A response to Gavin Ortlund on universalism

    Gavin Ortlund, a Reformed theologian and apologist, just released a video on universalism in the early church. I respect Gavin and generally appreciate the content that he puts out, even though I don’t always agree. As you might expect, this is a topic on which I disagree with him. In this post, I’ll be responding to his video. I hope to show that the early church did not, in fact, oppose universalism, nor is universalism as problematic as Gavin thinks – and actually, Gavin’s own view has some troubling implications that I’ll discuss at the end. Before reading this post, I urge you to watch his video (embedded above) to make sure I’m not misrepresenting his arguments!

Introduction

    At the start of his video, Gavin defines universalism as “the doctrine that ultimately all shall be saved. Not just all human beings, but according to many expressions of this, all demons as well.” This is a fair definition of universalism, and I appreciate that unlike some other anti-universalists, he doesn’t strawman it as the view that hell doesn’t exist or that all people automatically go to heaven. Some universalists do believe these things, but they’re not part of mainstream Christian universalism.

    Gavin outlines three main points of his argument:

1. Universalism always had a rocky relationship with orthodoxy. From its emergence in second-century Alexandrian gnostic teachers through the multiple waves of Christian controversy about Origen, an early Christian who affirmed universalism, it never really got a firm footing within the church.

2. Universalism has tended to be more speculative and philosophical in character, as opposed to textual or biblical in its motivations...

3. Universalism in the early church involved not just a different view of the final destination of reality, but a different framework for the entirety of reality, including creation and sometimes even the doctrine of God.

    He continues by emphasizing that universalism is becoming more popular in the church, across every Christian tradition.

Among Evangelicals, you think of different reactions to Rob Bell’s book Love Wins back in like 2011, 2012. Among Roman Catholics, you think about responses to various things that Pope Francis has said, like his... 2016 statement, “[This isn’t my dogma, just my thought:] I like to think of hell as being empty. [I hope it is.]” Among Eastern Orthodox Christians, you think of reactions to David Bentley Hart’s 2019 book That All Shall be Saved. But there’s lots of others, both popular level and academic, in all different Christian traditions, universalism is on the rise.

This is certainly true! We may disagree on whether this is a good thing or not, or whether it’s a result of undue modern influence on the church, but it’s hard to deny that Christian universalism is growing. I think it’s a good sign that popular-level teachers like Gavin Ortlund are engaging with universalism on its own terms, instead of just dismissing it as a heresy.

    Gavin’s careful to emphasize that “this is a tough topic... this is brutal” and he really desires every person to be saved, citing Romans 9:1–3 to show how we should deal with the topic of hell.

When we acknowledge the reality of final separation from God, we should do so soberly and with grief. It’s something that confronts me, I don’t feel comfortable with this doctrine, but I think we need to [acknowledge it]... The motive for rejecting universalism is that it’s a very problematic doctrine.

I appreciate this attitude toward the idea of people being separated from God, and I think we all should have this attitude, whether or not we believe that separation is final. This is very different from the attitude of some premodern infernalists, such as Tertullian and Aquinas, who believed that considering the torment of the wicked only enhances the happiness of the righteous (De Spectaculis 30; Summa Theologiae Suppl., 94). This isn’t to say that some universalists don’t also have an overly lenient view of separation from God, but wrongheaded attitudes toward hell aren’t unique to universalism or infernalism.

    Gavin concludes his introduction by saying,

In fact, ultimately the weight of Scripture and tradition are pretty decisively against [universalism]. I think Michael McClymond is correct in his analysis in this amazing two-volume book [The Devil’s Redemption]... I’m drawing a lot from this for this video. Basically what he says is, toward the beginning, “While universalism has undeniable curb appeal for the theological driver-by, the universalist house proves to be not a very livable place.” That really resonates. I think that’s right.

It’s unfortunate that Gavin primarily relies on McClymond’s work for his research, and doesn’t even attempt to address Ilaria Ramelli’s extensive research in The Christian Doctrine of Apokatastasis, which deals with the exact topic of universalism in the early church. Ramelli is a respected patristics (early church) scholar, whereas McClymond had little experience in this area before writing The Devil’s Redemption. Of course, Ramelli’s credentials don’t make her infallible, nor does it make McClymond wrong. But the fact that Gavin doesn’t even cite or address Ramelli’s work on this topic means that he didn’t give both sides of this debate a fair shake, which is unfortunate!

Universalism and orthodoxy

    The next section of Gavin’s video deals with the first point of his argument: “Universalism has always had a tenuous relationship with orthodoxy.” He claims that

[Universalism] first emerged among certain gnostic teachers in and around Alexandria in the second century. [Quote onscreen: “Origen’s universalism was itself an adaptation and transformation of second-century gnosis.” The Devil’s Redemption, pp. 209] And those in turn influenced Origen and possibly Clement of Alexandria as well.

    Gavin relies entirely on McClymond for this claim, so let’s investigate his evidence. First, he cites Irenaeus’ statement that the Carpocratian sect believed in a kind of universal salvation for pure souls (not bodies; Against Heresies I.25.4). The Nag Hammadi text On the Origin of the World says that, in the end, darkness will be banished, “those who have not become perfect... will receive glory in their realms... but they will never enter the kingless realm,” and “all must return to the place where they came from... all of them will reveal their natures.” The Apocryphon of John distinguishes three classes of souls, one which will be saved immediately, one which will be saved through punishment, and one which will never repent and be saved. The Tripartite Tractate says that “all the limbs of the body of the Church” will be restored, but there are three classes of natures – spiritual, soulish, and material – and only the first two can be saved.

    What’s striking is that none of these ‘gnostic’ texts that McClymond quotes, with the possible exception of On the Origin of the World, are explicitly universalist! The Nag Hammadi texts distinguish between different natures of people, one of which will never be saved, so their view of restoration isn’t universal. Ramelli develops this point in her research (Apokatastasis, pp. 87–89; A Larger Hope, pp. 238–243). In any case, Origen strongly opposes ‘gnosticism’ – especially the “doctrine of natures” found at Nag Hammadi – in many of his writings, so it would be incredible if he adopted the centerpiece of his eschatology from the sects that he opposed. Indeed, as I showed in another post, Origen developed his doctrine of universal restoration precisely in opposition to the ‘gnostics’.

    Gavin continues,

Furthermore, Origen’s universalism was always controversial... You get these waves of controversy surrounding Origen. First around the turn of the fifth century and then again in a more protracted way throughout the sixth century. Ultimately, Origen’s views are rejected at the fifth ecumenical council in 553 AD. Though this is tricky because the condemnation is bound up with other aspects of Origen’s theology like his doctrine of pre-existent souls [sic].

This is true, but it’s an overstatement to say that Origen was always controversial. Gavin leaves out just how influential Origen was before these controversies. For example, St. Jerome wrote in AD 389 that “none but the ignorant will deny [Origen] to be the greatest teacher of the Church after the apostles” (On Hebrew Names, pref.). Furthermore, the controversies themselves were largely based on misinterpretations of Origen! He explicitly denied the doctrine of pre-existent souls (Comm in Matt XIII.1), and argued that every being except the Trinity is essentially embodied (De Princ II.2.2; 3.2–3; IV.4.8).

    Even though Origen was condemned at the fifth ecumenical council, the doctrine of universalism as such wasn’t condemned. Gavin acknowledges this, but argues that “the reception of this council” shows universalism was perceived to be condemned. This is true, but it was a later development; as Gavin goes on to acknowledge, canonized saints after AD 553 like St. Isaac of Nineveh and (arguably) St. Maximus were universalists, which means that universalism wasn’t perceived to be condemned until later. As a Protestant theologian, Gavin doesn’t accept tradition as infallible, and even Roman Catholic and Orthodox Christians believe that tradition outside ecumenical councils and ex cathedra papal pronouncements can be fallible. I’m not sure why he’s giving such weight to the informal ‘tradition’ of the medieval era.

    Gavin next addresses the argument that

Prior to the sixth century... universalism was more of a common view. Or sometimes what people say is that in the West you have Augustine, and the way the Western tradition goes is away from universalism towards particularism, but in the East there’s more friendliness to universalism.

He acknowledges that there were some universalists in the early Eastern church, including Didymus the Blind, Theodore of Mopsuestia, St. Gregory of Nyssa, possibly St. Gregory of Nazianzus and St. Maximus. I think that this is an understatement, and there were many more universalists in the early church (both East and West) – in fact, that universalism became the dominant view in third and fourth century Eastern Christianity – but that would require a whole lot more argumentation (which I plan to provide in later posts on this topic). For now, I’ll just point to Ramelli’s work again (Apokatastasis, pp. 223–658), which Gavin has failed to engage with.

    Gavin then points out two fourth-century Eastern theologians, St. Basil and St. John Chrysostom, who opposed universalism. (The single anti-universalist passage in Basil’s Regulae may be an interpolation, but I’ll treat it as authentic here.) The passages to which Gavin points argue against universalism on the basis that Scripture describes punishment as aiōnios (often translated “eternal”), and that our future life is described with the same adjective. However, both of these arguments are often addressed by Christian universalists, both today and as early as Origen. I’m not sure what Gavin’s point was in bringing up these arguments if he wasn’t going to acknowledge the universalist rebuttals or provide any counter-rebuttal.

    Gavin concludes this section of his video with a quote from Richard Bauckham’s 1978 article, “Universalism: A Historical Survey,” to the effect that virtually all Christians until the nineteenth century rejected universalism. However, Bauckham has since changed his view in response to Ilaria Ramelli’s research, and admitted that the extent of universalism in the early church has been “under-estimated”! (See his foreword to Ramelli’s book A Larger Hope.) I don’t think Gavin is being intentionally disingenuous, but it strikes me as at least strange that he cites Bauckham’s fifty-year-old article without acknowledging Ramelli’s later scholarship and Bauckham’s own shift.

Universalism and speculation

    The next section of the video deals with the second point of Gavin’s argument: “[Universalism] seems to be more speculative and philosophical in its character and in its motivations, as opposed to biblical.” He says that this may not be true of modern Christian universalists, but it’s generally true of universalism in the early church.

