That All Shall Be Saved: Heaven, Hell, and Universal Salvation

This is at the heart of the way in which I believe we can today restate the doctrine of final judgment. I find it quite impossible, reading the New Testament on the one hand and the newspaper on the other, to suppose that there will be no ultimate condemnation, no final loss, no human beings to whom, as C. S. Lewis put it, God will eventually say,

fair. If the New Testament is true, so was my original realization that members of other religions are going to Hell because their teachers mentally conditioned them to believe their respective religious systems. These individuals were simply doomed from the beginning; they had no chance.

As long as one “leaves alone” the question of God, as Weil had done through most of her life, the presence of affliction in our lives is harrowing, but not especially puzzling. It is the unavoidable consequence of a world governed by forces largely beyond our comprehension, not to mention our control. When we add God to this mix, however, we transf