On the Practical Implications of Universalism and its Relation to Suffering

Abstract

The doctrine of universalism, which asserts that all will find salvation in the life to come, can be critiqued on the grounds that it appears to underplay the real and lasting significance of suffering and injustice in this life, potentially placing its adherents in an improper relation to suffering and sufferers. In this essay, I engage with this problem, first, through examining how Karen Kilby’s critique of conceptual clarity might problematize the doctrine. I argue, however, in this essay’s second part, that the conceptual clarity we might first see is not the full story of universalism. In seeking a fuller story, I approach universalism from the perspective of its practical implications, here borrowing from ideas explored by Simeon Zahl, taking up his call to attend to the concrete outworking of doctrine in human experience. Two possible ‘affects’ of universalism are suggested, which, in a third part, I argue might nurture in the believer a heightened sensitivity to the wrongness of death and the problem of sin. Universalism, examined from the perspective of its practical implications, problematizes in this life some of the suffering that it might appear to resolve in the next.

Introduction

In a chapter titled ‘Eschatology, Suffering and the Limits of Theology’, Karen Kilby places before us a problem. On the one hand, she sees, it is a moral failure to ‘make sense and find meaning in the suffering of another’ and ‘approach the suffering of others in search of a framework which will. . .place. . .it in a fundamentally positive story’. ¹ As well as transgressing the proper distance between persons, in seeking an answer of kinds to the problem of evil such an attempt also suggests a possible reconciliation to evil, which is, fundamentally, ‘to put oneself in the wrong relationship’ to it. ² Kilby’s point is persuasive: while there may be instances where the meaning of suffering requires collective interpretation, the projection of meaning onto another’s suffering, where the other is at a distance from me, risks great moral insensitivity, potentially adding to the sufferer’s suffering by suggesting that the pain in question ought to be construed as good or useful. It is, Kilby sees, our moral duty to resist ascribing meaning to the suffering of others at a distance. On the other hand, Kilby asks if it is not exactly this kind of ascription that Christian eschatology is, and must be, committed to: ‘affirming that there is some ultimate framework, some ultimate horizon, some ultimate story, in which not just my personal story will find meaning and resolution, but in which all shall be well, every tear wiped away?’ ³ Christian eschatology involves ‘affirming a belief that the pain of the other—the devastation, the loss, the shame, the humiliation, the experience of degradation of the other—will one day be made meaningful, or woven into something meaningful’. ⁴ In this sense, a Christian eschatology of any detail, which offers even the beginnings of a description of how exactly all things might be wrapped up, ‘almost inevitably’ concedes a moral failure in domesticating the world’s ills. ⁵ Eschatology seeks to speculate and theorize on the end. As far as it does, it theorizes on the suffering of others. As far as it does that, it implicitly diminishes the significance of evil.

Kilby has suggestions for how the work of eschatology might prevent slipping into such moral trespass. A certain restraint must be exercised, which holds back from applying eschatological thought to a given situation of suffering. Such restraint ‘has something to do with holding two thoughts in mind’—the suffering before one and the hope of all being well—‘unsynthesized’. ⁶ Restraint must be exercised, more fundamentally, in the ‘content of what is believed’. ⁷ Here Kilby is clear of the limits of theology:

Precisely because we have no business speculating about the possible meaning of the suffering of others, we cannot aim, even provisionally, to fill out, to sketch in, the content of eschatological hope. We can hope that it will all be woven into something meaningful and redemptive, but we cannot even begin to imagine what that might be, to conceive of what could make meaningful, or understandable, or acceptable, the terrors that befall other people. ⁸