    There isn’t really much to respond to here. Gavin spends most of this section claiming that the passages in Scripture which seem to imply universalism are easier to reconcile with particularism, than the passages which seem to imply particularism are to reconcile with universalism. I think that it’s the other way around: the passages which seem to imply particularism can easily be reconciled with universalism, so long as we recognize that they refer to a period before the final restoration of all. It’s hard to substantiate either of these claims without getting into the weeds of Scriptural exegesis, which Gavin understandably doesn’t do here (since this video is supposed to be about the early church).

    Gavin points to Gregory of Nyssa as a patristic universalist who was more biblically-based in his belief in universalism. However, his universalism was still philosophically motivated, because (Gavin quotes patristic scholar Constantine Tsirpanlis), “The strongest and perhaps most convincing argument of Gregory in support of universal restoration and salvation is the finiteness of evil as non-existent.” I was really surprised when Gavin pointed to this as an overly philosophical or esoteric view, since the fact that evil is ontologically non-subsistent has been central to the orthodox Christian case against dualism since the second century! Augustine, who was a staunch anti-universalist, made this point in many of his writings! This is strange to me, but it only gets worse in the next section.

Universalism and ontology

    In the last section, Gavin moves on to his third point: “Universalism in the early church is not just a different vision of the ending of the story of creation, but it’s a different vision of the whole meaning of the story.” I actually agree with this to an extent, but I would develop this point in a very different direction than Gavin does. He continues, “Ultimately the question that comes up here is, is reality ultimately a synthesis, or is it more of a dialectic?” Gavin opts for the latter view, with some troubling consequences for his overall theology.

    Gavin argues that the biblical story is “creation → fall → redemption”, whereas the patristic universalist vision is “unity → diversity → reunion”. I fail to see how these two visions aren’t complementary. It looks to me like the second vision just is the first vision, translated into the language and concerns of the classical philosophy shared by the early church fathers. Not just universalists, but also anti-universalists like Augustine, conceived of the creation-fall-redemption story in terms of unity-diversity-reunion. (See especially Samantha Thompson, “What Goodness Is: Order as Imitation of Unity in Augustine,” The Review of Metaphysics 65:3, 525–553). The original and final state of creation isn’t an undifferentiated unity, to be sure, but it’s a unity nonetheless.

    Gavin then claims that Origen’s belief in the pre-existence of souls resulted from his vision of unity-diversity-reunion. Maybe this would be convincing if Origen actually believed in the pre-existence of souls, but he explicitly rejected that view (see above). Gavin then spends several minutes discussing Stephen bar-Sudayli, a sixth-century Christian mystic who believed that everything will become consubstantial with the Father in the universal restoration. But Stephen is certainly not representative of mainstream Christian universalism; he was the most extreme proponent of sixth-century ‘Origenism’ (which was a severe distortion of Origen’s actual views)! Gavin spends a disproportionate amount of time discussing bar-Sudayli, which gives the false impression that he’s representative in any way of patristic universalism.

    Gavin concludes,

There’s a reason why this ontological vision of oneness so often undergirds universalism: because it’s hard to see what grounds [universalism] apart from that. Put it like this. If you lose the primordial unity, what confidence do you have for eschatological unity?... The concern here is a deficient view of evil. Why can’t it be that Satan will forever hate God and that certain demons will forever hate God? And here’s the scary thought, that certain humans will forever hate God.

He’s right that it’s hard to detach universal salvation from the other aspects of patristic universalist thought. This is part of an interconnected web of beliefs that undergird and support one another. Your view of evil does affect your eschatology. But let’s see how Gavin develops this point:

Reality is a dialectic. Created reality is a dialectic. Good and evil are forever expanding apart from one another. It’s a different vision of everything. That seems to be what I think Scripture teaches.

    I was really shocked when I first watched this part of the video, because this view is dangerously close to dualism. In fact, it looks explicitly dualistic. If this is true, then evil is not a privation of good, despite what Christians have historically taught (including infernalists like Augustine and Aquinas), but a substance which exists in a dialectic with goodness. This was the view held by ancient ‘gnostic’ groups like the Valentinians, Marcionites, and Manichaeans. It was precisely this view that Origen opposed, in which context he developed his doctrine of universal restoration. Furthermore, dualism has concerning implications for the doctrine of God: if evil is a created substance, then either God who created it is (at least partially) evil, or there’s another God who created it.

    It’s troubling, but not surprising to me, that Gavin seems to embrace dualism in his opposition to universalism. Origen himself was concerned that if life and death will both exist eternally, then they must be ontologically equal, which is dualism (Comm in Rom V.7.8). Even Augustine, in his polemics against the dualist Manichaeans, used an argument that seems to imply universalism (De moribus II.7.9). I have a hard time believing that Gavin is actually a dualist in the way that the ‘gnostics’ were, but his argument against universalism certainly looks like it. This just highlights how infernalism and non-dualism exist in tension with one another. So yes, one’s view of evil does affect one’s eschatology! But this really doesn’t seem to be a point against universalism!

Conclusion

    Gavin Ortlund’s video about universalism in the early church doesn’t really bring up any arguments that haven’t been addressed before. Many of the points that he makes were already rebutted by Origen nearly two thousand years ago. What I find most remarkable about this video is how openly Gavin seems to embrace dualism in his opposition to universalism. Thankfully, based on the comments of the video, it looks like most people recognize that these arguments are inadequate! In an update comment, Gavin says he’s planning to read Ilaria Ramelli’s book, so hopefully he can address this topic again in a future video with more research and better arguments that don’t retread old ground. If he does, I look forward to watching it.

The Restoration of All: Universalism in Early Christianity (part 4)

Part 3: Second-Century Apologists

The “Man of Steel”: Origen of Alexandria

    Origen was an influential Christian theologian at Alexandria in the third century. Origen was the first systematic theologian, and had a great influence on the later church. Whereas universalism (as we’ve seen) existed in many earlier Christian authors, he provided a clear systematization of it as a doctrine. He did the same for other Christian views, such as trinitarian theology (he was the first to apply the language of one ousia and three hypostaseis to God, which became prominent in the fourth-century theological conflicts). [1] Unfortunately, some of the doctrines that he held were considered orthodox in his day, but were distorted by his later followers and then condemned as heresy, resulting in the condemnation of Origen himself. [2] However, this doesn’t diminish his influence on the third- and fourth-century church. Here we’ll examine his idea of universal apokatastasis in detail.

Evil as Non-Being

    Origen developed his uniquely Christian philosophy in opposition to the ‘gnostic’ Christian groups that existed at that time. These ‘gnostics’ typically held to a stark division between the spiritual and material worlds, the inherent goodness of the former and inherent evilness of the latter, and that humans must embrace the spiritual and escape the material. Valentinian ‘gnostics’ in particular believed that humanity was divided into three classes – material, soulish, and spiritual – that the spiritual would be saved (but not their bodies), the material would perish, and the soulish would have an uncertain salvation (Tripartite Tractate; Irenaeus, AH I.6.1–2). This was effectively an extreme form of predestination, which Origen referred to as the “doctrine of natures” and strongly opposed.

    Origen frequently engages the “doctrine of natures,” which he attributes to the ‘gnostics’ Valentinus and Marcion, in his commentary on Romans. He begins by proving that Paul was “set apart for God’s gospel” (Rom 1:1) not because he had a special nature, but because he chose goodness (Comm in Rom I.3). God judges people according to their heart, works, and thoughts (Rom 2:10, 16), not because of their nature (II.4.7; 10.2). God reconciled himself to us “while we were enemies” (Rom 5:10), showing that enemies are not so by nature (IV.12.1–2). A person can present themself as slave to either sin or righteousness, and broken off or grafted into the olive tree (Rom 6:16–18; 11:16–24), they are not determined to one or the other (VI.3.3–5; VIII.11). In fact, based on Rom 14:14ff, the fact is that “none of the things God has created is unclean of its own nature” – it is only “because of the offence” that “what is good of its own nature becomes evil” (XI.42; X.3).

    His philosophical basis for this draws upon the idea, common in classical philosophy, that evil is simply a privation (lack) of goodness and not something that subsists in itself. This view was first proposed by Plato and Aristotle, and further developed by Plotinus (a later contemporary of Origen). Origen sets forth a Christian argument for this in his commentary on John 1:3:

“For the Lord said to Moses, ‘He who is, this is my name.’” [Exod 3:14] Now according to us who boast that we belong to the Church, it is the good God who speaks these words. This is the same God the Savior honors when he says, “No one is good except the one God, the Father.” [Mk 10:18] “The one who is good,” therefore, is the same as “the one who is.’’ But evil or wickedness is opposite to the good, and “not being” is opposite to “being.” It follows that wickedness and evil are “not being.” (Comm in John II.95–96)

This argument is Scripturally based: since God is the One who Is and Good, it follows that being and being good are fundamentally the same; therefore, evil is not-being. Origen also adduces a couple of passages that refer to evil or evildoers as “those which are not” (II.94–95; cf. Rom 4:17; Esth 4:22 LXX). He offers yet another argument in his commentary on Romans 14:14–20: “none of the things God has created is unclean of its own nature—for it is an established fact that everything created by the good God is good and clean” (Comm in Rom XI.42.4). In other words, God is Good, and therefore whatever he creates is good, which means that evil is a non-creature. 

    This is crucial to Origen’s understanding of rational creatures and his refutation of ‘gnosticism’. He sees all rational creatures as having fundamentally the same nature, so that none of them is inherently morally good or evil, but rather every being – with the exception of God, Christ, and the Holy Spirit – has the ability to choose good and evil (De Princ I.8.2–3; Comm in John XX.198ff). Even the devil, qua rational being, is not evil in his substance, for that would mean that (as the “deceived” claim) he was made by a different creator.

