Prof. Dr. Ilaria Ramelli is one of the leading experts on early Christianity. She earned several degrees in this field and taught at many universities worldwide on the topic. Her studies of the church fathers led her to embrace the belief in apokatastasis (the belief that one day God will reconcile and restore everything and everyone). This article features my notes from an interview that Peter Hiett conducted with her in 2016. I recommend watching the full interview (the link is at the end of the article). My notes are only supposed to summarize the interview at a glance.
Many of the early church fathers believed that one day God will fill all things.
apokatastasis = to restore to an earlier condition; the word was used in many different contexts, for example, restoration of health, or even restoration of a star/planet which returned to its usual location.
The doctrine of Creation is deeply connected with the doctrine of apokatastasis.
Jesus himself spoke about apokatastasis (Mt 17:11).
1 Cor 15:28 is an important verse. Gregory of Nysa is very helpful for understanding this verse. God doesn’t want any forced submission!! He only wants honest allegiance from a repentant heart. Jesus represents all of humanity. Every human will gladly submit to God one day!!
The early church fathers saw apokatastasis as orthodoxy and used it to actually defend heresy.
Until the early 5th-century apokatastasis was likely the dominant doctrine. Even the early Augustine believed in it but later he rejected it in his writings. But he acknowledged that the majority doesn’t believe in eternal conscious torment.
“It is quite in vain, then, that some–indeed very many–yield to merely human feelings and deplore the notion of the eternal punishment of the damned and their interminable and perpetual misery. They do not believe that such things will be. Not that they would go counter to divine Scripture—but, yielding to their own human feelings, they soften what seems harsh and give a milder emphasis to statements they believe are meant more to terrify than to express literal truth.” (Augustine, Enchiridion, sec. 112.)
Only a few church fathers rejected apokatastasis (eg Tertullian).
Some church fathers believed that God will redeem even the devil and his angels but most believed at least that God will save all humans.
God alone is eternal. What he is and what he gives is eternal. But death and sin can’t be eternal because they are not from God. Jesus is Life. Jesus is God. Therefore life is eternal. But consequently, death cannot be eternal. Death will be abolished.
Sulfur (in Revelations) could be translated as divinity as well. Therefore God himself could be understood as the fire (Isaac of Niniveh and Origen understood the fire in that way).
Most church fathers agree that God‘s grace and his punishments are the same.
The Marcionites (a heretical group) separated God’s justice from his goodness and grace. They created a dichotomy between God’s grace and his justice. This heretical thinking has influence until today. God’s justice was understood by the fathers as an expression of his grace and goodness.
Augustine fell for the Marcionite heresy: he believed that God is good to some and just to others! He separated God’s goodness from his justice. This is a schizophrenic picture of God. The earlier fathers didn’t see this chasm between God’s goodness and his justice/punishment. For them, God’s justice was good news.
Origen was convinced that God will be all in all. If he is all in all then evil and sin will have no more place because God contains no evil.
Origen even mentioned that we shouldn’t call it “punishment” because God’s punishments are always for our benefit and restorative in nature.
God’s punishment is his act of purifying us from all evil that got intertwined with our nature. He is a purifying fire. Therefore we shouldn’t identify with our sin because it will be burned out of us and it is not part of who we really are.
The fathers believed in limitless grace. Grace without boundaries. But Augustine brought this 50% grace and 50% justice thinking.
Link to the interview:
https://vimeo.com/177946820?embedded=false&source=vimeo_logo&owner=3228156
More articles related to the topic:
Hello,
My comments are laced with questions.
I am interested in how this topic was debated during the 4th or 5th centuries…if it was at all… so that the Catholic Church firmly established this doctrine of eternal conscious torment. Were political and social pressures involved? Was the breakdown between Latin and Greek translations purely at the heart of this matter? It would seem that if so, that today these translations could be quickly remedied were it not for such horrific consequences undermining all church authority permeated for centuries and prevailing in Protestantism. I was raised Roman Catholic but found Jesus personally and accepted more of a protestant Pentecostal faith. I was so overjoyed by the love and forgiveness of Jesus that I experienced 25 years ago. For many years I was convinced that the Christ who found me and convicted me of my multitude of sins, offering forgiveness and new life, would, therefore, reach others in the same way through the power of the Holy Spirit. I basked in His unfailing love, as the ONE who delights in the redemption of one lost sheep. Over the past few years, I began to pray and seek a deeper relationship with my Lord and Creator and began to question the passages which state that it is the will of God that all mankind should be saved. I also felt from a very young age that I belonged to God and that one day I would reunite with Him. This was something internal that I felt and not something that I had pursued intellectually with a scholarly approach. I accepted that belief that God willed that all men shall be saved and willed that no man the eternal enter hell prepared for Satan and his fallen angels. I also accepted that idea that Man sends himself there through our rejection of the free “gift “of salvation. I believed that a just God would never sentence anyone to hell who had never heard the truth. The facts remain that there have been centuries in time where societies were isolated geographically and culturally from the knowledge of Jesus Christ and God’s plan for redemption. This troubled me. Yet, many of my Protestant friends said that these would, in fact, die in sin away from the mercy of God. However, what led me to gr3eater introspection and thought was that very few in the Christian world around me seemed desired to discuss hell as the torment which lasts forever with the possibility that their very neighbors whom they have never shared their Biblical knowledge with would go there …. and that they could somehow go through their day with little thought to it. I became convinced that if the modern church truly believed in an eternal torment that was so horrific that their minds could not entertain the thought, that they would not be saying hello each day to their neighbors with no thought of sharing the gospel. Yet, this is Christianity in the United States. Likewise, I have many Jewish family members whom I love and have been praying for to see Jesus as Savior, and they are put off by the very concept of an eternal Conscience torment since it is not specifically identified or believed by most Jews to my understanding. This is where I began my search. What did the Hebrews believe and what did most believe during Jesus’s day? Was their understanding of the afterlife and was Jesus’ teaching about the afterlife consistent to their beliefs or truly radical and novel to them? I hope to find your latest book. Could anyone address my first questions regarding why the Catholic Church essentially deviated and adopted the belief of eternal conscious torment and did this directly defy the prevailing Greek Manuscripts of the New Testament during the 4th and 5th centuries?
Sorry, for the VERY LATE reply! You ask great questions and I can’t answer them all. In the Old Testament time, it appears that the Hebrews first believed that we cease to exist after death. But closer towards the intertestamental time, the idea of an afterlife developed more and more. I believe that some Jews adopted the idea of an eternal hell from Egyptian and Greek sources. In the time of Jesus, existed a great mix of ideas among the Jews what the afterlife is like. The Saduccees didn’t believe in an afterlife, while the Pharisees did. There was no one united Jewish view on this. This complicates things for us greatly.
The idea of an eternal hell, gained popularity through Augustine, who didn’t speak Greek very well, which caused him to misunderstand key verses which the Greek church fathers read very differently from Augustine. When Constantine made Christianity the state religion, he needed a tool to control the people. Fear of hell has always been a beloved tool in the hand of the church to make people obey. Thus, eternal hell became the dominant belief.