define the essence of divine love.
In other words, we will have to grapple with what it means for God to be holy love, whose grace is
cauterizing and whose mercy judges us in our sinfulness while refusing to abandon us even while we
persistently turn away.

I end this section with two quotes by Karl Barth. They are worthy of separate sections of their own,
and I heartily recommend giving them the attention they deserve. Barth provokes us to consider
what it means to affirm God’s love as universal or cosmic in scope while at the same time particular
 and embodied in the person of Jesus Christ. At the same, however, he emphasizes that this divine
love is holy, meaning that God accomplishes God’s purposes over against all opposition. Of course,
we must remember that God’s revealed purpose is to redeem this world and create a fellowship of
new persons who exist in restored relations with God, others, and themselves by the power of the
Holy Spirit. God is the Lord of all creation as the one who loves in freedom.

 God is He who in His Son Jesus Christ loves all His children, in His children all men, and in
men His whole creation. God’s being is His loving. He is all that He is as the One who loves.
All His perfections are the perfections of His love. Since our knowledge of God is grounded
in His revelation in Jesus Christ and remains bound up with it, we cannot begin elsewhere—
if we are now to consider and state in detail and in order who and what God is—than with the
consideration of His love. In the Gospel of Israel’s Messiah and His fulfilment of the Law, of
the Word that was made flesh and dwelt among us, of Him who died for our sins and rose
again for our justification—in this Gospel the love of God is the first word. If then, as is
proper, we are to be told by the Gospel who and what God is, we must allow this primary
word to be spoken to us—that God is love. (CD II.1, 351)

God’s loving is a divine being and action distinct from every other loving in the fact that it is
holy. As holy, it is characterised by the fact that God, as He seeks and creates fellowship, is
always the Lord. He therefore distinguishes and maintains His own will as against every
other will. He condemns, excludes and annihilates all contradiction and resistance to it. He
gives it validity and actuality in this fellowship as His own and therefore as good. In this
distinctiveness alone is the love of God truly His own divine love. (CD II.1, 359)

Further Reading:
Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics II.1, pp. 257-439
E. Jüngel, God as the Mystery of the World, pp. 314-43
E. Jüngel, “What does it mean to say, ‘God is love’?”
Pope Benedict XVI, Deus Caritas Est

 WHY I AM A UNIVERSALIST, § 4: THE DOCTRINE

OF GOD, PART 3: THE ATTRIBUTES OF GOD
(SECTION II)

Section II: Grace
 In this section, I wish to let Barth speak for himself as I have done in the past. We turn our attention
to the subject of God’s grace. What is this grace? What is the relationship between grace and
holiness? These are questions which we will consider. I will segue between quotes, but Barth will be
the one to address and answer these and other questions. All parenthetical page references are from
Church Dogmatics II.1 (The Doctrine of God). If you read only one quote, read the last one
(subsection 5), in which I have placed the most important passage in bold letters for emphasis. If you
read two subsections, read nos. 3 and 5. I will return to the quote in #3 later, since it is especially
relevant to the topic of universalism.

1. First, what is grace?

 Grace denotes, comprehensively, the manner in which God, in His essential being, turns
towards us. This turning, which is that of a superior to an inferior, and takes place in the form
of a condescension, is contained even in the meaning of the word charis, the Latin gratia,
our English grace, and most strongly of all the German Gnade. Especially the Old Testament
contexts in which the word appears make it clear that in His turning everything which God
confers on man as a benefit is implied: His truth, His faithfulness, His law, His mercy, His
covenant (Dan 9.4), or, according to the apostolic formula of greeting, His peace. All this is
primarily and fundamentally His grace also. (354)
 2. Second, what it means to speak of God as the gracious God, as the God of all grace? How does the
God who is the “one who loves in freedom” revealed as the God who is gracious?

 When God loves, revealing His inmost being in the fact that He loves and therefore seeks
and creates fellowship, this being and doing is divine and distinct from all other loving to the
extent that the love of God is grace. Grace is the distinctive mode of God’s being in so far as
it seeks and creates fellowship by its own free inclination and favour, unconditioned by any
merit or claim in the beloved, but also unhindered by any unworthiness or opposition in the
latter-able, on the contrary, to overcome all unworthiness and opposition. It is in this
distinctive characteristic that we recognise the divinity of God’s love. (353)

God is gracious, merciful and patient both in Himself and in all His works. This is His loving.
But He is gracious, merciful and patient in such a way—because He loves in His freedom—
that He is also holy, righteous and wise—again both in Himself and in all His works. For this
is the freedom in which He loves. Thus the divinity of His love consists and confirms itself in
the fact that it is grace, mercy and patience and in that way and for that reason it is also
holiness, righteousness and wisdom. These are the perfections of His love. (352)
 3. Third, what is the relationship between the grace of God and the sinners who are the recipients of
God’s grace?

 The biblical conception of grace involves further that the counterpart which receives it from
God is not only not worthy of it but utterly unworthy, that God is gracious to sinners, that His
being gracious is an inclination, goodwill and favour which remains unimpeded even by sin,
by the resistance with which the creature faces Him. Again, the positive element to be
discussed here will fall for special consideration under the heading of God’s mercy. Grace in
itself means primarily that the sin of the creature, the resistance which it opposes to God,
cannot check, weaken or render impossible the operation of divine grace. On the contrary,
grace shows its power over and against sin. Grace, in fact, presupposes the existence of this
opposition. It reckons with it, but does not fear it. It is not limited by it. It overcomes it,
triumphing in this opposition and the overcoming of it. (355)
 4. Fourth, what is the relationship between grace and holiness? Are these competitive concepts?

 We now place this concept of the grace of God alongside that His holiness. This cannot
mean that we imply a need either to qualify or to expand what is denoted by the concept of
grace. In grace we have characterised God Himself, the one God in all His fulness. We are
not wrong, we do not overlook or neglect anything, if we affirm that His love and therefore
His whole being, in all the heights and depths of the Godhead, is simply grace. (358)
 5. Fifth, what do we mean when we say that God is both gracious and holy? What connects God’s
grace and God’s holiness? How do they relate to the overarching description of God as the “one who
loves in freedom”?

 The common factor linking the biblical concepts of the grace and the holiness of God is seen
in the fact that they both in characteristic though differing fashion point to the transcendence
of God over all that is not Himself. When we speak of grace, we think of the freedom in which
God turns His inclination, good will and favour towards another. When we speak of holiness,
we think of this same freedom which God proves by the fact that in this turning towards the
other He remains true to Himself and makes His own will prevail. How can we properly
separate these two aspects? The freedom with which God remains true to Himself cannot
shine more gloriously than in the freedom with which He turns towards the creature without
regard to the latter’s merit and worthiness. And again, this freedom cannot be manifested
and understood except as the freedom with which He remains true to Himself. The bond
between the concepts of grace and holiness consists further in the fact that both point
to God’s transcendence over the resistance which His being and action encounters
 from the opposite side. When we speak of grace, we think of the fact that His
favourable inclination towards the creature does not allow itself to be soured and
frustrated by the resistance of the latter. When we speak of holiness, we think, on the
other hand, of the fact that His favourable inclination overcomes and destroys this
resistance. To say grace is to say the forgiveness of sins; to say holiness, judgment
upon sins. But since both reflect the love of God, how can there be the one without
the other, forgiveness without judgment or judgment without forgiveness? Only where
God’s love is not yet revealed, not yet or no longer believed, can there be here a separation
instead of a distinction. In this case forgiveness would be inferred in abstracto from sin, and
judgment from condemnation. It would not be God’s judgment in the one case or God’s
forgiveness in the other. If we speak in faith, and therefore in the light of God and His love,
and therefore of God’s forgiveness and judgment, as our insight grows we shall distinguish,
but we shall certainly not separate, between God’s grace and God’s holiness. The link
between the two is decisively summed up in the fact that both characterise and distinguish
His love and therefore Himself in His action in the covenant, as the Lord of the covenant
between Himself and His creature. (360)

 §5: The Doctrine of God, Part 4: The Doctrine of Election

o Section I: A summary of Barth's doctrine of election
o Section II: Jesus Christ, electing and elected
o Section III: Jesus Christ, divine election, and predestination
o Section IV: The election of the individual
 WHY I AM A UNIVERSALIST, § 5: THE DOCTRINE
OF GOD, PART 4: THE DOCTRINE OF ELECTION
(SECTION I)

Section I: A summary of Barth’s doctrine of election

Accepting Barth’s doctrine of election is not necessary for universalism to be theologically valid, but
if one understands what Barth rightly accomplishes through this doctrine, universalism makes even
more sense. The central thesis of Barth’s doctrine of election is that election, like revelation, finds its
locus not in some abstract decision by God but rather in the concrete embodiment of God’s will in
the person of Jesus the Christ. Consequently, any talk of election must find its center in the Son of
God who is the one who elects humanity for himself and is himself elected by God to be the savior of
the world. In other words, Jesus Christ is both the subject of election (the one who elects) and the
object of election (the one elected).
Barth places the doctrine of election in the doctrine of God, because election reveals who God is.
Barth can say this because all of God’s acts ad extra reveal who God is ad intra. God is a being-in-act
—in which God is what God does—so the immanent Trinity and economic Trinity are identical (and
yet remain distinct). But our only sure knowledge of God comes through the incarnation of Jesus
Christ, as the Son of God who came to the world “for us and for our salvation.” Jesus Christ, as the
Word of God incarnate, is the self-revelation of God, to which Scripture witnesses as the written
Word of God. To put these points together, election is revealed to us in and through Jesus Christ
alone; in that Jesus as the being of God ad extra reveals the being of the triune God ad intra, we can
say that election is an act of God that is rooted in the being of God as the God who elects humanity
for Godself and is thus both the electing God and elected human in Jesus Christ. Jesus embodies both
sides of the dialectic: in that he is fully God, he is the God who elects humankind by taking on
humanity in the hypostatic union; in that he is fully human, he is the man who is elected by God and
vicariously represents all humanity in his flesh. To put it in simple terms, the orthodox definition of
Jesus as fully God and fully human is the doctrine of election in a nutshell.

The ramification of this christocentric reorientation of election is that individual humans are elect
only in Christ. Just as the atonement is not something that occurs apart from Christ’s atoning work in
his life, death, and resurrection, so too election is not something that occurs apart from Jesus Christ.
Jesus was not just symbolic of the rest of humanity. Instead, just as in atonement our sins were
actually taken on by Jesus and thus nailed to the cross, so too we must say that in Jesus all human
persons were actually there in his person. Jesus was the one man for many. We often speak of this as
the substitutionary atonement—which is indeed true—but it has to begin with election, because
election is the primal divine decree that determines that God will be God for us and the humanity
will be humanity for God.

It was the major mistake of much classical theology to separate election as a divine decree apart
from the concretization of God’s divine will in Jesus Christ. By making election a protological decision
—in which God decided prior to creation who would be saved and who would be damned—classical
theologians predetermined the extent and efficacy of Christ’s atoning work. They felt justified in
doing so because they did not view Jesus as the self-revelation of God—and thus the norm for all
knowledge of God—but instead viewed Scripture as a collection of propositional truths.
Consequently, if Scripture speaks of an elect people of God, they felt it was proper for them to
elaborate a theology of election independent from any other doctrine—independent, even, from the
doctrine of God.
 Lastly, Barth’s doctrine of election leads him to affirm double predestination or double election. God
does indeed reject and elect, damn and save, but both sides of this dialectic occur—or, rather,
occurred—in Jesus Christ. Jesus was doubly predestined for rejection and election, for damnation on
the cross and eternal life beyond the tomb. Because we are all in Jesus—because God elected all of
humanity in the assumption of humanity in the incarnation—we are all involved in what occurs in the
person of Jesus. This is what one must affirm in order to hold fast to the substitutionary atonement.
Christ is the vicarious mediator for all humanity or else Christ is nothing but a moral exemplar who
shows humanity how to earn their righteousness before God. If we rule out the latter—as we must—
we are forced to grapple with the implications of Christ’s role as vicar, as mediator, between God
and humanity.

In other words, for Barth, election is the ground and foundation for reconciliation. We cannot speak
about Jesus Christ as the one who reconciles us to God apart from the work of election which takes
place in and through him as the electing God and elected human.

 WHY I AM A UNIVERSALIST, § 5: THE DOCTRINE

OF GOD, PART 4: THE DOCTRINE OF ELECTION
(SECTION II)

Section II: Jesus Christ, electing and elected

In the following sections I will mostly quote from Barth and then offer some reflections on Barth’s
statements regarding election. Here I address the center of the doctrine: Jesus Christ, the electing
God and elected man. We have no doctrine of election, no knowledge of God at all, apart from this
locus, the focal point of all that we do and say. The following quotes come from Church Dogmatics
II.2 (The Doctrine of God), § 33: The Election of Jesus Christ, and they serve as expatiations on what I
presented in the first section.

 Between God and man there stands the person of Jesus Christ, Himself God and Himself
man, and so mediating between the two. In Him God reveals Himself to man. In Him man
sees and knows God. In Him God stands before man and man stands before God, as is the
eternal will of God, and the eternal ordination of man in accordance with this will. In Him
God’s plan for man is disclosed, God’s judgment on man fulfilled, God’s deliverance of man
accomplished, God’s gift to man present in fulness, God’s claim and promise to man
declared. In Him God has joined Himself to man. And so man exists for His sake. It is by
Him, Jesus Christ, and for Him and to Him, that the universe is created as a theatre for God’s
 dealings with man and man’s dealings with God. The being of God is His being, and similarly
the being of man is originally His being. And there is nothing that is not from Him and by Him
and to Him, He is the Word of God in whose truth everything is disclosed and whose truth
cannot be over-reached or conditioned by any other word. He is the decree of God behind
and above which there can be no earlier or higher decree and beside which there can be no
other, since all others serve only the fulfilment of this decree. He is the beginning of God
before which there is no other beginning apart from that of God within Himself. Except, then,
for God Himself, nothing can derive from any other source or look back to any other starting-
point. He is the election of God before which and without which and beside which God
cannot make any other choices. Before Him and without Him and beside Him God does not,
then, elect or will anything. And He is the election (and on that account the beginning and the
decree and the Word) of the free grace of God. For it is God’s free grace that in Him He
elects to be man and to have dealings with man and to join Himself to man. He, Jesus Christ,
is the free grace of God as not content simply to remain identical with the inward and eternal
being of God, but operating ad extra in the ways and works of God. And for this reason,
before Him and above Him and beside Him and apart from Him there is no election, no
beginning, no decree, no Word of God. Free grace is the only basis and meaning of all God’s
ways and works ad extra. For what extra is there that the ways and works could serve, or
necessitate, or evoke? There is no extra except that which is first willed and posited by God
in the presupposing of all His ways and works. There is no extra except that which has its
basis and meaning as such in the divine election of grace. But Jesus Christ is Himself the
divine election of grace. For this reason He is God’s Word, God’s decree and God’s
beginning. He is so all-inclusively, comprehending absolutely within Himself all things and
everything, enclosing within Himself the autonomy of all other words, decrees and
beginnings. (94-95)
 After his exposition of John’s prologue, Barth writes about predestination and election. I will offer
some more passages on the topic of predestination and election in the next section.

 In its simplest and most comprehensive form the dogma of predestination consists, then, in
the assertion that the divine predestination is the election of Jesus Christ. But the concept of
election has a double reference—to the elector and to the elected. And so, too, the name of
Jesus Christ has within itself the double reference: the One called by this name is both very
God and very man. Thus the simplest form of the dogma may be divided at once into the two
assertions that Jesus Christ is the electing God, and that He is also elected man.

In so far as He is the electing God, we must obviously—and above all—ascribe to Him the
 active determination of electing. It is not that He does not also elect as man, i.e., elect God in
faith. But this election can only follow His prior election, and that means that it follows the
divine electing which is the basic and proper determination of His existence.

In so far as He is man, the passive determination of election is also and necessarily proper to
Him. It is true, of course, that even as God He is elected; the Elected of His Father. But
because as the Son of the Father He has no need of any special election, we must add at
once that He is the Son of God elected in His oneness with man, and in fulfilment of God’s
covenant with man. Primarily, then, electing is the divine determination of the existence of
Jesus Christ, and election (being elected) the human.

Jesus Christ is the electing God. We must begin with this assertion because by its content it
has the character and dignity of a basic principle, and because the other assertion, that
Jesus Christ is elected man, can be understood only in the light of it. (103)
 Barth is here at his most profound and revolutionary. By thinking through the doctrine of election
from a center found in Jesus Christ, Barth not only broke with the ancient and Reformed traditions,
he broke from his earlier writings on election. Yet at the same time he was attempting to be faithful
to the biblical witness. The following are some observations based on these passages:

1. Jesus is identified as God’s self-revelation. God reveals Godself in Jesus of Nazareth; Jesus is the
one in whom we see and know God. Jesus is the focal point which determines all our knowing and
speaking concerning God. There is nothing about who God is or what God does that is not
determined by the person of Jesus Christ.

2. Jesus is the sole mediator between God and humanity (1 Tim 2:5). The mediating role of Christ is
absolute and not occasional; Christ mediates from incarnation to resurrection. Jesus does not
mediate only on the cross, but throughout his life and ministry. Jesus is God before the world (Deus
coram mundo) and the world before God (mundus coram Deo)—electing God and elected human.

3. Jesus is the electing God and the elected man, because of his identity as very God and very man.
The hypostatic union forms the basis of Jesus’ dual role as both electing and elected. Jesus is both
subject and object of election.

4. Jesus, as the incarnation of God, is the enfleshment of God’s being and will, or God’s being-in-
act. Because one cannot justifiably separate God’s essence from God’s will, by incarnating God’s
essence, Jesus also incarnates the will, decree, and election of God. Jesus is the embodiment of who
 God is and what God decrees—the God whose eternity and omnipresence includes time and space,
whose immanent being includes economic becoming, whose constancy includes suffering and death,
whose infinite freedom includes infinite love.

5. Jesus is the divine election of grace. The culmination of all that Barth has to say concerning Jesus
is found here: he is God’s grace made manifest, known, and effective. Jesus is the divine election
incarnate, the electing God who loves in freedom and elect humanity who is reconciled to God in
him alone.

 WHY I AM A UNIVERSALIST, § 5: THE DOCTRINE

OF GOD, PART 4: THE DOCTRINE OF ELECTION
(SECTION III)

Section III: Jesus Christ, divine election, and predestination

This section does not present any new insights, but it serves to reinforce Barth’s position with
respect to his exposition of John 1 and his break from the Reformed tradition which posited God’s
absolute decree as a protological decision regarding which individuals would be saved and which
would be damned. Against this Barth places the scriptural witness, which stresses that Jesus Christ
stands at the center of all God’s actions in time and space. Christ is involved in everything that God
does economically, from creation to redemption, but the basis for all this is the election or
foreordination of all things to exist in communion with their Creator. This election is embodied in
Jesus Christ, in whom the pre-temporal decree and the temporal covenant of grace find their center.

 In trying to understand Jesus Christ as the electing God we abandon this tradition [of the
decretum absolutum], but we hold fast by Jn. 1.1-2. Jesus Christ was in the beginning with
God. He was so not merely in the sense that in view of God’s eternal knowing and willing all
things may be said to have been in the beginning with God, in His plan and decree. For
these are two separate things: the Son of God in His oneness with the Son of Man, as
foreordained from all eternity; and the universe which was created, and universal history
which was willed for the sake of this oneness, in their communion with God, as foreordained
from all eternity. On the one hand, there is the Word of God by which all things were made,
and, on the other, the things fashioned by that Word. On the one hand, there is God’s eternal
election of grace, and, on the other, God’s creation, reconciliation and redemption grounded
in that election and ordained with reference to it. On the one hand, there is the eternal
election which as it concerns man God made within Himself in His pie-temporal eternity, and,
 on the other, the covenant of grace between God and man whose establishment and
fulfilment in time were determined by that election. We can and must say that Jesus Christ
was in the beginning with God in the sense that all creation and its history was in God’s plan
and decree with God. But He was so not merely in that way. He was also in the beginning
with God as “the first-born of every creature” (Col. 1.15), Himself the plan and decree of God,
Himself the divine decision with respect to all creation and its history whose content is
already determined. All that is embraced and signified in God’s election of grace as His
movement towards man, all that results from that election and all that is presupposed in such
results—all these are determined and conditioned by the fact that that election is the divine
decision whose content is already determined, that Jesus Christ is the divine election of
grace. (104)
 With this next quote we begin our segue into the discussion of individual election. Barth addresses
the subject of individual election, but he drastically subordinates it beneath the election of Jesus
Christ and the election of the community. Barth’s theology works in concentric circles. The doctrine
of revelation works as follows: Jesus is at the center as God’s self-revelation (the incarnate Word of
God); the biblical witness is the next circle (the written Word of God); and preaching is the third
circle (the spoken Word of God). The doctrine of election is similar: Jesus Christ as electing God and
elected man is the center; the elect community of the church is second; and the elected individuals
are the third circle. I will skip Barth’s discussion of the community, but of course all of these topics
are worth substantially more energy and time than I can give them here. What concerns me now is
my overall argument for universalism. Election is not the center of my argument, but it could be. For
Barth, election is surely the center. I discuss it here, as he does, under the doctrine of God where it
belongs, and I address individual election because it is what most traditionally think of when they
hear the words “election” and “predestination.” Thus, it is important that I allow Barth to speak on
that subject—especially since there he offers his most clear affirmation of universalism.

