A Latin cross inscribed in a circle, off-center
For as in Adam all die, so in Christ all will be made alive... For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet. The last enemy to be destroyed is death... so that God may be all in all. —Paul of Tarsus, I Corinthians 15

Christian Universalism is a range of Christian theologies which includes belief in the doctrine of universal reconciliation, the view that all human beings and angels will ultimately be redeemed in paths of proper relationship with God.

See also:
Christianity
Christian anarchism
Christian pacifism
Unitarian Universalism
Universalism

Quotes

God hides nothing. His very work from the beginning is revelation, — a casting aside of veil after veil, a showing unto men of truth after truth. ~ George MacDonald
The mission of the Universalist church has been …first to contravert the one-time prevalent idea of an endless hell. This part of the mission has practically been accomplished. … But the second and more important one awaits fulfillment … a fight which shall continue until the real, actual hells, before our very eyes, are destroyed. ~ Henry Clay Ledyard
  • I am a convinced universalist. I believe that in the end all men will be gathered into the love of God.
    • William Barclay, author of the Daily Study Bible, a set of commentaries on the New Testament A Spiritual Autobiography, pg 65–67, William B Eerdmans Publishing Company, Grand Rapids, 1977.
  • Hell exists as a final possibility, but several of the Fathers have none the less believed that in the end all will be reconciled to God. It is heretical to say that all must be saved, for this is to deny free will; but it is legitimate to hope that all may be saved. Until the Last Day comes, we must not despair of anyone’s salvation, but must long and pray for the reconciliation of all without exception. No one must be excluded from our loving intercession. ‘What is a merciful heart?’ asked Isaac the Syrian. ‘It is a heart that burns with love for the whole of creation, for men, for the birds, for the beasts, for the demons, for all creatures.’Gregory of Nyssa said that Christians may legitimately hope even for the redemption of the Devil.
"I think we in evangelical Christianity have ignored the Sovereignty of God and limited the scope and sweep of His great Love toward all. Scripture says, "While we were yet sinners, Christ died for us" (Romans 5:20)— He died once for all. (Romans 6:10 and 1 Peter 3:18) And contrary to popular opinion, our belief systems and religious presuppositions do not invalidate or reverse the effectiveness or efficiency of the finished work of Calvary. (Romans 3:3).
  • God hides nothing. His very work from the beginning is revelation, — a casting aside of veil after veil, a showing unto men of truth after truth. On and on, from fact to fact divine he advances, until at length in his Son Jesus he unveils his very face. Then begins a fresh unveiling, for the very work of the Father is the work the Son himself has to do, — to reveal. His life was the unveiling of himself, and the unveiling of the Son is still going on, and is that for the sake of which the world exists. When he is unveiled, that is, when we know the Son, we shall know the Father also. The whole of creation, its growth, its history, the gathering total of human existence, is an unveiling of the Father. He is the life, the eternal life, the Only. I see it — ah! believe me — I see it as I cannot say it. From month to month it grows upon me. The lovely home-light, the one essence of peaceful being, is God himself.
    He loves light and not darkness, therefore shines, therefore reveals. True, there are infinite gulfs in him, into which our small vision cannot pierce, but they are gulfs of light, and the truths there are invisible only through excess of their own clarity. There is a darkness that comes of effulgence, and the most veiling of all veils is the light. That for which the eye exists is light, but through light no human eye can pierce. — I find myself beyond my depth. I am ever beyond my depth, afloat in an infinite sea; but the depth of the sea knows me, for the ocean of my being is God. — What I would say is this, that the light is not blinding because God would hide, but because the truth is too glorious for our vision. The effulgence of himself God veiled that he might unveil it — in his Son. Inter-universal spaces, icons, eternities — what word of vastness you can find or choose — take unfathomable darkness itself, if you will, to express the infinitude of God, that original splendor existing only to the consciousness of God himself — I say he hides it not, but is revealing it ever, for ever, at all cost of labor, yea of pain to himself. His whole creation is a sacrificing of himself to the being and well-being of his little ones, that, being wrought out at last into partakers of his divine nature, that nature may be revealed in them to their divinest bliss. He brings hidden things out of the light of his own being into the light of ours.
    But see how different we are, — until we learn of him! See the tendency of man to conceal his treasures, to claim even truth as his own by discovery, to hide it and be proud of it, gloating over that which he thinks he has in himself, instead of groaning after the infinite of God! We would be forever heaping together possessions, dragging things into the cave of our finitude, our individual self, not perceiving that the things which pass that dreariest of doors, whatever they may have been, are thenceforth "but straws, small sticks, and dust of the floor." When a man would have a truth in thither as if it were of private interpretation, he drags in only the bag which the truth, remaining outside, has burst and left.
  • I firmly believe people have hitherto been a great deal too much taken up about doctrine and far too little about practice. The word doctrine, as used in the Bible, means teaching of duty, not theory. I preached a sermon about this. We are far too anxious to be definite and to have finished, well-polished, sharp-edged systems — forgetting that the more perfect a theory about the infinite, the surer it is to be wrong, the more impossible it is to be right.
    • George MacDonald, in a letter to his father, quoted in George MacDonald and His Wife (1924) by Greville MacDonald
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