Book Description

All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well. Lady Julian of Norwich Universalism runs like a slender thread through the history of Christian theology. It has always been a minority report and has often been regarded as heresy, but it has proven to be a surprisingly resilient idea. Over the centuries Christian universalism, in one form or another, has been reinvented time and time again. In this book an international team of scholars explore the diverse universalisms of Christian thinkers from the Origen to Moltmann. In the introduction Gregory MacDonald argues that theologies of universal salvation occupy a space between heresy and dogma. Therefore disagreements about whether all will be saved should not be thought of as debates between the orthodox and heretics but rather as in-house debates between Christians. The studies that follow aim, in the first instance, to hear, understand, and explain the eschatological claims of a range of Christians from the third to the twenty-first centuries. They also offer some constructive, critical engagement with those claims. Origen (Tom Greggs) Gregory of Nyssa (Steve Harmon) Julian of Norwich (Robert Sweetman) The Cambridge Platonists (Louise Hickman) James Relly (Wayne K. Clymer) Elhanan Winchester (Robin Parry) Friedrich Schleiermacher (Murray Rae) Thomas Erskine (Don Horrocks) George MacDonald (Thomas Talbott) P. T. Forsyth (Jason Goroncy) Sergius Bulgakov (Paul Gavrilyuk) Karl Barth (Oliver Crisp) Jaques Ellul (Andrew Goddard) J. A. T. Robinson (Trevor Hart) Hans Urs von Balthasar (Edward T. Oakes, SJ) John Hick (Lindsay Hall) Jÿrgen Moltmann (Nik Ansell)