Fourth Meditation: What Is Freedom?
of Christian history. Often the effect has been absurd. From
the time of Augustine, for instance, it has been obligatory for
devout infernalists to insist that in the space of a single verse
(Romans 5:18)-of a single sentence, in fact-the word "all"
changes from a reference to every human being throughout
the whole of time into a reference solely to the limited num-
ber of those elected for salvation, and does so without the least
notice being given. One should simply know that that is what
Paul meant to say. This is preposterous, obviously, but settled
orthodoxies so often are.
Perhaps, then, a little willful perversity might have a salu-
tary effect here. What if one were to be so eccentric in one's
hermeneutical method as to choose not to rationalize those
universalist verses away, or not to treat them as hyperboles
casually tossed off by authors too lethargic to be precise, and
to elect instead to take them with the utmost seriousness, to
recognize how numerous they are, and to attempt to under-
stand the gospel in the light of the promises they seem to ad-
vance? This, at least, was the approach taken by Gregory of
Nyssa. And, to be honest, I know of no interpreter of the New
Testament whose readings of the text are more comprehen -
sive, more coherent, or more rigorously faithful to the words
on the page. Not that most modern Christians are likely to
see this, at least not all at once. Most are captives of systems
of theology that arose in the sixteenth century and after-this
is true even of most Catholics-which were so remote in sen-
sibility and conceptual structure from the world of the first
century that they scarcely retained anything of the intellectual
atmosphere and natural idiom of the Evangelists and Apostles,
and which incorporated distinctly modern notions about such
things as the nature of sovereignty and the logic of rational
freedom. And then even those whose faith has not been en -