The doctrine of universalism, which holds that the whole of humankind will at the end be reconciled to God, can be seen, in many of its expressions, as ‘filled out’ and ‘sketched in’, offering the ‘troubling clarity’ that Kilby warns against. I will argue, however, that this conceptual clarity is not the full story of this doctrine. In seeking this fuller story, I approach the doctrine from the perspective of its practical implications, here borrowing from a set of ideas explored by Simeon Zahl. ⁹ I will explicate how I seek to make use of Zahl’s proposal more fully in what follows; for now, in brief, my approach can be thought of as looking to universalism not only from the perspective of its conceptual or metaphysical ‘content’, but in addition, speculatively, at the practice and character of response that it would provoke and form in those who assent to it. In looking to the doctrine at this interpretive angle, we shall see that, ‘filled out’ and ‘sketched in’ though universalism may be, it does not straightforwardly collude in the moral failure to which eschatology is prone, in Kilby’s view. While its ‘content’ might give rise to such failure, its practical implications in fact intensify the problem that, by another angle, it might appear to solve.

The examination that follows will be made in three stages. First, I will give an account of universalism, examining in particular the argument, present in the work of several significant advocates of the doctrine, that universal salvation will ensue, in part, as a consequence of the outworking of human freedom. Second, I will make the case for approaching the doctrine by recourse to its practical implications, and, in turn, suggest one outworking of universalism as reached through the argumentation I examine: a reverence for human freedom. In a third move, I will spell out how this outworking might, in practice, intensify for the believer part of the problem of suffering that the doctrine might appear, at another level, to resolve.

The Doctrine of Universalism

The doctrine of universalism has been reached by various theological and philosophical routes. In what follows, I seek to trace one particularly influential route, which concerns the significance of human freedom at the eschaton. Versions of this route are taken by a number of theologians, prominent among them Gregory of Nyssa (c. 335–395), whose account I use here as a case study.

Gregory’s statement of universalism

A key theological conviction that undergirds Gregory’s universalism, which likewise undergirds the universalism of several theologians before and beyond him, is a belief that the punishment of sinners at the end is temporary and purifying (rather than retributive). Its temporary nature is implied, for Gregory, by the scriptural statement that punishment will occur commensurate to the particularities of an individual’s sinfulness. As he comments in On the Soul and Resurrection, responding to Jesus’s parable of the two debtors (Luke 7.36–50), the debts incurred by sins committed in this world must be repaid in full: just as ‘the indebted man was delivered to the tormenters until he should pay the whole debt’ by way of ‘the coin of torment’, so too the sinner will pay for their accumulated sin by way of enduring his particular ‘share of pain’. ¹⁰ Such repayment is, for Gregory, understood as corresponding to the sin committed and, on this basis, is a limited process rather than an infinite state. ¹¹

That such punishment, in Gregory’s sight, is purificatory is suggested by the images his wise sister Macrina uses to describe it to him in her teaching and which he reaffirms: punishment is like a fire which refines rather than destroys, or like the process by which a rope, plastered with mud, is pulled through a narrow opening to strip the rope of its debris. ¹² The function of such purification is to teach resurrected selves to distinguish effectively between what is good and evil. It is, he writes, by ‘the purifying furnace of fire’, that humanity will ‘taste the evils it desired and learn by experience what sort of things it had exchanged for the kinds it chose’. ¹³ As well as exposing the true end of evil, such purifying punishment will also, for Gregory, refine the broken passions: since it is the unrefined passions that can disrupt and confuse the right perception of what is good, the soul must (if it has not managed to in this life) ‘by purgation . . . become free from any emotional connection with the brute creation’, that is, from what is irrational. ¹⁴ Once this is so, ‘there will be nothing to impede its contemplation of the Beautiful’. ¹⁵

Gregory’s interpretation of the punishment to come as serving this function, to equip resurrected selves with the aptitude to distinguish good from evil, finds similarity with several theologians before and after him. His own position owes much to Origen, who himself follows Clement in articulating a conception of punishment as a means of purification after death. Like Gregory, Origen conceives a large portion of this remedial purification to be intellectual in character: ‘by word, by reason, by teaching, by exhortation to better things’ souls will learn what is truly good. ¹⁶ In our own era, David Bentley Hart likewise grounds his statement of universalism in a conviction, among others, that if punishment lies ahead it will be temporary. ¹⁷ If purgation awaits, Hart sees, it should be understood as temporary, a part of God’s providence, ‘guiding every soul to the only final end it can ever truly freely desire’. ¹⁸ Such purgation would be ‘the act of bringing about the soul’s only true liberation’, remedial rather than retributive in nature. ¹⁹ It is a rejection of eternal punishment based on its purificatory nature—wherein any punishment that exists will perform a function for the purposes of divine love—which, as we shall see next, serves the integral role that human freedom is imagined to play at the eschaton.