What is important, then, about this quote is that Barth allows Jesus Christ to condition all that can
and must be said about predestination. And here we see more fully how Barth conceives of
individual predestination, now that Christ stands as its center and basis.

 In relation to this passive election of Jesus Christ the great exponents of the traditional
doctrine of predestination developed an insight which we too must take as our starting-point,
because, rightly understood, it contains within itself everything else that must be noted and
said in this connexion. The insight is this: that in the predestination of the man Jesus
we see what predestination is always and everywhere—the acceptance and reception
of man only by the free grace of God. Even in the man Jesus there is indeed no merit, no
 prior and self-sufficient goodness, which can precede His election to divine sonship. Neither
prayer nor the life of faith can command or compel His election. It is by the work of the Word
of God, by the Holy Spirit, that He is conceived and born without sin, that He is what He is,
the Son of God; by grace alone. And as He became Christ, so we become Christians. As He
became our Head, so we become His body and members. As He became the object of our
faith, so we become believers in Him. What we have to consider in the elected man
Jesus is, then, the destiny of human nature, its exaltation to fellowship with God, and
the manner of its participation in this exaltation by the free grace of God. But more, it
is in this man that the exaltation itself is revealed and proclaimed. For with His decree
concerning this man, God decreed too that this man should be the cause and the
instrument of our exaltation. (118; emphasis added)

 WHY I AM A UNIVERSALIST, § 5: THE DOCTRINE

OF GOD, PART 4: THE DOCTRINE OF ELECTION
(SECTION IV)

Section IV: The election of the individual

Karl Barth says all that needs to be said on the subject of individual salvation in one lengthy passage
from § 35 of the Church Dogmatics. If you are looking for Barth’s most clear and unequivocal
endorsement of universalism, look no further. It is important to note that in this passage, he speaks
about how the church community should present the Good News to unbelievers, to those who reject
God entirely. He speaks first about the godlessness within the church and then about the
godlessness of those who remain outside of it. What Barth says here has important ramifications for
how we conceive of ecclesiology, to which we will return at a later time.

 This, then, is the message with which the elect community (as the circumference of the elect
man, Jesus of Nazareth) has to approach every man—the promise, that he, too, is an elect
man. It is fully aware of his perverted choice. It is fully aware of his godlessness. It consists
itself of godless men who were enabled to hear and believe this promise, and who still need
to hear and believe it. It does and must reckon continually with the original godlessness of its
members. It is fully aware, too, of the eternal condemnation of the man who is isolated over
against God, which is unfailingly exhibited by the godlessness of every such man. It knows
what his perverse choice must cost him. It knows of the threat under which he stands. It
knows of the wrath and judgment and punishment of God in which the rejection of the man
isolated over against God takes its course. And it also knows of the shadow into which every
man does actually move because he desires and undertakes at all costs to be a man
isolated, and therefore rejected, in relation to God; because he behaves and conducts
himself at all costs as though he were this rejected man.

But it knows, above all, about Jesus Christ. It is the community founded by His death and
resurrection. It belongs to Him as His property. Its existence is defined by witness to Him. It
proclaims Him and nobody and nothing else. It knows men, therefore, only to the extent that
it knows Jesus Christ. And so it knows the full extent of their godlessness, and the rejection
that accompanies it. But it knows something greater than that. And it knows even that only in
relation to this greater thing. It knows what has become of this threat, how and where it has
been executed. It knows that God, by the decree He made in the beginning of all His works
and ways, has taken upon Himself the rejection merited by the man isolated in relation to
Him; that on the basis of this decree of His the only truly rejected man is His own Son; that
God’s rejection has taken its course and been fulfilled and reached its goal, with all that that
involves, against this One, so that it can no longer fall on other men or be their concern. [...]
Their concern is still to be aware of the threat of their rejection. But it cannot now be their
concern to suffer the execution of this threat, to suffer the eternal damnation which their
godlessness deserves. Their desire and their undertaking are pointless in so far as their only
end can be to make them rejected. And this is the very goal which the godless cannot reach,
because it has already been taken away by the eternally decreed offering of the Son of God
to suffer in place of the godless, and cannot any longer be their goal.

This is the contradiction with which the community opposes the godless, who do not know all
this. It testifies to them that the way in which they find themselves was aimless even before
they entered upon it; that their desire and undertaking were nullified before the world began.
The revelation of this contradiction is the basis of the community itself. How can it meet any
other man otherwise than with this contradiction? But it knows more than this. It knows that
God has removed the merited rejection of man, and has laid it upon His own Son, so that He
might draw man to Himself and clothe him with His own glory. It knows that God is gracious
to man, not only in a negative sense, not only by the removal of his rejection, but positively,
in that He elects him. Indeed, the first and essential thing that He has decreed for him in His
Son is his election to covenant with Him. He loves His enemies, the godless: not because
they are godless; not because they seek to be free of Him; but because He will not let them
break away; because in consequence they cannot really break away from Him. What is laid
 up for man is eternal life in fellowship with God. (CD II.2, 318-19; paragraph breaks added
for readability)
 Karl Barth’s argument rests on the “But” in the second paragraph: “But it [the community] knows,
above all, about Jesus Christ.” This could be a summary of Barth’s entire theological program. Jesus
Christ is “above all” human concerns about our eternal state, because in Jesus all concerns are
rendered null and void. In him we have our answer. In him we hear the promise of God to each
individual: Because you were there in my Son—because he stood in your place—you are my beloved,
my elect. This is the gospel, the “good news” which we must proclaim to the world: We belong to
God, and to no one else—especially not to ourselves. No one can escape the gracious grasp of the
Holy One in our midst (Hos. 11:9), the God who “loves in freedom” and displayed this holy love in the
incarnation of Jesus Christ as the realization of God’s infinite grace. The verdict has been given, and
Jesus took upon himself the punishment which we deserved. Apart from God we are doomed to
perish. But we are never apart from God, because God claims us as God’s beloved children. Thus we
may rejoice! We are not lost. We are not guilty. Our lives are hidden with God and we are promised
an eternity of fellowship with our Creator as the special guests at the banquet table. Whether we all
know it or not, we are invited as the elect of God, no longer rejected as God’s enemies. God
determined before the creation of the world that we would share in the wedding feast for all
eternity. And so we shall! Praise be to God!

After reading this passage, I am reminded of the quote I posted earlier on grace, from CD II.1:

 Grace in itself means primarily that the sin of the creature, the resistance
which it opposes to God, cannot check, weaken or render impossible the operation
of divine grace. On the contrary, grace shows its power over and against sin.
Grace, in fact, presupposes the existence of this opposition. It reckons with
it, but does not fear it. It is not limited by it. It overcomes it, triumphing
in this opposition and the overcoming of it. (355)

Karl Barth proves to be a theologian of grace from beginning to end—the grace of God’s self-
revelation, God’s gracious being-in-act as the “one who loves in freedom,” and now God’s election of
Jesus Christ as the divine election of grace for all humanity. What is significant is that this grace is not
only connected to God’s wrath and judgment but is, in fact, realized in God’s judgment of sin on the
cross in the person of Jesus Christ.

I close now with a selection from an earlier section in CD II.2, but one which connects the election of
 individuals to the topic that will be presented next: Jesus Christ as the Judge judged in our place.
Barth does not address this fully until the fourth volume, under the doctrine of reconciliation. So
with this quote we finally end our discussion of the doctrine of God and move into Christology,
reconciliation, justification, and the atonement.

 Who is the Elect? He is always the one who “was dead and is alive again,” who “was lost
and is found” (Lk. 15.21). That the elected man Jesus had to suffer and die means no more
and no less than that in becoming man God makes Himself responsible for man who
became His enemy, and that He takes upon Himself all the consequences of man’s action—
his rejection and his death. This is what is involved in the self-giving of God. This is the
radicalness of His grace. God must let righteousness reign, and He wills to do so. Against
the aggression of the shadow-world of Satan which is negated by Him and which exists only
in virtue of this negation, God must and will maintain the honour of His creation, the honour
of man as created and ordained for Him, and His own honour. God cannot and will not
acquiesce in the encroachment of this shadow-world upon the sphere of His positive will, an
encroachment made with the fall of man. On the contrary, it must be His pleasure to see that
Satan and all that has its source and origin in him are rejected.

But this means that God must and will reject man as he is in himself. And He does so. But
He does it in the person of the elected man Jesus. And in Him He loves man as he is in
himself. He elects Jesus, then, at the head and in the place of all others. The wrath of God,
the judgment and the penalty, fall, then, upon Him. And this means upon His own Son, upon
Himself: upon Him, and not upon those whom He loves and elects “in Him;” upon Him, and
not upon the disobedient. Why not upon the disobedient? Why this interposition of the just
for the unjust by which in some incomprehensible manner the eternal Judge becomes
Himself the judged? Because His justice is a merciful and for this reason a perfect justice.
Because the sin of the disobedient is also their need, and even while it affronts Him it also
moves Him to pity. [. . .] That is why He intervened on our behalf in His Son. That is why He
did no less. He did not owe it to us to do it. For it was not He but we ourselves in our
culpable weakness who delivered us up to Satan and to the divine wrath and rejection. And
yet God does it because from all eternity He loves and elects us in His Son, because from all
eternity He sees us in His Son as sinners to whom He is gracious.

For all those, then, whom God elects in His Son, the essence of the free grace of God
consists in the fact that in this same Jesus God who is the Judge takes the place of the
 judged, and they are fully acquitted, therefore, from sin and its guilt and penalty. Thus the
wrath of God and the rejection of Satan and his kingdom no longer have any relevance for
them. On the contrary, the wrath of God and the rejection of Satan, the free course of divine
justice to which God Himself has subjected Himself on their behalf, has brought them to
freedom. In the One in whom they are elected, that is to say, in the death which the Son of
God has died for them, they themselves have died as sinners. And that means their radical
sanctification, separation and purification for participation in a true creaturely independence,
and more than that, for the divine sonship of the creature which is the grace for which from
all eternity they are elected in the election of the man Jesus. (CD II.2, 124-25; paragraph
breaks added for readability)
§6: Jesus Christ, the Judge Judged in Our Place

WHY I AM A UNIVERSALIST, §6: JESUS CHRIST, THE

JUDGE JUDGED IN OUR PLACE
His death is the foundation of his exclusivity. And this exclusiveness consists precisely in a universal
inclusivity, in that in his death the sin of all sinners is condemned to pass away and brought to
nothing.

—Eberhard Jüngel, “On the Doctrine of Justification,” IJST 1:1, p. 40

We move from the doctrine of election to its necessary corollary: the doctrine of reconciliation. As true God
and true human, Jesus Christ is the electing God and the elected human. To put this in terms of the doctrine of
reconciliation, Jesus Christ is the Judge over all creation (electing God) and the one who was judged in our
place (elected human). This is the heart of the doctrine of reconciliation. The God who alone is judge over all
creation determined in Godself to enter the world in the incarnation of Jesus Christ, live a life of obedience to
the law by the power of the Holy Spirit, take the judgment of God against all humanity upon himself, and rise
again to bring new life to all who were judged in the person of Jesus Christ. Only the divine Judge is capable
of taking the judgment upon himself. Sinful humanity is incapable of achieving this; we are lost sinners who
are thrust upon the faithfulness and mercy of God. Jesus Christ alone is the center of our reconciliation to God,
the one who alone made it possible for us to live in communion with the Creator. Jesus was the one judged in
our place, and lo! we are liberated for new life. To quote Barth:

We now return to our question: Why did the Son of God become man, one of us, our brother, our
fellow in the human situation? The answer is: In order to judge the world. But in the light of what God
has actually done we must add at once: In order to judge it in the exercise of His kingly freedom to
show His grace in the execution of His judgment, to pronounce us free in passing sentence, to free
us by imprisoning us, to ground our life on our death, to redeem and save us by our destruction.
That is how God has actually judged in Jesus Christ. And that is why He humbled Himself. That is
why He went into the far country as the obedient Son of the Father. That is why He did not abandon
us, but came amongst us as our brother. That is why the Father sent Him. That was the eternal will
of God and its fulfilment in time—the execution of this strange judgment. If this strange judgment had
not taken place, there would be only a lost world and lost men. Since it has taken place, we can only
recognise and believe and proclaim to the whole world and all men: Not lost.

But what did take place? At this point we can and must make the decisive statement: What took
place is that the Son of God fulfilled the righteous judgment on us men by Himself taking our place
as man and in our place undergoing the judgment under which we had passed. That is why He
came and was amongst us. In this way, in this "for us," He was our Judge against us. That is what
happened when the divine accusation was, as it were, embodied in His presence in the flesh. That is
what happened when the divine condemnation had, as it were, visibly to fall on this our fellow-man.
And that is what happened when by reason of our accusation and condemnation it had to come to
the point of our perishing, our destruction, our fall into nothingness, our death. Everything happened
to us exactly as it had to happen, but because God willed to execute His judgment on us in His Son
it all happened in His person, as His accusation and condemnation and destruction. He judged, and
it was the Judge who was judged, who let Himself be judged. Because He was a man like us, He
was able to be judged like us. Because He was the Son of God and Himself God, He had the
competence and power to allow this to happen to Him. Because He was the divine Judge come
amongst us, He had the authority in this way—by this giving up of Himself to judgment in our place—
to exercise the divine justice of grace, to pronounce us righteous on the ground of what happened to
Him, to free us therefore from the accusation and condemnation and punishment, to save us from
the impending loss and destruction. And because in divine freedom He was on the way of
obedience, He did not refuse to accept the will of the Father as His will in this self-giving. In His
doing this for us, in His taking to Himself—to fulfil all righteousness—our accusation and
condemnation and punishment, in His suffering in our place and for us, there came to pass our
reconciliation with God. Cur Deus homo? In order that God as man might do and accomplish and
achieve and complete all this for us wrong-doers, in order that in this way there might be brought
about by Him our reconciliation with Him and conversion to Him. [CD IV.1, pp. 222-223.]

A christocentric doctrine of reconciliation, as propounded by Barth, protects against the superficial

universalism characterized by the liberal theology of the nineteenth century up through contemporary secular
religiosity. Such a view states that because God is love, God affirms us in our plight and does not judge us;
instead, God shows solidarity with humanity by embracing us as we are and welcoming us into eternal life
while helping us to live better lives in the here and now. There is some truth to this, but this perspective makes
the grave mistake of viewing love and justice, or mercy and righteousness, as mutually exclusive. I have
already discussed this under the heading of God’s attributes, or perfections, but it bears repeating.

What Barth accomplishes is what any universalist doctrine of reconciliation must recognize: that God as the
Judge must enact judgment upon humankind, and in fact has already done so in the person of Jesus Christ. The
very incarnation of God in Jesus was a judgment against sinful humanity, because it affirmed what humans
have always tried to deny: that we are incapable of saving ourselves and must be rescued. God in divine grace
and mercy determined in Godself to be the one who rescues us, to be Deus pro nobis—God for us. Any
theological system that avoids judgment threatens to sidestep the central point of God’s economic activity. Of
course, there are other ways of expressing God’s economic activity besides using the penal language of judge,
judged, and judgment, and Barth in fact does translate this framework into the cultic language of priest,
sacrifice, and satisfaction. Barth, however, finds the justice imagery to best convey the point: Jesus Christ
came in the place of all humanity, suffered God’s judgment against all humanity, and effected God’s
reconciliation with all humanity. Everything occurred in Jesus Christ. There is no sidestepping that indubitable
reality.

Consequently, we cannot conceive of eschatology apart from the reality of what occurred (perfect tense) in
Jesus Christ. Judgment is not something that simply awaits each individual beyond death; an eternal judgment
has in fact already been given to each person in the judgment bestowed upon Jesus. The last judgment is not a
new judgment upon each person but rather the universal revelation of the judgment that was already given. The
judgment upon Jesus was hidden from humanity under the veil of human flesh, and thus the self-revelation of
God in Jesus Christ was God’s hiddenness in revelation and not full disclosure of the being and works of God.
Revelation in Jesus Christ was indirect revelation, in that it was not a direct encounter between the living God
and sinful humanity. What will occur in the eschaton is the direct and cosmic revelation of the same God who
was revealed, however indirectly, in Jesus Christ. The last judgment, consequently, is the universal
manifestation of what is already true, of what has already occurred and now awaits the clear proclamation to
all creation by the Lord God in glory. We will address this in more detail under the heading of eschatology.

In other words, divine judgment is still a reality in the eschatological sense of the last judgment, but that
judgment can no longer be viewed as a period of retribution for people’s sins. Such a view is wholly un-
Christian. The last judgment is an act of grace, because Christ is the one who judges us and He still bears the
marks of the cross. It is not the wrathful God whom we encounter in the eschaton, but rather the living Christ
who died for us and for our salvation. When we approach the judgment seat of Christ, the only verdict
available will be: Not guilty. The Son of God who judges us will still bear the marks of his passion on his
hands and feet. Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever, and that means the suffering he bore for
our sakes will remain throughout eternity. When the Son of God sees each person in the eschaton, there is only
one judgment left to make: “I lived and died in your place. Come, you that are blessed by my Father, inherit
the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world” (Matt. 25:34).

§7: The Doctrine of Justification

EBERHARD JÜNGEL: ON THE DOCTRINE OF

JUSTIFICATION
I recently posted a series on the doctrine of justification according to Eberhard Jüngel on the online forum for
Jüngel studies that I began, God as the Mystery of Theology. The posts are roughly equivalent to those I posted
in my series on universalism on this site. I welcome any comments and criticisms.

On the Doctrine of Justification: A Series

Part I: Introduction to the doctrine of justification in the theology of Eberhard Jüngel

Part II: Solus Christus

Part III: Sola gratia

Part IV: Solo verbo

Part V: Sola fide

Bibliography:

Jüngel, Eberhard. God as the Mystery of the World: On the Foundation of the Theology of the Crucified One in
the Dispute between Theism and Atheism, trans. Darrell L. Guder (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, ET 1983).

—. Justification: The Heart of the Christian Faith, trans. Jeffrey F. Cayzer (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, ET 2001).

Recommended Reading:

—. The Freedom of a Christian: Luther's Significance for Contemporary Theology, trans. Roy A. Harrisville
(Minneapolis: Augsburg, ET 1988).
—. "On the Doctrine of Justification" in the International Journal of Systematic Theology 1:1 (1999), pp. 24-
52.

—. Theological Essays II, trans. J. B. Webster and A. Neufeldt-Fast (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, ET 1994).

WHY I AM A UNIVERSALIST, §7: THE DOCTRINE OF

JUSTIFICATION (SECTION I)

Section I: Introduction to the doctrine of justification

The doctrine of justification, made prominent in the theology of Martin Luther, is in many respects the “heart
of the Christian faith” (Jüngel, Justification: The Heart of the Christian Faith). Justification is the
hermeneutical category through which we grasp the significance of Jesus Christ and the meaning of the
Christian gospel. Jesus apart from justification can be interpreted in any number of ways. There is a lot of
textual support from the sayings of Jesus in the gospel accounts for a version of Christianity as a purely moral
religion—i.e., how we live our lives, whether for good or evil, determines whether we are accepted by God or
not. A strong case could be made, divorced of course from the rest of the New Testament, that Jesus brings to
the world a message of how to live one’s life in a holy and righteous way. We see this, for example, in the
Mormon church. Any interpretation of Jesus along these lines is an interpretation devoid of justification,
because justification asserts that Jesus, the Christ of God, came to make righteous those who were otherwise
unrighteous and would remain so regardless of how well they lived their lives before God. Justification is the
negation of our human efforts at pleasing God for the sake of a greater affirmation brought about by the Son of
God incarnate, who lived, died, and rose again for our justification.

I follow Eberhard Jüngel in qualifying the doctrine of justification with the four Reformation particles: Christ
alone (solus Christus), by grace alone (sola gratia), by the word alone (solo verbo), and by faith alone (sola
fide). As Jüngel points out, the sum effect of these four phrases is the single assertion: solus deus—God alone.
“Humans are indeed excluded with the aim of properly including them in their justification” (Jüngel 148).
What I will do next is provide a brief overview of justification according to each of the particles while giving
extra attention to justification and its relation to faith.
WHY I AM A UNIVERSALIST, §7: THE DOCTRINE OF
JUSTIFICATION (SECTION II)

Section II: Solus Christus

The affirmation that Christ alone is our justification begins by identifying the Second Person of the Trinity
with the man Jesus, apart from which we can have no guarantee of our salvation. The central text is John 14:6:
“I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me” (cf. Acts 4:12, 1 Cor.
3:11, Eph. 2:20). By affirming the uniqueness and exclusiveness of Jesus Christ, we state that in him alone we
find new life for the world. No one else can serve as a savior alongside the Son of God; only Jesus is capable
of fulfilling this role. By confessing that Jesus alone is Lord and Savior, we confess that we play no role in
accomplishing our salvation. We confess that God finished this work in the life, death, and resurrection of the
one mediator between God and humanity.

