Third New Book Excerpt: Atonement-Based Theories of Universal Salvation

I am presently working on the chapter of That Damned Book in which we consider species of "DU" (the Doctrine of Universalism). Our strategy is to distinguish species of DU according to two parameters: first, in terms of what is taken to be God's motive for willing the salvation of all (or, in terms we borrow from the Lutheran Orthodox, in terms of God's "impelling cause" for saving all); second, in terms of the means God uses to bring it about that all sinners are reformed in the ways necessary for enjoying the beatific vision.

So, we divide this chapter into two main sections--one which distinguishes species of DU according to God's motives or impelling causes for saving all, the other according to God's means of saving all. The excerpt below falls in the former section. In that section we identify five sub-species of DU, which I will lay out here to provide context:

IU1: God is motivated to save all through His sheer benevolence
IU2: God is motivated to save all by virtue of Christ's Atonement
IU3: God is motivated to save all out of His "complacent love" for Himself
IU4: God is motivated to save all out of His "compacent love" for creatures.
IU5: God is motivated by several or all of the motives identified in IU1-IU4.

After discussing versions of DU that appeal to God's benevolence alone as the motive for God's desire to save all, we turn to IU2. In the earlier draft of this chapter, this section was substantially shorter, but I felt moved to expand it a fair bit (but still not nearly enough to provide a fully adequate exposition of the various species of Atonement Theory discussed). I share it here in part because it relates to some themes that come up in the first excerpt I posted a few weeks back. Since this is very much a work in progress, feel free to make suggestions for refining it.

The first and most obvious reason why IU1 might be incomplete, at least from a Christian perspective, is that Christians believe Christ’s Atonement plays a central role in salvation. Christians might therefore worry that appealing to God’s “naked” benevolence as the sole motive of our salvation, without reference to the Atonement, risks making Christ’s work irrelevant. Now we have already pointed out in Chapter 1 the problem with this worry. As we put it there, one may be convinced that a good God wants to save all, can do so, and hence will, without so much as considering the specific steps God might take or need to take in order to do so—and hence without considering whether the means He used (or had to use) are those Christians affirm.

And so it seems one might hold that God’s motive for saving all is nothing other than His benevolence, but then go on to argue that the Atonement is the necessary means of saving all, thereby ensuring that Christ’s work is not irrelevant.

But while this strikes us as correct as far as it goes, it is not the whole story because, on some of the most influential versions of Atonement doctrine, Christ’s Atonement can be taken as a “means” of salvation only in a very special sense. Specifically, it is the means whereby it becomes morally fitting for God to will the salvation of sinners. Rather than serving as the means whereby God actually brings about the salvation of sinners, the Atonement serves as the means whereby God becomes reconciled to sinners so as to be able to will their salvation as an end.

In the taxonomy of DU we’re developing here, when we distinguish species according to God’s means of saving all our focus will be on alternative ways that God might go about converting sinners (that is, bringing it about that they are subjectively capable of enjoying the blessings of heaven), not those means He might employ to harmonize His moral motives with respect to the sinner.

Now there certainly are important understandings of the Atonement which take Christ’s work to serve primarily as a means of converting sinners. For example, the “moral influence” view of the Atonement promulgated by Abelard and taken up by a number of later progressive theologians treats Christ’s life, crucifixion, and resurrection as offering a moral lesson intended to awaken sinners to the gravity of their sin and so inspire repentance. On this construal, the Atonement might well be understood as a means of bringing about the conversion and salvation of the sinner. But if so, either it is efficacious in the sense that it irresistibly brings about conversion (at least when God fully employs it by, say, vividly presenting to the sinner the full significance of Christ’s death on the cross), or it is resistible by the exercise of the sinner’s free choice and can only be used as one strategy among others to wear away at the sinner’s resistance over time. These alternatives exactly parallel the means of salvation we will explicate in the next section. Hence, if the Atonement is construed in this way, it can be readily folded into the means of salvation we discuss in the next section.

But the most historically influential theories of the Atonement have conceived of it, not as a causal means used by God to convert sinners, but as a means whereby God’s motives for rejecting sinners—motives which would otherwise impede Him from acting on His prima facie will to save sinners—are done away with. In other words, the most historically influential Atonement theories presuppose that God has morally compelling motives which conflict with the benevolent ones that would otherwise motivate him to save sinners. But while these Atonement theories posit such conflicting motives, they also conceive of the Atonement as a means of overcoming the conflict, and hence of clearing the way for God’s benevolence to operate unimpeded.