Freedom

In the account of universalism under examination, the purificatory punishment at the end exists to restore to every resurrected self the perfected condition of human freedom. The logic of this position owes much, as Illaria Ramelli points out, to the ‘ethical intellectualism’ arising from both the fourth Gospel and Plato, namely, that ‘it is truth that makes one free’: our capacity for freedom exists in our ability, first, to distinguish what is truly good. ²⁰ It is, as Gregory writes in On the Soul and Resurrection, ‘having put off from him all that foreign growth which sin is’—via the mechanism of punishment—‘and discarded the shame of any debts’, that the resurrected person ‘might stand in liberty and fearlessness’. ²¹ It is in these restored conditions of freedom that the resurrected person can (and indeed, for Gregory, will) choose their own salvation. ²² ‘Everything’, as Gregory puts it, ‘that is free will be found in virtue’. ²³ Thus is universalism deduced: all will have their knowledge purified through punishment, therefore all will be free; since all will be free, all will prefer the Good (God); since all will prefer the Good (God), evil will cease and salvation will be the destiny of all.

Once again, Gregory’s argumentation finds semblance across accounts of universalism which take the same route. Hart, drawing on Maximus as well as Gregory, argues in parallel that ‘freedom is a being’s power to flourish as what it naturally is, to become ever more fully what it is’. ²⁴ For the human person, such freedom, Hart writes, is ‘consummation in union with God’. ²⁵ A choice for anything less—a rejection of divine goodness—is a clear proof of inhibited freedom. A rational will would never reject God. Thomas Talbott makes a similar argument in positing the following question: ‘Why suppose it even possible that someone might freely choose to endure an objective horror and then, after experiencing it, continue to embrace it freely for all of eternity’? ²⁶ The same logic is present, if more loosely articulated, in the work of John Hick and John Robinson. For Hick, it is human nature to ‘seek after God and find him’. ²⁷ Any choice which denies this pursuit is a denial of who the human really is. Freedom, when truly exercised, will necessarily find itself in union with divine love. ²⁸ For Robinson, the extent of God’s love—its endurance and omnipotence—is such that in the end it will be impossible for any person to resist. ²⁹ So profound is divine love, in other words, that no free person would for Robinson logically turn it down. Across these accounts, the basic connection articulated in Gregory’s theology is present: when the human person is fully herself, fully free, she will every time choose eternal life. There can be no free choice of eternal hell.

A Problem

The expression of universalism we have been examining, an example of which we find in Gregory’s theology, is not just ‘sketched in’ and ‘filled out’ but, we might say, ‘high resolution’ in the picture it offers of how our eschatological end will look. The accounts considered offer assurance concerning how salvation will be found for all as human sin is totally overcome. One can sense the trouble that such accounts’ clarity might evoke. To start, in the doctrine of universalism as we have explored it, sin and the suffering it causes is no mystery at all but a fully comprehendible consequence of the failure to distinguish between the good and its opposite. Further, the suffering caused by sin and experienced in this life is presented as eschatologically relevant to those who inflicted suffering (who must undergo purification of it), but not to its victims. Further still, the frame such accounts give to the cause of sin—lack of freedom (since freedom is truth, and it is truth that evil doers mistake)—might seem difficult to swallow when, experientially, the sin we commit so often is experienced as our free choice to deny the freedom of others to do as they wish. Such an eschatology may seem to underplay the calculated, premeditated, and apparently chosen character of acts which cause us to reach for the descriptor ‘evil’.