Faith in Jesus Christ implies that only he can stand and has stood in the place of all people. Only he
and he alone! But this one alone takes the place of all others and so represents all others. That is
the inclusiveness, which is the goal of Jesus’ exclusiveness. Both are fundamentally linked to each
other in the concept of substitution. This concept links the element of Jesus’ exclusiveness to that of
inclusiveness. It says that this one single person died for all (2 Cor. 5:14f). Therefore in him all are
made alive (1 Cor. 15:22). Thus the aim of confessing the exclusiveness of Christ is to decide the
status of all people. In him alone all people are included. His exclusiveness consists in the universal
inclusion of all people. (Jüngel 150-51)

The statement “Christ alone” takes us back to “God alone,” apart from which we might be misled into thinking
that Jesus’ life and death is simply a moral example and not a salvific, substitutionary, sacrificial death on
behalf of the world. Jesus Christ—as true God and true human, as the Creator who enters the creation—is
alone capable of atoning for the sins of the world, because in him alone both the God who judges and the
people who are judged are present. The statement “Christ alone” states “that in Jesus Christ alone, none other
than God himself has come into the world and that therefore in this one person the salvation of all people is
determined” (153).

The death of Jesus is God’s offering of Godself for the world in order to bring shalom to a broken creation.
The cross is the eschatological event that establishes the covenantal foundation for the new heavens and new
earth. God's self-offering brings life and freedom to those who once existed in bondage to sin and death: "I
came that they may have life, and have it abundantly" (Jn. 10:10; cf 1 Jn. 5:20). Just as the sins of Israel were
transferred to the animals sacrificed to God in order to restore relations between God and the covenant
community, so too our sins—in fact, our very persons—are assumed by Jesus so that his death is our death and
his new life brings new life to all people. In both situations, Israelite offerings and God’s self-offering in Jesus
Christ, it is never human beings who effect the atoning work. God alone acts to reconcile sinful human beings
with the Holy One of Israel. And nowhere is this more pronounced than in the “word of the cross,” in which
we hear the astounding news that God became the sacrifice. In Jesus, God took on the very being of sinful
humanity in order to atone for sin and establish new relations between Creator and creation.

It is not God who is conciliated [in the sacrificial offering of an animal], but God who reconciles the
world. Sinful human beings do not atone for themselves; the Holy God removes the sin from sinful
human beings. (159)

Since the eternal God has identified himself with this human being, since Jesus Christ the human
being is the Son of God, for that reason the whole of humanity is integrated in his humanness. Thus
we are all present in the One, so that it is true to say: ‘One has died for all; therefore all have died’ (2
Cor. 5:14; cf. Rom. 5:12-21). […] Not only was God shown as reconciling the world in him, but this
reconciliation was accomplished in him. This did not come about by a replacement, but, if we may
use this term, by the ontologically appropriate substitution. Therefore he is the epitome of the perfect
sacrifice, sacrificed once and for all. There is no meaningful sacrifice that can follow. (161-62)

“Christ alone,” as “God alone,” means that Jesus Christ does not simply show us how much God loves us but
actually accomplishes God’s purposes for the world. Our justification is not only revealed in Christ, but it is
realized in him. He takes upon himself our very being in order to judge and kill our sinful natures and establish
in himself a new humanity for all people. In Christ alone, “there is a new creation: everything old has passed
away; see, everything has become new! All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ …
that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them” (2 Cor.
5:17-19).
WHY I AM A UNIVERSALIST, §7: THE DOCTRINE OF
JUSTIFICATION (SECTION III)

Section III: Sola gratia

If the exclusive Christological formula excludes our having any other mediator but Jesus Christ (or
any other mediatrix), then the exclusive formula of sola gratia guarantees that everything God has
done for humanity in, through and for the sake of Jesus Christ is an unconditional divine gift. (Jüngel,
Justification 173)

The phrase “by grace alone” conditions the statement “Christ alone” by asserting that God’s love and mercy is
not conditioned by anything external to God. The triune God alone is the unconditioned, self-determining God
of all grace. Nothing humanity does or fails to do has any impact upon what God accomplishes. The formula
sola gratia “clearly excludes human beings from taking an active role in their justification” (175). Any active
participation on the part of human beings is excluded by God’s free and sovereign grace. The outworking of
God’s love remains free from any creaturely conditions, and thus is not deterred by human sinfulness. As made
clear in our discussion of the divine attributes, God’s love must be understood out of itself, out of divine self-
revelation, and not out of any comparison with human love. God’s love does something sui generis; it is utterly
incomprehensible and yet revealed to us in the person of Jesus. The love of God is grace, and as grace it is
creative and replete with possibilities. The gracious love of God accomplishes what humankind cannot
accomplish: it brings the dead to new life.

God’s love for us thus flies the banner ‘by grace alone’. A fellowship of love is by definition a
fellowship of choice, except that there is an important distinction between a fellowship of love from
human being to human being and one of God to human beings. Human love, amor hominis, chooses
what is attractive and present. [. . .] The amor crucis, on the other hand, God’s love revealed in the
cross of Jesus, discovers nothing attractive, only sin, so that God’s love first creates what is
attractive by the act of love: ‘The love of God does not find, but creates, that which is pleasing to it’
(Luther). The love of God, the amor Dei, is directed to the unlovable and the ugly and by the act of
creative love makes them lovable and beautiful. That is the difference between human fellowships of
love and the loving fellowship of God and human beings which is founded on compassion. God has
mercy on those who are totally unlovable. (174)

Jüngel writes at length about the nature of God’s love in God as the Mystery of the World:

Love wants to radiate. As love, it presses to move beyond the lovers themselves. … It wants to
radiate out into the realm of lovelessness. … And so it does not fear lovelessness but rather drives
out fear (1 John 4:18). … For love does not assert itself in any other way than through love. And that
is both its strength and its weakness. Since love asserts itself only lovingly, it is highly vulnerable
from the outside, but inwardly it is profoundly indestructible. It remains with its element, and it
radiates in order to draw into itself. It cannot destroy what opposes it, but can only transform it.
(GMW 325)

God has himself only in that he gives himself away. But, in giving himself away, he has himself. That
is how he is. … God is the one and living God in that he as the loving Father gives up his beloved
Son and thus turns to those others, those people who are marked by death, and draws the death of
these people into his eternal life. (GMW 328)

Jüngel is thus able to extrapolate from the Johannine definition of God as love the further definition of God as
the one who “unites life and death in favor of life” (GMW 326). As the self-giving God of love and grace, the
triune God who created all life became vulnerable and weak in the person of Jesus Christ, taking on the
likeness of sinful flesh, in order to overcome death in the death of the Son for the sake of new life for all
people. As the Latin saying goes, “Mors mortis morti, mortem mors morte redemit, et Christi morte est, sic
reparata salus,” which, when roughly translated, states, “The death of death by death; death redeemed death
through death—through the death of Christ—and thus life has been restored.” The point is that God’s loving
grace is such that it indeed overcomes opposition, but it is not omnipotent in the sense of absolute power.
Rather, the love and grace of God is the one place where we find power and weakness existing together in a
dialectical unity. Only as divine love can God’s cruciform weakness have the power to transform lovelessness.
Only because God is the “union of death and life for the sake of life” (GMW 299) can God make what is ugly
and unlovable truly lovable and beautiful. Only because God is Love can the expression of love in the cross
lead to the victory of love in the resurrection.

Because God is the triune God of all grace, however, we as sinful human beings are excluded from having any
“active participation” in our justification. If justification occurs solely by God’s grace, then “sinners simply
can do nothing for their own justification” (179). As Jüngel states clearly, “We ourselves can contribute
nothing towards our fellowship with God, absolutely nothing. We can only receive. We are in fact involved in
our justification in a merely passive way” (181). We are brought into an ontological participation with God,
but it is one in which we are taken outside ourselves (extra nos) and made to conform to the image of God
embodied in Jesus Christ (conformitas Christi). We have no role to play in making ourselves beautiful; we
cannot make ourselves more lovable before God. We must all find ourselves by going out of ourselves, by
finding our identity in the person of Jesus, first at the foot of the cross and only then at the empty tomb.

Once we recognize and affirm that justification is by grace alone, that we can do nothing to alter the reality of
sin and nothingness that encompasses our lives, only then will we recognize that God has determined to be our
God and for us to be the people of God. In other words, when we are extra nos, faith then recognizes Deus pro
nobis (God for us) as well as Deus in nobis (God in us). “God is only near to us in that he distances us from
ourselves. … When we, in listening to his word, are outside of ourselves, then God is already there for us”
(GMW 183). Those who were once marked by death are by the grace of God now drawn into eternal life. The
mystery of the gospel is that the mors mortis—the death of death—has already occurred. The reign of sin and
death has already been defeated. What we must proclaim now is not that our good works do nothing to save us,
but that our good works have already been nullified by the glorious grace of God who came to this world to
draw those “who are marked by death” into new life with God. We are all excluded for the sake of being
included.

This is the meaning of Immanuel: God is not just with some, but rather God is with all and for all as Love, as
the God who did not spare his only Son but came to the world to become both our sin and our death for the
sake of a new and glorious life with God for all eternity.
WHY I AM A UNIVERSALIST, §7: THE DOCTRINE OF
JUSTIFICATION (SECTION IV)

Section IV: Solo verbo

The God of grace, the God who justifies the ungodly is a God who speaks. This very fact, that he is
not a silent partner, but speaks as he interacts with us, is grace. (Jüngel 198)

The justification of the ungodly is a word event. Primarily, this is because the justifying grace of God is
actualized in Jesus Christ, the Word of God incarnate. Secondarily, God’s grace reaches us existentially in the
“word of the cross” (1 Cor. 1:18), in which the reality ‘there and then’ in AD 1-30 becomes our reality ‘here
and now.’ Jesus Christ is the Word of God to us, for us, and with us. In him God has spoken new life through
the cross and resurrection. In him God has revealed the No of judgment and the Yes of reconciliation. In him
the dialectic of rejection and justification are conjoined and completed. In him we hear the word of the gospel:
Immanuel, God is with us.

God has spoken, spoken once and for all, in the person of Jesus Christ, who died for all human
beings and was raised from the dead (Heb. 1:2). And he has said what he had to say once and for
all in the story of this person. Paul compresses this neatly when he writes: ‘in him it has always been
“Yes”’ (2 Cor. 1:19 [NIV]). And this Yes of God’s happened when God gave his grace its due place
and thus set in motion the justification of the ungodly. (198)

Justification is a trinitarian dialogical event. We can describe the dialogical theo-drama of salvation in the
following way. In the protological first act, the triune God constitutes Godself in triunity by speaking the
primal Yes ad intra—the Father speaks, the Son is spoken, and the Spirit unites the divine dialogue—followed
by the second act, in which God both reveals this Yes ad extra in the incarnation of the Word in time and
space and empowers the Yes of God’s Word through the agency of the Holy Spirit, who welcomes broken
humanity into the divine dialogue of grace. The economic work of the triune God is thus an act of self-
communication to humanity in the person of Jesus Christ, who comes to us now in the “word of the cross,” the
gospel of grace, in which we hear the proclamation of our justification and the invitation to respond with
thanks and praise. The Yes of God to humanity invites us to respond with our own Yes.

The event of justification in the economy of salvation has a two-fold movement—ontological and ontic, or
christological and existential—which begins when God speaks the divine Yes as a judgment on the life and
death of Jesus “in the form of a Word that raises from the dead” (Jüngel 199). God’s Yes to Jesus establishes
the ontological status of humanity, who are all elect in the incarnate Word, the one mediator between God and
humanity. The locus of our ontological identity is found in Jesus Christ, the Word of God incarnate, in which
the old self is crucified on the cross and the new self is raised again to new life “for our justification” (Rom.
4:25). The old self caught in the relationless spiral toward the abyss is definitely destroyed ‘there and then,’
opening up a future of new possibilities in the ‘here and now.’

The event of justification is then realized existentially when God speaks the divine Yes to human beings in the
kerygma. The human response of faith establishes the ontic status of each individual by allowing the God who
speaks in the word to interrupt and displace the hearer of the word. Those who are displaced live ec-
centrically; they ex-sist outside themselves (extra se) with God in correspondence to the locus of their identity
in Jesus Christ. In the disruptive event of the word, God brings the inner person into correspondence to God.
The passive new human responds with her own Yes to God in invocation and thanksgiving through the
Eucharistic fellowship of the communio sanctorum. The joy of this Yes overflows to the outer person who is
liberated to continue this dialogue in human acts of love. To quote Luther, “nothing happens but that our dear
Lord himself speaks with us through his holy word, and we in turn speak with him through prayer and praise.”
Thus we do not act on our own power but only out of the encounter with the speaking God who conforms us
into Christ’s image, and thus into the imago Dei. The God who is pro nobis graciously communicates to
humanity, and humanity—by grace alone—is able to respond.

The divine Yes sums up all we need to know of justification solo verbo, but we must remember that this Yes
always includes the divine No. Both the No and Yes of God are brought together in the person of Jesus, who
took upon himself the No of judgment against sin and the Yes of pardon from sin: in the Word incarnate we
see the word that both judges and pardons. This judgment reaches us in the gospel, the “word of the cross,” and
an encounter with God’s Yes to us gives our very existence “a word-shaped structure” (Jüngel 199). As those
defined by the word of God, we take on the forma verbi—the “shape of the word”—and the church functions
as the creatura verbi—the “creature of the word.”

The drama of the word provides the framework for our analysis of justification by the word alone. We must
still investigate what this word is and how it affects human beings existentially in our ontological identity
coram Deo. I will do so in the form of numbered theses.

1. The word is both divine judgment and divine creation; the word judges as it creates, and creates as it
judges. Justification is a judicial or forensic event, but such judgments must be understood as part of the divine
drama of salvation in which the Yes of God connects God’s being and our being in an ontological relation of
new creation. This is what distinguishes divine judgment from human judgment: human judges make
judgments based on what is already true—a person is innocent or guilty—whereas God’s judgments establish
truth—God makes the guilty innocent and the ungodly righteous. What God determines in divine judgment is
the truth of life, and what was true prior to God’s judgment is nullified by God. God determines who we are
coram Deo, which means that our actions do not decide our identity. God’s creative judgment on Jesus raises
him from the dead to a new existence, and God’s judgment on us re-creates us now as new creations that await
the consummation of this judgment in the eschaton, when mortality will put on immortality and we too will
participate in the resurrection of all things.

If sinners are pronounced righteous by God’s judging Word – which is also pre-eminently creative in
its judging power – and thus recognized by God as being righteous, then they not only count as
righteous, they are righteous. Here we must again remind ourselves that the Word alone can in this
way do both things at once: a judgement and a creative Word – a pardon and a Word which sets us
free. (211)

2. The word addresses human beings as God’s dialogue partners in the covenant of grace. The essence of the
Logos is self-communication, in which God’s self-disclosure and self-revelation not only find concrete
expression in the incarnate Word, but also become words of address that communicate righteousness to the
otherwise unrighteous. The Logos is an effective word which not only speaks to us, but also imparts or imputes
righteousness to us. In other words, the word of God is both declarative and ontological; the word reveals and
transforms, proclaims and renews, judges and reconciles. Human beings are linguistic creatures who are
shaped by language. In the event of justification, the word reshapes us so that we are reoriented to the divine
Word, and thus our identity is located in the Logos and no longer in ourselves. We are declared righteous, and
thus we are righteous. We who once were incurvatus in se—curved in upon ourselves—are now externally
reoriented and relate to God, others, and ourselves as those who are interrupted and displaced. We speak a new
language. We are part of a new dialogue.

3. The creative word creates us anew by placing us extra nos [outside ourselves]. The Logos of God speaks to
us and interrupts us by displacing us from ourselves. We “find ourselves” only outside of ourselves, contrary to
all contemporary spiritualities that tell us to seek the source of our identity within ourselves. The one who is
justified does not possess righteousness, just as no person possesses the imago Dei. Identity, the image of God,
righteousness, and salvation are all located in God alone—solus Deus—who brings us into right relations with
others and ourselves by bringing us to God through the divine word. Sin is the opposite of such right relations
as the individual descent into relationlessness, which is death. By allowing God to place us extra nos, we allow
God to interrupt our endless spiral toward nothingness and give us new life which is found in the abundant
riches of God’s grace alone. When we are outside of ourselves, we are with God, affirmed by God, made new
by God.

I am always accepted by someone else. I always have to gain my acceptance before a group. So
recognition can never be ‘had’ as a possession by the one who is accepted or recognized. Those
who are justified must resort to a tribunal outside themselves (extra se). There is nothing about them
or in them – not even justifying grace poured into them – which can make sinners righteous. In the
reality of the state of the justified there are no concessions to be made. They are righteous purely
and simply because they are pronounced righteous. And they are only pronounced righteous
because God’s righteousness, which is extraneous to them, is attributed, imputed to them. So in the
strictest sense, God’s righteousness comes to them from outside, it is outward. Sinners are
righteous externally to themselves: extrinsece Iustificantur semper. Sinners are righteous externally
to themselves in the same sense that the Word is an external One, coming from the outside into our
innermost being and responding and relating to what has happened outside us (extra nos) in Christ.
(206)

[The] justifying Word of God speaks to us creatively. Such a Word can never remain ‘external’ to
those addressed. Together with the righteousness of God that brings it to us, it touches us so greatly
that it touches us more closely than we can touch ourselves. It becomes to us something more
inward than our inmost being: interior intimo meo. However, now we need to emphasize again that
the justifying Word that so addresses and touches sinners does not let us remain in ourselves; it
calls and places our inner being outside ourselves. If our inner being were to stay put, it would not be
justified. This is what creatively defines those who are in concord with God: they come out of
themselves in order to come to themselves – outside themselves, among other persons, and above
all with the person of the wholly other God. And this is our human sin: that we want to come to
ourselves by ourselves – instead of outside ourselves. So, leaving the relational riches of our being,
we press forward into relationlessness. The Word of justifying grace essentially interrupts sinners in
this urge towards relationlessness as it speaks creatively to us. It calls us out of ourselves as it
comes so close to us, as it speaks and relates to what is outside ourselves, to what has been
definitively moved by God's righteousness. It speaks and relates to the cross and resurrection of
Jesus Christ as they are outside us. The justifying Word from the cross addresses our inner being in
this exterior aspect of our existence so that there we may come to ourselves and thus really,
effectively be renewed. ‘Anyone who is in Christ is a new creation’ (2 Cor 5:17). (212-13)

4. The word finds concrete expression as both word and sacrament, as proclamation and Eucharist. With the
justifying word that addresses sinners, we have no dichotomy between spirit and senses, between reason and
experience, between invisible and visible. The word that proclaims to us the truth of life—the justifying
judgment, the Yes to grace and life and the No to sin and death—is a word that also demands concrete
expression in our worship as the communio sanctorum, the communion of saints gathered at the cross and
marked out for the path of discipleship. We must proclaim and embody the gospel; we must hear, but also take
and eat.

5. ‘Solo verbo’ means both ‘solus Christus’ and ‘solo evangelio’—Christ alone, by the gospel alone. The
divine word is both the incarnate Word of God in Jesus Christ, and the proclaimed Word of God in the gospel
kerygma which declares to us the truth of life: that the ungodly have been declared righteous in Christ alone.
The gospel of Jesus Christ “so unites with Jesus Christ human beings who have been named as sinners that
they are able conscientiously to have no conscience” (232). In sum, solo verbo, solus Christus, and solo
evangelio all state the same reality: freedom.
WHY I AM A UNIVERSALIST, §7: THE DOCTRINE OF
JUSTIFICATION (SECTION V)
Section V: Sola fide

In our discussion of the final Reformation phrase, “by faith alone,” we reach the heart of the doctrine of
justification and, in fact, the heart of the Christian faith itself. All proponents of the traditional teaching on
salvation argue that our faith is what saves us, which is perfectly correct when placed in its proper context.
Jüngel, following the Reformers, is deliberate in emphasizing all four particles in this specific order—solus
Christus, sola gratia, solo verbo, and now sola fide. The question posed to the traditional view is whether we
actually possess any of these soteriological foundations. The first three clearly belong to God alone: the Christ
of God, the grace of God, and the word of God. But what about faith?

