A Larger Hope?, Volume 2

Universal Salvation from the Reformation to the Nineteenth Century

Robin A. Parry, Ilaria L. E. Ramelli

• Éditeur: Cascade Books
• Année: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781498200417
• Sujet: Theology & Religion
• Sous-sujet: History of Christianity

This book aims to uncover and explore the ideas of notable people in the story of Christian universalism from the time of the Reformation until the end of the nineteenth century. It is a story that is largely unknown in both the church and the academy, and the characters that populate it have for the most part passed into obscurity. With carefully located bore holes drilled to release the long-hidden theologies of key people and texts, the volume seeks to display and historically situate the roots, shapes, and diversity of Christian universalism. Here we discover a diverse and motley crew of mystics and scholars, social prophets and end-time sectarians, evangelicals and liberals, orthodox and heretics, Calvinists and Arminians, Puritans, Pietists, and a host of others. The story crisscrosses Continental Europe, Britain, and America, and its reverberations remain with us to this day.

Part I

The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries

Reformation and Beyond

1

At the Radical Fringe of Reformation and Counter-Reformation

The Protestant Reformation was a time of massive religious, social, and political upheaval in Europe. Until that point, the church had kept a tight control over acceptable doctrine and the correct interpretation of Scripture, lest individuals get it into their heads that they were able to rightly interpret the Bible on their own and thus unleash upon the world a plethora of potentially heretical teachings, wrapped in the clothing of biblical authority. The Protestant demotion of the authority of church tradition and elevation of the Bible and its many individual interpreters changed all that. The Protestant cry was that “Scripture alone” was the authoritative source for Christian belief and life. Furthermore, discerning the meaning of Scripture, said the Reformers, was not the preserve of the church authorities, but of all true believers, for the Bible is clear when it read canonically and according to sensible grammatical-historical standards. Any Christian, they said, has the right to interpret the text and appeal to its authority, and if the Bible turns out to run counter to traditional Catholic teaching, then so much the worse for traditional Catholic teaching.

The Protestant Reformation very quickly generated not a single version of true biblical faith, but a wide range of different, not-fully-compatible versions of Christian religion all claiming to be the genuine manifestation of biblical teaching. The diversity was reflected even among the Magisterial Reformers like Luther, Calvin, and Zwingli, but was most clear around the margins of Protestantism, where individuals who considered themselves Spirit-led interpreters of the Bible were empowered to declare their new “discoveries” with confidence.

In this context, it is no surprise that the idea of universal salvation, which had for a long time been suppressed as “heretical” by the authority of the church, now began to re-enter through the crack in the door opened up by the Reformation. Its reappearance is hard to chart with any certainty. The Magisterial Reformers themselves never really questioned the traditional Western teachings on hell and heaven, taking them as given,5 for their theological focus was elsewhere. Nevertheless, the idea of universal restoration did reappear quickly in some quarters. Thus Luther, in a letter to Hans von Rechenberg in 1522, wrote:

For the opinion that God could not have created man to be rejected and cast away into eternal torment is held among us also, as it was at all times by some of the most renowned people, such as Origen and his kind. They regard it as too harsh and cruel and inconsistent with God’s goodness. They based their opinion on Psalm 77[:7–9], where the Psalmist says, “Will God cast off forever, and never again be gracious? Has his steadfast love forever ceased? And his promises at an end for all time? Had God’s forgotten to be gracious? Has he in anger shut up his compassion?” [They also cite] Paul, 1 Timothy 2[:4], “God desires all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of all truth.” Proceeding from this premise they argue that in the end even the devils will be saved and will not be eternally damned, etc., etc., one step following from the other.6

We are not certain who Luther has in mind here, but what is clear is that within five years of Luther nailing his ninety-five theses to the door of All Saints’ Church in Wittenberg (1517), a trigger-event for the start of the Reformation, universalism was already poking its head around the doors of some Protestants.

Accusations of teaching the universalist heresy are especially common against Anabaptists—the radical wing of the Protestant Reformation. For instance, the Lutheran Augsburg Confession says that their churches “condemn the Anabaptists, who think that there will be an end to the punishments of condemned men and devils” (Article 17). In 1552/53 the Reformed English Church also intended to ratify one of its Articles of Religion against universalism, and it is generally thought that the article was directed against what was considered an Anabaptist belief: “All men shall not be saved at the last. They also are worthy of condemnation, who endeavor at this time to restore the dangerous opinion, that all men be they never so ungodly, shall at length be saved, when they have suffered pains for their sins a certain time appointed by God’s justice” (Article 42). The ascent of the Catholic Queen Mary to the throne stopped the Articles making it to the statute books, and after Mary’s death the Forty-Two Articles were reduced to the Thirty-Nine Articles, with the anti-universalism being dropped (presumably because the threat from universalism seemed to have diminished by 1571).

Accusations of universalism were repeated against one Anabaptist in particular—Hans Denck, an Anabaptist leader and humanist from Southern Germany. It is worth our while considering him in some more detail.

Hans Denck (ca. 1495–1527)—Anabaptist

Hans Denck was a pious, intelligent, and often irenic man. Born in Bavaria, he studied at the University of Ingolstadt, where he seems to have been well regarded by his teachers, and on leaving edited a three-volume Greek dictionary before settling down to a quiet and respectable family life working as a headmaster in Nuremberg. However, his soul was restless, and he struggled with his inner sense of spiritual poverty despite his outward respectability. This led him to make contact with the Anabaptist Thomas Müntzer, who provoked Denck to significantly rethink his theology and practice. For this he was expelled from Nuremberg in 1525, when the city accepted the Reformation.

Denck was (re)baptized by Balthasar Hubmeier, an Anabaptist leader, in 1526, though he always maintained that it was the inner spiritual reality, not outward rituals like Baptism and Eucharist, that really counted. He was certainly harsh concerning what he regarded as legalistic religion based on the outward “dead letter,” rather than the Spirit within. Denck then began preaching and publishing his ideas and became prominent within Anabaptist groups (and strongly disliked in Magisterial Reformation circles).

After his expulsion from Nuremberg, he remained “homeless” for the rest of his short life, moving to Augsburg, Strasbourg, Southern Germany, and then on to Basel in Switzerland, where he died of the Black Death in 1527, aged only thirty-two.

Was Hans Denck a universalist? Possibly, though scholars continue to debate the issue and certainty eludes us. In 1525 Denck was imprisoned in Schwyz with the charge of teaching the salvation of sinners, and even the devil, from hell. In the same year, he was accused of disturbing the Anabaptists of St. Gall with similar doctrines.7 Caution is always required when treating the accusations of opponents, and universalism was one of those “off-the-peg heresies” that was often used to dress one’s enemies in this period. Charges of universalism were thus often leveled without accuracy—for instance, by some Catholics against all the opponents of the doctrine of purgatory—so that accusations alone are not enough to establish whether someone actually upheld a theory of universal sa...