In the chapter cited at the outset of this essay, Kilby engages with John Thiel’s Icons of Hope: The “Last Things” in Catholic Imagination. In probing what she takes to be Thiel’s troublingly unrestrained speculation of how suffering will be resolved at the end, she places Marilyn McCord Adams’s category of ‘horrendous evils’ into Thiel’s system to expose exactly what the latter is implying, for example, about how an abused child and its parents will be expected to live in a forgiving communion with the child’s abuser for eternity. ³⁰ We might invoke the same particularity to sharpen the point with respect to the example of universalism under discussion. The abuse of the child, understood through the frame of this universalism, is liable to be interpreted as simply a matter of an abuser confusing the good from the evil, even if experientially it seemed like an intentioned choice of evil. Resolution of such evil will come in the form of the abuser’s being educated beyond such confusion, even if experientially it may seem like it is the victim of such abuse who, justly, would be entitled to such resolution. Being rooted in confusion, the abuser’s acts on earth should be considered a symptom of a lack of freedom, even if experientially such abuse has the character of the overreach of a form of freedom. The high resolution of the doctrine construed along the lines we have examined, we may say for now, could certainly lend itself to the moral failure of comprehending the suffering of others in such a way as to reduce evil’s sting and offer an improperly glib balm for the wounds it causes.

A Practical Implication of Universalism

Doctrine, as is frequently noted, does not end as a set of written propositions but gives rise to practices and ways of living. This observation, as Simeon Zahl notes in an article titled ‘On the Affective Salience of Doctrines’ is well-worn. For the frequency with which it is remarked that Christian doctrine has ‘practical “shaping” and “regulative” effects on the human beings who constitute the church in the world’, Zahl remarks on how infrequently specific relations between doctrine and practice or experience are actually parsed out. Zahl, in response, asks:

how does all this actually work more specifically, in particular concrete instances in human lives? For example, which kinds of emotion and experience are shaped by which doctrines and practices? Are some doctrines more oriented towards emotional impact or desire-shaping than others? And what are the different forms that such impact can take[?] ³¹

Zahl’s proposal is to attend to what he names as ‘the affective salience of doctrines’, here drawing from the discipline of psychology, ‘where an object of our attention is understood to be “affectively salient” to the degree that it evokes and brings to awareness particular bodily affective states’. ³² He suggests two possible approaches to analyzing the affective salience of doctrine: first, empirically testing the affective responses had to doctrines on their being communicated (a task for social scientists and psychologists of religion); and, second, (here thinking of the theologian) by pursuing ‘argumentation based on the expected salience of particular doctrinal positions’ and analyzing doctrine through probing the effects those proposing it held it to have. ³³ In his essay, Zahl demonstrates in a worked example the ‘substantial theological dividends’ that ‘attention to concrete and specific instances of the relationship between doctrines and human experience’ can pay. ³⁴ Inspired by this approach, it is to what we may imagine of something like the ‘salience’ of universalism—what practice it would seem to imply, what affect, action, or habit of thought it might elicit—that I turn in this next part. I will suggest one specific practical implication of the doctrine, as framed by the reasoning explored above: a sharpened regard for human freedom.

A sharpened regard for human freedom

As set out in the first part of this essay, the universalism under examination imagines the eschaton to involve the positive offer of opportunity and conditions which make resurrected selves free to choose the good (and so, God) going forward. As the opportunity of free choice and conversion to the good is gifted, the eschatological future is an undecided future. That is, the eschatological future, in this account of universalism, is neither predetermined by the sin of the past nor by any one-sided divine mercy, but remains affected by the actions of human freedom. The fact that all will choose the good does not imply the foreclosure of the eschatological future (a divine scripting of the end) but is the result of a set of propositions regarding the characteristics of freedom and virtue that enable the deduction of their logic playing out: punishment will enable us to discern the good; such discernment constitutes perfected freedom; in freedom we will (necessarily) choose what is good (God). As far as the paradox is possible, within the doctrine we have been examining, the salvation of all is completely predictable but not predetermined. The deduction that all will incline towards the good is no detraction from the fact that within this perspective such inclination is still a real and live choice. The role of human freedom, once it is restored by instructive purgation, is then pivotal to this iteration of universalism. Accordingly, to hold that eternal salvation will be the fate of all is at once to recognise the significance of human freedom as an integral component within the process by which such salvation will ensue.