The point, in other words, is that there might be a distinctively Christian species of DU according to which (in the helpful technical terminology of the Lutheran Orthodox) God possesses more than one impelling cause for willing the salvation of all. In addition to the “internal impelling cause” of our salvation found in God’s sheer unmerited benevolence (IU1), one might take there also to be an “external impelling cause” found in the all-sufficient Atonement of Christ (IU2). What this external impelling cause does, however, is bring it about that a divine reason not to save all—what we might call a “salvation-impeding divine motive”—is done away with.

Perhaps the most dominant strain of thought on the Atonement follows Anselm in holding that the salvation-impeding motive in question is God’s need to meet the demands of retributive justice. Many if not most who ascribe to this Anselmian "penal-substitutionary" view conceive of God’s justice as a separate attribute from His love, one that places limits on the appropriate expression of it. Put simply (and overlooking differences of detail), the idea is that sinners come to deserve eternal punishment because in offending an infinite God they have committed a crime of infinite severity. The Atonement is God’s means of vicariously meeting the demands of justice, thereby sweeping away a moral impediment that would have otherwise barred Him from willing the sinner’s salvation. Because Christ was fully God, what He endured on the cross had the infinite worth necessary to atone for sins of infinite gravity. Because He was fully human, what he endured could be offered up on behalf of humanity as the payment for humanity’s sinfulness. And because Christ’s atoning work fully satisfies the demands of justice, God is free to act on His benevolent desire to save sinners without thereby offending the demands of justice (a reconciliation of motives that itself has its origins in God’s love).

Does this Anselmian doctrine, with its introduction of divine justice as a distinct trait separate from God’s love, rule out DU? On the contrary, we will argue in Chapter 4 that those who seek to justify DH by appeal to the demands of divine justice actually confront a compelling challenge to their view in the Anselmian theory of the Atonement and its later development (especially among the Lutheran Orthodox). We argue, in effect, that even if divine justice is taken to be a distinct motive apart from God’s benevolence that places constraints on the exercise of the latter, any view of divine justice according to which eternal damnation is the appropriate penalty for sin would actually call for something like a vicarious Atonement—which in turn would remove any impediment to God’s saving all stemming from the demands of justice. In short, we think there can be a distinctly Anselmian species of DU, one which holds that, because Christ satisfied the demands of justice on the cross, God is free to act on His limitless benevolence to pursue the salvation of all.

But to say that an Anselmian version of DU falling under IU2 is possible is not to say that such a version is the best Christian version of DU. In fact, there have been many Christian critics of Anselm’s understand of the Atonement, and as such many who would be loathe to accept IU2 if it meant allegiance to some variant of the penal-substitutionary Atonement theory.

Reasons for criticizing the Anselmian theory are numerous. Some reject it on the basis of its separation of divine justice from divine love, holding instead (with, for example, Karl Barth) that divine justice should be understood as an expression or manifestation of divine love. Others object to it because the theory makes the crucifixion into something orchestrated by God in such a way that we can no longer treat it as we ought to, namely as a wrong done by humanity to the incarnate God. Still others argue that this model of the Atonement is premised on the moral acceptability of retributive violence, and so is at odds with important New Testament themes testifying to an ethic of nonviolence.

While we have some sympathy with all of these objections, we also think it is possible to construct a variant of the Anselmian theory that avoids them—a variant we find nascent in some of the things said by Luther and later Lutheran theologians. On this neo-Lutheran theory, the key impediment to saving sinners is not that justice demands of God the infliction of retributive suffering. Rather, the key impediment lies in features of the moral character of reformed sinners.

The idea, roughly, is that sinners cannot come fully into God’s presence—which entails both truly understanding and aligning ourselves with the good—without both (a) becoming perfectly conscious of the full weight and magnitude of our past sinfulness (our guilt), and (b) becoming the kind of people who take responsibility for our past errors (who do penance—which is what divine justice really calls for, as opposed to the mere external infliction of hardship). That is, when we are morally perfected through the beatific vision, our past sins do not and cannot just go away as if they never existed. On the contrary, for sinners such as ourselves to become sanctified means, in part, coming to fully understand our guilt and feel a pressing moral need to make it right—and so to diligently pursue penance for the wrongs we have done.

But here is the problem: We can’t make it right, because nothing we as finite beings can do would be sufficient to atone for wronging the infinitely benevolent creator of all. And as such, the guilt we bear is more than we can bear. And so, in the absence of some kind of profound divine intervention, coming into the presence of God (which, of course, is the essential element of salvation) would lead us to care so much about the good and to take such responsibility for our sins that we would toil for eternity to make up for offenses we could never succeed in making up for. And so, paradoxically, for anyone who has sinned—in other words, for all of us—salvation would be hell.