For insofar as he is the devil, he is not a creation of God, but to the extent that it falls to the devil ‘to be,’ being made, since there is no creator except our God, he is a creation of God. It is as if we should say that a murderer is not a creation of God, while we do not annul the fact that qua man, he has been made by God. (Comm in John II.97)

This concept of evil as not-being, and created substances (qua created by God) as good, is very important for Origen’s eschatology as we will see. It also clears up the controversy of whether or not he believed in the ultimate salvation of the devil.

Punishment as Purification

    Another crucial idea developed by Origen, which (like his concept of evil as not-being) has Scriptural and earlier patristic roots, is that God punishes in order to correct. This teaching is found explicitly in some biblical authors (Lam 3:31-33; Heb 12:5-11), along with the theme of punishment and restoration throughout the prophets, and it recurs frequently in the writings of Origen’s predecessor Clement of Alexandria (see my previous post). Origen himself developed this view in opposition to the Marcionite ‘gnostics,’ who distinguished the ‘just’ god YHWH of the Hebrew Bible from the ‘good’ Father of Jesus. Contrary to Marcion, he insists on the identity of YHWH and the Father, drawing heavily on the New Testament to support this view (De Princ II.4).

    According to the “heretics,” since YHWH is ‘just’ while the Father is ‘good,’ they can’t be the same; for them, ‘justice’ is retribution, while ‘goodness’ is (equally) doing good to all people indiscriminately (De Princ II.5.1). Origen shows that, according to Scripture, it is also true that YHWH is good and the Father is just, so their view is wrong (II.5.2). Moreover, he draws upon the theme of punishment and restoration in the prophets to show that God’s justice is restorative and not retributive (II.5.3). According to Ezekiel, Sodom who was punished shall be restored (Ezek 16:55); according to Isaiah, Babylon’s punishment is a “help” to her (Isa 47:14–15 LXX); according to Asaph, those whom God punished afterward “sought” him (Ps 78:34).

From all these illustrations it is plain that the just and good God of the law and the gospels is one and the same, and that he does good with justice and punishes in kindness, since neither goodness without justice nor justice without goodness can describe the dignity of the divine nature. (De Princ II.5.3; cf. II.10.6–7; Comm in Rom VI.5.5)

Origen then returns to direct Scriptural affirmations that the God of the law is “good” and the God of the gospels is “just,” so the Marcionites are wrong (II.5.4). His view of punishment as restorative is crucial to his defense against the ‘gnostics’: if God punished someone without a view to their ultimate good, then his justice and goodness would be incompatible. For Origen, God is simple (without parts), so his attributes could not possibly conflict (De Princ I.I.6).

    This view of punishment as restorative is found throughout Origen’s many writings (e.g., De Princ II.10.6–8; Hom in Exod III.3; VIII.5–6; Hom in Jer I.15–16; VI.2; XII.5; Contra Celsum III.75; IV.72, 99; V.31). He holds that even death is purifying punishment (Comm in Matt 15.15; Hom in Lev 14.4). We already saw this view in Theophilus of Antioch, who held that physical death was inflicted after the fall so as to prevent fallen humans to sin forever and incur eternal punishment (To Autolycus II.26). Likewise, for Origen, eternal punishment is not possible for God, since by definition that could not be restorative. The Scriptural affirmation of aiōnios punishment (e.g., Matt 25:46) presents no challenge, for he is aware that aiōnios in Greek properly refers to the aeons and not eternity:

In the Scriptures “aeon” is sometimes recorded because the end is not known, but sometimes because the time period designated does not have an end in the present aeon, though it does end in the future. Sometimes a period of time or even the length of one man’s life may be designated as “aeon” (Comm in Rom VI.5.9)

“Lord, you who rule from aeon to aeon and beyond.” [Exod 15:18] As often as “from aeon to aeon” is said a length of time is indicated but there is some end. And if Scripture says “into another aeon,” certainly something longer is indicated, but an end is set. And as often as “the aeons of the aeons” is mentioned some termination is indicated, although perhaps unknown to us, nevertheless established by God. But Scripture adds in this passage: “and beyond.” No sense of any termination or end remains. (Hom in Exod VI.13)

Origen doesn’t follow Plato and the Greek philosophers of his own day in using aiōn and aiōnios to refer to absolute eternity. Instead, he follows the Scriptural usage of these terms to refer to a lengthy but not endless period of time – an “age” or “aeon.” [3] God is called “aeonian” because he rules and acts within history, within the aeons (contrary to the more deistic God of the philosophers); but Scripture also says, “and beyond,” with reference to God’s rule and life. This shows that when the world reaches its telos, it will be “something more than an aeon... when all things are no longer in an aeon, but ‘God is all and in all’ [1 Cor 15:28]” (De Princ II.3.5).

    If “aeonian punishment” has an end, then on what basis does Origen maintain that “aeonian life” will be endless? He gives two complementary answers to this inquiry. First, “aeonian life” is primarily a quality of life, not its duration; it is the quality of intimately knowing God and Jesus (Comm in Rom II.5.8; 7.4). We know that this is endless not because the word aiōnios is used – since that word has many meanings – but because other words like “always” (pantote) are used (VI.5.9). In another sense, however, aeonian life will end. Our knowledge of God and Christ within the aeons will be superceded by an even better life when the aeons end. Referencing the “aeonian tabernacle” of 1 Cor 5:1, he says that “there is a stage that is beyond this and superior to rational creatures. In that state, rational creatures will be in the Father and the Son, or rather in the Trinity” (Sel in Ps 60). For the Father is “beyond aeonian life” (Comm in John XIII.18–19).

The End as the So-Called Restoration

    This topic naturally leads to Origen’s view of the end of history. For him, since the substance of every rational creature is fundamentally good, and God’s punishments are aimed at turning their corrupted wills back to the good, it is impossible that evil could exist forever. This belief wasn’t a result of the influence of Greek philosophy, but followed from his ‘orthodox’ polemics against the ‘gnostic’ heretics. In fact, Plato himself believed that some sinners are “incurable” (e.g., Phaedo 113E2); Origen rejected this view on the Christian grounds that God is the Almighty Physician, so it is possible for him to cure any of his creatures, even the worst (De Princ III.6.5; cf. Contra Celsum VIII.72). 

    For Origen, the “restoration” (apokatastasis) of all rational beings is the goal to which all of history aims. In his commentary on John 1:1, with reference to the “beginning” in which the Logos “was,” he says regarding the corresponding “end”:

I think the stopping point and goal [telos] is the so-called restoration, because no one is left as an enemy then, if indeed the statement is true, “For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet. And the last enemy to be destroyed is death.” [1 Cor 15:25–26] For at that time those who have come to God through the Logos who is “with him” [John 1:1] will have the contemplation of God as their only activity, that, having been accurately formed in the knowledge of the Father, they may all thus become a son, since now the Son alone has known the Father [Matt 11:27]. (Comm in John I.91–93)

Later in his commentary, he states that the telos will be simultaneous with Christ’s coming, citing 1 Cor 15:23–24 (Comm in John XXXII.27–30). The fact that he says that the end is the “so-called” restoration implies that he is relating something that has been previously taught.

    One of his sources is clearly 1 Corinthians 15:24–28, which actually refers to the subjection of God’s enemies as the telos. This passage is Origen’s primary Scriptural basis for his belief in the universal restoration, and he devotes a large portion of his On First Principles to exegeting this text (De Princ I.6; III.5.6–6.8). He thinks that the subjection of God’s enemies refers to their salvation for two reasons. First, because it is explicitly said in Scripture that subjection to God is salvation (De Princ I.6.1; cf. Ps 62:1). Second, because this same subjection is applied to Christ. Contrary to the “heretics,” who “deprecate using the term subjection in regard to the Son,” the subjection of the Son can be nothing but “good and salutary,” and includes the “perfect restoration of the entire creation” which will at that time have been incorporated into the body of Christ (De Princ III.5.7; cf. Eph 1:10).

    Another source for Origen’s belief in the universal restoration is likely Acts 3:21, which connects the “restoration of all things” to Christ’s return. In fact, he references this passage to support his view that the “perfect telos” of the world will be the restoration (De Princ II.3.5; cf. Comm in Matt 17.19). Finally, a third source for his belief that the “telos is the so-called restoration” is likely his predecessor Clement of Alexandria, who also said that Paul “teaches that the telos is the restoration we hope for” (Stromata II.22). We shouldn’t discount the influence of Clement, who was a clear universalist, on Origen, although we also shouldn’t overemphasize this influence (it’s unlikely that Origen actually studied under Clement, as has often been thought).

    Origen’s belief in universal restoration is not only based in Scripture, but also philosophy – that is, Christian philosophy, not Greek philosophy. As noted above, his beliefs that evil is non-being and that God’s punishment is restorative lead directly to his universalism. It is possible for a soul to become so fully integrated around goodness that its good will is “changed into nature”; this is precisely what happened with Christ’s human soul (De Princ II.6.5–7). In fact, this is precisely why, after the restoration of all beings, there will be no more fall, and Christ will not need to be sacrificed a second time (Origen considers this thought to be absurd). All beings will have been made perfect in the love of Christ, and “love never fails” (Comm in Rom V.10.12–16).

    But it is not possible for a soul to become fully integrated around evil in this way; evil is non-being, and such a soul would cease to exist. Scripture affirms that God “created all things so that they might exist” (Wis 1:14), so he would not allow any of his creatures to pass completely into non-being (De Princ III.6.5; Hom in Jer I.16; Contra Celsum V.22). Death and life are two contraries, one is the privation of the other; therefore, they cannot both be of eternal duration, for that would make them ontologically equal. “Therefore it is certain that if life is eternal, death cannot be eternal” (Comm in Rom V.7.8). It’s interesting that Origen opposes his universalism to annihilation, and not to eternal torment; this may reflect the state of Christian eschatological discourse in his day, since (as I showed in my previous posts) universalism and annihilation/conditionalism were the two main options at this time.

