Revisiting & Redefining Universal Salvation

Readers of a certain age will remember MAD, the humor magazine the cover of which invariably featured a freckled-faced, big-eared, gap-toothed urchin with an insouciant grin. The imp’s response to any fix he got himself into was “What, me worry?” He and the magazine are still around, but these days, the letters M-A-D less often signify harmless tomfoolery than the strategic concept of mutual assured destruction. As a people, our response to that fate likewise seems to be “What, me worry?” After all, although we might not be saints, we’ve pretty well banished any fear that our death might be followed by eternal punishment in Hell. As Pope Benedict XVI, the late, great theologian, ruefully acknowledged toward the end of his life, “Mankind today, in a very general way, has the sense that God cannot allow the majority of humanity to be damned” (“Faith Is Not an Idea but a Life,” What Is Christianity: The Last Writings, 2023).

Has eternal damnation been done away with? Are there now only three Last Things: death, judgment, and Heaven? There are at least two theological theories floating around to that effect. One is annihilationism, which, though it recognizes that evil will someday be punished, posits that after the Last Judgment all the damned humans and fallen angels will be destroyed and will no longer suffer. This idea has been endorsed by the Church of England’s Doctrine Commission, which suggested that “Hell may be a state of ‘total non-being,’ not eternal torment” (“The Mystery of Salvation,” 1996). A rival theory, apocatastasis, similarly rejects the possibility of eternal punishment in Hell. A heresy dating at least to the third century, it posits the ultimate restoration of creation to a condition of perfection, with everyone being saved, even the Devil.

Though the Catholic Church does not support either theory, the word Hell itself is missing from the New American Bible, the most widely used translation in U.S. parishes. Out of sight, out of mind? Occasionally, Hell gets mentioned, but we are no longer supposed to think of it as a physical place of torment for great sinners after they die, whether located under or in the earth or elsewhere in the universe. That longstanding concept was upended by no less an authority than Pope St. John Paul II, who, in a general audience (July 28, 1999), proposed a new understanding of Hell:

Rather than a place, hell indicates the state of those who freely and definitively separate themselves from God, the source of all life and joy…. To die in mortal sin without repenting and accepting God’s merciful love means remaining separated from him forever by our own free choice. This state of definitive self-exclusion from communion with God and the blessed is called “hell.” (emphasis added)

Yet, even in John Paul’s understanding, there is a “hell” of some kind that goes on “forever.” As for Heaven, we know that Jesus’ explicit words were “I am the gate. Whoever enters through me will be saved” (Jn. 10:9), and “no one comes to the Father except through me” (Jn. 14:6). Most people now alive were not, and will not be, given a Christian baptism. Is there a middle, perpetual state for them — a “Limbo” or “Salvation-Lite” — in which they will be happy but not have the beatific vision? Benedict rejected extending the doctrine of Limbo to unbaptized pagans: “In the second half of the last century, it was fully affirmed:…mere natural happiness cannot represent a real answer to the question of human existence.” And, though the Church historically has emphasized missionary work, Benedict did not propose that the problem of saving unbaptized persons could be solved by the missionary activities of the Church:

If it is true that the great missionaries of the sixteenth century were still convinced that those who are not baptized are forever lost — and this explains their missionary commitment — in the Catholic Church after the Second Vatican Council, that conviction was definitively abandoned. (op. cit.)

In an inconclusive and unsatisfying section of his essay, Benedict attempts to deal with the current profound crisis of faith, how we might reconcile “the universal necessity of Christian faith with the possibility of salvation without it,” in three ways. First, he mentions Karl Rahner’s bizarre and simplistic theory whereby every man who merely “accepts himself in his essential being…fulfills the essence of being a Christian without knowing what it is in a conceptual way.” Second, he raises the possibility of other equally valid religions, other ways to salvation. Rejecting these possibilities, he turns to the work of Henri de Lubac and others “who labored over the concept of vicarious substitution” (whereby Christians, along with Christ, “live for others”), albeit acknowledging that this “does not completely resolve the problem.” Indeed, it could not even scratch the surface of the problem, given how few committed Christians there are compared to the number of non-Christians for whom they might exist vicariously.