On recognising the significance that the doctrine grants to human freedom, it becomes unsurprising to notice that Gregory, who so firmly held to universalism, just as firmly recognized freedom as essential to personhood and articulated as much across his corpus. As he writes in On the Making of Man:

there is in us the principle of all excellence, all virtue and wisdom, and every higher thing that we can conceive: but pre-eminent among all is the fact that we are free from necessity, and not in bondage to any natural power, but have decision in our own power as we please. ³⁵

Such freedom, indeed, is what for Gregory contributes to our divine likeness. As he writes in In Regard to Those Fallen Asleep, ‘humanity was made godlike. . .because it had been honoured with free autonomy’. ³⁶ Where an external power over-determines the actions of a human, the divine image in them is severely disrespected. On such a basis Gregory would become among the first Christian theologians to condemn slavery in unqualified terms. ³⁷ What Gregory here helps us see is the logical coinciding of a belief in universal salvation that rests on the imagined free choice of all for God, on the one hand, and, on the other, a sharpened regard for human freedom and its significance as a characteristic of our personhood.

To return to Zahl’s challenge, we may summarize by suggesting, as a first step, that the implication of the universalism we have been examining involves a high regard and respect for human freedom, where freedom is construed as the capacity to choose and incline freely towards the good. It is on the divine restoration of human freedom and the subsequent function of human freedom to choose God that the doctrine rests. This is a key dimension of universalism’s upshot: to believe that all will be saved is to know and sense the profound significance of our freedom. It is to the practical effect this implication might have that we turn in the next part.

A heightened sensitivity

In this third part, I want to suggest that the implication identified above might have the practical effect of intensifying the reality of suffering for the proponent of the universalism under discussion. In this sense, what the doctrine does is at one level quite contrary to what the doctrine, on a ‘cerebral’ reading, might seem to do. In what follows I suggest how a sharpened regard for human freedom might evoke a heightened sensitivity to the suffering known in death and the suffering known by way of sin.

Human freedom and the suffering of death

The doctrine of universalism seems on the surface like it might be exactly what could wrap up the matter of death without difficulty. It offers a narrative of the certain good that follows death. It offers a potential comprehension of how those who deal in death—by way of inflicting violence or injustice—will come to find peace. It lends itself to a potentially glib balm for all grief: Be happy because the one you have loved and lost will rise again and enjoy endless bliss. If the doctrine does contain this potential, another look clarifies that it also contains the seeds to a sensitivity that radically undermines any easy acceptance of death. Namely, in asserting the properness of human freedom, and how integral freedom is to the human person, its proponents confront not an answer to death but the intensification of its wrongness.

As outlined above, adherents to the iteration of universalism under consideration are alerted to the significance of human freedom and the future possibilities into which human persons are able to act. The freedom that the doctrine underscores is the freedom humans possess to choose the good when they had previously chosen the bad; to incline one way instead of the other; not to be trapped in the stasis of sin but enabled the opportunity, again, to draw close to God. Taking the doctrine seriously, then, entails reckoning with the dynamism of our personhood; recognizing that the possibility of change, towards the good, is integral to us.

Death, seen from this perspective, which emphasizes the proper dynamism of personhood and the movement towards the good to which humans are called, poses as violent interruption. Death ends dynamism, severing the possibility of continued change and so contradicting free and unimpeded movement towards the good (God). In this light, what follows is a sensitivity to the suffering death entails in curtailing the human vocation. If we are looking for examples with which to imagine this kind of sensitivity we might look to the Psalmist, who, responsive precisely to the fact of death’s interruption of what human life is for, asks:

What profit is there in my death,

if I go down to the Pit?