    Did Origen believe that even the devil would be saved, then? Some scholars have actually argued that he didn’t, based on a handful of passages where he speaks of the devil’s destruction (e.g., Hom in Lev XI.11.2; Contra Celsum VI.44). [4] This seems impossible to maintain in light of his repeated forceful statements that all rational beings will be restored, that God will be truly “in all” without exception. But one of his statements about the devil is particularly confusing:

They say that I claim that the father of wickedness and perdition, and of those who are cast out of the kingdom of God, namely, the devil, is to be saved. This is something which not even a madman and someone who is manifestly insane can say. (quoted in Rufinus, On the Falsification 7)

    Does he contradict himself here? Not if we understand the nuances of his position. For Origen, “the devil” is a title that properly refers not to the substance of the one who became the devil, which (qua creature of God) is fundamentally good, but to his evil choices and will (De Princ I.5.2; Comm in John II.97; Contra Celsum IV.65). The destruction of the “last enemy” will not involve the destruction of his substance, but the destruction of his hostile will, so that he is no longer devil (De Princ III.6.5). It would indeed be wrong to maintain that “the devil” will be saved, since that would mean that his evil will is saved, which is nonsense – but that’s precisely the view that his opponent Candidus falsely attributed to him (which he was refuting in the above passage), since Candidus was a ‘gnostic’ who believed that the devil was evil in his nature.

    In his polemics with the ‘gnostics,’ Origen did not oppose universal restoration to freedom of choice, but held that it is certain precisely because of freedom of choice (along with the asymmetry of good and evil). Freedom of choice is why it will be possible even for demons and the devil to return to the Good in future aeons (De Princ I.6.3; Comm in Rom V.10.13–14). The reason why all will ultimately be restored eternally is that good, unlike evil, can become nature for a rational being, as it did for Christ’s human soul. The love of Christ shown in his sacrifice is strong enough to fully integrate every creature within the Good (Comm in Rom V.10.12–18). Thus, despite his later critics, Origen’s universalism was in fact centered around Christ’s sacrifice and creatures’ freedom of choice.

    Although he clearly expounded universal restoration in his theological treatises, he was pastorally concerned that teaching this doctrine aloud would cause weaker brethren to sin. In his polemic against the pagan philosopher Celsus, Origen makes a brief mention of the purificatory nature of punishment, but says that these remarks “are neither to be made to all, nor to be uttered on the present occasion,” because of those who have difficulty restraining from sin (Contra Celsum VI.26). He even held that this same pastoral concern is why Paul said that “many” would be saved rather than “all men” in Rom 5:15 (Comm in Rom V.1.5–7). This should be kept in mind when we’re investigating the eschatology of those who were influenced by Origen; they may have kept their belief in universalism out of their pastoral and apologetic writings for this purpose.

Origen’s Influence

    Now that we’ve covered Origen’s Christian universalism in depth, let’s consider both the people who influenced him and those that he later influenced. There is a misconception that he was first and foremost a philosopher and only secondarily a Christian, and that he was heavily influenced by Middle Platonism. I don’t see this ‘Platonism’ in his writings to any great extent.

    Origen explicitly rejected Plato’s thesis of an external world of Forms (De Princ II.3.6). His concept of time was more influenced by Stoicism than Platonism, and even then he staunchly opposed the Stoic idea of an eternal succession of identical aeons (De Princ II.3.4; Contra Celsum IV.67–68). [5] His most Platonic view was the privation theory of evil, but he developed this primarily on the basis of Scripture, not philosophical arguments. His universalism was in opposition to Plato, who thought that some sinners were “incurable” (e.g., Phaedo 113E2). In my opinion, Origen would best be classified not as a Platonist, but as a uniquely Christian philosopher (one of the first of his kind).

    Origen had a great influence on the early church after him, especially the Eastern part of the church. He deeply influenced Athanasius of Alexandria and the three Cappadocian Fathers, who were the primary members of the victorious pro-Nicene faction in the fourth-century conflicts. In the late fourth century, Jerome wrote, “none but the ignorant will deny [Origen] to be the greatest teacher of the Church after the apostles” (On Hebrew Names pref.). This shows just how great his influence was, before the later controversies that regrettably marred his reputation within Christian tradition.

    Nearly all of the doctrines that were attributed to him in the sixth-century Origenist controversy were doctrines that he never held, and even explicitly refuted. For example, Origen did not believe in the idea of transmigration of souls – that souls pre-existed their bodies incorporeally – and actually called out this doctrine by name as false (Comm in Matt XIII.1). He believed that every being except for the Trinity is essentially embodied (De Princ II.2.2; 3.2–3; IV.4.8), and that the resurrection body maintains continuity of identity with the mortal body (De Princ II.10.1–3; III.6.6). Nor did he believe that Christ will be sacrificed again; he considered this an absurdity (Comm in Rom V.10.12–16). This should suffice to show that Origen himself was not an ‘Origenist’; his views were badly distorted up to the sixth century, and he was wrongly condemned.

______________________________

[1] Ilaria L. E. Ramelli, “Origen’s Anti-Subordinationism and its Heritage in the Nicene and Cappadocian Line,” Vigiliae Christinae 65 (2011): 21-49.

[2] Mark Edwards, “Origen of Alexandria,” in The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Patristics, ed. Ken Parry (West Sussex, UK: John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2015), 98-110.

[3] See my own blog post series on the usage of aiōn and aiōnios throughout Scripture.

[4] Lisa R. Holliday, “Will Satan Be Saved? Reconsidering Origen’s Theory of Volition in Peri Archon,” Vigiliae Christinae 63 (2009): 1-23; Michael S. Domeracki, “The Unchanging Mind: Origen’s Lifetime Argument and The Dissolution of the Devil.”

[5] P. Tzamalikos, Origen: Cosmology and Ontology of Time (Boston: Brill, 2006).

Χριστός Ανέστη! ("Christ is risen!")

    Hi everyone! I had a post planned for today, but it didn’t really match the theme of Easter / Christ’s resurrection at all, so I’ll publish it at a later date. Today, let’s celebrate the single event that marks the turning point of history, the beginning of the new creation, which secured the ultimate restoration of all of us – the bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ.

When the Sabbath was over, Mary Magdalene and Mary the mother of James and Salome bought spices, so that they might go and anoint him. And very early on the first day of the week, when the sun had risen, they went to the tomb. They had been saying to one another, “Who will roll away the stone for us from the entrance to the tomb?” When they looked up, they saw that the stone, which was very large, had already been rolled back. As they entered the tomb, they saw a young man dressed in a white robe sitting on the right side, and they were alarmed. But he said to them, “Do not be alarmed; you are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has been raised; he is not here. Look, there is the place they laid him. But go, tell his disciples and Peter that he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him, just as he told you.” (Mark 16:1–7)

But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have died. For since death came through a human, the resurrection of the dead has also come through a human, for as all die in Adam, so all will be made alive in Christ. But each in its own order: Christ the first fruits, then at his coming those who belong to Christ. Then comes the end, when he hands over the kingdom to God the Father, after he has destroyed every ruler and every authority and power. For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet. The last enemy to be destroyed is death. For “God has put all things in subjection under his feet.” But when it says, “All things are put in subjection,” it is plain that this does not include the one who put all things in subjection under him. When all things are subjected to him, then the Son himself will also be subjected to the one who put all things in subjection under him, so that God may be all in all. (1 Corinthians 15:20–28)

[Christ] is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, so that he might come to have first place in everything. For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross. (Colossians 1:18–20)

[R]aising our Lord Jesus from the dead is more magnificent among the praises of God than the making of heaven and earth, the creating of angels, and the establishment of the heavenly powers. For the latter had to do with making what did not exist; the former, however, to restore what had perished... the restoration of the world and the renovation of the entire creation which has been re-established through the resurrection of the Lord. (Origen, Comm in Rom IV.7.3)

Χριστός ανέστη! Αληθώς ανέστη!

Resurrection and metaphysical anthropology (part 2 of 2)

Part 1: substance dualism and physicalism

Hylomorphic dualism

    Hylomorphic dualism is a middle ground view between substance dualism and physicalism. This view is based in hylomorphism, the Aristotelian doctrine that corporeal substances are made up of matter (hylē) and form (morphē). Form is that which gives a substance its attributes (e.g., color, shape, size) and powers, while matter is what receives and individuates form. (Forms, such as dog-ness and triangularity, don’t exist by themselves – at least, not usually – they exist in individual substances, like dogs and triangles, which are distinguished by their unique parcels of matter.)

    Hylomorphism was first proposed to help explain change. For change to really happen, there must be something that underlies and stays the same, and something that changes. If the former doesn’t exist, then nothing really changes, things just come into and go out of existence. (For example: if nothing underlies and persists through change, then a banana doesn’t change from green to yellow, instead a green banana goes out of existence and a yellow banana comes into existence.) If the latter doesn’t exist, then nothing ever changes at all.

    When it comes to substantial change (change from one substance to another), the thing that underlies must be something that is not itself a substance, but can take on new attributes and powers (this is what Aristotle called “matter”), and there must be something in virtue of which the matter comes to have new attributes and powers (this is what Aristotle called “form”). Even hyper-reductionist physicalists should agree that substantial change occurs, since fundamental particles can decay into other kinds of fundamental particles. Thus, the existence of matter and form as metaphysical parts of substances is well-grounded in the fact that change (especially substantial change) really happens.

    Hylomorphic dualism is just the application of hylomorphism to human persons. Like all other material substances, humans have both matter – which individuates us from other humans – and substantial form – which gives us the attributes and powers that are proper to humans. This includes not just attributes like shape and size, but also our perceptual and cognitive powers. Aristotle referred to the form of a living thing as its “soul” (psychē); not just for humans, but for other vegetative and sentient life as well. However, he argued that the human form/soul is unique because it has a rational intellect which is immaterial and naturally indestructible (De Anima 3.4-7).