First, at the very least, we can see that faith is impossible without Christ, grace, and the word. Without the
gospel word that interrupts us with the grace of God in Jesus Christ, faith is an impossibility. But thanks be to
God that the impossible has become an impossible possibility! Second, recent New Testament scholarship has
made a convincing argument that Paul’s statement, “faith in Jesus Christ,” should also be understood as “the
faith of Jesus Christ” (cf. The Faith of Jesus Christ, by Richard Hays). Third, theology supports this exegetical
move in the doctrine of the mediation of Christ. Jesus is the only the mediator between God and humanity, but
his role of mediation was not limited to his passive obedience on the cross as the bearer of our sins before the
Father; that is, the cross and resurrection do not exhaust the significance of Jesus. While the cross rightfully
receives the emphasis in Christology and soteriology, all too often such a narrow focus fails to give attention to
the incarnation and the life of obedience that Jesus lived. What theologians like T. F. Torrance quite rightly
affirm is both the passive and active obedience of Jesus Christ. Jesus not only fulfilled the atoning sacrifice for
our sins, but he also fulfilled the necessary human response of faith and obedience. Jesus was our mediator not
only in death but also in life. Jesus stood fully in our place, as the one who lived and died on our behalf. His
death was our death, and his life of faithful response was our faithful response.

We return to the question: What about our faith? Does not Paul write in Romans that the righteousness of God
“comes through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe” and that God “justifies those who have faith in Jesus”
(Rom. 3:22, 26)? And did not Paul and Silas tell the jailer in the Acts of the Apostles, “Believe on the Lord
Jesus, and you will be saved, you and your household” (Acts 16:31)? And as 1 John 5:1 declares, “Everyone
who believes that Jesus is the Messiah has been born of God.” It would seem from such passages that our faith
saves us, or that our faith does something necessary for us to be the children of God. In a certain sense, yes,
our faith is essential and necessary. But in what way? To answer that question, I shall quote from Eberhard
Jüngel on the subject of faith.

Why and how is faith justifying faith, fides iustificans? Why and how is it that very faith which justifies
human beings? What is human faith that it can achieve such great things? The simplest answer to
the question of the nature of human faith is that faith is the human ‘Yes’, the affirmation, coming from
the heart, to the definitive affirmation from God which comes to us in the occasion of our justification.
It is the human ‘Yes’ to that clear and already accomplished negation by God which we have
because of that definitive affirmation in Jesus Christ. Believers say Yes to God’s Word, to God’s
judgement, to the judgement of God which condemns sin and condemns the sinner to perish, but
also acquits us, because it acquits sinners. Believers agree that God’s condemning and acquitting
judgement is already accomplished in the person of Jesus Christ. It has been accomplished to such
a degree that a sinner’s death lies behind us and the life of the just lies before us, right now. Faith is
our heartfelt affirmation of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. It affirms Good Friday and
Easter Sunday as being the two great events which are decisive for all human beings. Because it is
this heartfelt affirmation, faith is justifying faith, it is fides iustificans. (E. Jüngel, Justification 237)

Faith is our ‘Yes’ to God’s ‘Yes’ to us in Jesus Christ—this is the meaning of sola fide. Faith is our affirmation
of God’s affirmation of us. Faith passively accepts what was actively accomplished on our behalf. In terms of
the atonement and the being of Jesus Christ, faith is not a deed or work which actualizes what would otherwise
remain merely potential and thus ineffective. In terms of our own relation to this salvific event, however, faith
does indeed effect something, but only as a passive relation to the divine self-determination in the life, death,
and resurrection of Jesus. Faith is the opening of our hearts to the person of Jesus Christ.

Faith allows the word of God to penetrate, disrupt, and reorient our very existence: “Faith is understood here as
the relation of man who responds to the God who addresses him, a relation which is made possible by the
event of the God who speaks and which is existentially called into being” (Jüngel, God as the Mystery of the
World 163). Faith is “called into being” by the word, and thus faith depends upon the creative grace of God.
By faith alone, we are existentially made new so that we ontically correspond to the God who recreates sinners
as the people of the covenant. To put this another way, in faith we correspond with the person that we already
actually are in Christ—i.e., we correspond with ourselves, with the self that already died and was raised to new
life. In faith, our existential self in the ‘here and now’ corresponds with the ontological self in the ‘there and
then.’
Man is removed—through the word of God addressing him—in faith into that very defined extra nos
which has in the series of human being-here and being-now a concrete historical place in a very
definite ‘here and now’ (hic et nunc), namely, in the ‘there and then’ (illic et tunc) of the cross of
Jesus Christ. (GMW 183)

The faith of human beings is their heartfelt Yes to Jesus Christ and to the divine judgement that has
been passed and enacted. This Yes comes from the heart, because the divine judgement has come
into the heart of believers, striking them in the centre of their existence. … The Yes of faith is the
most concentrated expression of human existence. When we believe, our whole existence becomes
a single Yes by which we are affirming God’s decisive judgement over all human existence and thus
over our own existence. But who is really making the decision here? Who makes the decision in my
heart? Do I make the decision about myself? (Justification 238)

The answer must be, ‘No, only God determines who we are. Only God can make the judgment about my
being.’ This is not a comfortable thought for a free-thinking, enlightened, individualistic society which
proclaims the pseudo-gospel of self-realization and self-determination. The modern individual thinks that she
must “find herself” or that he must “become all that he can be.” Inevitably, in such a corrosive milieu, faith
becomes an individual act of self-determination. We make a “choice” for God, just as we make a choice to go
to this particular college or this particular church. “Faith is frequently understood as being a human decision
for God, whereby the human Self makes its own fundamental decision about itself. Faith has been interpreted
as a free and fundamental decision of the human subject” (238). All of this is part of an individualistic,
voluntaristic culture which relocates action and identity in the individual human. ‘You are what you do’—this
is what we are told by parents, media, books, even pastors. The gospel of Jesus Christ declares something else
entirely, a message of radical passivity and dependence upon the God who alone is self-determining. And in
that God determines God’s own being, God also determines our being. In that God justifies Godself, God also
determines that we shall be justified.

Faith is thus not our decision for God, but our acceptance of the fact that God has already decided about us.
Faith is our existential Yes of acceptance to the historical-ontological Yes of God actualized in the person of
Jesus Christ. By faith we do not ‘make something of ourselves’; instead, we discover that we have already
been made. We discover that we are not our own, that we belong to the Creator of heaven and earth. Faith is a
journey of discovery in which we discover ourselves at the same time that we discover God.

By responding with a heartfelt Yes to God’s effectual justifying judgement, we are affirming that a
gracious decision has already been made concerning us and that the justified and thus new nature is
already established by this effectual divine decision. We discover ourselves as new people,
constituted by God. Faith is a self-discovery that begins at the same time as we discover God. It is
the discovery of a self-renewal that affects the whole person. Those who discover themselves as
new persons cannot make themselves into new persons; nor can they decide to exist as such. (241)

Faith is the “act of saying Yes to my own negation and affirmation by God” (242). Faith is the Yes of Mary
when she answers the angel, “Let it be with me according to your word” (Luke 1:38). Faith follows after the
word of God in obedience. Faith is being-after God’s promise, just as theology is thinking-after God’s self-
revelation. In theology, one thinks after the movement of God in the triune economy of salvation history. In
faith, one responds after the movement of God who addresses us and calls us outside ourselves. Faith is a
movement of our own being that follows God’s being. But in that we follow God’s being, we are also
following our own true being. Thus, as we follow God in faith, we come to find our own true identity in and
with God. Because God posits Godself as a being-in-becoming—who created human creatures as beings-in-
becoming by God’s grace alone—we are freed from the sinful pursuit of trying to “become” something new in
ourselves. Instead, in freedom, we recognize that God has already determined us to be new creatures in Jesus
Christ. In our faithful affirmation of this divine determination, we then allow God to alter us and make us new
creatures here in the present. In the freedom of faith, we passively follow the active God who creates ex nihilo.
Faith is a process of being shaped, of being conformed to the image of God in Jesus Christ (conformitas
Christi). Faith is a being-after, a being-taken-along by God:

Faith … is the immediate form of being taken along by God. Faith is the ego’s going out of itself
unceasingly. … God does not come near to us without moving us out of our self-realized nearness to
ourselves: ‘he puts us outside of ourselves’ (ponit nos extra nos). God is only present to the ego
which has been moved outside of itself. On the other hand, God with me is removed from me for the
very reason that he comes nearer to me and is nearer to me than I am able to come near to myself.
That very thing which is closest to me is that which is radically removed from me. It can be
experienced only in the ecstatic structure of this ‘we being outside ourselves’ (nos extra nos esse).
(Jüngel, GMW 167, 182)

In conclusion, faith brings us back to the other three particles of justification. Faith follows the word of God
which addresses us, a word of promise and grace that was embodied and effected in Jesus Christ. Faith is
established in the past objective event of Jesus Christ, summoned in the present event of the word, sustained
through the ongoing gift of grace, and perfected in the future eschatological hope of resurrection. Faith finds its
origin and telos in God alone. Faith is protologically prepared in the divine election of grace, historically
accomplished in the life of Jesus of Nazareth, and awaits eschatological completion in the divine promise of
new creation. Faith begins in the heart of God and takes root by God’s grace in the heartfelt trust of the person
who entrusts herself to God now and throughout eternity. Faith is indeed the narrow way, but it is a way that
was traveled for us by Jesus of Nazareth, who represents us as the faithful Son before the loving Father.
Faith, therefore, does not belong to the one who believes, because the one who believes recognizes that God
has displaced us from ourselves. We no longer possess ourselves but are instead possessed by God; we are not
our own, but we belong to God. True faith affirms that “every perfect gift is from above” (James 1:17),
including but not limited to the gift of faith, which is more accurately the gift of ourselves. We live anew as
those who are gifted with ourselves, as those who continually receive our being from God. Insofar as we
receive ourselves from God—insofar as we allow ourselves to be displaced, allow God to be nearer to us than
we are to ourselves, and entrust ourselves to God as those who live-after the life of Jesus Christ—we become
truly human. “Those who find their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it”
(Matt. 10:39). The truly human person lives outside of herself and entrusts herself wholly to God alone.

Faith, the heartfelt Yes to God’s judgement, is the foundational act of a life lived definitively outside
itself. Faith thus follows the movement of the Word that justifies sinners. In faith we agree that God’s
justifying Word is calling, taking and placing us outside ourselves. In faith we go outside ourselves,
that is, in conformity with the divine decision that affects us. In faith we comprehend the movement
of our own justification which has already taken place in Jesus Christ, and it is in that comprehension
– and not in some other way! – that we also complement that comprehension. As those who have
been moved, we move; as those who have been moved by the grace and the Word of God, we
move in accordance with this movement of divine grace and the divine Word. Believing, we trust
God and thus entrust ourselves to the movement of grace and God’s Word. That is why the external
righteousness of God becomes in faith our own righteousness. For, as we believe, we allow
ourselves to be transposed to the place which is our rightful place, that is where we, as human
beings, are in our rightful human place: with God and his righteousness – with the God who is
gracious to us and who, out of his grace, has suffered the judgement of a sinner condemned to
death in order to bring new, justified life to light out of the darkness of such a death.

That is where I come to myself. That is where I am righteous. Outside myself I am in full possession
of myself. If such a thing as Christian mysticism existed, it would consist of some such crossover of
the inward and the outward, whereby the God who speaks to me in the act of justification calls me
out to him in a fellowship of life. Of course, such fellowship can only be a fellowship along the way.
The mystical union would not be the goal, but the way. Furthermore, it would be a way where the
world was not shut out, but viewed from a new perspective. It follows that this would be a way where
our senses might not – as is otherwise the case in mystical exercises – be excluded, but rather
would be heightened, so that we would have eyes to see, ears to hear – to hear and be amazed. It
would be a mysticism of opened eyes and opened ears. (242-43)

What all four particles emphasize is our human passivity before the God who came in Jesus Christ, whose
grace overcomes the world, who speaks to us in the “word of the cross,” and who lived a human life of faithful
obedience. Justification by faith alone is passive because God is active, inclusive because we are excluded
from the act of atonement, gracious because we are judged, dialogical because God speaks to us and opens our
ears to the word of truth, and creative because the triune Lord who made heaven and earth determined in
Godself to make all things new (Rev. 21:5). All of this coheres in Jesus Christ, who is the proleptic realization
of God’s eschatological promise to be “all in all” (1 Cor. 15:28). In him, all things are reconciled (2 Cor. 5:19;
Gal. 3:28); in him alone we find our true freedom as the children of God.

All four particles are thus nothing more than a gloss on the twin proclamations of the gospel: solus Deus [God
alone] and Deus pro nobis [God for us]. The God who is the exclusive source of life is also the God who
condescended to be with us and who took our place in life and in death so that new life might be ours without
restriction. We can then say that solus Deus pro nobis is the sum of the gospel. We find our identity and true
humanity in nothing and no one apart from the God who accomplished all things ‘for us and for our salvation.’
God alone for us—that is the summa.

WHY I AM A UNIVERSALIST, §8: THE DOCTRINE OF

THE ATONEMENT (SECTION I)

Section I: Introduction to the doctrine of the atonement

The question as to the nature of the atonement is in truth nothing else than the question ‘what is
Christianity?’ (John McLeod Campbell, The Nature of the Atonement, 316)

The question of universalism must, at some point, come to rest on a particular understanding of the atonement
accomplished in Jesus Christ. Universalism, in the final analysis, asks about the doctrine of the atonement:
Who is reconciled to God? Who exactly is the object of God’s atoning work in Jesus Christ? Of course, by this
point in the series, it should be obvious to any reader how I will go about explicating the doctrine of the
atonement. Yet I wish to make explicit what has been hitherto merely implicit.

Robert Jenson makes the point that in the history of the church, there has never been an officially agreed upon
doctrine of the atonement. I mostly agree with him that the root of the problem is likely found in the failure of
theologians to connect the atonement to God’s economic activity prior to the cross and following the
resurrection. The atonement is viewed as an singular moment concentrated on the cross and resurrection, to the
exclusion, on the one hand, of Jesus’ life of ministry and the history of Israel narrated in the Old Testament,
and on the other hand, of the history of the church and the consummation of all things in the eschatological
future. That being said, the failure of the church to reach a consensus on the atonement casts a shadow over the
controversy regarding universalism. It is my contention that how we view the life, death, and resurrection of
Jesus has important ramifications for whether or not we find universalism convincing. The Scriptural evidence
is not entirely clear either way, and so we depend upon theological argumentation to move us beyond the
impasse toward some kind of resolution.

The atonement is generally viewed in terms of one of three major models, as famously outlined by Gustaf
Aulén in his important work, Christus Victor. The three models are (1) the moral-exemplarist theory
(associated with Peter Abelard); (2) the ‘Christus Victor’ theory, and (3) the satisfaction theory (associated
with Anselm of Canterbury). Aulén makes the case that the ‘Christus Victor’ model is the original theory
among the early church fathers. In the last decade, this model has been the clear favorite among those engaging
in contextual theology, including feminist and nonviolent theologies. Aulén’s book is somewhat outdated, and
the three models he highlights are not the only options, nor are they mutually exclusive. What I will do next is
summarize the different positions very briefly before moving on to the doctrine of the atonement as articulated
by Karl Barth and Hans Urs von Balthasar.

WHY I AM A UNIVERSALIST, §8: THE DOCTRINE OF

THE ATONEMENT (SECTION II)

Section II: Models of the atonement

(1) The Moral-Exemplarist Theory. I will rather quickly dispense with the theory traditionally attributed to
Abelard, which is also represented in Pelagianism and Arminianism. Essentially, this model presents Jesus as a
moral example whose self-offering on the cross was a display of love which ought to be emulated by everyone.
The reconciliation between God and humanity is not accomplished on the cross, but rather by each individual
as he or she follows the way of the cross in obedience. The importance of Jesus as an example is not to be
dismissed, since Christianity must emphasize the centrality of discipleship for all believers. However, the
‘imitation of Christ’ cannot be viewed as the basis of the ‘at-one-ment’ between God and humanity, if we wish
to avoid turning the gospel of grace into the pseudo-gospel of our good works. Such a false teaching would
undermine Paul’s primary insistence in his letters, that the sacrifice of Jesus Christ allows us to be free before
God and before others. Any ‘moral influence’ model of atonement quickly turns into the competitive pursuit of
righteousness based on human obedience. If all we had were the parables and teachings of Jesus, such a
doctrinal conclusion could be plausible. However, these teachings have their place only within the larger
context of Christ’s passion and the interpretation of this divine event by the early church. We thus confess that
the entire biblical witness, including the Pauline letters, are authoritative, and consequently any doctrine that
places the responsibility of reconciliation upon fallen human creatures must be discarded regardless of how
pious and biblical its teachings may be.

(2) The ‘Christus Victor’ Theory. According to Aulén, the ‘Christus Victor’ model is the original theory of the
atonement among the patristic period. This theory takes many different forms, but the general theme is evident
enough just in the title. Essentially, the ‘Christus Victor’ theory stresses Christ’s victory over the powers of
death, satan, sin, or whatever else is identified as the opposing force or entity which must be defeated in order
to effect reconciliation. Where this theory is entirely right is in its insistence that God in Christ does not
surrender to the power of sin in the passion, but rather the passion in all its suffering and passivity is the very
means by which the triune God effects new life and redemption for the world. Where this theory goes wrong is
in its rather odd attempts—at least in some patristic literature—to explain away the apparent passivity of Jesus
at the hands of his executioners. So we have Origen’s ransom theory of the atonement, in which God baits
satan with the hook of a crucified Jesus, only to trick satan on the third day, defeating satan’s power in the
resurrection of Christ from the dead. (We find this theory represented in C. S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch,
and the Wardrobe.) Origen’s theory is speculative and dualistic, and presents God more as the Great Trickster
than as the Great Redeemer whose love and mercy are displayed in the self-giving of God on behalf of
humanity.

Other versions of this theory abandon the ransom model while retaining the emphasis on divine victory. By
placing these together under a single category, we can see that ‘Christus Victor’ is not so much a single theory
as it is a motif or theme that runs through most theories of the atonement. This becomes most evident when we
realize that one can affirm the substitutionary atonement and also believe that Christ was the victor on the
cross—as we shall see was the case for Barth. In fact, any orthodox theory of the atonement will have to
affirm, in some form, the victorious nature of the passion. The only theory which has no need for a divine
victory in the event of the cross is the ‘moral-exemplarist’ model. Thus, the subtitle of this section, “The
‘Christus Victor’ Theory,” is actually a misnomer: there is no one theory of Christ’s victory. If the atonement
was realized in Christ’s life, death, and resurrection, then Christ was by definition victorious. The question of
what or whom Christ is victorious over is the source of the various differences among proponents of this
theme.

Excursus: Contemporary ‘Christus Victor’ theology

I should also mention that the ‘Christus Victor’ model has been adapted in light of contemporary feminist and
black theology to offer a nonviolent presentation of Christ’s atoning work on the cross. This model is generally
called the “narrative Christus Victor” and is discussed at length in J. Denny Weaver’s The Nonviolent
Atonement. I do not suggest that this modern appropriation of the ancient eastern theory of the ‘Christus
Victor’ should be embraced, only that it is worth one’s attention. The criticisms lodged against the typically
violent and vengeful portraits of God in classical doctrines of the atonement ought to be taken seriously. There
are ways of avoiding an inexcusably violent God and a God who is entirely contextualized according to the
frameworks established by contemporary social norms, but to do so requires a truly trinitarian and biblical
analysis of God’s divine work of reconciliation. Before we reach that topic, however, I must address the
Anselmian theory.

(3) The Satisfaction Theory. Anselm’s theory of the atonement, from Cur Deus Homo?, is arguably the most
famous. His is the paradigmatic ‘western’ theory, often placed in contrast to the ‘eastern’ model of the
‘Christus Victor,’ and it formed the basis for the penal substitution theories which were propagated in the
period of Protestant Orthodoxy. Anselm’s so-called ‘satisfaction’ theory is grounded in the idea that humanity
failed (and fails) to give God the honor that is due, and by robbing God of what is proper to God, humanity
owes an infinite debt. Here I quote Anselm from Cur Deus Homo?, which is written as a dialogue with a man
rather accurately named, Boso:

Anselm. If man or angel always rendered to God his due, he would never sin.
Boso. I cannot deny that.
Anselm. Therefore to sin is nothing else than not to render to God his due.
Boso. What is the debt which we owe to God?
Anselm. Every wish of a rational creature should be subject to the will of God.
Boso. Nothing is more true.
Anselm. This is the debt which man and angel owe to God, and no one who pays this debt commits
sin; but every one who does not pay it sins. This is justice, or uprightness of will, which makes a
being just or upright in heart, that is, in will; and this is the sole and complete debt of honor which we
owe to God, and which God requires of us. For it is such a will only, when it can be exercised, that
does works pleasing to God; and when this will cannot be exercised, it is pleasing of itself alone,
since without it no work is acceptable. He who does not render this honor which is due to God, robs
God of his own and dishonors him; and this is sin. Moreover, so long as he does not restore what he
has taken away, he remains in fault; and it will not suffice merely to restore what has been taken
away, but, considering the contempt offered, he ought to restore more than he took away. For as
one who imperils another’s safety does not enough by merely restoring his safety, without making
some compensation for the anguish incurred; so he who violates another’s honor does not enough
by merely rendering honor again, but must, according to the extent of the injury done, make
restoration in some way satisfactory to the person whom he has dishonored. We must also observe
that when any one pays what he has unjustly taken away, he ought to give something which could
not have been demanded of him, had he not stolen what belonged to another. So then, every one
who sins ought to pay back the honor of which he has robbed God; and this is the satisfaction which
every sinner owes to God. (Book I, Chapter XI)
Whether or not we find Anselm convincing, we can at least see where his soteriological commitments will lead
him. Clearly the debt we owe God cannot be paid by any merely finite human person. If it could, then that
person would be worthy of our worship. God alone must accomplish our salvation, as Anselm argues in
Chapter V. Anselm is on weaker ground when he places compassion over against judgment by stating that God
cannot simply be compassionate on human sin but instead must punish such sin in order to restore the divine
honor.

