According to classic Christian doctrine, faith is a necessary and sufficient condition for salvation. So, if any persons were to fail to have such faith, then they will be consigned to hell. There are three views of salvation and hell on offer:
- Infernalism
- Universalism
- Annihilationism
According to infernalism, some persons are consigned to hell, no-one who is consigned to hell ever escapes hell, and consignment to hell is divine punishment for sin.
According to universalism, some persons are consigned to hell, everyone who is consigned to hell escapes hell, and consignment to hell is divine correction for sin.
According to annihilationism, some persons are consigned to hell, no-one who is consigned to hell ever escapes hell and all are eventually annihilated, and consignment to hell is divine punishment for sin.
In today’s discussion, we will be concerned with universalism.
Universalism
A necessary and sufficient condition for being a universalist is that you maintain UNIVERSAL. According to UNIVERSAL, every being that could have salvific union with God will have salvific union with God. Now, universalists differ with respect to (i) the scope, (ii) modal register, and (iii) metaphysical account of UNIVERSAL.
Thus, as I will illustrate below, depending on your views regarding (i)-(iii), your answer to the question, “Who or what will have salvific union with God?,” will change. There is also a question about (iv) the semantics of ‘will’, whether ‘will’ is a kind of necessity operator, but we will not discuss that here. We will address (i)-(iii) in order.
(i) Scope
We can ask, what is the scope of the quantifier present in UNIVERSAL? is it restricted or unrestricted? Call a quantifier ‘unrestricted’ if it ranges over absolutely all objects. In ordinary discourse, our quantifiers are often restricted to some contextually salient domain. For instance, suppose that someone asserts ‘Everyone came to the party’. Ordinarily, we would not take this assertion to imply that everyone in the entire world came to the party. We would interpret the quantifier as being restricted to some contextually relevant class of people, i.e. everyone who was invited to the party. Now, are our quantifiers always restricted in this way? Prima facie, the answer appears to be ‘no’. There are various contexts where it would be natural to take the quantifiers to be unrestricted. For instance, when a philosopher asserts ‘Everything is self-identical’ or ‘There are no abstract objects’, we typically take the quantifiers to range over all objects whatsoever. So, is UNIVERSAL restricted to some contextually salient domain? or is it unrestricted in scope? If it is restricted, what are we ranging over? According to some universalists, we are only ranging over human persons. According to others, we are ranging over all of the creation.
(ii) Modal Register
We can ask, is UNIVERSAL necessarily true or contingently true? If UNIVERSAL were necessarily true, then we get NEC-UNIVERSAL. According to NEC-UNIVERSAL, necessarily every being that could have salvific union with God will have salvific union with God. To be more precise, we have: □(∀x) Sx → Hx, where ‘S’ is the property of being the kind of being that could have salvific union with God, and where ‘H’ is the property of eventually having salvific union with God. According to this view, there is no possible world where some being that could have salvific union with God does not have salvific union with God.
If UNIVERSAL were contingently true, then we get POS-UNIVERSAL. According to POS-UNIVERSAL, possibly every being that could have salvific union with God will have salvific union with God. To be more precise, we have: ◊(∀x) Sx → Hx. According to this view, there are possible worlds where some being that could have salvific union with God does not have salvific union with God.
(iii) Metaphysical Accounts
One central metaphysical question every universalist thesis must answer is: in virtue of what does salvific union with God obtain? Answers to this question are metaphysical accounts of UNIVERSAL — coherent stories in which salvific union with God is explained. Unfortunately, for convenience’ sake, I will not outline every metaphysical account of UNIVERSAL, but there are highly sophisticated accounts developed by Origen, Gregory of Nyssa, Eric Reitan, John Kronen, and Thomas Talbott.
Rather, I will simply outline one particularly interesting account that has some odd implications for the salvific state of persons. This view is called quasi-universalism, and it is universalist because it affirms UNIVERSAL.
According to quasi-universalism, for every person P who enjoys union with God at some time t, there is another person P+ who will not enjoy union until t+1. So no matter how many persons are saved, there will always be some person (at least one) who is not saved. It follows that, no matter what the time, some person is not saved. Thus, if for every person P who enjoys union with God at some time t, there is another person P+ who will not enjoy union until t+1, then there will be no end to the number of people and there may be persons who never realize their salvific union with God.
