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.