Anselm. Let us return and consider whether it were proper for God to put away sins by compassion
alone, without any payment of the honor taken from him.
Boso. I do not see why it is not proper.
Anselm. To remit sin in this manner is nothing else than not to punish; and since it is not right to
cancel sin without compensation or punishment; if it be not punished, then is it passed by
undischarged. (I.XII)

Anselm has set up the conditions for a potentially disastrous theological conclusion: that God the Father
punishes the Son to satisfy the Father’s honor. This is disastrous for a couple reasons. First, it fails to give
proper attention to the triune economy of salvation. Anselm so strictly appropriates the role of judge to the
Father and the role of the judged to the Son that the perichoretic relations within the Trinity are obscured. The
Son, we must insist, is not simply the one who receives the Father’s punishment for sin; the Son is also the
divine judge who willingly takes upon himself the divine judgment. Anselm often seems to reduce ‘God’ to the
Father, while the Son is the God-man who can receive the full brunt of the Father’s punishment (II.VII).
Second, Anselm speaks as if the Son bears the judgment for sin so that we are spared from judgment (cf.
II.XIV). This position follows from the third and most disastrous aspect of Anselm’s doctrine of the
atonement, which is that the suffering and death of the Son satisfies God's wrath and moves God from wrath to
love. Christ dies at the hands of the Father in order to appease the wrath of God, in order that God may then be
the loving God for all of humanity. In direct contrast to this, we will see that Barth insists upon viewing the
judgment of sin on the cross as the outpouring of God’s holy love. God offers Godself in the person of Jesus
Christ in order to accomplish God’s judgment on sin, but this judgment is upon all humankind, since all are
ontologically located in the person of Jesus Christ as the electing and elected one of God.

Before we explicate Barth more carefully on the atonement, it is worth noticing that Anselm’s satisfaction
theory is actually a late medieval variation of Irenaeus’ doctrine of recapitulation:

Anselm. Listen to the voice of strict justice; and judge according to that whether man makes to God
a real satisfaction for his sin, unless, by overcoming the devil, man restore to God what he took from
God in allowing himself to be conquered by the devil; so that, as by this conquest over man the devil
took what belonged to God, and God was the loser, so in man’s victory the devil may be despoiled,
and God recover his right. (I.XXIII)

The doctrine of recapitulation is the simplest of all explanations, in that it simply expands upon the typology of
Adam and Christ—Adam as the origin of sin and death, and Jesus Christ as the origin of righteousness and life.
Jesus, as the second Adam, restores creation and brings new life to all, just as the fall of Adam brought death
to all. Recapitulation finds its biblical basis in Romans 5:12-21, in which Paul states:

For if many died through one man’s trespass, much more have the grace of God and the free gift by
the grace of that one man Jesus Christ abounded for many. . . . Therefore, as one trespass led to
condemnation for all people, so one act of righteousness leads to justification and life for all people.
(vv. 15, 18)

In his variation of recapitulation, Anselm combines the Adam-Christ typology, the ‘Christus Victor’ motif
(“the devil may be despoiled”), and his own emphasis on satisfaction and divine honor. We can see why his
doctrine of the atonement has captured the theological imagination of so many in the west. Anselm’s theology
has its flaws, but it represents some of the best work of theology in the history of the church. In the next
section, we will explain how Barth and von Balthasar explicate the doctrine of the atonement in a way that
does justice to the doctrine of the Trinity, the perfections of God, and the doctrine of election.

WHY I AM A UNIVERSALIST, §8: THE DOCTRINE OF

THE ATONEMENT (SECTION III)

Section III: Foundations for a doctrine of the atonement

In the third and fourth installments on the doctrine of the atonement, I intend to use the constructive theology
of Karl Barth and Hans Urs von Balthasar to establish parameters for an orthodox doctrine of the atonement. I
will rely heavily in these sections on the recently published book by David Lauber, Barth on the Descent into
Hell: God, Atonement and the Christian Life (2004, Ashgate). Before outlining those parameters in the fourth
section, I first need to clarify and (re)establish basic theologoumena shared by both Barth and von Balthasar.
These will serve as essential and specific foundations for the more general parameters that will be set forth in
the following section. Much of what I say here will hearken back to earlier paragraphs in this series.

1. God is pro nobis (for us). Barth and Balthasar both have the confession “pro nobis” at the center of their
respective theologies, which comes from the Nicene Creed: Crucifixus etiam pro nobis sub Pontio Pilato, “He
was crucified for us under Pontius Pilate.” Balthasar goes so far as to state that the pro nobis “unlocks not only
all Christology but the entire Trinitarian doctrine of God that flows from it, as well as the doctrine of the
Church” (Theo-Drama IV, 239). Any doctrine of the atonement must start from this essential affirmation:
Deus pro nobis. We are able to confess—in fact, we must confess—that God is for us only because God has
revealed God’s very nature to be pro nobis in the person of Jesus Christ. The mission of the Son reached its
telos in the passion, in which Christ suffered and died in our place for us and our salvation, and thus the
internal triune being of God is definable as for the world. The triune Lord desires to be our God, and for us to
be the covenant people of God: “I will walk among you and be your God, and you will be my people” (Lev.
26:12).

2. God alone atones for sin. Barth follows Anselm and the orthodox tradition of the church on this point, but it
is worth how Barth develops the tradition through the trinitarian framework of his theology. We see this
especially in Barth’s assertion that Jesus as the God-man does not simply satisfy the infinite debt of honor that
humanity owed to God. Rather the very incarnation, life, and passion of Jesus Christ is a divine act. As
Eberhard Jüngel warns us, “it is not God who sacrifices the human Jesus—this is not human sacrifice! No, God
so identifies himself with the human Jesus put to death by humans, that we must affirm that this human being
was God’s Son. To put it accurately: God does not identify himself with the executioners, but with the
executed one” (Justification 163). The person and work of Jesus is the self-determination of the triune God
who alone took the initiative to deal with sin and death definitively once and for all, which is why Jüngel calls
the death of Christ “God’s offering of himself,” and he even goes so far as to say, “God sacrifices himself”
(164). In terms of Barth’s theology, Lauber says it best, so I will quote him at length:

The passion of Jesus Christ, according to Barth, is from first to last a divine action, and as a divine
action it is motivated and carried out by God’s love alone. The goal and the actual consequence of
the passion is the single outcome of the reconciliation and redemption of humanity. In the passion,
humanity is brought into a proper covenantal relationship with God; humans as sinners are
destroyed and, as a result, established as new creatures. Human beings as sinners are purified by
the fire of God’s love and are recreated by being put to death and resurrected as new creatures. The
passion, which Barth describes as the worst event imaginable, is funded by God’s love, and God’s
love is unlike any love known in the creaturely realm. God’s love is pure holy love and it is radical.
This holy and radical love takes the initiative in effectively removing the obstacle that separates
humanity from God. Sin is the obstacle and can be dealt with only through its radical eradication,
which leads to its annihilation. God’s love takes the initiative in that humans do not offer a sacrifice,
no matter how pure, in hopes of satisfying God’s wrath, nor do humans benefit from the punishment
of a representative human being, and are in turn freed from the punishment that awaits them.
Rather, God’s radical and holy love satisfies itself. God’s love takes the form of wrath and God’s love
is satisfied through its own activity as a result of the outpouring of God’s wrath. God’s wrath works
itself out in such a way that the individual sinner is killed, extinguished and removed. From the
rubble of this destruction, the individual is resurrected and recreated, and is established in a right
covenantal relation with God as new creature. (36)

Lauber goes on to clarify Barth’s theology so that, in stressing the divine action in the atonement, we do not
lose the genuinely human element in the life and passion of Jesus. Both the divine and human elements must
be held together in order for the atonement to be truly substitutionary and effective, but we must remember the
human element is divinely determined by God who elects to become human in Jesus and assumes humanity
into the Godhead in the assumptio carnis, so that nothing human is alien to God’s inner being. “Christ’s
suffering and descent into hell is human suffering of God. It is genuine human suffering, death and presence in
hell taken up into the very life of God, and as such God triumphs over and destroys suffering, death and hell”
(Lauber 37). God is self-determining, self-actualizing, and self-giving. God justifies Godself in the justification
of humanity, and God satisfies Godself in the reconciliation between God and sinful creatures. God is not
determined by some external definition of justice; rather, God determines the nature of justice in God’s own
judgment upon sin and death. The triune Father, Son, and Holy Spirit determine and effect what is necessary
—“necessary” only according to the divine will—in order to accomplish the destruction of sin and sinful
humanity and the resurrection of a new humanity in the person of Jesus Christ.

3. God is the one who loves in freedom. Barth’s doctrine of God consistently brings the perfections (attributes)
of God into dialectical tension, refusing to sacrifice either the unity of God or the richness of God’s being. This
is especially significant in his treatment of the love and wrath of God. Since love is God’s most essential and
primary perfection, wrath is defined as the outpouring of God’s holy love in relation to the sin of creatures.
Barth writes:

We can only be overlooking or misunderstanding the biblical message if for one reason or another
we try to be spared having to take quite seriously the fact that God is the God who for the sake of
His righteousness is wrathful and condemns and punishes. He is not only this, but He is also this. …
If we truly love Him, we must love Him also in His anger, condemnation and punishments, or rather
we must see, feel and appreciate His love to us even in His anger, condemnation and punishment.
For we cannot avoid the conclusion that it is where the divine love and therefore the divine grace
and mercy are attested with the supreme clarity in which they are necessarily known as the meaning
and intention of Scripture as a whole, where that love and grace and mercy are embodied in a
unique event, i.e., in Jesus Christ, that according to the unmistakable witness of the New Testament
itself they encounter us as a divine act of wrath, judgment and punishment. (CD II/1, 394)

Lauber writes the following in response to this passage:

Here we see that love is not in tension with wrath; grace is not opposed to judgment; and mercy is
not contradictory to punishment. The love of God, when faced with resistance by sinful humanity,
takes the form of wrath in order to deal effectively with this resistance, which results in the removal
of humanity from its miserable condition. … Here we may conclude that wrath serves divine love.
Wrath is the form that divine love takes in the face of resistance and opposition. (17)

In other words, love and wrath, grace and judgment, mercy and righteousness, Deus pro nobis and Deus in se
do not stand side by side as different parts of God’s being; rather, these perfections interpenetrate and flow out
of a unity in the triune being of God. To be more precise, these perfections are defined out of the concrete
center in the Logos incarnate, Jesus the Christ. We know who God is internally out of God’s external acts in
the divine economy of salvation. When we thus say that God is the “one who loves in freedom,” we mean that
God freely determined in Godself to be God for us in Jesus Christ.

Finally, in the discussion of the triune being of God as the one who loves in freedom, we must also affirm that
the self-offering of the Son in the incarnation and passion is not an act that moves God from wrath to love;
rather, the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross is God’s self-donation in a divine economy of love. The Son’s
obedience to the Father in going to the cross on Good Friday and then, as Balthasar asserts, “going to the dead”
on Holy Saturday, is a divinely determined act of love that flows out of God’s righteousness and grace. God’s
very being is such that God takes on the depths of Sheol—even the very depths of hell itself—in order to
reconcile humanity in the covenant of grace.

The passion is the goal of the incarnation. The passion is also a continuous divine act in which God
is both the subject and object of Jesus Christ’s reconciling work. This being the case, there is no
movement from wrath to love on God’s part as a response to the suffering and death of Jesus Christ;
rather, God’s love is the source of the reconciling significance of Christ’s death. … Christ does not
suffer solely under the wrath of God (wrath abstracted from God’s love) and in this suffering move
God’s disposition towards humanity from wrath to love. Rather, God’s wrath is a function of God’s
love. Therefore, divine love is the source for what took place on the cross. (Lauber 14-15)

I close this subsection with the words of Eberhard Jüngel, who makes it very clear that we cannot think of the
atonement as something that satisfies God’s wrath in order that God may then act out of love towards us.
Sinners cannot atone for themselves by making a sacrifice; not even the Old Testament cultic sacrifices
operated with this kind of theology. “It is not God who is conciliated, but God who reconciles the world. Sinful
human beings do not atone for themselves; the Holy God removes the sin from sinful human beings. He does
this by granting his holiness to those who are totally unholy” (Justification 159-60).
 Section IV: Parameters for a doctrine of the atonement
o Section IV.1: Triune
o Section IV.2: Concretely Christocentric
o Section IV.3: Substitutionary
o Section IV.4: Actualized
o Section IV.5: Ontological
o Section IV.6: Eschatological

 WHY I AM A UNIVERSALIST, §8: THE DOCTRINE

OF THE ATONEMENT (SECTION IV.1)

Section IV.1: Parameters for a doctrine of the atonement: triunity

An orthodox doctrine of the atonement must affirm that God’s economy of salvation is …

(1) … triune. In order to understand the atonement, we have to think through the triune economy of
salvation as the act of one subject in three modes of being—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The being-
in-act of God is a triune being-in-act in which the works appropriated to each person of the Trinity
are perichoretically united in the one Lord, Deus pro nobis, who loves in freedom. The doctrine of the
Trinity is essential for the doctrine of the atonement in at least the following three ways: (1) The
doctrine of the Trinity forms the dogmatic ground out of which can arise a doctrine of the atonement
in which the salvation effected on the cross can properly be both a divine and human event; (2) the
doctrine of the Trinity is the interpretation of God’s self-revelation in Jesus Christ, in which the
economic activity of God reveals the immanent being of God as the gracious triune Lord; and (3) the
doctrine of the Trinity allows us to preserve both the radical nearness and the radical distance
between the Father and the Son in the event of the cross through the Holy Spirit’s “bond of love.”

Hans Urs von Balthasar stresses the centrality of the Trinity in the atonement, both as its ontological
basis and as the noetic conclusion of thinking through the self-revelation of God in Jesus Christ.
Balthasar constructs a kenotic doctrine of the Trinity in which the persons of the Trinity are mutually
self-emptying and self-donating from all eternity in a divine drama of love. The protological “primal
kenosis” occurs in the eternal generation of the Son from the Father, which corresponds to the
kenotic act of creation and reaches a dramatic climax in the incarnation of the Son in Jesus. All of this
reveals the “genuine dynamic activity within the triune life of God” in which Balthasar “emphasizes
 God’s independence from the world” and at the same time “affirms God’s real involvement with the
world” (Lauber 58). Significantly, for Balthasar, the kenotic drama between the Father and the Son
“implies such an incomprehensible and unique ‘separation’ of God from himself that it includes and
grounds every other separation—be it never so dark and bitter” (Theo-Drama IV, 325). As David
Lauber makes clear, “God exists in this manner of self-giving and in no other” (58).

We can see from this trinitarian backdrop how the self-giving of Jesus on the cross for the sake of
sinful humanity is the economic overflow of God’s own internal being. Who God is eternally ad intra
forms the very basis for what God accomplishes in relation to creation ad extra. Lauber writes:

 The ‘distance’ between the Father and the Son provides the space for the radical separation

experienced by the Son, who has taken on the condition of sin, from the Father. The eternal
self-giving of the Father is the ontological condition for the possibility for the extravagance of
the self-giving of the Son in willingly taking on the world’s sin and enduring the abandonment
that this sin necessitates. (60)

 Two quotes from Balthasar illustrate how the ontological drama of kenosis within the triune life of

God establishes the possibility for what became actuality in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus
Christ:

 The exteriorisation of God (in the Incarnation) has its ontic condition of possibility in the

eternal exteriorisation of God—that is, in his tripersonal self-gift. (Mysterium Paschale 28)

Everything that can be thought and imagined where God is concerned is, in advance,
included and transcended in this self-destitution which constitutes the person of the Father,
and, at the same time, those of the Son and the Spirit. God as the ‘gulf’ of absolute Love
contains in advance, eternally, all the modalities of love, of compassion, and even of a
‘separation’ motivated by love and founded on the infinite distinction between hypostases—
modalities which may manifest themselves in the course of a history of salvation involving
sinful humankind. (MP viii)

 Balthasar thus stresses the importance of internal difference and otherness within the Godhead. He

speaks of this dynamic movement within God in terms of a “primal kenosis” in which the persons of
the Trinity eternally give of themselves. It is the eternal event of sharing between the Father, Son,
 and Holy Spirit that constitutes this “community of mutual otherness” (Jüngel) as the deity, as God.
God is the event of self-differentiation in which the triune Lord is, at the same time, self-positing and
self-posited. God determines Godself to be both the sending Father and the sent Son, both the one
who commands and the one who obeys, both the priest and the sacrifice, both the judge and the
judged. God is in Godself the event of reconciliation. In that God justifies Godself, the world is
reconciled to God. Nothing external to God can enable, disrupt, or alter the event of reconciliation,
and yet this very exclusivity is the ground for the infinite inclusivity of God’s reconciling work in Jesus
Christ, the incarnate Son of God. Reconciliation is accomplished in the triune being of God as the
“union of death and life for the sake of life” (Jüngel, God as the Mystery of the World 299).

 In that God differentiates himself and thus, in unity with the crucified Jesus, suffers as God

the Son being forsaken by God the Father, he is God the Reconciler. God reconciles the
world with himself in that in the death of Jesus he encounters himself as God the Father and
God the Son without becoming disunited in himself. On the contrary, in the encounter of God
and God, of Father and Son, God reveals himself as the one who he is. He is God the Spirit,
who lets Father and Son be one in the death of Jesus, in true distinction, in this encounter.
… Thus God is differentiated in a threefold way in his unity: in the encounter of Father and
Son, related to each other as Spirit. But in the fatal encounter, God remains one God. (GMW
368)

 While Balthasar speaks of the separation between the Father and the Son, Jüngel speaks of the

“encounter” between God the Father and God the Son; in this divine encounter, God is self-
differentiated without becoming disunited. God preserves the “mutual otherness” within the
Godhead as integral to the dynamic movement within the being of God—both between the persons
of the Trinity and between God and the world. Jüngel writes much that is in concord with Balthasar’s
theology of the divine kenosis, though instead of speaking of God’s self-emptying, Jüngel speaks of
God’s selflessness ad intra and ad extra. Jüngel defines God’s being in light of the tension between
divine self-relatedness and selflessness; the former speaks of God’s immanent freedom, while the
latter of God’s economic graciousness and overflowing love in the incarnation of Jesus. Thus, Jüngel
defines God’s triune being as the “still greater selflessness in the midst of a very great self-
relatedness.” The very being of God is the event of love which moves beyond self-relatedness
toward selfless donation and overflow. The triune God is the dynamic event of self-giving.
 A “still greater selflessness in the midst of a very great, and justifiably great self-relatedness”

is nothing other than a self-relationship which in freedom goes beyond itself, overflows itself,
and gives itself away. It is pure overflow, overflowing being for the sake of another and only
then for the sake of itself. That is love. And that is the God who is love: the one who always
heightens and expands his own being in such great self-relatedness still more selfless and
thus overflowing. (GMW 369)

 The self-relatedness of the deity of God takes place in an unsurpassable way in the very

selflessness of the incarnation of God. That is the meaning of talk about the humanity of
God. It is not a second thing next to the eternal God but rather the event of the deity of God.
For that reason, the “economic” Trinity is the “immanent” Trinity, and vice versa. And thus the
Crucified One belongs to the concept of God. For the giving up of the eternal Son of God
takes place in the temporal existence of one, that is, of this crucified man Jesus. In him, the
love of God has appeared (1 John 4:9), because that love has happened in him. The
crucified Jesus belongs to the Christian concept of God in that he makes it necessary that a
distinction between God and God be made. Therefore, the incarnation of God is to be taken
seriously to the very depths of the harshness of God’s abandonment of the Son who was
made sin and the curse for us. (GMW 372)

 More than any other theologian, Jüngel conceives of God’s being in light of the Johannine

confession: God is love. The event of love requires “mutual otherness” and self-differentiation
between the lover and the beloved. This distinction is primary for Jüngel and establishes the ground
for the other divine self-differentiations, such as priest and sacrifice, judge and judged. In the divine
self-positing as lover (Father), beloved (Son), and bond of love (Spirit), the immanent Trinity is both
internally differentiated and externally oriented.

