This essay is taken from the Introduction to Fr. Alvin F. Kimel’s Destined for Joy: The Gospel of Universal Salvation.
Ten years ago, on 15 June 2012, my second son Aaron died by suicide at the age of 32. He was brilliant and funny, articulate and eccentric. When he died I was destroyed, as were my wife Christine and my other three children, Alvin, Bredon, and Taryn. Aaron was beloved and cherished by each of us. I was swallowed up in a fire of sorrow and grief that consumed everything inside of me. I mean that quite literally. I quickly became an empty shell. I wept uncontrollably day after day for over a year.
Four months after Aaron's death, I decided to start a blog, which I named Eclectic Orthodoxy. My goal was simple---to hold onto that sliver of sanity I had left. I determined to begin reading the Church Fathers and to summarize their thoughts on the blog. And so I began. I first immersed myself in the orations of St Gregory of Nazianzus. He is venerated in both the Orthodox and Catholic Churches as one of the great theologians of the patristic period. Along with St Athanasius of Alexandria, he was instrumental in the victory of the Nicene confession that Jesus Christ is homoousios ("of one substance") with the Father. My articles on Gregory continued for several months. They did not draw many visitors, but that was fine. I wasn't writing for anyone but myself.
In March 2013 I began a series of posts on the 7th century ascetic St Isaac the Syrian, a beloved figure in Eastern Orthodoxy. What drew me to St Isaac was his profound conviction that God is absolute love:
In love did He bring the world into existence; in love does He guide it during this its temporal existence; in love is He going to bring it to that wondrous transformed state, and in love will the world be swallowed up in the great mystery of Him who has performed all things; in love will the whole course of the governance of creation be finally comprised.
The series concluded with two articles devoted to St Isaac's confident belief that God will save all, human and angelic beings alike, no matter the depth of their wickedness. Suddenly the blog traffic exploded. Apparently not many were aware that Isaac was a universalist. A good God, the Syrian saint declares, would never condemn his children to everlasting torment:
It is not the way of the compassionate Maker to create rational beings in order to deliver them over mercilessly to unending affliction in punishment for things of which He knew even before they were fashioned, aware how they would turn out when He created them—and whom nonetheless He created.
I was surprised by the interest the series generated. It was extensively discussed and debated on social media, as well as the comments box. Apparently hell is a popular topic. Two months later I published a series on the eschatology of the great 20th century Orthodox theologian Sergius Bulgakov. Like Isaac, he too was a convinced universalist. And like my series on Isaac, the series on Bulgakov generated a goodly amount of traffic. The blog developed a following. A year later I followed up with articles on the writings of Thomas Talbott, an analytic philosopher and evangelical universalist. I had read Talbott two years before Aaron's death and found his arguments sufficiently persuasive to move me from the hopeful universalism I had held for over fifteen years to a confident universalism. While I continued to write on the Church Fathers, Eclectic Orthodoxy became known as a universalist blog, drawing visitors from a wide ecumenical spectrum. And so it has remained to the present.
Destined for Joy contains what I judge to be the best of my articles written on God's absolute and unconditional love and his unwavering commitment to reconcile all human beings to himself in Jesus Christ. As St Paul declares, God "desires everyone to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth" (1 Tim 2:4). What God desires, he wills, and what he wills must come to pass. It really is as simple as that. God's love for mankind will triumph. This is a controversial claim, I know, yet it logically flows from God's self-revelation in Jesus, and is well attested in the Scriptures, if read rightly. Jesus is the Good Shepherd who abandons his flock to search for the one lost sheep. He is the woman who turns her house upside-down to find the one lost coin. He is the father who runs down the road in exuberant joy to welcome his prodigal son. He is the God who dies on the Cross and rises from death on Easter morning to effect the salvation of all. His love knows no bounds. From Origen and St Gregory of Nyssa to the present, universalists have insisted that everlasting perdition would be unworthy of the God of Jesus Christ. We may speculate on how he will effectively save all, but ultimately we must fall back on our fundamental faith in the Holy Trinity. In the words of the great 19th century Anglican universalist, Thomas Allin:
And this brings us face to face with a blunder of our traditional creed, which is radical. It talks of God’s love as though that stood merely on a par with his justice, as though it were something belonging to him which he puts on or off. It is hardly possible to open a religious book in which this fatal error is not found; fatal, because it virtually strikes out of the gospel its fundamental truth—that GOD IS LOVE. The terms are equivalent. They can be interchanged. God is not anger, though he can be angry; God is not vengeance, though he does avenge. These are attributes; love is essence. Therefore, God is unchangeably love. Therefore, in judgment he is love, in wrath he is love, in vengeance he is love—“love first, and last, and midst, and without end.”
