Ellul on universal salvation

I’m a little surprised to notice that I’ve rarely quoted Jacques Ellul on this blog. It was Ellul’s chapter on “universal salvation” in his book What I Believe that first revived my interest in the question of universalism – indeed, I resisted reading that chapter at first because of the challenge I could tell it was going to pose to my beliefs.

Ellul begins by stating what he believes on this subject:

I am taking up here a basic theme that I have dealt with elsewhere but which is so essential that I have no hesitation in repeating myself. It is the recognition that all people from the beginning of time are saved by God in Jesus Christ, that they have all been recipients of his grace no matter what they have done.

Ellul acknowledges how shocking this sounds:

This is a scandalous proposition. It shocks our spontaneous sense of justice. The guilty ought to be punished. How can Hitler and Stalin be among the saved? The just ought to be recognized as such and the wicked condemned. But in my view this is purely human logic which simply shows that there is no understanding of salvation by grace or of the meaning of the death of Jesus Christ.

One of the most interesting aspects to Ellul’s presentation is his insistence on this as his personal belief rather than as something which can be taught with the certainty of doctrine:

But I want to stress that I am speaking about belief in universal salvation. This is for me a matter of faith. I am not making a dogma or a principle of it. I can say only what I believe, not pretending to teach it doctrinally as the truth.

The cornerstone of Ellul’s belief in universal salvation is the fact that God is love:

[A]fter Jesus Christ we know that God is love. This is the central revelation. How can we conceive of him who is love ceasing to love one of his creatures? How can we think that God can cease to love the creation that he has made in his own image? This would be a contradiction in terms. God cannot cease to be love. If we combine the two theses we see at once that nothing can exist outside God’s love, for God is all in all. It is unthinkable that there should exist a place of suffering, of torment, of the domination of evil, of beings that merely hate since their only function is to torture.

It is astounding that Christian theology should not have seen at a glance how impossible this idea is. Being love, God cannot send to hell the creation which he so loved that he gave his only Son for it. He cannot reject it because it is his creation. This would be to cut off himself.

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