 Only in the unity of the giving Father and the given Son is God the event of giving up which

is love itself in the relation of lover and beloved. The Spirit who proceeds from the Father
and the Son constitutes the unity of the divine being as that event which is love itself by
preserving the differentiation. … It is solely the Spirit of God as the relation of the relations
who constitutes the being of love as event. This love as event is what makes up the essence
of deity, so that the full identity of the divine essence and divine existence has been thought
in these three divine relations: Father, who loves of himself; the Son, who has always been
 loved and has loved; and the constantly new event of love between the Father and the Son
which is the Spirit. (GMW 374-75)

 The triune Event of Love posits a dynamic movement toward the Other within God, as the persons of

the Trinity exist in selfless giving to one another. In the event of reconciliation between God and
humanity, the Trinity moves outward and downward, condescending to be with humanity as
Emmanuel—God with us. In the incarnation of Jesus, the God who is love enters into the nexus of
nothingness by assuming the full depths of human existence. By identifying Godself with the human
Jesus, God involves Godself in the crisis of death, plunging into the abyss of nothingness as our sole
mediator and redeemer. The triune Event of Love enters into the dank cellars of lovelessness in
order to eradicate the sinful drive toward relationlessness and definitively establish new life in
correspondence to God in the place of our “sickness unto death.” The triune God comes to the world
in the self-revelation of God in Jesus Christ, who willingly ‘goes into the far country’ in obedience to
the Father; the triune God completes the reconciliation of humanity to God through the ‘event of the
cross’; and the triune God perfects the new relation beween humanity and God through the ongoing
agency of the Spirit.

This narrative of God’s being-in-coming is what we mean when we confess that “God is love.” God is
the infinitely rich story of love—a love that not only enters nothingness but returns victorious, a love
which comes into fatal contact with death itself and, behold, still lives! The triune God from eternity
past is the one in whom the deepest opposites—heaven and hell, East and West, unity and
separation, life and death—are able to cohere within the relational unity of Father, Son, and Holy
Spirit. But God is not merely the unity of opposites; God moves beyond the tension toward
reconciliation, renewal, and redemption. God is the still greater unity in the midst of such great
separation; the still greater grace in the midst of such great sinfulness; the still greater life in the
midst of such great death.

According to Jüngel, “The being of love unites love and death in that in the event of love life goes
beyond itself” (GMW 222). Life goes beyond death, beyond sin, beyond nothingness itself, because
life is only found in the God who goes beyond death, beyond sin, beyond nothingness. Life comes to
us in the midst of our death and establishes new life. The gospel proclaims that the God of life, the
God who is love, came in Jesus Christ in order to “make all things new”; the telos of the incarnation is
thus the resurrection, in which the eschatological Yes is proleptically realized in the midst of the
hellish No of the grave. The resurrection is the definitive event of life going-beyond-itself; the
resurrection is the “still greater life in the midst of such great death.”
 Resurrection means the overcoming of death. But death will cease to be only when it no

longer consumes the life which excludes it, but when life has absorbed death into itself. The
victory over death, which is the object of faith’s hope on the basis of God’s identification with
the dead Jesus which took place in the death of Jesus, is the transformation of death
through its reception into that life which is called eternal life. (GMW 364)

 The God of the resurrection, the God of life, does not exclude death but rather aborbs it. In Jesus

Christ, the triune God defeats death by dying; and yet in absorbing death in the crucifixion of Jesus,
the triune God still lives. God transforms death by receiving death into the very life of God. The
infinite repletion of God’s being means that death is not excluded but included in the inexaustible
richness of divine existence. The God of life is the God who brings creation toward its proper end and
as such is the God of new life. The triune God who raised Jesus from the dead is the God of the
future—a future in which “we will be changed,” because in Jesus Christ, “death has been swallowed
up in victory” (1 Cor. 15:52b, 54b). The God of the resurrection is the constantly new event of the
future who overcomes the past and teleologically reorders the present toward the reign of love. It is
toward this eschatological hope that the atonement points; the atonement, in fact, is the very
ground of our hope. The cross awaits in eager expectation the “day of the Lord,” in which the love
that overflowed “for us and our salvation” on Good Friday will reign supreme in the glorious light of
Easter. The Event of Love in Jesus Christ, as God’s ceaseless going-out-of-Godself, not only comes
from the future but brings us forward out of the past toward the future of God when death will be
swallowed up in life, and sin swallowed up in grace. As “the union of death and life for the sake of
life,” as the one who assumed our death in order that we might enjoy new life for all eternity, God
defines Godself as Love.

 WHY I AM A UNIVERSALIST, §8: THE DOCTRINE

OF THE ATONEMENT (SECTION IV.2)

Section IV.2: Parameters for a doctrine of the atonement: christocentrism

An orthodox doctrine of the atonement must affirm that God’s economy of salvation is …

(2) … concretely christocentric. The two words—“concrete” and “christocentric”—are both essential
for the doctrine of the atonement. The latter takes its bearings from Karl Barth and follows the
christological assertion: “He is before all things, and in him all things are held together” (Col. 1:17).
 By christologically grounding our theology, we allow the self-revelation of God in Jesus Christ to
shape our doctrinal affirmations and our ecclesial identity. Nowhere is this more important than in
the doctrine of the atonement, in which we wrestle with the reality of our reconciliation to God
accomplished in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. As Barth states:

 In willing to do this and doing it [acting as the Representative for all humanity in his death

and resurrection], [Jesus Christ] did what as the Son He ought to do, what He could do in
virtue of His right as Son. And He did it concretely as the legitimate bearer and
representative and executor of the divine right of creation and the covenant to man and over
man. (CD IV.1, 565; emphasis added)

 By establishing our theology as christocentric in shape, we do not permit a christomonism which

resolves the rich and complex character of the God-human relationship into one particular person;
such a theological program is reductionistic and fails to account for the church as the people of God
who are brought into a participatory correspondence to God through Jesus Christ. The statement by
Colossians is illuminating: “in him all things are held together.” While Christ is indeed “before all
things,” he does not dissolve the value of all things nor are all things resolved into his person; rather,
“all things are held together” in his identity as the incarnate Son of God. The church, creation, the
cosmos itself retain their particular worth and integrity in Jesus Christ, even while they are given new
meaning and directed toward the telos of God’s eschatological future. We might think of Barth’s
threefold Word of God: though Jesus stands at the center as the self-revelation of God, we also must
affirm the witness of the apostles and prophets in Holy Scripture and the preaching of the Word in
the church today. In this threefold Word of God, we have a picture of how theology as a whole is
structured. Jesus Christ forms the center and basis for our theological statements, which are
informed by the tradition and writings of the early church in Holy Scripture and proclaimed today in
the church.

The word “concrete” clarifies the word “christocentric” by grounding our theology in the particular
person, Jesus of Nazareth. Theology attends to this concrete reality, not to an abstract concept which
happens to be applied to Jesus (cf. Tillich’s conception of the Christ-symbol). A concrete theology
prevents any kind of liquefaction of “Christ” into other realities: our contemporary situation (any
contextual theology), our human experience (liberal theology), the church (Catholicism; Radical
Orthodoxy), the world (paganism), or God (modalism). Christian theology is concretely christocentric,
and thus it is concerned at every point with the divine reality made manifest in Jesus of Nazareth.
All of this is essential for the doctrine of the atonement. The doctrine of the atonement must find its
center in the particular person of Jesus. When we state that this doctrine must be concretely
grounded in the christological reality of the cross, we assert that reconciliation was accomplished in
the physical personhood of Jesus Christ. The reconciliation between God and humanity begins and
ends with him. Nothing and no one apart from Jesus may contribute to the work of atonement. Only
the Messiah, the Suffering Servant on behalf of the world, may mediate between God and humanity,
and in this mediation, restore the broken relations between Creator and creation that have disrupted
the cosmos since the dawn of time. In the rending of the tabernacle cloth on Good Friday, the rent
cosmos was made whole. Wholeness comes in and through Jesus of Nazareth alone. In stating this,
we simply acknowledge the Reformation confession of solus Christus.

The particularity and exclusiveness of the divine work of atonement is also the ground for its
universal and inclusive scope. Jesus Christ, as Jüngel writes (following Gogarten), is the “turning point
of the world” (GMW 364). Barth speaks of the history of Jesus as the line that runs through and
connects all human history. We could appropriate Tillich and call Jesus Christ the ground of both
being and new being—in him the worlds were created, in him “all things hold together” (Col. 1:17),
“through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things” (Col. 1:20), and in his particular
history, new humanity was definitively established through his life, death, and resurrection. The
narrative of the gospel as the universal narrative definitive for all people receives its story from this
particular life and from no other.

In conclusion, the identity of Jesus Christ is a concrete identity. The Logos of God is a concrete Word.
As Barth says, “God always speaks a concretissimum (CD I.1, 137). The Word of God is not just any
word, nor is a word that can be changed to adapt the needs of some particular time and place. By
this I do not mean that the Word of God overlooks the existential situation of the one who hears the
gospel; rather, what is most concrete and other than us is simultaneously what concerns us the most
and remains the most near to us—nearer, in fact, than we are to ourselves. The Word of God took
concrete form in Jesus of Nazareth, who by the Spirit remains present to us in our existential
situation through the gospel kerygma. A concrete christocentric theology does not neglect the one
who hears and receives the Good News; rather it asserts that the Good News is only ‘good’ because
we confess the concrete nature of the gospel which declares that God revealed Godself to be ‘for us’
in Jesus of Nazareth, and in him alone. There, in the years 1-30, we discover the truth of faith, the
truth of theology, the truth of ourselves, and the truth of the world: “I am the way, and the truth,
and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me” (Jn. 14:6).
 WHY I AM A UNIVERSALIST, §8: THE DOCTRINE
OF THE ATONEMENT (SECTION IV.3)
 Section IV.3: Parameters for a doctrine of the atonement: substitution

An orthodox doctrine of the atonement must affirm that God’s economy of salvation is …

(3) … substitutionary. By stressing the substitutionary nature of the atonement, we simply mean that
what God accomplished in Jesus Christ was ‘for us’; the self-offering of Christ was on our behalf and
in our place. Barth discusses the pro nobis character of Christ’s person and work by stating:

 He took our place as Judge. He took our place as the judged. He was judged in our place.

And He acted justly in our place. It is important to see that we cannot add anything to this—
unless it is an Amen …. All theology, both that which follows and indeed that which precedes
the doctrine of reconciliation, depends upon this theologia crucis. And it depends upon it
under the particular aspect under which we have had to develop it in this first part of the
doctrine of reconciliation as the doctrine of substitution. Everything depends upon the fact
that the Lord who became a servant, the Son of God who went into the far country, and
came to us, was and did all this for us; that He fulfilled in this way, the divine judgment laid
upon Him. There is no avoiding this strait gate. There is no other way but this narrow way.
(CD IV.1, 273)

 In the first four statements, Barth explicates the substitutionary nature of the Mediator in both

ontological and actualistic terms—that is, in terms of Christ’s person and work. Ontologically, Jesus
Christ is the God-human: “He took our place as Judge. He took our place as the judged.” In terms of
the actualization of his being, Jesus Christ took our place actively in his life of ministry and passively
in his death and resurrection: “He was judged in our place. And He acted justly in our place.” Jesus
was our substitute in both life and death; he was active and passive in our place. The full scope of his
life, including his “cadaver obedience” (Balthasar) in going to the abyss of hell, is essential to the
nature of the atonement that was accomplished concretely in his very being.

The concept of substitution is too often prematurely associated with the Reformed doctrine of the
penal substitutionary atonement. We need to dissociate the two as clearly as possible. The latter is a
particular version of the satisfaction theory of the atonement that was expounded by Anselm of
 Canterbury. The former is simply a biblical and theologically essential component of any orthodox
Christology. Without the concept of substitution, Jesus’ life and death are emptied of any meaning
beyond mere examples of divine love. Without substitution, we have no assurance that salvation was
accomplished for us in Jesus. Without substitution, the burden of salvation is left upon our shoulders,
and that is a burden too great to bear.

The church depends upon the creedal confession that Jesus Christ came “for us and for our
salvation.” The pro nobis is the heart of the Christian faith; it undergirds the doctrine of justification
by grounding the hope of our salvation in the very being of God. As Barth rightly declares,
“Everything depends upon the fact that the Lord . . . did all this for us.” This is indeed the “narrow
way” of the gospel, but it is also the way of freedom, the way of hope, and the way of love. God is
‘for us’ and not ‘against us.’ “God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died
for us” (Rom. 5:8).

 God’s love was revealed among us in this way: God sent his only Son into the world so that

we might live through him. In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent
his Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins. (1 John 4:9-10)

 For us. For our sins. In our place. These are the qualifications of Christ’s person and work out of

which we establish our theology. This is the concrete center of our being—the center, in fact, of the
whole cosmos. In the gospel story, we discover that “the conversion of the world to [God] took place
in the form of an exchange, a substitution” (Barth, CD IV.1, 75). Jesus Christ is the “turning point of
the world” precisely because in him the “happy exchange” took place: our godlessness was borne
away to the grave by Jesus, and conversely the new being of Easter morning was granted to
humanity.

 The death of Jesus, however, is not only the consequence of that godlessness but at the

same time his bearing of that godlessness. In that Jesus suffers the godlessness of the
world, the conflict with the law which he provoked is decided in his own person. For the
godlessness which will not let God be God leads to death, according to the law. This cursed
death is the fate of a godless world. That Jesus suffers the death which the law foresees for
the godless, because he identified this godlessness as such, is the conflict of the law with the
law which is decided in his own person. And that is what constitutes the God-forsakenness of
the cross. The theological tradition has quite rightly used the category of substitution for this.
 It is, to be sure, a category which presupposes the identity of God with Jesus. It is only on
the basis of this identity that one can call Jesus Christ our substitute in the sense that “Jesus
Christ is in Himself ‘for us’—without our being with Him, without any fulfilment of our being
either with or after Him—on the contrary (Rom. 5:6f), even when we were without strength,
godless, and enemies.” God has then identified himself with the Jesus who made himself sin
for us as our substitute. We have recognized this identification of divine life with the dead
Jesus as the event of divine love. As such, it is the turning point of the world, because God
has interposed himself in the midst of fatal God-forsakenness in order to create a new
relationship with God. (Jüngel, God as the Mystery of the World 367)

 The “happy exchange” that took place in Jesus is not an abstract theory of atonement but instead

the concrete event of divine love. The substitution of Christ’s righteousness for our sinfulness, of his
life for our death, is the meaning of the cross. God’s love identifies the life of God with the death of
Jesus—whose death is identified as the death of all people—and thus God “interposes himself in the
midst of fatal God-forsakenness” as the judge judged in our place. Of course, we must not limit
ourselves to the cross and thereby ignore the scope of this substitution. In the Christ event, God also
identifies the life of God with the life of Jesus, and thus Jesus Christ mediates on our behalf in life and
in death. Our God-forsakenness and our response of faithful obedience are both mediated through
the being of Jesus Christ. In him alone, our estrangement from God is destroyed and in its place a
dialogical relation of ontological correspondence is definitively established. “For our sake he made
him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God” (2 Cor.
5:21).

 What has in fact taken place in Jesus Christ? We will first give the general answer that there

has taken place in Him the effective self-substitution of God for us sinful men. … God does
not merely confront him as God and Lord and Judge, but as such He effectively takes His
place at the side of sinful man, indeed, He takes the place of sinful man, representing him
against Himself His eternal Word becomes flesh. He Himself in His Word becomes man.
Why? In order that He may not only conduct His own case against all men, but take up and
conduct the case of all men, which they themselves cannot conduct, in that process between
Him and them In order that He may be for them what they cannot be for themselves—an
active subject and a passive object in that conflict. In order that He may take over on their
behalf the suffering and activity for which they are not adapted, which is completely beyond
their capacity and will In order to carry through as their Representative the justification which
cannot take place or be carried through if they fall short. Not from His own side. Not as God,
 Lord and Judge. But from their side. As the God, Lord and Judge who is man, servant and
judged. (Barth, CD IV.1, 550-51)

 In the person of Jesus Christ, God stands by our side in solidarity with sinful humanity. But God not

only stands with us (cum nobis); God also stands for us (pro nobis). In Jesus Christ, God exists in
solidarity with humanity as our servant while also taking our place and representing us before the
Father as our sole mediator. God takes our place as both the “active subject” of faithful obedience
and the “passive object” of God’s holy love on the cross. God accomplishes in Jesus Christ what
humanity could never accomplish on its own. God thus self-determines in Jesus to be both the judge
over us and the judged for us, and in this divine self-substitution on behalf of humankind, divine love
exercises itself against the old and for the new: “everything old has passed away; see, everything has
become new!” (2 Cor. 5:17). What has in fact taken place in Jesus Christ? The transition from the old
to the new, from sinfulness to righteousness, from estrangement to reconciliation, from enemy to
friend, from death to life, from love everlasting to love everlasting.

 WHY I AM A UNIVERSALIST, §8: THE DOCTRINE

OF THE ATONEMENT (SECTION IV.4)
 Section IV.4: Parameters for a doctrine of the atonement: actualism

 Now all things are of God, who has reconciled us to Himself through Jesus Christ, and has

given us the ministry of reconciliation, that is, that God was in Christ reconciling the world to
Himself, not imputing their trespasses to them, and has committed to us the word of
reconciliation. Now then, we are ambassadors for Christ, as though God were pleading
through us: we implore you on Christ’s behalf, be reconciled to God. For He made Him who
knew no sin to be sin for us, that we might become the righteousness of God in Him. (2 Cor.
5:18-21; NKJV)

[God] is who He is, and lives as what He is, in that He does what He does. … The whole
being and life of God is an activity, both in eternity and in worldly time, both in Himself as
Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and in His relation to man and all creation. (Barth, CD IV.1, 6-7)

 An orthodox doctrine of the atonement must affirm that God’s economy of salvation is …

(4) … actualized. By establishing actualism as a central parameter in a doctrine of the atonement, I

 knowingly distance myself from both liberal Protestantism and evangelical semi-Pelagianism: the
former emphasizes our subjective imitation of Jesus as a moral example while the latter stresses that
Christ’s atoning sacrifice was made available to all people but is only actualized in our subjective
appropriation of that sacrifice. I will return to my dispute with both of these popular positions in
more detail below, but for now it will suffice to point out that both liberalism and semi-Pelagianism
undermine the exclusivity of Christ. By affirming the actuality of the atonement, I thus affirm the
unique and exclusive nature of Christ’s person and work. Before continuing, however, I will review
the essential features of an actualistic theological ontology.

The question of actualism is not primarily christological; rather, divine actualism first and foremost
concerns our doctrine of God. One of the major revolutions in modern theology was the discovery of
the dogmatic axiom, “God is what God does,” which was itself a clarification of the more basic axiom
governing all orthodox theology, “God alone reveals God.” These two axioms together are an
attempt to speak meaningfully of God’s being without metaphysical speculation, that is, without
resorting to a substance metaphysics or a speculative deus absconditus. In order to accomplish this,
theology must attend to the acts of God—i.e., to the event of God rather than the substance of God.
In particular, an actualistic theology attends to the concrete revelation of God in Jesus Christ as “the
beginning of all the ways and works of God.” (Barth, CD II.2, 316).

 In connexion with the being of God that is here in question, we are not concerned with a

concept of being that is common, neutral and free to choose, but with one which is from the
first filled out in a quite definite way. … This means that we cannot discern the being of God
in any other way than by looking where God Himself gives us Himself to see, and therefore
by looking at His works, at this relation and attitude—in the confidence that in these His
works we do not have to do with any others, but with His works and therefore with God
Himself, with His being as God. (CD II.1, 261)

 Jesus Christ is the locus and criterion of divine revelation, and thus the locus and criterion of God’s

eternal being. God’s very being is made known to humanity in the history of Jesus of Nazareth as the
event of divine self-revelation. Of course, God is not self-evident to humanity but remains known
only through faith by the power of the Holy Spirit: “The being of God is either known by grace or it is
not known at all” (CD II.1, 27). Nevertheless, by faith we confess that in the person of Jesus, God
defines Godself; in Jesus Christ, God acts. Jesus Christ is the event of God. Emmanuel—God with us
—“is not a state, but an event” (CD IV.1, 6). We can thus state these insights in the form of logical
 propositions:

 A. God alone reveals God.

B. Revelation is the act of God.

C. God is (eternally) what God does (historically).

D. Jesus Christ is the historical self-revelation of God.

E. Therefore, Jesus Christ reveals in history who God is eternally; that is, Jesus reveals pro
nobis [for us] who God is in se [in Godself].