God is love, an eternal communion of perichoretic self-giving between the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Because he is love, he will never rest until he has realized his salvific will throughout the cosmos and in the heart of every sinner. He will be "all in all," as the Apostle teaches (1 Cor 15:28).
The articles in this volume have been revised and expanded for this volume. While I have tried to avoid redundant overlap, this has not always been possible. In some cases I have combined two or more articles into one. I have also given some new titles. All retain the colloquial-academic style of writing that I adopted for my blog, a mixture of preaching and theological reflection. "I'm a blogger, dammit, not a theologian!" is my byline. But of course, every preacher is a theologian, for good or ill.
I have divided the book into three sections:
The first section, "The Greater Hope and the Absolute Love of God," contains those articles devoted to the elaboration of the unconditional love and grace of God as revealed in Jesus Christ. Here you will find the theologians who have most informed my understanding of the gospel over the decades--James and Thomas Torrance, Robert W. Jenson, Gerhard Forde, George MacDonald, and Robert Farrar Capon. It closes with a lexical analysis of the Greek word aionios, which is often translated in our English Bibles as "eternal." When Jesus speaks of aionios punishment, must he be understood as declaring "eternal" or "everlasting" damnation? Not necessarily! In these articles you will often hear me speaking in my evangelical voice as a preacher of the gospel.
The second section, "The Greater Hope in History," contains my articles on important universalist figures from the premodern period. The great Syrian mystic Saint Isaac of Nineveh dominates. His argument for universal salvation is simple and in my judgment utterly compelling. Here also you will find my article on the wonderful mystic Dame Julian of Norwich. Her famous book Shewings, in which she shares her visionary revelations of the risen "Jhesu crist," is one of the great works of the theological and spiritual tradition. "All shalle be wele," Jesus promises her. Yet if all shall be well, how then can there be hell? The section concludes with a long article on the Fifth Ecumenical Council, which is commonly reported to have condemned the doctrine of universal salvation. As you will see, this claim is not historically well-founded. I am particularly proud of this article. I have worked on it over a period of seven years and it has undergone numerous revisions. It's been read by three patristic scholars, including an expert in the Ecumenical Councils, and none found any blunders nor offered any corrections. Not too shabby for a blogger.
The third section, "The Gospel of Universal Salvation," presents the theological case for apokatastasis as advanced by modern theologians--Thomas Talbott, David Bentley Hart, Sergius Bulgakov, and Eric Reitan. In these articles my own theological voice makes a periodic appearance. How could it not, given that these theologians have convinced me that the gospel of Christ's atoning love entails universal salvation?
In these articles I often use the word apokatastasis. This Greek term refers to the cosmic consummation of all things in the Kingdom of the Incarnate Son. In my usage, it serves as a synonym for universal salvation, which I also term "the greater hope." Apokatastasis is but the gospel of Christ’s absolute and unconditional love sung in an eschatological key.
First and foremost, I am a preacher of the gospel. I was ordained a priest in the Episcopal Church in 1980. I served as Curate in one congregation and pastored three others as Rector. Since 2011 I have been a priest (now retired) in the Eastern Orthodox Church and am commonly addressed by my fellow Orthodox as "Fr Aidan." Please don't let that deter you from reading my articles. My blog has always been intended for an ecumenical audience. The gospel I proclaim is the gospel shared by most (alas, not all) Christians through the ages: God is absolute love and his love intends the salvation of every human being.