    This view avoids the problems that are associated with substance dualism and physicalism. Unlike substance dualism, hylomorphic dualism conceives of a human as a single substance comprising both body and mind. There is therefore no interaction problem, because the form of a person ‘interacts’ with her matter in the same way that form and matter ‘interact’ in any other material substance, namely, by informing its attributes and powers (both bodily and mental). There is also no problem of personal identity, because a person is an ontological whole rather than a mere aggregate of two distinct substances (her body and her mind). Likewise, the fact that our perception and cognition are fundamentally embodied poses no issue for hylomorphic dualism, because a person’s mind is integrated with her body as proper parts of one and the same substance.

    Hylomorphic dualism can also sidestep the arguments against physicalism that I gave earlier. These arguments show that our cognitive processes can’t be wholly corporeal, since our concepts are inherently determinate and universal, whereas physical facts are indeterminate and particular. This also shows that our intellect isn’t wholly material in the Aristotelian sense, because our concepts can abstract away matter to get at the universal forms like triangularity. Hylomorphic dualists aren’t committed to saying that humans are wholly material; we can say, as Aristotle did, that the human form/soul has some operations that are immaterial.

    By the scholastic principle agere sequitur esse (“action follows being”), the fact that the human substantial form has immaterial operations means that it also has an immaterial mode of subsistence. Since my intellect isn’t tied to or reducible to my body, unlike my other operations – for example, sight, which is tied to (at least) my eyes and the occipital lobe of my brain – it can exist even if my body does not. Indeed, as an immaterial thing, it’s not naturally destructible as material substances are. When I die, and my matter ceases to be informed by my substantial form, the immaterial operations of my substantial form that don’t inform any matter will continue to exist, and so my substantial form will still exist. And it will exist in an individualized way, distinguished from other human substantial forms by its unique causal history (having been combined with my matter).

    However, my form will be an incomplete substance after my death. It won’t be me, because I am a composite substance made up of both matter and form. It won’t naturally undergo new perceptual experiences, because my perceptual abilities are tied to my body (see the arguments against substance dualism), and it won’t be able to form any new concepts, because new concepts are formed based on our experiences of the external world (even though concepts aren’t reducible to perception). And although this is controversial among hylomorphic dualists, I don’t think the post-mortem human form is naturally conscious, at least not apart from supernatural intervention. If syncope (temporary blood loss to the brain) results in a loss of consciousness, then the complete disconnection from the brain that comes with death should also result in a loss of consciousness, even though the human form persists through both these things.

    In summary, based purely on philosophical considerations in the philosophy of mind, we can know that humans exist as a composite of body and form/soul, that the form/soul is partially immaterial, and that our form/soul persists after our death in an individuated but severely impaired way. How does this square with Scripture and our three axioms about the afterlife?

Hylomorphic dualism and Christian anthropology

    According to Genesis 2:7, when God created the human, he first made a body out of dust and then breathed spirit/breath (Heb: ruach; Gk: pneuma) into it, and “the human became a living soul.” The body apart from the spirit is dead (Jas. 2:26), and at death, the body/dust returns to the earth and the spirit/breath returns to God (Ps. 104:29; 146:4; Ecc. 12:7; cf. Zech. 12:1; Acts 7:59). It appears that a person’s spirit continues to be individualized after her death, as evidenced by the little girl whose “spirit returned” when Jesus resurrected her (Lk. 8:54-55), and by the examples of Jesus (who gave up “his spirit”; Matt. 27:50; Lk. 23:46; John 19:30) and Stephen (who told Jesus to “receive my spirit”; Acts 7:59). A soul, on the other hand, can be killed (e.g., Num. 31:19; 35:11, 15, 30; Josh. 20:3, 9; Matt. 10:28; Mk. 3:4) and be dead (e.g., Lev. 21:11; Num. 6:6; 19:11, 13; Josh. 2:13; Jas. 5:20; Rev. 16:3).

    These are the clearest passages that deal with the relationship between body, spirit, and soul. Based on this, it seems that the Aristotelian concept of the human ‘soul’ or substantial form actually corresponds to the Scriptural concept of spirit, as the principle that animates a person and continues to exist after a person’s death. The Scriptural concept of soul corresponds not to a person’s substantial form, but to the person herself, who is a composite of body and spirit and can die. Neither substance dualism nor physicalism correspond as well as hylomorphic dualism to the Scriptural data, since the Aristotelian categories of matter, form, and substance map almost one-to-one onto the Scriptural categories of body, spirit, and soul.

The centrality of bodily resurrection

    But what about the three claims that nearly all Christians affirm about the afterlife? The first claim is that the bodily resurrection is our primary hope for life after death. This is well-grounded in Paul’s argument for the resurrection, in which he says that if there is no resurrection, “those who have died in Christ have perished... we are of all people most to be pitied” (1 Cor. 15:12-19). Paul says that the resurrection is the hope for those who grieve (1 Thess. 4:13-18), and that he doesn’t want to be “unclothed,” that is, bodiless (2 Cor. 5:3-4). In the New Testament, the resurrection is mentioned far more than any conscious intermediate state, if such a state is mentioned at all (the most likely prooftext for such a state is Luke 16:19-31, which is plausibly a parable).

    Hylomorphic dualism provides a strong philosophical basis for this belief. My substantial form will continue to exist immaterially beyond my death, but in a severely impaired way, without new perceptual experiences and plausibly without any consciousness at all. This fact is reflected in the Hebrew Bible’s assertions that the dead cannot know or praise God (Ps. 6:4-5; 30:8-10; 88:9-12; 115:17; Isa. 38:17-19), and that their perception and cognition are at least severely impaired (Ps. 146:3-4; Ecc. 9:5-10). It’s also reflected in the metaphor of death as sleep, which is found all throughout the Scriptures. Sleep is an accurate metaphor for death in another way: if my form does undergo conscious experiences after death, they won’t be directly experienced by me, but I will remember them when I’m resurrected, like my memories of a dream when I wake up from sleep.

    The only way for me to exist normally after death, and indeed for me to exist at all after death (since I am a composite of matter and form), is for my form to once again inform matter and become part of a material substance. This is just metaphysical language for bodily resurrection. Therefore, unlike substance dualism and physicalism, hylomorphic dualism provides both a motive and a mechanism for resurrection.

The immediacy of paradise

    The second claim that nearly all Christians affirm about the afterlife is that some people will have immediate, paradisiacal existence after death. Can hylomorphic dualism explain this? Yes, and it follows the Non-Existence Thesis rather than the Intermediate State Thesis (see above). A person, who is the composite of her matter and form, doesn’t exist after her death. Her first conscious experience after death will be at the resurrection. Even if we assume (as I don’t) that her spirit has conscious experiences between death and resurrection, she won’t experience them, she’ll just remember them when she’s resurrected, analogously to how we can recall dreams after we wake from sleep. Therefore, from her perspective, she will immediately experience paradise after she dies.

The identity of the dead and resurrected person

    The third claim, that the person who dies is numerically identical to the person who is resurrected, might be the hardest one to explain on a hylomorphic view. Since I affirm that the person (a composite of matter and form) ceases to exist between death and the resurrection, I also have to deny the widely accepted axiom No Gappy Existence: that one and the same thing can’t begin to exist more than once. 

    However, unlike physicalist Christians, hylomorphic dualists can deny NGE without any weird consequences about personal identity. Whereas physicalists say that a person just is identical to a certain physical process, hylomorphists say that a person is constituted by matter that’s informed by a particular substantial form. If a person ceases to exist, but her individual substantial form continues to exist, then that same person can come into existence again if her form once again begins to inform matter. Since the person isn’t annihilated, but corrupted (broken up) into matter and form, her particular form and matter can recombine to generate the same person. There’s no danger that two copies of the same person could exist if her body is duplicated, as in physicalism. That’s not even a metaphysical possibility, because a person is a single material substance with a particular substantial form.

    In fact, hylomorphists already have good reason to deny NGE, even apart from any considerations about bodily resurrection (Toner 2015). When two or more substances combine to form one substance (for example, hydrogen and oxygen making water), the initial substances cease to exist actually, but exist virtually or potentially in the new substance, and can begin to exist actually again (so the same hydrogen and oxygen atoms can be recovered from an H2O molecule). Aristotle argues for this when he responds to a metaphysical argument against the possibility of combination:

For, according to some thinkers, it is impossible for one thing to be combined with another. They argue that (i) if both the ‘combined’ constituents persist unaltered, they are no more ‘combined’ now than they were before, but are in the same condition: while (ii) if one has been destroyed, the constituents have not been ‘combined’ – on the contrary, one constituent is and the other is not, whereas ‘combination’ demands uniformity of condition in them both: and on the same principle (iii) even if both the combining constituents have been destroyed as a result of their coalescence, they cannot ‘have been combined’ since they have no being at all. (De Gen. et Cor. 1.10)

This Parmenidean argument seeks to show that combination is impossible. You can’t really combine two things to get a third thing, because you’re either left with (1) the mere aggregate of two things, (2) one of the initial two things, or (3) the initial two things are annihilated and a third thing is created. Like Parmenides’ argument against the possibility of change, this argument relies on a stark distinction between existence and non-existence. You can’t have two things and a third thing that exist in the same way, at the same place, at the same time, so combination is impossible.

    Aristotle rebuts this conclusion by saying that there’s something in between actual existence and non-existence, namely potential existence. When two substances are combined, they exist potentially in the new substance, which exists actually. But this means that NGE is wrong, because things can cease to exist actually and begin to exist actually again, as long as they have potential existence in between. Since I do exist potentially after my death, inasmuch as my individual form still exists and has the potential to combine with matter, hylomorphism can account for my personal identity at the resurrection.

Conclusion

    The three claims of Christianity about the afterlife appear inconsistent, since the central importance of bodily resurrection seems to conflict with the immediacy of paradise after death. But from considerations in the philosophy of mind, independent of theological concerns about resurrection, we can determine that hylomorphic dualism is true, which makes bodily resurrection not only logically possible but plausible. There's a solid metaphysical basis to accept the Scriptural tripartite division of humans into body (matter), spirit (form), and soul (substance), as well as the survival of the spirit after death and the possibility of bodily resurrection. Our Christian hope for the afterlife is philosophically sound!