F. Therefore, God actualized in Jesus Christ who God is ontologically from all eternity; that
is, God ontologically defined Godself in the historical act of self-revelation in Jesus Christ.

G. To summarize, God is a being-in-act, “which is in no sense act in general but the

concrete, specific action of His love” (CD II.1, 299).

 The assertion that God is a being-in-act means that “the being of God declares His reality: not only

His reality for us—certainly that—but at the same time His own, inner, proper reality, behind which
and above which there is no other” (262). God’s reality—actualized and revealed in Christ—is both
pro nobis and pro se, both ad extra and ad intra, both historical and eternal, both actualistic and
ontological. God’s triune being-in-act thus encompasses the full scope of the divine life both in
eternity and in history: “The whole being and life of God is an activity, both in eternity and in worldly
time, both in Himself as Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and in His relation to man and all creation” (CD
IV.1, 7). The whole life of God is a being-in-act in which the being of God is defined by the acts of
God. By identifying God as a being-in-act, modern theology affirms the closest possible relation
between actualism and ontology, the latter of which I will discuss in the next section (§8.IV.5). This
divine relation—between history and ontology, between act and being—is a actuality in the person
of Jesus Christ.

 What is concerned is always the birth, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, always His

justification of faith, always His lordship in the Church, always His coming again, and
 therefore Himself as our hope. … And in this very event God is who He is. God is He who in
this event is subject, predicate and object; the revealer, the act of revelation, the revealed;
Father, Son and Holy Spirit. God is the Lord active in this event. We say “active” in this
event, and therefore for our salvation and for His glory, but in any case active. Seeking and
finding God in His revelation, we cannot escape the action of God for a God who is not
active. This is not only because we ourselves cannot, but because there is no surpassing or
bypassing at all of the divine action, because a transcendence of His action is nonsense. We
are dealing with the being of God: but with regard to the being of God, the word “event” or
“act” is final, and cannot be surpassed or compromised. To its very deepest depths God’s
Godhead consists in the fact that it is an event—not any event, not events in general, but the
event of His action, in which we have a share in God’s revelation. (CD II.1, 262-63; emphasis
added)

 All of this can be reframed in trinitarian terms. We can say, following Karl Rahner, that the economic

Trinity (what God does) is the immanent Trinity (who God is) and correspondingly the immanent
Trinity (ontology) is the economic Trinity (actualism). In other words, the God ad extra is the God ad
intra, and vice versa. To state it most simply, what God accomplishes historically reveals who God is
ontologically. We thus have no grounds for permitting a split within God between the deus revelatus
[the revealed God] and the deus absconditus [the hidden God]. We know only one God—the God of
grace revealed to us in Jesus Christ—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

 God is who He is, the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, Creator, Reconciler and Redeemer,

supreme, the one true Lord; and He is known in this entirety or He is not known at all. There
is no existence of God behind or beyond this entirety of His being. Whatever we can know
and say about the being of God can be only a continual explanation of this entirety. … We
either know God Himself and therefore entirely, or we do not know Him at all. (CD II.1, 51-
52)

God is wholly and utterly the good-pleasure of His grace and mercy. At any rate, He is wholly
and utterly in His revelation, in Jesus Christ. And therefore it is not only justifiable but
necessary for us to understand His whole being and nature as comprehended and ordered
in His good pleasure. (75)

 While I affirm Rahner’s formula, I also recognize the danger pointed out by Hans Urs von Balthasar,

that we might end up resolving the being of God into a purely immanent reality. In order to protect
 against this, we should remember that Jesus Christ is not the whole triune God incarnate but rather
the incarnate second person of the Trinity. With this qualification in mind, however, we must still
assert that the subject of the life of Jesus is indeed the Logos, the second person of the Trinity. God is
the subject of the life, suffering, death, and resurrection of Jesus, even while the triune God’s self-
differentiation allows God, as the incarnate Logos, to act also as the object of the divine command.
God is internally and eternally the self-positing and self-posited God; God self-determines Godself to
be both subject and object. To ensure that we do not reduce the triune God into God’s historical self-
manifestation, we should keep in mind the basic principle of Scripture: “All things are of God, who
has reconciled us to himself through Jesus Christ, … God was in Christ reconciling the world to
himself” (2 Cor. 5.18-19, NKJV; emphasis added). God was actually in Christ—so that Jesus Christ
truly acts as God and reveals the being of God—but God is not limited to Christ. The triunity of God
enables revelation and prevents limitation. God precludes any attempt to exhaust the divine richness
by confining the being of God to one particular system of thought.

If God ontologically defines Godself out of the historical actuality of divine revelation, then we have
the basis for a proper theological method ordered by God’s self-revelation. As stated above
(Proposition A), the theological datum governing this entire project is that God alone reveals God.
With this in mind, we can develop a theological method which (1) examines what God does in the
history of God’s covenant relations with humanity and (2) then extrapolates from that concrete
reality who God must be ontologically to enable the actualization of that historical event. In other
words, an actualistic theological ontology thinks after (Nachdenken) the movement of God’s being in
time and space. We do not think before (i.e., speculate about) God’s actions; rather, we allow God to
define Godself within the concrete event of revelation. Theological thought is thus reflection on the
event of God:

 To think God means to be taken along by God. Theological thought is in a profound sense a

process of being taken along. (Jüngel, God as the Mystery of the World 159)

 What follows from this is the operative principle in a theological system which “thinks after” God’s

being: If God has done x, then God must be capable of x in God’s own being. For example, if God has
become incarnate in Jesus of Nazareth, then God ad intra is a God capable of incarnation. The
actuality of God’s movement in history depends upon the divine possibility of this actuality;
conversely, we only determine what is possible for God based on what God has already
accomplished. The acts of God (ad extra) truly reveal the life of God (ad intra), just as the life of God
is the ground of possibility for the acts of God. An actualistic ontology will thus distinguish between
 possibility and actuality in the triune life of God—not through speculation but by attending to the
concrete, historical reality of God’s being-in-act as a being-in-becoming.

 No concept of God arrived at independent of the reality of Jesus Christ may decide what is

possible and impossible for God. Rather, we are to say from what God as man in Jesus
Christ is, does and suffers: ‘God can do this.’ (Jüngel, God’s Being Is in Becoming 99)

 What bearing does any of this have upon the doctrine of the atonement? The doctrine of the

atonement is concerned, first and foremost, with the event of reconciliation—a singular, exclusive,
unrepeatable event. The name of this event is Jesus Christ. The doctrine of the atonement is not
primarily concerned with how but with who. It is not an abstract teaching on how guilt is removed
but is rather the most concrete doctrine—concrete precisely because it is cruciform. At the heart of
the gospel stands the most particular and decisive act of God: the cross of Christ. The cross, death,
and resurrection of Jesus Christ—the mysterium paschale—is the sine qua non of the atonement and
thus the heart of the euangelion, the “good news” of the gospel. At the heart of the Christian faith
stands the person of Jesus Christ, who is indistinguishable from the reconciling work of God that was
accomplished in his person: “God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself” (2 Cor. 5.19). Jesus
unites in himself act and being, event and ontology, history and eternity.

If the event of Jesus Christ is indeed decisive for reconciliation to take place between sinful humanity
and the holy triune God, what is the nature of this event? What does it mean to call the atonement
an act of God? Christian tradition has tended to view the atonement in two different ways, and by
this I do not mean the different theories of the atonement. Outside and above the different theories,
Christian tradition has viewed the atonement in one of two ways, which can be described using
different pairs of terms: objective/subjective, exclusive/inclusive, actualized/non-actualized. Each of
these pairs offers slightly different perspectives on the same basic question: Did Christ completely
and actually atone for sin in himself, once and for all? The first term in each pair answers this
question in the affirmative, the latter in the negative.

What is the significance of either position? (1) If one affirms that the atonement was actualized in
Christ, then one affirms that Christ’s atonement for sins was objective and exclusive; that is, Christ
excludes all other attempts to achieve salvation by locating salvation objectively in his own person as
the messiah of God. (2) If one affirms that the atonement was not actualized in Christ, then one
affirms that Christ’s atonement for sins is (at least potentially) inclusive of other means of salvation
(by works, other religions, etc.) and that salvation is thus located not in the objective reality of Christ
 but in the subjective reality of the believer. The actuality of the atonement thus means that the
atonement was fully, objectively, and exclusively accomplished in Jesus Christ. The non-actuality of
the atonement means that the atonement was not completed in the event of Jesus Christ and thus
that Christ is not the sole and exclusive basis for reconciliation with God.

By affirming divine actualism—and thus the actuality of the atonement—we rule out the idea that
Jesus only made reconciliation possible. We deny that Jesus made reconciliation a potential reality,
which we as believers must then actualize by our faith. By undermining the actuality of the
atonement, one also undermines the event-character of the life of Jesus as the act of God. The very
being of Jesus Christ becomes a potentiality, not an actuality. Correspondingly, any attempt to lessen
the actuality of the atonement implies that the subjective completion of the atonement is not only a
completion of reconciliation, but the completion of God’s own being in Christ. The very being of God
is at stake in the doctrine of the atonement.

Furthermore, with the loss of actuality and finality in the event of reconciliation, Jesus becomes
merely a teacher and moral influence who urges his followers to actualize his example. Jesus does
not accomplish anything exclusively on his own as the Son of God—other than perhaps living the
perfect moral life. Denying the actuality of the atonement denies the centrality and divinity of Christ
and elevates the human believer as the center of the faith. In other words, whenever we lessen the
actuality of God’s reconciling work in Christ, we elevate our own status as reconciling partners with
God. Whenever we lessen divine actualism, we threaten our very knowledge of God as a being-in-act
and undermine our assurance of grace and salvation in Jesus Christ. Divine actualism allows us to be
passive recipients of God’s reconciling love and frees us from the unbearable responsibility of trying
to earn God’s favor. Divine actualism preserves God’s relation to us as a relation of pure grace.

 We preach and teach the Gospel evangelically, then, in such a way as this: God loves you

so utterly and completely that he has given himself for you in Jesus Christ his beloved Son,
and has thereby pledged his very Being as God for your salvation. In Jesus Christ God has
actualised his unconditional love for you in your human nature in such a once and for all
way, that he cannot go back upon it without undoing the Incarnation and the Cross and
thereby denying himself. Jesus Christ died for you precisely because you are sinful and
utterly unworthy of him, and has thereby already made you his own before and apart from
your ever believing in him. He has bound you to himself by his love in a way that he will
never let you go, for even if you refuse him and damn yourself in hell his love will never
cease. Therefore, repent and believe in Jesus Christ as your Lord and Saviour. … He has
 believed for you, fulfilled your human response to God, even made your personal decision
for you, … so that in Jesus Christ you are already accepted by him. (T.F. Torrance, The
Mediation of Christ 94)

 The gracious actuality of the atonement involves both the death and life of Jesus, both the objective

sacrifice and the objective response. Jesus Christ is the Mediator, whose vicarious mediation restores
us in relation to God through his death to sin and his life of righteousness. In Jesus Christ, both sides
of reconciliation are complete: both the movement of God to humanity and the movement of
humanity to God. In Christ alone, God not only actualizes the divine forgiveness and acceptance of
sinful humanity, but God also actualizes the human repentance and decision for God. Divine
actualism ensures that salvation is sola gratia—by grace alone.

 God is He who in this event is subject, predicate and object; the revealer, the act of

revelation, the revealed; Father, Son and Holy Spirit. God is the Lord active in this event. We
say “active” in this event, and therefore for our salvation and for His glory, but in any case
active. Seeking and finding God in His revelation, we cannot escape the action of God for a
God who is not active. (CD II.1, 263)

 God is the Lord, as Barth stresses, and as the Lord, God is active “for our salvation and for His glory.”

God does not depend on human creatures to finish the work of redemption and reconciliation, just
as God does not depend on us to create the cosmos. God is the personal event of Love, and we are
the recipients of the gracious gifts overflowing from this event for all people. God is subject and
object, revealer and revealed, giver and receiver, speaker and hearer, beginning and end, origin and
telos. The event of reconciliation begins and ends within God’s own being, and yet we participate in
this reconciliation because we participate in the being of Jesus Christ who assumed human nature
‘for us and for our salvation.’ God does not need us, yet God freely and graciously makes us God’s
covenant partners. God has divinely decided to not be God without us, and thus to be God for us.

I shall now return to where we began this discussion of divine actualism. The affirmation of actualism
has a two-fold polemic in mind: First, actualism denies semi-Pelagianism, which states that we have
to meet God half-way; that we have to freely seek God, and then God will grant us the grace of
salvation. We see this most prominently in evangelical revivalism, in which people are implored to
step forward toward the altar and make a decision for Christ. The free human decision is what
completes the event of reconciliation—and thus also the being of God in Jesus Christ. Apart from this
decision, salvation remains merely potential. Calvinism and Augustinian-Thomism state that this first
 move is purely an act of divine grace, because these were the people elected by God in pre-temporal
eternity (double predestination). The former position (Calvinism) believes that these people are
eternally secure, while the latter (Augustinian-Thomism) believes such people must maintain their
salvation through penance and works of love. Universalism accepts all the tenets of the former
except that it refuses to place limits around the scope of God’s grace: “God was in Christ, reconciling
the world to himself.”

Second, divine actualism rejects the liberal position of Christ as mere moral example. Jesus as
example does not definitively accomplish anything in himself but only urges his followers to imitate
his example in their own lives. Divine actualism is replaced with divine exhortation. But exhortation
without reconciliation is salvation by works, while reconciliation—when it comes first and comes
from God—liberates us to live according to the exhortations of Christ. Abelard’s liberal theological
position is untenable for anyone wishing to affirm a high Christology that proclaims boldly: “God was
in Christ.”

The question of the atonement—as the christological-soteriological question about God’s being-in-
act—is thus intimately connected to the question of faith. Do we complete the atonement by
professing faith in Christ? Or do we affirm something that is already true? Does our faith reconcile us
to God, or does our faith instead recognize and affirm that God has indeed reconciled the world to
himself in Jesus Christ? The answer of classical Protestantism was and is that God alone reconciles,
and we are the recipients of that reconciling love. In light of divine actualism, we must then define
faith, as we addressed in §7, as our Yes to God’s prior and actualized Yes to us in Jesus Christ. Faith
asserts that the atonement is complete—“it is finished”—and yet also affirms that the ontological
reality of Christ’s reconciling work must become existentially effective—“be reconciled to God.” Faith
is faith in the actuality of the atonement, in the event of Jesus Christ, in the gracious being-in-act of
God as Deus pro nobis.

 The simplest answer to the question of the nature of human faith is that faith is the human

‘Yes’, the affirmation, coming from the heart, to the definitive affirmation from God which
comes to us in the occasion of our justification. It is the human ‘Yes’ to that clear and already
accomplished negation by God which we have because of that definitive affirmation in Jesus
Christ. ... Believers agree that God’s condemning and acquitting judgement is already
accomplished in the person of Jesus Christ. (Jüngel, Justification 237)
 Faith ... is our grateful Yes and Amen to God’s own Yes and Amen, which has come into
being in Jesus Christ (2 Cor. 1:19f). There can be no additions made to this Amen. (251)

 Divine actualism is no abstract teaching about God’s being. Actualism is the most concrete and

central affirmation of the Christian faith. The actuality of God ensures that the triune God we
encounter in history is the triune God who lives for all eternity in the repleteness of God’s being-in-
communion. The actuality of God ensures that what Christ accomplished in his life, death, and
resurrection is indeed ‘for us and for our salvation,’ effective and complete, objective and exclusive,
in our place and on our behalf, pro nobis and pro omnibus, total and free. The actuality of God
promises that our condemnation and acquittal, our negation and affirmation, our judgment and
justification, are already accomplished in Christ, thus liberating us to be passive recipients of God’s
overflowing grace as participants in the being of Jesus Christ.

In conclusion, the narrative of God’s being-in-act frees us for faith now and awaits the eschaton with
hope. The actuality of the triune God involves the past event of reconciliation, the present event of
reunion, and the future event of resurrection: “for as all die in Adam, so all will be made alive in
Christ” (1 Cor. 15:22). Only as the actuality of reconciliation occurs extra nos in Jesus Christ can
reunion with God be existentially realized in nobis and eschatologically perfected pro omnibus. Our
hope and salvation is solus Christus—Christ alone. The actuality of God thus takes the form of a
servant and the shape of a cross. Divine actualism is the assurance of the faith, the confidence in the
truth, and the confession of the gospel: “God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself.” Yes and
Amen.

 WHY I AM A UNIVERSALIST, §8: THE DOCTRINE

OF THE ATONEMENT (SECTION IV.5)
 Section IV.5: Parameters for a doctrine of the atonement: ontology

An orthodox doctrine of the atonement must affirm that God’s economy of salvation is …

(5) … ontological. Ontology is the branch of metaphysics dealing with the nature of being. Classically,
ontology is the study of “the ‘what’ … which indicates the substance of a thing” (Metaphysics VII.1).
To describe something as “ontological” is to relate this thing to being itself. The ontology of God is
thus an investigation into the nature of God’s being. Already in previous posts, particularly on
actualism, we have investigated ontology at some length. The qualification of actualism means that
ontology in this study is no longer concerned with “the substance of a thing” but rather with the act
of a thing, the event of a thing’s being. An actualistic ontology thus understands being as the
consequent of act. At the very least, being and act coinhere so that being is being-as-act and act is
act-as-being. And on the level of epistemology, God’s being—qualitatively distinct from creaturely
being—is only noematically accessible in light of divine action. The basic contours of an actualistic
ontology we have already sketched in the previous section, along with the identity of the atonement
as the reconciling act of God in Jesus Christ. Our concern now is to focus on the ontological nature of
the atonement, i.e., how this reconciling act is definitive of both God’s being and ours.

The ontology of the atonement follows from the acceptance of two presuppositions: (1) a christological actualistic
ontology, and (2) a strong doctrine of the hypostatic union in Jesus Christ. The latter implies other theological
assumptions which have been and will be discussed when necessary, including but not limited to the following: (3) the
objectivity of the incarnation, which asserts the efficacy of the incarnation apart from our subjective awareness of
that christological event; and (4) the doctrine of election as developed by Karl Barth. Now of these theological topics,
(1) and (4) have been addressed at length already, and (3) has been a theme throughout §8. Consequently, I will
devote the rest of this section to the hypostatic union and the ontological grounding of our reconciliation in Jesus
Christ. Along the way, of course, I will articulate the other emphases when necessary for explanatory purposes.

The event of the atonement looks in two directions at once: backward to the protological act of
election and forward to the eschatological realization of new being in the ecclesial community. Both
dimensions—past and future—find their ontic center in the person of Jesus Christ, who is the hinge
for divine and human history. Jesus Christ is both the God who elects in pretemporal eternity to be
God for us and the humanity elected by God to be humanity for God. As Deus pro nobis, Jesus Christ
is both self-positing and self-posited, electing and elected, the God who assumes and the humanity
that is assumed. Jesus is the ontological unity of the divine Logos and the human nature; the triune
God and the ecclesial community are indissolubly linked in the incarnate Christ. In the person of
Christ we look backwards and forwards, inward into the being of God ad intra and outward into the
being of the church. We find this hinge between God and humanity in the hypostatic union.

The atonement is an ontological event because of the hypostatic union of the divine and human
natures in Jesus Christ. In the incarnation, the Logos definitively assumed human nature, joining God
and humanity in the decisive act of God ad extra. The assumptio carnis (assumption of flesh) is a
clarification of God’s being in carne (in the flesh). Jesus Christ is not merely the Logos in the form of a
human; he also embodies and actualizes the gracious taking up of humanity into the life of God. In
the joining of the Logos to human nature, the triune God actively assumes what is other than God
into the very being of God. In other words, the incarnation is itself the event of reconciliation. The
very act of incarnation is the reconciliation of what is not-God with God, and thus the incarnation
 itself points forward in expectation of the cross. The incarnation depends upon the essential events
of crucifixion and resurrection, in which God redeemed sinful humanity and reconciled the world to
Godself. The assumption of humanity in the incarnation of Jesus Christ presupposes the mission of
the Son to suffer and die in the place of sinful humanity. The atonement is an act of God which
encompasses the entire life of Jesus from birth to ascension.

In the assumptio carnis, the Logos did not assume an abstract humanity without any relation to
particular human persons; rather the Logos assumed the concrete human nature that is common to
us all.