Should we turn to some variation of the theory of universal salvation to solve this dilemma? The last time there was an extended airing of this subject in the NOR was almost a quarter century ago. It was a time when Hans Urs von Balthasar breathed new life into it with his book Dare We Hope “That All Men Be Saved”? (1998). His thesis was picked up by Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, editor of First Things, who wrote in support therein (June/July 2000) and in his book Death on a Friday Afternoon: Meditations on the Last Words of Jesus from the Cross (2001). Universal salvation, Balthasar and Neuhaus asserted, was a reasonable possibility due to the goodness of God. They cited Church authorities for their hope that all might be saved — that there is no such place as Hell, or at least no one in it — no matter what they did or didn’t do, or believe in, in this life, and no matter whether they were baptized.¹

NOR editor Dale Vree was quick to drive a stake through the heart of the hope that all might be saved in his lengthy rebuttal article, “If Everyone Is Saved…Why Bother?” (Jan. 2001). Vree cites better authorities, particularly Jesus’ cautionary sayings in the Gospels about the dangers of Hell and damnation.

Let us acknowledge that there is a Hell, and that there are souls in it. Is there a way to reconcile that reality with the concept of universal salvation?

I believe there is, provided we define the mechanics of universal salvation in a way that does not equate the process with a “Get Out of Jail Free Card,” which may be played by anyone, as he dies, regardless of his past actions or beliefs. Put another way, when we reject universal salvation, we may be assuming that it jettisons not only Hell but also Purgatory (or even a process of purgation), so that all, or at least all who are not truly evil, go directly to Heaven when they die. But that is not so.

There may well be a Hell with only those souls in it who have, as John Paul said, by their own free choice determined to remain separated from God forever.² As for the rest of sinful mankind, perhaps there is a purgatorial process they will pass through, whether baptized or not. I submit that this is exactly what John Paul and Benedict proposed. Consider it to be a redefinition of the concept of universal salvation. This is what the former wrote in his book Crossing the Threshold of Hope (1994):

The Holy Scriptures include the concept of the purifying fire…. The mystical works of Saint John of the Cross offered me a very strong argument for purgatory. The “living flame of love,” of which Saint John speaks, is above all a purifying fire…. God makes man pass through such an interior purgatory of his sensual and spiritual nature in order to bring him into union with Himself…. It is Love that demands purification, before man can be made ready for that union with God which is his ultimate vocation and destiny. (emphasis in original)

Benedict fleshes out his predecessor’s thought more fully in his encyclical Spe Salvi (2007), in which he speculates about what happens as we are about to die — we who have not totally destroyed our desire for truth and readiness to love, but who are not utterly pure and completely permeated by God. Citing St. Paul, who intimates that in order to be saved we might have to pass through “fire” (cf. 1 Cor. 3:12-15), Benedict writes:

Some recent theologians are of the opinion that the fire which both burns and saves is Christ himself, the Judge and Savior. The encounter with him is the decisive act of judgment. Before his gaze all falsehood melts away. This encounter with him, as it burns us, transforms and frees us, allowing us to become truly ourselves. All that we build during our lives can prove to be mere straw, pure bluster, and it collapses. Yet in the pain of this encounter, when the impurity and sickness of our lives become evident to us, there lies salvation. His gaze, the touch of his heart heals us through an undeniably painful transformation “as through fire.”… At the moment of judgment we experience and we absorb the overwhelming power of his love over all the evil in the world and in ourselves. The pain of love becomes our salvation and our joy. It is clear that we cannot calculate the “duration” of this transforming burning in terms of the chronological measurements of this world. (no. 47; emphasis added)

Shortly after the encyclical appeared, Avery Cardinal Dulles seemed to echo the Pope’s thought in an article aptly titled “Who Can Be Saved?” (First Things, Feb. 2008). He writes about the plight of those who die without becoming members of the Catholic Church — or any church. He speculates that God will make it possible for them to receive the grace they need to avoid eternal damnation, with the solemn moment of death serving as a “moment of revelation” secretly in their consciousness.³

The significance of a moment-of-death retrospective and choice — offering the possibility of a true “baptism of desire” — cannot be overstated. It appears to solve the problem of how we can square the Catholic doctrine that baptism and faith in Christ are necessary for salvation with the hope that people who were not baptized, and did not believe in Jesus during their lifetimes — even though they may have heard of Him — still can be saved. Inasmuch as the individual is given a choice at the moment of death, with full understanding of the consequences of his answer, the procedure allows full reign to his free will.

Should longtime Catholics, like the laborers in the vineyard who were hired early in the morning (cf. Mt. 20:11), grumble at this possibility? No, because from what the Popes write, it is clear they both expect the process to be painful and possibly long in duration. It could truly be thought of as Purgatory with a capital P, and not as a “purgatory-lite” or a “pseudo-purgatory.”⁴ Therefore, I suggest, such a dispensation of divine providence would have the great merit of solving the challenge, which has long confounded theologians, of how perfect justice can be coupled with perfect mercy for the unbaptized.