Put simply, the guilt we have accrued for our sinfulness is too great for us to bear ourselves. And so God, in His perfect benevolence, finds a way to bear it for us on the cross.

It isn’t our purpose here to explain how Christ can vicariously bear our guilt and perform on our behalf the penance we’d otherwise feel compelled to attempt despite its fruitlessness. Our point here is simply to highlight another version of vicarious, “substitutionary” Atonement theory, one in which the brutality of the crucifixion is not conceived as something orchestrated by God on the grounds that penal violence is morally required to satisfy a divine justice divorced from His love. On this view it is quite possible to see the crucifixion as something that we humans do to Christ precisely in response to His sanctity and benevolence, precisely because we cannot bear the burden of guilt we would experience were we to truly internalize what it means to be as good as we ought to be, as good as Christ calls us to be, as good as we intuitively recognize Him to be. We reject and nail Christ to a cross rather than face the magnitude of our sin. This isn’t something God does to Christ to satisfy the demands of justice. Rather, it is something we do to Christ to avoid having to bear the burden of our sin.

What God does, in response, is turn our violence on its head, making of it a penance on our behalf. Because we cannot bear our guilt, we nail Christ to the cross. And Christ makes of that crime an opportunity to bear our guilt in truth. The ultimate sin of killing the Incarnate God is transformed, through a kind of divine moral jujitsu, into the sufficient atonement for that very sin. By deciding to treat our crime against Him as a penance for that very crime, Christ makes it possible for us to “wear His cloak of righteousness” over our own sin (to borrow Luther’s language) as we come into the presence of God, and so to experience the beatific vision without being overwhelmed by our own guilt.

There are many details which would need to be worked out in order for such a view of the Atonement to be wholly defensible. The point we want to make here, however, is that like the Anselmian theory, this neo-Lutheran variant holds that a vicarious Atonement clears away an impediment to God’s willing the salvation of all. For Anselm, the impediment is the moral demand that an infinite punishment be imposed in response to sin. On the neo-Lutheran view, the impediment is that sinners who become sanctified experience a responsibility and need for penance too vast to bear. The same divine love that inspires God to wish to impart the beatific vision also precludes Him from imposing on us a burden we could never conceivably bear—and that is what granting us the beatific vision would entail in the absence of a vicarious Atonement. What the Atonement does, then, is lift away a moral impediment to God’s willing that sinners be granted the beatific vision—an impediment rooted in divine love, conflicting with another urging of divine love, and overcome by divine love.

What this shows, we think, is that even those universalists who have serious objections to the Anselmian theory might nevertheless embrace a version of IU2 that takes seriously a kind of substitutionary Atonement. But there is even more to be said here, because the Anselmian theory is not the only Atonement theory which might ground a species of IU2. Specifically, we think a species of IU2 can be grounded on the oldest Atonement theory, endorsed by the early Church Fathers and sometimes called the “Ransom” theory, which views Christ’s suffering and death as a ransom paid to the forces of evil in order to liberate sinners from bondage to those forces.

While there are different ways of working out this theory, including Gustav Aulen’s “Christus Victor” approach, one possibility (metaphorically promulgated by C.S. Lewis in The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe) is to see the forces of evil as having acquired a legitimate claim over sinners. One might imagine that sinners have, by an exercise of will, made a more or less metaphorical contract with the Devil. We have used the freedom God gave us, the freedom to make decisions about the disposition of our own lives, in the most self-destructive way imaginable: handing our lives over to das Nichtige (“the Nothingness,” Barth’s term for the palpable force of nonbeing that is God’s ultimate adversary) in exchange for ephemeral or imaginary goods. And insofar as God has given us a real right over our own lives, our act of giving those lives over to the forces of darkness thereby confers upon those forces a claim upon us that God cannot legitimately ignore.

To pursue our salvation in defiance of that claim (which an omnipotent God would certainly have the power to do) would be less than morally perfect. And so God, being morally perfect, becomes incarnate and offers Himself to be crucified in exchange for releasing humanity from bondage. And once we are released, the moral impediment which stands in the way of God pursuing our salvation is lifted. Once again on this view, the universalist could argue that this impediment is wholly lifted—thereby endorsing a species of IU2 according to which, by virtue of the ransom Christ paid for our souls, there is nothing that impedes God from willing the salvation of all.

In short, there are numerous ways of understanding the Atonement, several of which could be incorporated into species of DU falling under IU2—but not, we think, divorced from IU1. For even if Christ’s Atonement is conceived as operating on God’s motives (rather than serving as a tool to convert sinners), the way in which it does so is by clearing away a conflict in God’s motives such that God’s benevolence is free to act unimpeded on the sinner’s behalf.