 Jesus the human being (the homo humanus) is identical with human nature (the natura

humana), so that Christian doctrine is right to express the mystery of God’s becoming human
not as him taking on human life (assumptio hominis), but as him assuming human nature
(assumptio humanae naturae) in the person of the Son of God. In this way the early
theologians with their language and thinking about substance and ontology emphasized the
universal scope of the identity of the Son of God with the one distinctive person Jesus. In so
doing they dared to think that Jesus Christ is the sacramentum mundi – the generally
recognized great Sacrament per se (cf. 1 Tim. 3:16). Not only was God shown as reconciling
the world in him, but this reconciliation was accomplished in him. (Jüngel, Justification 161-
62)

 Jesus is the sacrament of the world, and thus the sacrament of each individual person. In the

assumption of human flesh, Jesus assumed my flesh. Consequently, we are joined to Christ in a real
and ontological manner. Our very life is grounded in him: his death to sin is our death, his life of
obedience is our life, and the reality of his resurrection will be our reality (2 Cor. 5:14-15). According
to a christological actualistic ontology, our being is a being-in-act only insofar as our being is located
in the being of Jesus Christ. His life is our life; his humanity is our humanity; his being-in-act is our
being-in-act. The primacy of the past event of Christ’s atoning life and death does not reduce reality
into a crude christomonism, but instead properly situates our own present historical existence within
the narrative of God’s gracious and sovereign will. Thus, it is necessary for us to distinguish properly
between past and present, between Christ and us. At another time I will address in detail the three
tenses of salvation—past, present, and future—but for now it will suffice to examine the ontology of
the atonement in relation to the past reality of Jesus Christ and the present reality of believers.

Our thesis is that the person of Jesus Christ is the definitive and constitutive center of each person’s
being. Against fears that this evacuates present reality of any significance, we must assert that this
kind of strong doctrine of the incarnation does not undermine but rather preserves a proper place
for our present existence by redefining the being of humanity as the humanity of Jesus Christ. The
axiom undergirding this thesis comes from Col. 3:3: “For you have died and your life is hidden with
Christ in God.” Our life—our true life—is hidden from us in the person of Jesus Christ, and thus in the
being of God. Our identity is not located in ourselves (in nobis) but outside of ourselves (extra nos).
The external center of existence—our de-centeredness in Christ—is a reality known only by faith.
Through faith alone, we awaken with new eyes to see that the ontological ground of our being is
indeed Jesus Christ, even though present reality would seem to indicate otherwise. Faith, as the
author of Hebrews reminds us, is “the conviction of things not seen,” and one of the things “not
seen” is the center of our existence. Often Christians confuse the center of their being with the
“soul,” which is a metaphor that simply means we are more than the sum of our biological parts.
However, this extra something, this superadded plus of being which often bears the name “soul,” is
not something we possess, but instead a relation toward the external ground of our existence in
God. Thus, it is theologically more appropriate not to speak of a “soul” but instead to identify the
ontological ground of our being in Jesus Christ; or rather, the ground of our being is Jesus Christ.

The ontology of the atonement thus connects past, present, and future in the person of Jesus Christ
as the center of both human history in general and each person’s history in particular. Christ’s
actualized existence is the ontological locus of our existence, to which we are existentially
conformed by faith alone (sola fide). Our ontological being is Christ; our ontic-existential being is in
conformity to Christ (conformitas Christi). To put this another way, our essential being is the
consequent of God’s acting in Jesus Christ ‘for us and our salvation,’ while our existential being is the
consequent of God’s acting in us through faith. Both dimensions of reconciliation—past and present,
ontological and existential—are the work of God who reconciles the world to Godself. The former
—“God was in Christ” (2 Cor. 5:19)—definitively establishes our new being through the life, death,
and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth; the latter—“God in us” (Deus in nobis)—existentially disrupts
and reorients us through the ‘word of the cross’ which creates faith.

In more traditional terms, the former is the doctrine of the atonement and the latter is the doctrine of justification.
Here, however, we are expanding the atonement to include past, present, and future. The past event of reconciliation
is the atoning work of Jesus Christ; the present event of justification is the unifying work of the Spirit; and the future
event of resurrection is the consummating work of the triune God “who is above all and through all and in all” (Eph.
4:6) and will in the eschaton be “all in all” (1 Cor. 15:28). Together, the three temporal stages of reconciliation all
depend upon the primal act of the Father who creates and elects through the Son and in the Spirit.
Atonement (the past event of new creation) is thus intimately related to justification (the present
event of new creation). In the same way that justification is not a purely forensic event but is
ontologically effective, so too is the atonement an ontological event. The reason why reconciliation
and ontology must be thought together is found in the person of Jesus, who establishes the
atonement between God and humanity and declares the justifying ‘word of the cross.’ “For Christ is
our peace,” as the author of Ephesians declares, in whose flesh God created “one new humanity in
place of the two, thus making peace” (Eph. 2:14-15). The accomplishment of the atonement in the
person of Jesus, however, is not the end of the story. Even though Jesus reconciled the world “to
God in one body through the cross,” he now proclaims “peace to you who were far off and peace to
those who were near; for through him both of us have access in one Spirit to the Father” (Eph. 2:16-
17). Peace was ontologically established in the person of Christ, in whom “one new humanity” was
created. But now God brings this new humanity to us in the existential event of justification. The
faithfulness of Jesus is the ground for our faith in him, and the being of Jesus as the eschatologically
new human person is the proleptic realization of our new being. Jesus is the true and definitive
imago Dei, and we ontologically correspond to him by conforming to the imago Christi through faith
alone.

Faith is thus an ontologically reflective Yes to God’s ontologically effective Yes to us in Jesus Christ;
that is, faith brings one’s individual being into correspondence with one’s true being in the person of
Christ. Faith, as the gracious gift of God, ontically connects past and present, Christ and humanity. By
grace alone (sola gratia), our being-in-faith corresponds to the being-in-faith of Jesus—a
correspondence that awaits the eschatological consummation of God’s reality toward which both
past and present point in hopeful expectation. Both aspects, the christological and the existential
—‘there and then’ and ‘here and now’—are entirely grace. Reconciliation in Christ and the existential
realization of new being are an overflowing of God’s utterly gratuitous being-as-love.

In conclusion, we must not shy away from ontology. The great christological formulas are rooted in
questions of ontology, though their presuppositions are far different from our own. We have not
touched on the communicatio idiomatum or the patristic emphasis on deification, nor have we
addressed the christological conflict between deification and impassibility in patristic theology or the
conflict between a classical substance ontology and a modern actualistic ontology. Our intention
here has been simply to articulate the basis for an ontology of the atonement, and this basis is none
other than Christ Jesus our Lord. The incarnation is more than a concept to talk about during Advent;
it is the ground of our hope. The hypostatic union is more than a term for academic theologians; it is
the basis for our identity, the locus of our humanity. A Christian ontology begins and ends here, with
the incarnate Son of God who is extra nos, pro nobis, and by the grace of God, in nobis. The heart of
 the gospel and the locus of our identity is found in the God who became Emmanuel, God with us, in
Jesus Christ—the one who graciously took on our estranged humanity in order to awaken us to new
life. In him alone we hear the words of liberating hope: “See, I am making all things new” (Rev. 21:5).

 Universalism: ESCHATOLOGY
 The Old Testament presents a clear and consistent view of human afterlife: every
person who dies descends to a place called Sheol.  That’s the Hebrew term; the Greek
word for it is Hades.  This depiction, of course, sharply contrasts with the traditional view
that righteous human beings go to heaven while wicked human beings go to hell. 
Nonetheless, it is beyond dispute that the Old Testament identifies but one destination for
the dead:  Sheol/Hades.

 Anyone who contradicts this is either ignorant of the Old Testament or dishonest about its
contents.  Most people just assume that the Bible teaches the traditional view without
ever examining the Scriptures themselves on this subject.  Such examination is
complicated by the fact that the traditional view has dominated the minds of translators
such that only study in the original languages or in literal translations with concordances
allows a clear view of what the Scriptures actually teach.  Most people don’t have the
time or resources for such study so they are at the mercy of what they have heard.  Thus
there are many people who think they have a biblical understanding of the afterlife, when
all they really have is a story that someone told them was biblical – with maybe some
isolated “proof texts” thrown in for reinforcement.  (If you don’t trust my portrayal of the
Scriptures, you can do your own word studies with any exhaustive English-Greek-
Hebrew concordance; Appendix I will give you a start, but you can just as easily start
with your own Bible and concordance.)

 This worldview of Sheol/Hades below as the resting place of all the dead was fully
embraced by Jesus and, of course, His apostles.  After all, the Old Testament was the
Bible to them.  They based their lives and everything they believed upon what it said.

 The apostles wrote the New Testament based upon what Jesus had taught them.  What
Jesus taught was that resurrection would come for the dead, and it would lead to heaven. 
This was a stunning revelation for while many had looked forward to a resurrection of the
dead, they expected it to be on earth…not in heaven.

 Just as there was only one destination identified for the dead in the Old Testament
(Sheol/Hades), there was only one destination identified for the resurrected in the New
Testament (heaven).  After His own resurrection, while proving to His disciples that He
had permanently conquered death, Jesus opened their minds to see how this entire plan
had been prophesied in the Old Testament.  Thus Jesus was not departing from the Old
 Testament but rather bringing to light what had been hidden there all along.  Afterward,
He Himself demonstrated the routing of resurrection when He ascended to heaven.

 There is much more that can be said about the two truths outlined above, and the book
indeed says much more.  However, these two truths are the essential foundation upon
which we may know that everyone goes to heaven.  For if the Old Testament said that all
who died went below to Sheol/Hades, and the New Testament says that all who die are
resurrected and go to heaven, then it follows that the Bible says everyone is going to
heaven.

 http://www.blogforthelordjesusbiblenotes.com/the-biblical-case-for-everyone-going-to-
heaven-appendix-ii-summary-of-the-book/

Universalism: A Summary Defense

Early in the history of this blog I posted my reasons for subscribing to universalism. Lately I've
wanted to pull those arguments into a summary post. Here, then, are the reasons I believe in universal
reconciliation, the eventual redemption of all of humanity.

1. Talbott's Propositions (along with a discussion of moral luck and human volition)
The philosopher Thomas Talbott has us consider the following three propositions:
1. God’s redemptive love extends to all human sinners equally in
the sense that he sincerely wills or desires the redemption of each
one of them.
2. Because no one can finally defeat God’s redemptive love or
resist it forever, God will triumph in the end and successfully
accomplish the redemption of everyone whose redemption he
sincerely wills or desires.
3. Some human sinners will never be redeemed but will instead
be separated from God forever.
All three propositions have ample biblical support. But, as Talbott points out, you cannot, logically,
endorse all three. Talbott goes on to show how the various soteriological systems adopt two of the
propositions and reject/marginalize the third. Summarizing how this happens:

1. Calvinism/Augustinianism: Adopt #2 and #3. God will

accomplish his plans and some will be separated from God
forever. This implies a rejection of #1, that God wills to save all
humanity. This conclusion is captured in the doctrine of election
and double predestination (i.e., God predestines some to be saved
and some to be lost).
2. Arminianism: Adopt #1 and #3. God loves all people and
some people will be separated from God forever. This implies that
 God's desires--for example, to save everyone--can be thwarted and
unfulfilled. This is usually explained by an appeal to human
choice. Due to free will people can resist/reject God. Thus, where
a Calvinist puts the "blame" on God for someone going to hell
(election) Arminians place the blame on people (free will).
3. Universalism: Adopt #1 and #2. God loves all people and
will accomplish his purposes. This implies a rejection of #3. The
implication is that God will continue his salvific work in some
postmortem fashion. Note that this postmortem salvific work can,
and often does, involve a strong vision of hell and can be
Christocentric.
I reject Calvinism because I find the doctrine of election to be loathsome. I don't find God worthy of
worship, praise or service if he created people with the intention of torturing most of them forever.
True, such actions would demonstrate his sovereignty and "justice" but it is hard to see those actions
as loving and praise-worthy. Also, I don't see how Calvinism allows for a dynamic and interactive
relationship between God and humanity. We end up being mere puppets and playthings.

To be fair, the reason Calvinism and Reformed theology leaves me cold is largely biographical. I
grew up in an Arminian tradition. Since college, however, I've grown disillusioned with free will
soteriological and theodicy systems. For three interrelated reasons:

1. Moral Luck: We begin life in very different places, morally

and religiously. Some people get a head start on Christianity.
Others are raised in different religious traditions. Further, our life
journeys can be highly variable, religiously and morally. A child
might be abused by a church leader. A missionary might never
show up at your village.
2. The Timing of Death is Unpredictable: The death event is
arbitrary in its timing. Some people live to a ripe old age and get
to repent of past sins or find the time to explore Christianity (if
they were born into another religion). Other people die young and
never get the chance, through no fault of their own, to repent or
explore Christianity.
3. Free Will is a Non-Starter: As a psychologist I've come to
believe that human volition (will) is very circumscribed and
anemic in its powers. Humans have the capacity for choice, and
perhaps freedom within a certain range, but at the end of the day
human choice is finite and limited. It can only do so much.
Given that our moral and religious journeys are qualitatively different (e.g., moral luck: some people
get head starts), that death is random (which can arbitrarily lengthen or shorten your religious and
moral journey) and a realistic view of human volitional powers (there is no radical form of free will)
it was difficult for me to maintain the Arminian stance of my religious heritage.

So, having rejected both Reformed and Arminian thinking I've settled on universalism as the
soteriological and eschatological system that best describes my views on salvation and redemption.

2. A Morally Coherent View of Justice

Most defenders of a classical view of hell eventually make appeals to God's justice. However, for
justice to be justice it has to meet a few, almost axiomatic, standards. Most importantly, all notions of
justice involve proportionality. As they say, the punishment must fit the crime. Thus, a punishment of
infinite duration and unspeakable torment fails to meet any moral standard of justice. More, if we
want to link justice to love then there needs to be a rehabilitative facet to the punishment. Not all
justice is rehabilitative. Capital punishment isn't. But a loving justice will try to accomplish three
things:

1. Vengeance for Victims (Justice)

2. Rehabilitation of the Perpetrators (Grace)
3. The Reconciliation of Perpetrators and Victims (Forgiveness
and Repentance)
Of the major soteriological systems only universalism gets us all three of these things.

3. Missional Concerns Over the Soteriological/Eschatological Disjoint

Many people in the church see salvation as a binary, you are either saved or lost. Christians then
fetishize this status, obsessing over who, at Judgment Day, will be saved or lost. This causes the
Christian community to become otherworldly in its focus, ignoring the cosmic (e.g., social, political,
ecological) and developmental (i.e., sanctification) aspects of salvation. This becomes a missional
problem in the church, where people just look to "get saved," eschatologically speaking. But it is
hard to fault people for this fetish if they are seeing things correctly, that there will be a non-
reversible binary judgement at the end of all things. In short, as much as missional church leaders
want to instill the notion that salvation is this-worldly as well as other-worldly they will fail, for clear
psychological reasons, unless they undermine the classic doctrine of hell. Leave the classical
teaching of hell intact (overtly or by trying to ignore it) and you'll compromise your missional effort.
Like it or not, hell and mission are intimately related. Worries over hell (which can't be helped if you
leave the doctrine intact) will import otherworldliness into the mission of the church.

4. Regulating Passages
The biggest objection to universalism involves the passages regarding hell in the bible. However,
there is no doctrinal teaching that doesn't have contradictory tensions within the biblical witness.
Witness the hermeneutical and exegetical diversity within the Christian tradition. In short,
universalists are not in any unique position. This is the way it is with just about any doctrine.

The issue, then, ultimately boils down to which biblical texts will regulate doctrinal choices. For
example, which of the two passages regulates your doctrine regarding female leadership in the
church?

1. "I do not permit a woman to teach, nor have authority over a

man." (1 Timothy 2.12)
2. "There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or
free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in
Christ Jesus." (Galatians 3.28)
If you are a Complementarian Passage #1 regulates your understanding of Passage #2. If you are an
Egalitarian Passage #2 regulates how you understand Passage #1. And there is no way to resolve any
debate between the two camps as these are meta-biblical choices.
A similar thing holds for the soteriological debates. Universalists have regulating passages that frame
how they understand the texts about hell. Here are four regulating texts for universalists:

1. "God is love." (1 John 4.8)

2. "For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him,
and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things
on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood,
shed on the cross." (Colossians 1.19-20)
3. "When he has done this, then the Son himself will be made
subject to him who put everything under him, so that God may be
all in all." (1 Corinthians 15.28)
4. "For God has bound all men over to disobedience so that he
may have mercy on them all." (Romans 11.32)
As with the gender texts one has to choose regulating texts about hell. And these are meta-biblical
choices. People who believe in a classical vision of hell will read the four passages above through
that lens. Universalists, by contrast, will read the texts on hell through the lens of these four passages.
That is, they will teach that hell must:

1. Be a manifestation that "God is love."

2. Be a means to "reconcile all things" to God
3. Allow God to be "all in all"
4. Provide a way for God to "have mercy upon all"
5. Hope
I think it was Karl Barth who said that he couldn't be sure if universalism was true but that it
was every Christian's obligation to hope so.
http://experimentaltheology.blogspot.com/2009/12/universalism-summary-defense.html

Universalism and the Open Wound of

Life
One of the struggles in subscribing to universal reconciliation are the constant misunderstandings.
Perhaps the biggest misunderstanding involves the distinctions between soteriology and theodicy.

If you are new here, let me define those terms. Soteriology has to do with salvation. Theodicy has to
do with the problem of horrific suffering (sometimes called "the problem of evil" or "the problem of
pain").

When I say I believe in universalism 99% of the time people think I'm attracted to the position
because I have soft heart, soteriologically speaking. I want a happy ending where "everyone gets to
go to heaven." For some reason, it is believed, probably because I'm a theological flower child, I just
can't stomach the Judgment and Sovereignty of God.
So the debate that typically ensues is all about soteriological issues: sin, forgiveness, judgment,
justice, heaven, and hell.

To be clear, those issues are of interest to me. But what most people fail to understand is that my
universalism, and most of the universalism I encounter within Christianity, isn't motivated by
soteriological issues. The doctrine isn't attractive because it solves the problem of hell. The doctrine
is attractive because it solves (or at least addresses) the problem of pain.

(And this, incidentally, is why I don't think annihilationism is of any real help here. Annihilationism
is still trying to fix the problem of hell rather than the real problem. Which, for me, is a sign of its
theological cluelessness.)

In short, universalism, for me and many others, is about theodicy. Not soteriology. The issue isn't
about salvation (traditionally understood). It's about suffering. Universalism, as best I can tell, is the
only Christian doctrine that takes the problem of suffering seriously. As evidence for this, just note
that when a theologian starts taking suffering seriously he or she starts moving toward universalism.
Examples include Jürgen Moltmann, Marilyn McCord Adams, and John Hick. Take suffering
seriously and the doctrine soon follows.

I gravitated to universalism in college because the problem of horrific suffering became (and
remains) the defining theological predicament of my faith experience. It is the obsessio of my
theological world. And while I find the doctrine of hell distasteful, this is due, again, to my theodicy
concerns. Is God really loving if he tortures people for eternity? More, isn't "accepting Jesus as your
Lord and Savior" largely contingent upon where you were born in the world, a manifestation of what
philosophers call moral luck? In every case it all goes back to theodicy.

Here's a test you can try on people. Whenever you find a person who doesn't "get" universalism (not
that they have to believe it, they just have to "get" it) you'll have person who doesn't "get" the
problem of horrific suffering. The two, in my experience, are of a piece.

Even on my own campus, where there are some very sharp theological minds, I am often frustrated
by how often people just don't get it. Not the universalism. I'm talking about the problem of
suffering. Because if they get the latter they get the former.

I was reminded of this association this week while reading Moltmann's Trinity and Kingdom. In it he
writes:
It is in suffering that the whole human question about God arises; for incomprehensible suffering
calls the God of men and women in question. The suffering of a single innocent child is an irrefutable
rebuttal of the notion of the almighty and kindly God in heaven. For a God who lets the innocent
suffer and who permits senseless death is not worthy to be called God at all...The theism of the
almighty and kindly God comes to an end on the rock of suffering...

The question of theodicy is not a speculative question; it is a critical one. It is the all-embracing
eschatological question. It is not purely theoretical, for it cannot be answered with any new theory
about the existing world. It is a practical question which will only be answered through experience of
the new world in which 'God will wipe away every tear from their eyes.' It is not really a question at
all, in the sense of something we can ask or not ask, like other questions. It is the open wound of life
in this world. It is the real task of faith and theology to make it possible for us to survive, to go on
living, with this open wound. The person who believes will not rest content with any slickly
explanatory answer to the theodicy question. And he will also resist any attempts to soften the
question down. The more a person believes, the more deeply he experiences pain over the suffering
in the world, and the more passionately he asks about God and the new creation.
Innocent suffering is the open wound of life and the real task of faith and theology is "to make it
possible for us to survive, to go on living, with this open wound."

Now here's the deal. You either get that, or you don't.

And if you don't, well, I'm sure you're a very nice and devout person.

But you'll never understand why I believe in universalism.

http://experimentaltheology.blogspot.com/2011/02/universalism-and-open-wound-of-life.html