Will the dust praise you?

Will it tell of your faithfulness? ³⁸

Elsewhere the Psalmist asks, ‘For in death there is no remembrance of you; in Sheol who can give you praise?’. ³⁹ Death here is envisaged as a condition in which humans cannot exercise their true freedom to incline towards God in praise and worship. Death is exposed as a dissolution of glory, confirmed as suffering.

The believer of the universalism we have been examining will be primed to join with the Psalmist’s sentiment: knowing the significance of human freedom, the properness of our capacity to incline and grow towards the good (God), death, which ends and impedes that growth, ought to be lamented. Quite in contrast to the ways in which universalism might appear to mitigate the severity of death—since all shall be well—here we see that its practical implication, followed through, alerts its adherent to death’s concomitant horror.

Human freedom and the problem of sin

Similarly, the doctrine seems, from one angle, positioned to reduce the significance of sin drastically. It asserts that at the eschaton the most minor and major of sins will equally be done away with as goodness will be chosen wholly by all. Yet, again, a closer look at the practical implications of the doctrine reveals another angle, from which a belief in universal salvation attunes its adherents to just how vast the problem of sin and the suffering it causes is.

With different emphases, the accounts of universalism cited above share a conviction that a rejection of God—of eternal life, of unending goodness—cannot be a free choice. A free rejection of goodness is implausible because, so proponents of this universalism assert, freedom, when functioning aright, will consistently be used to pursue what is truly good. When choices are made in favour of what is not good, true freedom is considered impeded or absent. In effect, such an understanding asserts a higher threshold for the execution of freedom than we may readily be used to imagining: there is not, as Talbott writes, ‘a single necessary condition of moral freedom, namely, that a choice is free in the libertarian sense only if it is not causally determined’. ⁴⁰ Rather, human freedom is that which requires certain conditions, in which accurate reflection on and knowledge of the good is possible, and which cannot be exercised in converse conditions, which curb and compromise our discernment of the good. Accordingly, part of what is clarified in this vision is an understanding of sin as borne out of conditions in which, for different reasons, accurate reflection on and knowledge of the good has not been possible or accessible. Sin, within this vision, denotes a lack of freedom.

Above, we asked briefly whether framing sin as a lack of freedom underplayed the potential cruelty and calculation of sin as deeply intended. If the doctrine is liable to nurture this impression, it is also liable, practically, to draw attention to sin’s depth and complexity. For, in drawing attention to the significance of conditions which obviate freedom and are conducive to sin, the doctrine nurtures the question of why and how a particular sin has occurred. If an apparent choice has led to the intentioned suffering of another, the proponent of universalism is one especially prone to ask what conditions were in play such that this choice could be interpreted by its undertaker as right? What distortions and misinterpretations shrouded the true good, such that, in this instance, what was evil could pose so convincingly as good?

To ask such questions is to enable a tricker picture of sin to come to the fore. Sin here cannot be treated discreetly, as a single act committed by a single actor. Instead, its boundaries are blurred: sinful acts arise against sinful settings; sinful individuals are shaped by sin first done to them; past sin begets present sin; a backdrop of sin enables and even persuades its endurance in individual acts. In this way, the adherent of the universalism under discussion is primed to interpret an instance of sin as running deeper than its surface appearance might suggest. To deploy more familiar theological shorthand, we might say that she is primed to attend to the ways in which instances of personal sin are entangled with preexisting structural sin, which shrouds the good and disguises the bad. To see the difficulty of disentangling what is personal from what is structural is to recognise a longer and graver story of sin from which it is much harder to escape.