Appendix: survivalism vs. corruptionism

    There’s a debate among hylomorphic dualists about whether a human person survives between death and resurrection (survivalism), or the human form between death and resurrection does not constitute a human person (corruptionism). I think corruptionism is pretty obviously true from a hylomorphist perspective, so I didn’t really discuss the debate above. Here, though, I’ll briefly explain why I think corruptionism is correct.

    First, there’s an exegetical debate about whether Thomas Aquinas was a survivalist or a corruptionist. Since I don’t feel the need to agree with Aquinas on everything, I don’t think this has much bearing on whether or not corruptionism is true. But it’s worth noting that Aquinas was pretty clearly a corruptionist and not a survivalist. Early in his career, he talked explicitly about this topic, in his Commentary on the Sentences. Here, he rejected Plato’s substance dualism in favor of Aristotle’s hylomorphic dualism:

...the opinion of Aristotle, which all current [authors] follow, [is] that the soul is united to the body as form to matter. Hence the soul is a part of human nature, and not some nature per se. And since the notion of a part is contrary to the notion of a person, as was said, therefore the separated soul cannot be called a person, since even though it is not actually a part [when] separated, nevertheless it has the nature to be a part. (In Sent. III.5.3.2; transl. Nevitt 2016)

Likewise, in his commentary on Paul’s (1 Cor. 15) and Jesus’ (Mk. 12:24-27) arguments for the bodily resurrection, Aquinas insisted that these arguments depend on the separated spirit not being a person:

The soul of Abraham is not, strictly speaking, Abraham himself, but it is a part of him. The same goes for the others [i.e. Isaac and Jacob]. Hence the life of the soul of Abraham would not be sufficient for Abraham to be living, nor for the God of Abraham to be the God of the living; but [this] requires the life of the whole composite, namely of soul and body. (In Sent. IV.43.1.1; transl. Nevitt 2016)

Man naturally desires his own salvation. But the soul, since it is a part of the man, is not the whole man; and I am not my soul. Thus, even though the soul attains salvation in the afterlife, nevertheless I – or any man – do not. (Super 1 Cor. 15.2.924; transl. Reese 2024)

Aquinas also said in various places, up through his last writings, that Christ didn’t exist as a human person while he was dead, which implies that the separated human form by itself isn’t a person (Nevitt 2016). The standard survivalist response is that although the human form isn’t a person by itself, it does somehow constitute a person; but this would go against Aquinas’ insistence that we don’t attain salvation if our separated form does.

    The metaphysical argument for corruptionism is also quite straightforward. The essence of a human, which is rational animality, includes both material (animality) and immaterial (rationality) aspects. If it only included immaterial aspects, then hylomorphic dualism would be no different than substance dualism, since our connection to our bodies would be only accidental. But nothing can exist without all the things that are essential to it; that’s what it means for something to be essential. Therefore, no human being can exist without both matter and form, and a person ceases to exist when her matter and form separate (Nevitt 2020). Yes, her form continues to subsist immaterially, but as its own incomplete, non-human substance, not as her.

    Finally, on the theological side of the debate, survivalists consistently claim to have the upper hand. This is because most hylomorphic dualists are Catholics, who accept the doctrines of purgatory before resurrection and praying to the saints, which seem to require that people exist between death and the resurrection. I’m not a Catholic, so I don’t particularly care whether corruptionism is compatible with praying to the saints – although it’s worth noting that Aquinas believed it is (In Sent. III.22.1.1; ST II-II.83.11). In fact, I’m inclined to believe our separated spirits aren’t conscious at all, in light of various Scriptural passages that indicate that. The numerous places across Scripture where dead people are said to be “no more” also supports corruptionism over survivalism.

    In my estimation, corruptionism has the upper hand over survivalism in terms of metaphysics, theology, and Thomistic exegesis. This means that death really is as serious as it appears (Reese 2024). It’s not just a gateway to heaven, it means that we cease to exist; death truly is the “last enemy” which will eventually be conquered by God (1 Cor. 15:26). Any other view would make bodily resurrection superfluous, since it would make the body merely accidental to human existence. This should make us even more grateful that God has provided a way for death to be defeated, namely resurrection in Christ!

Resurrection and metaphysical anthropology (part 1 of 2)

    Is bodily resurrection something desirable, or even a metaphysical possibility? According to nearly all Christians, it is. But this view has been ridiculed by some non-Christians since the very earliest days of Christianity, so much that the apostle Paul had to defend the doctrine of the resurrection against detractors in his letter to the Corinthian church (1 Cor. 15). While it would be easy for Christians to just ignore these detractors, the fact is that some of their concerns about the resurrection do have philosophical weight. In this post, I'll take a look at the concerns that Christian claims about the afterlife are inconsistent, and that it's impossible for personal identity to continue through the resurrection.

The problem of the resurrection

    There are three claims about the afterlife that are (or should be) affirmed by nearly all Christians, and which have very strong Scriptural support:

1. The bodily resurrection is our primary hope for life after death.

2. Some people have immediate, post-mortem, paradisiacal existence.

3. The person who dies is (numerically) the person who is resurrected.

    The first claim is clearly seen throughout the writings of Paul, who repeatedly emphasizes the importance of resurrection (Rom. 8:9-23; 1 Cor. 15; 2 Cor. 4:17-5:8; 1 Thess. 4:13-18). It’s also found all across the New Testament. For example, Jesus himself emphasized that the bodily resurrection of the Israelite patriarchs is necessary for them to be “living” (Matt. 22:29-32; Mk. 12:24-27; Lk. 20:34-38). Furthermore, if bodily resurrection were merely a superfluous add-on to our post-mortem existence, and not central to life after death, then the bodily resurrection of Christ would also be merely superfluous – but Jesus’ resurrection is central to the Christian faith, so our resurrection is central to our hope. (This is Paul’s argument in 1 Corinthians 15:1-19.)

    The second claim also finds much Scriptural support. To the rebel who was crucified beside him, Jesus said, “Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in paradise” (Lk. 23:43). (Admittedly, if this sentence were punctuated differently – which is a subjective translation decision – it would have a different meaning.) Paul told one of his congregations that his death, for him, would be “gain” because he would “depart and be with Christ” (Phil. 1:21-23). Christians may reasonably disagree on who exactly will immediately enter a paradisiacal existence after death, whether this is true of just martyrs, or of all Christians, or even (in the extreme case of Hosea Ballou) all people. But I’m unaware of any Christian group that denies that anyone will immediately enter paradise after death.

    The third claim follows from the first claim. If the person who is resurrected isn’t the same as the person who died, then the resurrection isn’t really our hope, but the hope of someone else who doesn’t exist yet. Even if someone with my exact memories is created at the resurrection, that means nothing to me if that person isn’t numerically identical to me.

    However, these three claims might be inconsistent. Let’s see why. Claim 2 could be interpreted in two ways:

Intermediate State Thesis (IST): at least some people exist in a disembodied, paradisiacal state between death and the resurrection.

Non-Existence Thesis (NET): at least some people don’t exist between death and resurrection, so that this interval is immediate for them.

IST has been the most common view throughout Christian history, but it undercuts claim 1: if our disembodied state is paradisiacal, then bodily resurrection appears superfluous. This tension was recognized by at least some early church writers, including Irenaeus and Augustine (Turner 2015, 37-46), and it was also recognized by Aquinas, who denied IST for this reason (In Sent. IV.43.1.1; Super 1 Cor. 15.2.924). On the other hand, NET undercuts claim 3 due to a widely accepted philosophical axiom that we’ll call No Gappy Existence (NGE): it isn’t possible for one and the same thing to come into existence more than once. If a fire is started, stopped, and then started again, the second fire isn’t numerically identical to the first. It’s also impossible for a person to cease to exist altogether and then come into existence as the same person.

    Therefore, the bodily resurrection poses a philosophical problem for Christians. It’s difficult to hold IST and claim 1 (the centrality of bodily resurrection) at the same time. But it’s also difficult to hold NET and claim 3 (the numerical identity of the dead and resurrected person) at the same time, given the widely accepted axiom NGE. How, then, can we interpret claims 1-3 to be self-consistent?

Substance dualism

    In modern metaphysical anthropology, views about human persons are divided between dualism and physicalism. Dualism says that people are (in some sense) partially corporeal and partially incorporeal, whereas physicalism says that people are entirely corporeal and physical. The most common dualist view is called substance dualism: this is the view that the mind and body are two substances, an incorporeal one and a corporeal one. A substance is an object with independent ontological reality, so that properties (like color, shape, and size) inhere in substances, but substances don’t inhere in anything else. Substance dualism can be interpreted in two ways: either a person simply is her mind, or she is the composite of her mind and body.

Substance dualism and the resurrection

    Let’s take the first interpretation. If a person is her mind, then it’s obvious how claim 2 (immediate paradisiacal existence) could be true, since she (i.e., her mind) can exist independently of a body after death. But this makes claim 2 even harder to reconcile with claim 1 (the centrality of bodily resurrection), since the body is totally superfluous to the flourishing existence of any person. In fact, two of the most historically prominent substance dualists, Plato and Descartes, both saw the body as a sort of prison for the mind/person. This view is completely foreign to the New Testament, as N. T. Wright argues strongly in his book The Resurrection of the Son of God, and it’s contrary to claim 1.

    What about the second interpretation? If a person is the composite of her mind and body, then claim 2 could still be true in virtue of an incorporeal part of her (i.e., her mind) that survives after death. It might also be easier to reconcile with claim 1: bodily resurrection is important because the body is a proper part of a person. But this view seems to run into insuperable difficulties about personal identity, because it means that the person isn’t a thinker or a knower, her mind is. Nor does the person do anything corporeal, her body does. Since she isn’t a substance, but merely the aggregate of two substances (mind and body), the person doesn’t actually do anything. It follows that persons, like other mere aggregates of substances (such as a table with a banana on it), are merely mental constructs. I don’t think it’s even possible to coherently accept this view, since someone who accepts it is denying that they exist. This is also contrary to claim 3 (the numerical identity of the dead and resurrected person), since that claim relies on a concept of real personal identity.