Given that a solemn moment-of-death retrospective and choice would be a profound mystery of faith, it is appropriate to consider the evidence of such mystical phenomena. Let us begin with an unimpeachable source, St. Maria Faustina Kowalska, the Divine Mercy nun, who wrote the following, based on her own experiences of helping importuning souls who came to her, and note that, in her understanding, the last-moment choice did not always result in salvation:

God’s mercy sometimes touches the sinner at the last moment in a wondrous and mysterious way. Outwardly, it seems as if everything were lost, but it is not so. The soul, illumined by a ray of God’s powerful final grace, turns to God in the last moment with such a power of love that, in an instant, it receives from God forgiveness of sin and punishment, while outwardly it shows no sign either of repentance or of contrition, because souls [at that stage] no longer react to external things…. Although a person is at the point of death, the merciful God gives the soul that interior vivid moment, so that if the soul is willing, it has the possibility of returning to God. But sometimes, the obduracy in souls is so great that consciously they choose hell; they thus make useless all the prayers that other souls offer to God for them and even the efforts of God himself. (Divine Mercy in My Soul §1698)

Next, consider the testimony of Sr. Emmanuel Maillard of the Beatitudes Community in Medjugorje, who conducted an interview with an old Austrian countrywoman, now deceased, named Maria Simma. The latter had a rare charism: For 60 years she ministered to the souls in Purgatory who visited her to ask for aid, usually the offering of a Mass or a Rosary. According to Fraulein Simma, at the time of death, before entering into eternity, “The Lord gives several minutes to each one, in order to regret his sins and to decide: I accept or I do not accept to go see God. There, we see a film of our lives” (The Amazing Secret of Souls in Purgatory, 1997).

The idea of a retrospective film of our lives might seem straight out of Hollywood — maybe Meryl Streep’s 1991 movie Defending Your Life. Yet consider two accounts by priests regarding their own experience of this sort while alive. In the first case, the Lord reviewed the sins of the priest as he lay in a coma and was expected to die after a vehicle collision. Upon seeing his sins, the priest heard Jesus tell him that His judgment was for Hell, which the priest himself felt he deserved. Then he heard the Blessed Mother plead for his life and Jesus grant her request. He awoke from his coma, recovered, and is now greatly changed and devoted to her in his priesthood (“Wake-Up Call Changes Priest Forever,” National Catholic Register, Aug. 19, 2011).

The second case involves Hermann Cohen, a famed 19th-century Jewish convert who became a Catholic after he saw interiorly a movie of his own sins shown to him by the Lord. Later, he became a Carmelite priest, and he prayed that his Jewish mother would be baptized. Although he was gravely disappointed when she died without that happening, he was reassured by receiving word from the Lord that He had come to Fr. Cohen’s mother at the moment when she expired, and that she had been saved by accepting Him right then as her Lord and God (Life of the Reverend Father Hermann Cohen by F. Raymond-Barker, 1925).

Having the choice of Heaven or Hell offered by Christ in the full light of all one has done in this life — as He sees it — does not require the person to have adhered to Catholic or even Christian dogma while alive. Yet the existence of this possibility does not obviate Christ’s command to evangelize all peoples in the here and now. As the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith stated, this must be done so people do not lack “a tremendous benefit in this world: to know the true face of God and the friendship of Jesus Christ” (“Doctrinal Note on Some Aspects of Evangelization,” 2007).

An objection can be raised: If people believe they will be given a “last chance” to avoid Hell, would that not make them less likely to lead Christian lives in the meantime? Perhaps. But waiting to the moment of death to repent would not be a wise course of action, for at that point, they who had theretofore spurned God could not obtain a ticket straight to Heaven by choosing correctly; they would have only the opportunity to attain Purgatory by repenting, thereby avoiding direct passage to Hell. Moreover, they could not count on being able to choose the right course at the end. Sinners might become so accustomed to sin that they would not accept God’s final mercy, out of pride, locking the door to Hell from the inside, or even due to demonic intervention. Think of the last moments of Doctor Faustus, as described by Christopher Marlowe, the 16th-century English playwright. Faustus bitterly regretted his bargain with the Devil, and his friends urged him to repent and call on God, but he found himself unable to do so:

Third Scholar : Yet, Faustus, call on God.

Faustus: On God, whom Faustus hath abjured! on God, whom Faustus hath blasphemed! Ah, my God, I would weep! but the devil draws in my tears. Gush forth blood, instead of tears! yea, life and soul — O, he stays my tongue! I would lift up my hands; but see, they [Lucifer and Mephistophilis] hold them, they hold them!…

[Exeunt DEVILS with FAUSTUS.]

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