Jennifer Beste’s work, God and the Victim, offers an example of what sensitivity to this entanglement might look like as she investigates how the experience of trauma diminishes the possibility of exercising freedom. ‘The desire to know more, grow, explore, place everything into question, and be open to further possibilities’—to practice self-awareness, self-reflection, and self-determination—‘is deeply influenced by one’s material and social conditions’, writes Beste. ⁴¹ This being true, ‘chronic interpersonal harm’, expressed in deficient material and social conditions, ‘can dramatically limit and constrict an individual’s horizons and her anticipation of future possibilities’. ⁴² Beste’s work demonstrates how inexorably caught up our own capacity for freedom—our capacity to see and choose what is truly good—is with conditions of trauma beyond our control. She sees that the sin by which others suffer is not limited to single outbursts by single ‘bad apples’ but that which we are steeped in and shaped by, quite beyond our choosing, with effects that are tragic and chaotic.

Once again, the practical implications of the doctrine we have been exploring expose a depth that may surprise. If freedom to pursue goodness is understood as requiring certain conditions, and sin is understood as the result of the absence of those conditions, then the believer in universal salvation will, like Beste, be drawn to see sin not as a containable single event but as the grave consequence of a whole web of prior sin that gives rise to the catastrophic misreading of the good today. If universalism promises that all sin will be eliminated in the life to come, strangely, this comes hand in hand practically with an intensified sense of its seriousness in life this side of heaven.

Conclusion

This essay was initially provoked by the challenge to eschatology posed by Kilby’s searching statement of a problem: if it is a moral failure to explain the suffering of another and find meaning in it, is it not a moral failure to engage in Christian eschatology, which affirms that there is a framework in which all suffering and pain will find its resolution and meaning? This essay does not solve such a problem. But, by engaging with an example of Christian eschatology at the extreme end of ‘sketched in’—a vivid account of universalism founded on a belief in purificatory punishment and renewed freedom to choose God—we have, perhaps, added another layer of useful complexity.

In assessing one iteration of universalism, we have been able to appreciate the problem: such a doctrine, in what it implies about the certain end of suffering, and the significance of suffering for the perpetrator rather than victim, could lend itself to the troublingly unrestrained speculation of suffering’s resolution that Kilby fears. Yet we have not looked at the doctrine only as it appears on the pages of theological works. Taking seriously Zahl’s call to interrogate more fully how ‘doctrine’ relates to ‘practice’, I have attempted to parse out the ways that this version of universalism might shape the practical outlook and practice of those who assent to it. This foray has involved uncovering a possible practical implication of the doctrine: a sharpened regard for human freedom. Such an implication, I suggested, might in turn nurture in the believer a heightened sensitivity to the wrongness of death (as it negates the freedom that is so integral to what it is to be human) and the problem of sin (borne of thwarted freedom and entangled in conditions that run beyond an individual’s choice). In effect, the doctrine, examined from the perspective of its possible outworking, problematizes in this life what it appears to solve in the next. It is by way of believing that all wrongness and suffering will find its end in the free conversion of all hearts to the good that, strangely, a portion of the wrongness and suffering of this present life might be recognized in its un-tinted and un-consolable reality.

Kilby sees that one route to avoid the moral trespass she identifies is to exercise a certain ‘restraint’ that ‘holds two thoughts in mind unsynthesized’—the suffering we see and the hope of all being made well. ⁴³ Another is to dial down the detail of how exactly we imagine all being made well, adopting ‘restraint’ in the very ‘content’ of what is believed. ⁴³ If the analysis offered in this essay is correct then what we have uncovered might be a route by which, in fact, eschatological detail and imagination, and not only their lack, might prime us to be sensitive to certain elements of suffering in life now. In the process of taking up Kilby’s problem and reaching this conclusion, we have along the way seen indeed the potential dividends of following Zahl in attempting to attend to ‘concrete and specific instances of the relationship between doctrines and human experience’. ⁴⁴ It has been in expanding our sense of where the doctrine ends—looking to the affect implied by a particular iteration of universalism—that we have identified its practical tension: in one breath clear that all shall be well but all is not well.