    Finally, the view of the intermediate state that substance dualism implies isn’t Scriptural. Paul looked forward to the resurrection body, but didn’t want to be “unclothed,” that is, without a body (2 Cor. 5:3-4). The Hebrew Bible consistently describes those who are dead as being “no more” (Gen. 37:30; 42:13, 36; Job 27:19; Ps. 37:10, 36; 39:13; 104:35; Isa. 17:14; Jer. 31:15; Lam. 5:7; Ezek. 26:21; 27:36; 28:19; cf. Matt. 2:18), and its wisdom literature repeatedly insists that the dead cannot praise or know God (Ps. 6:4-5; 30:8-10; 88:9-12; 115:17; Isa. 38:17-19), and that their perceptual and cognitive abilities are at the very least severely impaired (Ps. 146:3-4; Ecc. 9:5-10). Both the Hebrew Bible and New Testament writers use sleep as a metaphor for death, which suggests that death impairs a person’s knowledge of the external world and her cognitive abilities. All this is contrary to substance dualism, which entails that embodiment is irrelevant to mental activity.

Substance dualism and philosophy of mind

    In addition to the theological problems with substance dualism (it seems to contradict claims 1 and/or 3), there are a number of philosophical problems. The interaction problem argues that it’s impossible for a corporeal substance (the body) and an incorporeal substance (the mind) to interact with each other. Christians have good reason to accept that incorporeal substances can affect corporeal ones, since we already believe that an incorporeal God can affect the corporeal world. But the reverse is harder to affirm. Why is it the case that damage to the brain can damage a person’s perceptive and cognitive abilities, if they are attributes of a distinct substance? Why does stimulating the brain in a particular way have predictable effects on a person’s conscious experience? Why, for that matter, is the incorporeal mind connected to this particular body and not any other corporeal thing?

   This leads to another problem, which is the fundamentally embodied nature of perception and cognition. If our conscious experiences are mere representations of actual things, projected on a Cartesian theater in our minds, then we can never know the corporeal world as it is. My conscious experience could be exactly the same even if the world were completely different, or didn’t exist at all. To avoid radical epistemic skepticism, there can’t be an infinite regress of representations; at some point, there must be direct perception of the external world, which implies that the mind isn’t wholly incorporeal.

    Likewise, cognition is essentially embodied, since our concepts are set in a (largely subconscious) network of assumptions about the external world. To use an example given by Ed Feser (2024, chap. 7), if I go to a restaurant and say, “Bring me a steak,” I’m employing at least the concepts of steak and bringing. But this comes with background assumptions about the external world, like that the waiter is actually predisposed to bring me a steak, that she will do so on a plate, that she will put it on the table and not in my pocket, etc. Furthermore, the use of language presupposes common experience, that our words can really (and not merely seem to) refer to the same things. But if substance dualism is true, then there is no common environment, just the way things seem to each of us. Therefore, since arguments for substance dualism rely on such shared concepts, it’s self-defeating.

Physicalism

     The non-dualist view of human persons is physicalism, which says that people are wholly corporeal with no incorporeal parts or properties. This comes in two flavors: reductive, which says that the mind exists but is reducible to the physical, and eliminativist, which says that mental states really don’t exist at all. I think that eliminativism is self-defeating, because to accept eliminativism requires things like concepts, beliefs, and truth, which the eliminativist denies are real things. (Eliminativist philosopher Patricia Churchland says that we need a “successor concept to truth,” that has not yet been found, which would mean that statements like “eliminativism is true” have no determinable meaning.) Even if this doesn’t mean that eliminativism itself is necessarily false, it does show that no one can coherently accept eliminativism as true.

Physicalism and the resurrection

    Physicalism fails to make claims 1-3 consistent. If a person simply is, or is reducible to, her body, then she ceases to exist when the physical processes that constitute her life stop. But according to the axiom No Gappy Existence, that same person can’t begin to exist again at the resurrection; at best, a precise copy of her will begin to exist, which is contrary to claim 3.

    The proposed solutions to this problem aren’t very convincing. The “simulacrum” model suggests that God transports a person’s body away at the moment of death, replacing it with a simulacrum, and keeping it in stasis until the resurrection. The “falling elevator” model suggests that a person’s body undergoes some kind of metaphysical fission at death, and one part remains on earth while the other is taken by God and kept in stasis until the resurrection. Both of these models are just strange, and rely on controversial metaphysics. The “simulacrum” model implies that God is actively deceiving us about where a person’s body is after death, and the “falling elevator” model has to say that the corpse and the body in stasis are somehow both numerically identical to the dead person’s body.

    On the other hand, a physicalist could deny NGE and say that a person just ceases to exist after death and comes back into existence at the resurrection when God creates an identical body. But this also leads to strange conclusions. If all that is required for personal identity is for there to be an identical body with identical neurological states, then God could theoretically create two or more of the one and the same person by duplicating their body. Therefore, physicalism can only deny NGE at the expense of losing a robust account of numerical personal identity.

Physicalism and philosophy of mind

    There are also philosophical problems with reductive physicalism. For one thing, conceptual thinking is determinate, but physical processes aren’t determinate, which entails that conceptual thinking isn’t wholly reducible to physical processes (Ross 1992; Feser 2013). One example is given by Kripke (1982, 7-54). Suppose that you have never added numbers higher than 56, and you’re asked to add 60 + 61. You answer “121,” but a skeptic asks you how you know this. Perhaps what was meant by “+” wasn’t addition, but “quaddition”:

x quus y = x + y if x, y < 57; = 5 otherwise.

The correct answer, therefore, might be 5 and not 121. This seems absurd, but the physical facts don’t militate in favor of one answer over the other; you’ve never added numbers higher than 56, so what you meant in the past by “plus” could have been addition or quaddition. Even if you consciously think, “What I mean by ‘plus’ is addition and not quaddition,” this only pushes the issue a step back. The physical facts about the words “plus” and “addition” and your neurological states when you think those words have no determinate meaning other than what we give them.

    Another example is given by Quine (1960). Suppose you’re a field anthropologist following a native person who points at a rabbit and says, “Gavagai!” You might take “gavagai” to mean “rabbit,” but none of the physical facts about the situation require this; it could also mean “undetached rabbit part” or “landscape that includes at least one rabbit” or any number of other things. Even if you knew every physical fact about the native’s neurological state and the surrounding environment, you wouldn’t be able to tell which of these things he meant by “gavagai.” Surely, though, he did mean something determinate when he said “gavagai.” This implies that his concept “gavagai” isn’t reducible to physical facts.

    The fact is, there can’t be an infinite regress of things that merely have meaning because of other things (which are called instrumental signs). In order for anything to have determinate meaning, the regress must stop at things that not only have meaning but are meaning (formal signs), and are therefore irreducible to physical processes. If we deny that concepts and formal functions (like addition and modus ponens) have no determinate meaning, then we deny that our own arguments are logically valid, which is self-defeating.

    A related argument for the incorporeality of the intellect is that our concepts are abstract universals, but nothing physical is an abstract universal. For example, our concept “triangle” doesn’t correspond to any physical triangle, but to that which is common to all triangles (being a closed polygon with three sides). For a triangle to be physical means that it instantiates a certain way that triangles can be, and not triangularity itself. The fact that we can conceive of universals like triangularity and redness, abstracted from any concrete instantiation of those universals, implies that at least some of our concepts aren’t reducible to physical facts. 

    Furthermore, there are a larger number of possible concepts than possible physical configurations, which also implies that at least some concepts aren’t reducible to physical facts. In fact, there’s a potential infinity of concepts! For example, there is a possible concept for each natural number (which is an infinite set). Josh Rasmussen (2015; w/ Bailey 2020) has advanced a formal mathematical argument, based on Cantor’s Theorem, that the number of possible thoughts must in principle be larger than the number of possible physical configurations.

    In summary, physicalism suffers from quite a few metaphysical problems (and the ones I mentioned here aren’t the only ones). Our conceptual abilities can’t be corporeal because concepts have determinate meaning, whereas physical processes have no inherent meaning, and concepts are abstract universals, whereas physical things are concrete particulars. Furthermore, the number of possible concepts must be larger than the number of possibly physical configurations. These facts show that our conceptual abilities (our rational intellect) must be at least partly incorporeal. (However, our perceptual abilities could be wholly corporeal.)

Part 2: A solution to the problem

Reading Romans narratively (part 2 of 2)

Part 1

Who are God’s redeemed people?

    Jesus the Messiah, though his faithful death, has redeemed God’s people – a people now defined by his faithfulness – from their sinfulness and unfaithfulness. But, while this is the climax of the great story, it’s not the end of the story. God’s covenant people weren’t intended as the final goal in themselves; they were meant to restore humanity to God, and in doing so to restore the entire creation. But who are the covenant people now?

    In Romans, Paul draws on the covenant blessings in Deuteronomy 30 to prove how God has redefined his people. According to these blessings, when Israel would be restored from exile, they would be circumcised in their heart to be able to fulfill Torah (Deut. 30:1-10), so that Torah is near to them (30:11-14). Paul says that this has been fulfilled! Those who are not circumcised in their flesh may be “Jews,” regarded as circumcised in their heart by God’s spirit, and may actually judge those who are physically circumcised (Rom. 2:25-29). He says that this covenant blessing, the fulfillment of Torah, is found in the Messiah and belongs to those who confess him as lord and trust that God raised him (10:4-10; cf. 8:3-4).

    Because God’s people have been redefined by the Messiah’s faithfulness (3:21-26), they’re declared ‘right’ by faith, so that ethnic Jews and gentiles have been joined in a unified people befitting the one God — and this fulfills Torah, rather than nullifying it (3:27-31). When the covenant was first given, Abraham trusted God that he would have many descendants, and they would “inherit the world” (4:1-8, 13; cf. Gen. 15:1-7). The covenant was based on faith, not on Torah — if it were based on Torah, no one would fulfill it, because Torah condemns Israel too (4:13-16)! Since the covenant is based on faith, not circumcision or Torah, anyone who trusts in the God who raised the Messiah – whether ethnic Jew or gentile – may be counted as Abraham’s descendant and “inherit the world” (4:9-12, 16-25).

