66 Apokatastasis: Four Meditations
under the influence of certain figures from the first several cen-
turies of the church who seemed to me to possess an especially
sane understanding of the "good tidings": Origen, Gregory of
Nyssa, Isaac of Nineveh, and a number of other explicit uni-
versalists, as well as Maximus the Confessor, who never openly
professed universalism but whose entire system of theology
seems to me to leave no room for any other conclusion (not
that I have any desire to enter into that debate here). Before ad-
dressing any of these issues or figures, however, I want to make
it absolutely clear that I approach these meditations not as a
seeker tentatively and timidly groping his way toward some
anxious, uncertain, fragile hope. Unlike, say, the great Hans
Urs von Balthasar (1905-1988), I would not think it worth the
trouble to argue, as he does, that- given the paradoxes and
seemingly irreconcilable pronouncements of scriptures on the
final state of all things - Christians may be allowed to dare to
hope for the salvation of all. In fact, I have very small patience
for this kind of "hopeful universalism," as it is often called. As
far as I am concerned, anyone who hopes for the universal rec-
onciliation of creatures with God must already believe that this
would be the best possible ending to the Christian story; and
such a person has then no excuse for imagining that God could
bring any but the best possible ending to pass without thereby
being in some sense a failed creator. The position I want to at-
tempt to argue, therefore, to see how well it holds together,
is far more extreme: to wit, that, if Christianity is in any way
true, Christians dare not doubt the salvation of all, and that any
understanding of what God accomplished in Christ that does
not include the assurance of a final apokatastasis in which all
things created are redeemed and joined to God is ultimately
entirely incoherent and unworthy of rational faith.
This is an exorbitant and somewhat insolent claim, I real-