Apokatastasis: Four Meditationstirely shaped by early modern thinking, in the churches of East
and West, still tend to read the texts through centuries of later
theological developments, many of which ( to be perfectly hon-
est) are more accidents of history than natural consequences
of the tradition. I will not argue the specifics of that claim here.
Rather, let me simply propose that we grant that Gregory-
removed though he was by three centuries from the time of the
Apostles- understood the original Greek terms of the Bible
better than do most modern Christians, and that he inhab-
ited an intellectual and religious world much nearer that of
the New Testament than ours is, and then consider whether he
might have known what he was talking about after all.
We should also ask why his theology was so thoroughly
universalist. I can think of a number of answers that one might
extract from his writings. The first is that he clearly believed
universal salvation in Christ to be the true testimony of scrip-
ture, and the only theological position that could adequately
account for every dimension of the New Testament's princi-
pal theological claims. Then, secondly, there was his under-
standing of the nature of humanity, as related to Christ and
as bearing the image and likeness of God, and of the whole
of humanity as enfolded within God's eternal intention of
the Good (I discussed this in my previous meditation). Then,
thirdly, there was his certainty that, in Christ, God's victory
over evil and death was total, and that this triumph will be
fully realized only when God is "all in all" - in the sense both
that God will be "over all things" and that God will be "within
all things" (including every rational will)-and when creation,
by this perfect union with God, is finally fully raised up out of
the nothingness from which God liberates it in making it exist.
For him, therefore, the narrative of salvation in the New Tes-
tament was an epic tale of rescue and conquest, the overthrow