    The same idea appears in Paul’s other letters. Although he only refers to Jesus’ followers as “Israel” once or twice (Rom. 9:6; Gal. 6:16?), he can speak of a former time “when” the Corinthian believers “were gentiles” (1 Cor. 12:2), and refer to the ancient Israelites as their “fathers” (1 Cor. 10:1). They have “a new covenant,” no longer on the basis of Torah (2 Cor. 3:5-11), and receive the promises associated with Israel’s return from exile (2 Cor. 6:1-2, 16-18). There is a single, unified family descended from Abraham, not based on Torah, defined by faith, with both ethnic Jews and gentiles in the Messiah (Gal. 3:6-29). They are “the circumcision,” not based on outward signs like ethnicity, circumcision, and Torah, but based on the faithfulness of the Messiah (Phil. 3:2-11). His audience are “gentiles in flesh,” and were once “excluded from Israelite citizenship,” but now through Messiah – who tears down the dividing wall of Torah – are “fellow citizens of the saints” (Eph. 2:11-19).

    For Paul, then, God defines and declares ‘right’ (or “justifies”) his people no longer on the basis of Torah, but on the basis of the Messiah’s faithfulness, which actually fulfills Torah. The purpose of Torah wasn’t to get rid of Sin, but to intensify it and focus it on God’s people, so that it could be climactically condemned by Israel’s Messiah; this is the point of Romans 5:20-21 and 7:13-8:4 (as well as Galatians 3:19-22). Because covenant membership has been redefined around faith, both ethnic Jews and gentiles can join God’s unified people in the Messiah, which fulfills the covenantal promises. Having been declared ‘right’ by faith, we have nothing to fear from God, because we were reconciled to him, and we also know that we will share “God’s glory” which was lost because of sin (5:1-11; cf. 3:23).

The role of God’s redeemed people

    We’ve seen who God’s redeemed people are: ethnic Jews and gentiles who have and are defined by the Messiah’s faithfulness, not the outward signs of circumcision and Torah. But what is our purpose as God’s people? We must go back to our calling, which is expounded in chapters 6-8. Paul uses exodus terms to describe the redemption of God’s people – this wouldn’t have been lost on his audience, who was familiar with Torah (7:1).

    God’s people were rescued through water; not the water of the Red Sea, but the water of baptism, which unites us with Messiah Jesus in his death to Sin and resurrection (6:3-11). We used to be slaves, not of Egypt, but of Sin itself, and we were freed from this slavery in order to become Righteousness’ ‘slaves’ (6:6-7, 12-22). Since what we were freed from is Sin, it would be utter nonsense to use this freedom from Sin to sin more (6:1-7). The wages that Sin pays are death, whereas God gives the life of the coming age as a free gift (6:23).

    Moving on from our rescue from slavery through water, Paul goes to Mount Sinai and the giving of Torah — but there, we find that our united death with the Messiah has also freed us from Torah! (7:1-6) This isn’t because Torah is Sin; rather, the holy and good Torah makes Sin known, but Sin uses it to take power (7:7-12; cf. 1 Cor. 15:56). Torah actually makes Sin incredibly sinful (7:13). When Paul was enslaved to Sin, he desired to fulfill Torah with his mind, but the ‘Torah’ of Sin enslaved his flesh (7:14-25). However, the ‘Torah’ of Sin – and Sin itself – was condemned by God’s son, Messiah Jesus, making it possible for the ‘right’ status of Torah to be fulfilled in us (8:1-4).

    Moving on from Mount Sinai and Torah, we find that God’s spirit is guiding us through the present wilderness, the time between our united ‘resurrection’ with the Messiah (6:4-5, 9-11) and the actual resurrection of our bodies (8:4-11). God’s spirit allows us to “put to death the deeds of the body,” making us God’s children (8:12-17) – another probable exodus reference (Exod. 4:22; Hos. 11:1) – a verdict that will become clear at our future “adoption” (8:18-25). God elected this family, declared us ‘right,’ and glorified us (8:28-30), making it clear that nothing can separate us from his love in our lord Messiah Jesus (8:31-39).

    The primary role of God’s people in the present time, then, is to act as those who have been freed from Sin. We should be in unity with one another, and contribute to each other’s needs (12:3-13; 13:8-10). We must not pass judgment on other believers for irrelevant matters, like food restrictions and days of worship, in order to stay unified and upbuild one another, to glorify the one God in unity (14:1-15:6). However, we shouldn’t just love one another, but also non-believers, even the authorities, even those who persecute us (12:14-13:7). It’s very important to proclaim the good news to others (15:14-21; cf. 11:13-14). This points forward to the end of the story – God’s people, in themselves, were never the final goal!

The conclusion of the grand story

    From the beginning, God’s intention was to restore the entire creation to himself, in spite of humanity’s failure to live up to their role. The means by which he planned to do this is through his set-apart people, through the Messiah who is our representative. As I noted at the beginning of this article, Paul summarizes this story in Romans 8:18-23 – “the creation itself will be freed from its bondage to decay, into the freedom of the glory of God’s children.” But the “creation” doesn’t include only impersonal things. At the end of two major sections of his letter to the Romans, Paul makes this clear.

So then, just as through one trespass it is condemnation to all people, so also through one act of righteousness it is justification of life to all people. For as through the disobedience of the one man, the many were made sinners, so also through the obedience of the one, the many will be made righteous. Now Torah entered so that the trespass might abound. Yet where the sin abounded, grace superabounded, so that just as the sin reigned in death, so also grace may reign through righteousness unto life of the Age, through Jesus the Messiah our Lord. (5:18-21)

    Here, he emphasizes that the same number that were affected by Adam’s sin will also be affected by Jesus’ obedience. The parallelism is extremely careful from v. 15 to 19; whereas Paul switches between referring to the affected group as “the many” and “all people,” he never distinguishes two groups, for example by saying that “all people” were corrupted by Adam and “the many” will be justified by Jesus. There is only one group in view, and that is all of humanity. Some commentators appeal to 5:17 (“those who take the abundance of grace and the gift of righteousness”) as limiting the scope of 5:18-19, but Paul doesn’t say that only some people will ultimately take of the grace and righteousness that is offered. It would be more legitimate to see vv. 18-19 as determining the scope of v. 17 than vice versa. If even one person remains in Sin and Death, then the point of vv. 20-21 (that grace and righteousness superabound where Sin and Death once reigned) is utterly negated.

For I want you to understand this mystery, brethren, so that you may not claim to be wiser than you are: a hardening has come upon part of Israel until the totality of the gentiles comes in. And so all Israel will be saved… For God has shut up everyone in disobedience so that he may be merciful to all. O the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how untraceable his ways! “For who has known the mind of the Lord, or who has been his counselor?” “Or who has given to him and it will be recompensed?” For from him and through him and to him is everything. To him be the glory forever. Amen. (11:25-36)

    At the end of his quotation-rich, closely-argued discourse in Romans 9-11, Paul concludes that “all Israel will be saved” once “the totality of the gentiles comes in.” He was building to this conclusion throughout the entire section, as most of his Scripture quotations contextually refer to the restoration of rebel Israel. [1] Just as the gentile believers in Rome were once disobedient, but were shown mercy, rebel Israel will be shown mercy once she stops being disobedient (11:30-31). This is to be understood as a general principle: God has locked up everyone in disobedience, for the purpose of showing them mercy (11:32). This brings us to the conclusion of the grand story, summed up concisely in just eleven words: “For from him, and through him, and to him is everything” (11:36). Nothing that God has created will fail to return to him, whether those are disobedient people or corrupted nature. His grand plan, so overwhelming that Paul cannot help but break out into a doxology, is that everything which is “from him” is also, ultimately, “to him.”

Conclusion

    When read narratively, Paul’s letter to the Romans expertly elaborates on the ‘grand story’ of creation and recreation (shared by most Second Temple Jews), modifying it according to the Christian perspective and fitting it to the Roman church’s circumstances. The creation has been corrupted by humanity’s failure to live up to its vocation (1:18-32; 3:9-23); even God’s people, whom he intended to bring humanity back to him, has failed to live up to that calling (2:1-3:20; 9:1-18). Fortunately, through the faithfulness of Israel’s Messiah Jesus, God’s plan to restore creation is set on track (3:21-26; 10:4-13). God’s (redeemed) people are defined now by the Messiah’s faithfulness, which tears down ethnic and traditional boundaries (3:27- 4:25; 9:24-29; 10:11-13; 11:1-11). The purpose of God’s people in the present time is to act as those who have been freed from slavery to Sin, in unity and love, and to witness to non- believers (chaps. 6-8; 12-15). The ultimate goal – the conclusion of the grand story – is, as it has always been, the restoration of the entire creation (5:12-21; 8:18-23; 11:12-36).

    The primary differences between Paul’s Christian version of the grand story and the typical Second Temple Jewish version are the role of the Messiah and the identification of the enemy. Traditionally, the enemy was understood to be non-Jewish pagans; however, this was turned on its head by Jesus, who pointed out that Israel’s vocation was to bring light to the pagans, and the real enemies were the spiritual forces at play. [2] Paul further identified the enemy as personified Sin and Death (Rom. 5:20-8:2; cf. 1 Cor. 15:26, 54-56). By identifying the enemy not with any group of people, but with the forces that corrupt people, [3] he was able to come to the conclusion that the restoration of creation will involve not only corrupted nature but disobedient people. God’s grand plan to restore creation is not exclusionary, but radically inclusionary, as he will never cease acting to bring all things back to him until it is completed.

______________________________

[1] See my exegesis of Romans 9-11 for more details.

[2] N. T. Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God (London: SPCK, 1996), 446–463.

[3] See also Ephesians 6:12: “For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, the authorities, the world-rulers of this darkness, the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.”